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Our 10-year-old Infiniti has 80,000 miles on it. It recently went from “running perfectly” to “dead in the middle lane” on the Mass Pike (I-90). The transition occurred in about two seconds. The culprit turned out to be a bad “cam sensor” (Wikipedia article on a similar crankshaft sensor) that feeds the ignition timing system. The old-school distributor wasn’t perfect, but timing problems would result in a rough-running engine rather than an instantly dead engine, no?

Based on my experience with a 1998 Toyota Sienna that simply refused to break, I thought that we were on track for service-free and incident-free vehicles. But now I’m wondering if Peak Reliability wasn’t 10 or more years ago. Cars today have a lot of complexity and, apparently, potential for hard and sudden failures. At 8,000 miles and one year old, this particular Infiniti had an all-systems meltdown caused by some brake system controls. The latest cars have auto-braking, lane-keeping, and various other collision-avoidance systems that would seem to have the potential to disable the vehicle.

Readers; What do you think? Will cars actually be getting less reliable from now on? Except maybe electric cars that have a lot fewer moving parts (but Teslas aren’t good for reliability, are they?).

[Separately, I’m wondering why this Infiniti could be shut down by the failure of a single sensor. The camshaft is plenty long. Amazon sells camshaft sensors for as little as $13 as replacement parts ($172 at the dealer, plus $388 for installation). From this I infer that the factory cost of a sensor must be less than $1. Why wouldn’t Infiniti put in 2 or 3 of these and have the ignition computer pick the cleanest signal?]

Finally, if you’re in the market for a new car, don’t neglect politics. A wealthy Hillary-supporter on Facebook regarding the replacement of a beloved Volvo: “Trump anxiety is a factor in any spending even though the market has been kind to me.” (i.e., Trump has made him $1 million richer, but he is so anxious about the future that he is keeping his money in the market rather than cashing out $50,000 of gains to buy a fancy new car).

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Four friends and I went to see Wonder Woman the other night. Like any real American, most of my education comes from watching TV and the rest from Wikipedia. Now these two sources are in conflict.

Wikipedia: “Amazons were the daughters of Ares and Harmonia (a nymph of the Akmonian Wood). They were brutal and aggressive, and their main concern in life was war.”

movie: the Amazons are opponents of Ares and their main concern in life is peace.

If memory serves, the Amazons would have sex once/year and then, 9 or 10 months later, kill any male babies. Thus did they have a society of mortal females that could continue indefinitely. (Historians don’t say what happened in the case of transgender Amazons who identified as male starting at a later age.)

In the movie, by contrast, the Amazons seem to be immortal (they’ve been alive for thousands of years anyway) and they don’t have any children, except for one. (On the third hand, they can be killed by bullets so maybe they aren’t immortal?)

The interesting question for me is why the filmmakers decided for commercial reasons that it was better to have the Amazons be fighting against Ares and war rather than children of Ares and pro-war. Why did all of the Amazons have to be peace-loving? If the goal was to feature a peace-loving star, why couldn’t the star be a rebel who disagreed with the war-loving Amazon majority?

Obviously it is just a movie so they don’t need to stick to the Greek sources, but it is more trouble to make up new stuff. Why did the screenwriters go to the trouble? And if they had the energy to make up this alternative history of the Amazons, why were they too lazy to explain why an Amazon who leaves the community to fight with men can never return. Is it Cooties or what?

Verdict on the movie overall? One friend expressed boredom and complained that Ares was cut and pasted from the emperor in Star Wars. Personally I enjoyed seeing the imagined world of the Amazons the most and also liked the part where the Amazon discovers and tries to blend into the ugly urban world of mortal humans.

[Separately, the guy who took our tickets had a serious disability that had stunted his growth and left him confined to wheelchair. Plainly he could have qualified for SSDI and enough taxpayer-funded OxyContin to brighten his days. Yet he was working as cheerfully as anyone else. A good reminder for those times when we feel that walking into work is oppressive!]

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I predicted Obamas victory back in 2007 and Hillary’s popular vote majority (but not her loss; did not budget for Democrats clustering themselves into group hugs in a few cities). As with famous Wall Street prophets, I will now predict a market phenomenon but not the date on which it will occur…. Kara McCullough will be elected President of the United States.

I became aware of Ms. McCullough, the current Miss USA, because Facebook friends kept posting derisively about her while linking, e.g., to “New Miss USA Kara McCullough Sounds an Awful Lot Like Donald Trump” (Glamour). Apparently it is okay for older white women who self-identify as “feminists”, “liberals”, and “friends of African-Americans”, to heap scorn on a young black woman if the young black woman has committed thoughtcrimes. McCullough’s worst crime seems to be refusal to adopt “feminism”:

When asked if she identifies as a feminist during an earlier question, McCullough replied that the term feminism is too polarizing and she prefers to describe herself through a lens of “equalism.”

The Glamour journalist, Maggie Mallon, tries to make McCullough look stupid by citing an obsolete dictionary definition of feminism: “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes”.

[Why obsolete? For example, women’s organizations that self-identify as “feminist” currently lobby against equal treatment for men and women in many situations. We wrote about one category in the Rationale chapter:

Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”

We interviewed Janice Fiamengo, a literature professor at the University of Ottawa and a scholar of modern feminism, about the apparent contradiction of feminists promoting stay-at-home motherhood. “It is a contradiction if you define feminism as being about equality and women’s autonomy,” she responded. “But feminism today can be instead about women having power and getting state support.”]

As a proponent of “equalism” (her own coinage?), Ms. McCullough has the potential to appeal to a broad category of voters on a broad range of issues. The Glamour journalist laughs at McCullough for responding to a question about health care being a “privilege or right” with “for one to have health care, you need to have jobs. So therefore we need to continue to cultivate this environment that we’re given the opportunity to have health care, as well as jobs, to all the American citizens worldwide.” I think that’s a good answer for a 25-year-old. Zimbabwe can declare that Swiss-grade health care is a “right” but if they don’t have the economy and jobs to support it, the term “right” will be meaningless because they won’t be able to deliver on it. By contrast, anyone with a good job can, if necessary, fly to France, Israel, or Switzerland and get some decent health care at a price that is bearable.

Our centrally planned economy produces some stark inequalities (e.g., a free house worth $100,000 per year pre-tax or $0 and a position on a waiting list). There are a lot more losers than winners in this unequal government-created world. So a politician claiming adherence to “equalism” should get votes from the unfortunates (not to say Deplorables) on the waiting list, thus prevailing over a status quo politician who gets votes from the fortunates who are actually occupying free housing.

Other advantages: McCullough is tall and Americans like to vote for tall Presidents.

Readers: What do you think? Is this gal on track to be a future President?

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For walking around shop-lined pedestrian streets and enjoying the feeling of the city, my favorite Moscow hotel turned out to be the Marriott Royal Aurora. Ask for comments, a local said “Yeah this is very close to center, and I think it’s about as high as you can go in Moscow without the hotel having a dedicated elevator for disposing of overdosed escorts….”

The location is fine for seeing the tourist high points. You’re almost next to the Bolshoi Theater and about a 10-minute walk from Red Square. More importantly, a lot of the city’s better restaurants and shops are immediately adjacent. It is convenient to Metro (trains run every minute during core weekday hours!) and bus services.

Breakfast was included in my $200/night (including tax) price for a “superior” room (as big as a “junior suite” in most hotels). This is served in a pleasant atrium (photos) and service is attentive and friendly. They’ll come by every 5 minutes or so to see if you want more coffee, some of the Russian sparkling wine, fresh juice, etc. There is an omelette station, meats and potatoes, fresh fruit, cold cuts, smoked fish, and a vegetable and pickle section. You could eat about four complete meals at the breakfast buffet and wouldn’t be hungry for the rest of the day (or week?).

If you do eat four meals per day during your one hour at the buffet, the gym is nice and pleasantly staffed 24/7. The pool is kind of small but was always empty during my stay so you could actually swim for exercise. There is also a hot tub, steam room, and sauna.

Front desk and concierge services are excellent.

The hotel laundry is an expensive piece-by-piece service (supposedly hotels don’t actually get rich off this and yet the price of washing a shirt is about the same as buying a shirt at Costco or Walmart; this would be a great subject for young economists to investigate!). Moscow doesn’t have laundromats or wash-and-fold services (everyone has a machine at home), so try to bring enough clothes for your entire stay or budget an extra $100 per-person for laundry.

Internet is free and throttled to about 4 Mbit/second. It works reliably with no annoying reauthorization process. You won’t be streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime, or YouTube into Russia, so this will be mostly for work.

Some alternatives that I considered…

• Four Seasons: right next to Red Square, but unless you just love seeing Chinese tour groups, this is less convenient for everything other than touring the Kremlin. The lobby is not all that nice or big.
• Ritz-Carlton. Russians seem to like this place.
• Park Hyatt. Russians also like this one. Very close to the Marriott.
• Metropol. A Gentleman in Moscow makes it sound fantastic, but in reality the lobby and restaurants are small and not that interesting. The atrium at the Marriott is actually nicer.

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For those Americans who have an EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) card, e.g., the roughly 44 million on food stamps (SNAP), Amazon has cut the price of unlimited Prime video streaming to $5.99/month.

At a minimum, the folks at CATO will have to update their 2013 work versus welfare tradeoff analysis (summary: for tens of millions of Americans, it is not economically rational to work; this is on top of the tens of millions of Americans for whom it is more lucrative to collect child support than to work).

Readers: Do you expect to see more price discrimination based on whether or not a consumer holds an EBT card?

Related:

• Book Review: The Redistribution Recession

 

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A reader was kind enough to take me to the Bolshaya Bronnaya Synagogue, in a fashionable neighborhood of central Moscow, for Friday night services. They are welcoming to strangers, even a blonde Russian and her French boyfriend who showed up out of curiosity. Everything is in Hebrew and the books are in Hebrew/Russian so if you’re casual about your Jewish observance you’ll be kind of bored during the service per se (etiquette hint: don’t pull out your smartphone and start reading on the Kindle app during Shabbat!). The Lubavitch Hasidim run this temple under the Chabad banner and they serve a community Friday night dinner after the service. There we talked to a guy who appeared to be in his 30s who’d grown up in a Russian military family in Vladivostok. His family had abandoned Judaism in the 20th century, but he was seeking to rediscover the religion of his great-grandparents. To Jews from the West who can adjust their level of observance every week if they want, it was touching to see how precious Judaism was to this man. (Contrast to “Jewish Americans, who will go to any length, short of practicing Judaism, to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children.” (from Here I Am by Jonathan Foer))

If you’re curious about the revival of religion in Russia, or you happen to be Jewish, I would recommend spending a Friday evening at this synagogue. Dress code: most people wore suits, but I was in a T-shirt and blue jeans (if this upset anyone, I couldn’t understand enough Russian to learn about it).

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Scanning the New York Times right now…

Comey Accuses White House of ‘Lies’

Mr. Comey said that President Trump lied to the American public when he said that the F.B.I. was in disarray.

Is this worth a citizen’s attention? The first headline, about a politician allegedly lying, sounds a lot like gambling in Casablanca. The second headline sounds purely subjective (see “FBI Admits It Missed Opportunities to Stop Tamerlan Tsarnaev” (Boston Magazine, 2014); was that because of “disarray” or due to some other reason?)

Readers: What’s interesting about Mr. Comey and/or what he has said recently?

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Unlike from New York, there are no nonstop flights from Boston to Moscow. An unusual option in terms of timing is departing Logan Airport at 7:50 am, having dinner during a three-hour layover at LHR, and then proceeding onward to Moscow on a flight 10:35 pm that arrives around 4:30 am Moscow time (that’s 9:30 pm in Boston). Hop in an Uber and you can be at your hotel at 6:00 am, the perfect time to go to sleep if your body still thinks it is 11:00 pm, which it is in Boston.

British Airways quotes some pretty low prices. One way that they accomplish this miracle is that seat selection in advance is not included. Add about $250 and some hassle because, at least if you’re in the Economy or Premium Economy (a.k.a. what they used to call “Coach”) ghetto, you need to go to a separate post-booking web site to see if any decent seats are still left. Then pay.

The flight over was awesome. Boston Terminal E was deserted. I had checked in a bag and was through security about 10 minutes after arriving at the curb. The flight over was pretty nice, though it seems that BA is getting out of the Economy business. Fully half of the 777 was given over to First and Business. I am ashamed to admit this, but I watched (and enjoyed!) a documentary on synchronized swimming: Perfect.

LHR is kind of hassle, involving two train rides, another security check, and Terminal 5 shops that seem geared mostly to luxury fashion. There are no quiet restaurants that I could find and, as with American airports, there are loud TVs going at most gates, so it was a long three hours. Business and First passengers can enjoy what are presumably some fairly plush lounges.

It is about 4 hours on a packed A321 to Moscow. They have a strange business class seating arrangement in the front, but it might well be worth paying for. Unlike U.S. airlines, BA doesn’t seem to have any way when checking in to pay for an upgrade on one or more legs.

Although Russia tries to hassle Americans with a visa requirement somewhat reciprocal to what we impose on them, actual immigration and customs is much more efficient than in the U.S. Unlike at U.S. airports, if your luggage is delayed they do have bathrooms in the baggage claim area!

It is a one-hour ride into central Moscow and it costs about $17.50 via Uber. Airport WiFi in Russia requires authentication via a Russia cell phone number or bank card, I think, so make sure that you have a strategy for getting data service once you’re there (see Verizon Wireless in Russia). Although technically my room reservation didn’t start until 2 pm, the Marriott Royal Aurora hotel (highly recommended) offered me an immediate check-in.

The trip back started at 4:05 pm from DME. There was a 20-minute line to get through departure immigration, so I would advise not cutting it too close (though sometimes they called for specific flights and took people out of sequence). This was a comfortable 777 with Premium Economy seating. On the final leg from LHR to Boston, about 7.5 hours, the seat that I’d paid for and gone through the hassle of signing up for via the Web was actually broken (would not recline). The flight attendants could not fix. BA did not offer any kind of refund for the seat selection or other fees. It was a smooth ride down the glideslope, but the 777 pounded Runway 27 at Logan so hard that passengers gasped. (Can we sign up to be the landing gear supplier to BA?) Wind was a steady 16 knots so it is unclear why the landing was so hard. In any event, the gear remarkably did not come off the plane and we arrived at the gate early. Clearing immigration was quick due to my global entry status.

If you’re one of the Business or First travelers that BA actually wants to deal with, and you want to avoid flying overnight, I think these are good options in terms of timing. It might also work if you’re completely indifferent as to where you sit in the airplanes. I’m not sure that Premium Economy makes sense given the hassle of booking specific seats on a separate web site (coupled with the airline’s lack of any procedure for dealing with the consequences of their failure to maintain working seats).

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Brookline police log, May 23, excerpts:

At 8:25 p.m., a party came to the front desk and spoke to police officer about an orange gummy bear left on a rear bumper behind a Beacon Street business. The caller was advised that it was not a police matter.

At 12:42 p.m., a custodian reported aggressive turkeys at 1 Rene Playground during recess time.

At 1:28 p.m., a caller reported a gaggle of geese in her yard on Fenwood Road, and said they went after her dog.

At 7:00 p.m. a caller reported turkeys in the middle of Beacon Street.

At 12:37 p.m. a caller reported that there was a group of eight people vomiting and filming outside of 111 Cypress St.

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In Moscow a UK citizen told me “I’d love to live in London, but a decent apartment is at least 1 million pounds [$1.3 million] and I don’t have those kinds of savings.”

Then I flew to London and learned about a shortcut to the savings process…

I talked to a guy who’d been a divorce lawsuit defendant after a two-year marriage. He explained that courts split a married couple’s property 50/50 and that, unlike in California, premarital property is included. So he lost a London house that he’d purchased prior to the marriage. He agreed to a 50/50 shared parenting arrangement with his plaintiff, which meant that she had a “need” for a house in addition to her baseline entitlement to 50 percent of the combined property. She had enhanced her claim by refraining from work during the marriage.

Note that being married for just a day or two may not be sufficient in order to get a full 50 percent share. Courts can deviate from this policy if the marriage is “short-term”. There is no set definition of “short-term,” but the idea seems to be “a few months.” A two-year marriage is not obviously “short-term.”

It is difficult to contract out of this regime because English courts don’t typically recognize prenuptial agreements (see the International chapter of Real World Divorce for litigation regarding a German prenuptial agreement that Nicolas Granatino wanted set aside so that he could get more of his wife’s assets).

English courts are increasingly gender-neutral and therefore the above strategy could be employed by a man targeting a higher-wealth and/or higher-income woman. It is definitely helpful to have a child, though.

[Separately, I wonder if this contributes to the income inequality that the British complain about. A UK citizen who didn’t want to risk losing half of his or her assets after a year or two would have to avoid marriage or marry someone with at least as much in premarital savings.]

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