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Here’s why I still need to check Facebook… “Dog attacks family trying to dress it in sweater, 3 hurt” (Miami Herald):

Police in Florida say an angry dog sent three people to the hospital after one tried to put a sweater on it.

Tampa police say the pit bull mix named Scarface bit a 52-year-old woman who was trying to dress him on Friday and her husband was attacked while trying to pull the dog off of her. Police say the couple’s 22-year-old son was attacked while trying to stop the dog by stabbing it in the neck and head.

(Thanks, Tara!)

Let’s hope that Mindy the Cripper forgets this tale prior to Halloween 2017…

Related:

• Carl Hiaasen should be the official novelist for the Presidential Election?

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It’s a new year so maybe it is a time for a new group.

Following Hillary Clinton’s defeat, one of my white male programmer friends (mid-50s now and therefore in the sunset of his career in this young person’s field) posted the following on Facebook:

I would really hate to be gay, or a woman, or a minority, or an American right now.

Of course I couldn’t resist suggesting that he visit Abigail Johnson “to comfort her on the coming tough times?” (Johnson is the richest person in Boston.) I pointed out that “if you want to feel sorry for someone who identifies as ‘gay’, Peter Thiel could perhaps use a hug.” I ended with “This black American also merits your sympathy: http://www.forbes.com/profile/robert-smith/ ”

A few days later, Facebook friends signaled their intention to join the “Million Women March” on Washington, D.C.: “ALL women, femme, trans, gender non-conforming and feminist others are invited to march on Washington DC the day following the inauguration of the President elect. ”

What did the Facebookers who plan to participate in the Million Women March have in common? None of them were “women.” As with the above exchange, the passionate Hillary supporters were white males.

In their 50-60 years on the planet, none of these folks had ever written anything about Jews except to criticize the Jews of Israel for being the world’s most horrible and pernicious people. Ever since Trump’s election, however, they’d devoted themselves with passion to protecting American Jewry from Manhattan/LA/South Florida-based Jew-haters (i.e., Trump and Steve Bannon):

Steve Bannon is a known antisemite, as well as an abuser. Wake the fuck up, this is NOT okay!!

URGENT. RED ALARM. This is an EMERGENCY. (I do not use those words lightly.) Donald Trump just appointed an anti-Semitic white supremacist bigot as his chief advisor and strategist.

Steve Bannon, our nation’s foremost antisemite, is now WH senior council.

If you believe that an antisemite, woman-abuser, white supremacist dirtbag like Steve Bannon has no place in the White House, then I suggest calling these representatives and telling them directly.

White supremacist and antisemite Steve Bannon will serve as chief strategist and senior counselor in the Trump White House. This is only the beginning.

[Note that the “abuser” stuff comes out of a lawsuit for custody and child support profits filed against Bannon by a former wife. The allegation reported by newspapers was based on an affidavit from the cash-seeking plaintiff, a not atypical situation in the American family courts.]

A couple of weeks later these same folks had rallied around the idea of creating sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants (it turns out that almost every place in the U.S. is a suitable sanctuary except for their own houses). They had also pledged to register as Muslim in what they said was “Donald Trump’s proposed database of Muslim-Americans.”

I’m thinking that I could harness the power of these good-hearted Facebook friends who want to use their elite educations, $150,000/year incomes, and spare time to help the female, the gay, the non-white, and even the persecuted Jews. My new group will be called “White Man’s Burden.”

Structure: No dues or actions required beyond some virtuous-sounding postings on Facebook.

Thoughts?

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Happy New Year to everyone.

What’s your resolution this year?

Mine is to travel more. Travel is where my brain picks up new ideas.

First trip: Big Island of Hawaii (visit Mauna Loa Helicopters) and then Maui, February 1-10. Would anyone like to meet and talk about helicopters?

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It is 8th-night candle-lighting time here in Boston. Happy Hanukkah to those who are “practicing Jew-craft” as Trump administration appointees would presumably say.

Speaking of hate, check out the pictures below where some haters broke into the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and installed an 8′-high menorah “artwork” intended to make Judaism seem incredibly lame by comparison with Christianity (see the museum’s magnificent tree). To add insult to injury, the menorah was fully lit prior to the holiday’s beginning.

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Two MIT pioneers in computer science died in 2016. Jay Forrester pushed forward big computers for Big Government, including the military, and core memory. Bob Fano started the computer science lab at MIT. Both were 98.

I knew Fano and attended his memorial service, organized by pedagogical superhero (at least to me) Hal Abelson. Consistent with The Son Also Rises, Fano was born to a successful Jewish family in Italy: dad was a “prominent mathematician and pioneer of finite geometry” while his brother Ugo and cousin Giulio Racah were “established physicists.” Fano escaped anti-Jewish policies in 1939 by emigrating to the U.S. where he got a bachelor’s degree in 1941 and then worked for the Radiation Laboratory, which worked on military technologies such as RADAR and LORAN.

Check out this video, likely from 1964, where Fano talks about the potential for time-sharing computing. He opens by saying that a computer terminal could aid people in almost any cognitive area. He anticipates the open-source movement at 4:30. At 8:30 he talks about “hundreds” of people using a single mainframe. Is it fair to say that Fano anticipated our modern world of desktop PCs? In 1990 the answer would have been “no.” The mainframe had been miniaturized to desktop size and the number of terminals was 1. Today, however, I think that we are pretty much doing what Fano expected. The desktop PC is a higher-quality terminal than what Fano is shown using, but essentially it is a terminal to Amazon’s, Google’s, or Facebook’s “mainframe.” (See also this comparatively recent video where Fano shares his memories.)

The memorial gathering is available as a video. Bob Kahn, co-developer of TCP/IP, speaks in the middle, Fernando Corbato, co-developer of the modern operating system (MULTICS was the spiritual ancestor of today’s ubiquitous (unfortunately!) Unix/GNU/Linux). Ed Fredkin said that the idea of time-sharing originated with John McCarthy, also the developer of the One True Religion. MIT pushed him out. Caltech wouldn’t taken him in. Stanford apparently saw the merits of his idea and gave him a full professorship.

The best tribute is towards the end of the gathering. David Liu, a professor from Taiwan, gave the speech that anyone would wish to hear as a post-death fly-on-the-wall. If you need to talk about a departed colleague I recommend using Liu’s talk as a model.

Nearly all of the older crowd were super-nice folks and certainly Fano was one of the nicest people that I ever met in Academia. I’m wondering if it is partly because of the infinite funding for the lab that was described. These researchers didn’t have to compete with each other for research grants.

In an era where women are ostentatiously celebrated for trivial achievements in STEM, speakers recalled Mildred Dresselhaus, who became head of the EE side of MIT’s EECS department in 1971. (Dresselhaus, in the 1960s, laid the foundations for everything that is hyped today under the “nanotechnology” rubric.) Fano had three daughters. Dismayed by the pointless exercises put forward by the Massachusetts public schools, Fano taught the girls math in the context of physics. All three of them ended up having technical careers, e.g., one of them recently retired from an engineering job at General Motors.

Management tip from Corbato: Fano wouldn’t allow anyone to get money from the computer science lab and work remotely (i.e., across the street on the main MIT campus). You had to have a primary office in the rented 545 Technology Square office building to receive funding. Al Vezza attributed the physical combination of mathematicians and computer nerds for advances such as RSA cryptography.

What happens when MIT PhDs in computer science try to use an Apple Macintosh computer to play a video? You get unrelated music simultaneously layered on the video soundtrack until a quorum of 8 nerds is assembled in front of the Mac.

How has the world changed since Fano’s day? Academic computer science is much more dispersed, with high-quality departments all over the country and the world. Industrial computer science, however, seems more concentrated. At least in the U.S., if you’re not in Silicon Valley you’re probably not part of the big trend.

I’m not sure if it is massive population growth, economic growth, or a fall in the cost of transportation, but the cost of beachfront property has apparently gone up quite a bit. Fano’s daughter Linda talked about the family purchasing land in Chatham (Cape Cod), right on the beach and with a dock for the 31′ power boat, and then building a house. That’s a $2.5-4 million project today, not likely to be affordable on an MIT salary, even full professor pay (about $186,000 per year in 2014).

Any good life lessons here? Fano stayed fit by exercising. We saw photos of him skiing at age 80+ on Mt. Wachusett. When he wasn’t coming into MIT anymore, Fano stopped paying Massachusetts state income tax by moving to Naples, Florida. Watching the speakers struggle with memory issues was sobering. We don’t have a lot of time so we should probably be careful about how we use it.

That said… Happy New Year’s Eve to all readers and I hope that 2016 contained more gains than losses.

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“Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking” (nytimes) says that the U.S. government is taking action against the Russian government because we think that the Russians broke into the Democratic National Committee’s email.

First, how does this qualify as “election hacking”? Is there any evidence that the release of DNC emails influenced voters?

More importantly, why is it the U.S. government’s job to deal with one party’s loss of email confidentiality? If the Russians break into Joe Citizen’s email account, does the federal government retaliate? What if the Russians break into a corporation’s email? Is that the taxpayers’ problem? How about if the clever Russians break into Jill Stein’s email or the Libertarian party’s email? Would President Obama be taking action then?

If the answer to the above is “no” then what is special about the Democratic National Committee that it becomes the government’s (i.e., our) problem when they can’t keep their emails secret?

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“I’m Terrified of Raising a Boy in Trump’s America” (Elle) is kind of interesting. From the pregnant author:

Perhaps caught up in the momentum of the potentially ceiling-shattering election, I imagined the pea-size embryo was a girl and enjoyed a certain camaraderie as I cast my ballot, pleased about the stories I’d later tire her with about how she and I voted together for the first woman president. … I’d been sure I’d be raising a small woman during a new age of feminism, one where we didn’t even need to call it feminism anymore, one where it was normal for a woman to be the leader of the free world. But that was no longer the case.

It’s not the stereotypical boy things that worry me. … What terrifies me is the idea of raising a boy with good values when a man who represents the male stereotypes we’ve been fighting for generations is in the White House. A man who bullies both men and women in person and on Twitter. This man could dominate our news cycle for the next eight years. I can’t hide his bad behavior from our son.

How can I explain to a little boy that the year he was born, the President of the United States was an admitted sexual predator… How do I explain that grabbing a woman by her genitals is not an acceptable salutation when the man in charge of the country normalized it?

We can talk to him about the man who was in office when he was conceived, a self-declared feminist who made the world a better place for men and women of all colors and stripes.

I’ll start on January 21. I’ll be nearly five months pregnant when I travel to Washington, D.C., to march with thousands of other women who want to show our new president that there will be consequences for bad behavior.

According to Pew Research, “College graduates backed Clinton by a 9-point margin (52%-43%)”. If the author of this piece is typical of the thinking of Hillary supporters, could it be that there will be a further decline in fertility among America’s college-educated citizens?

[Separately, I kind of like the way she spins her personal loss (of the beloved President Obama) and disappointment (about not being ruled by Hillary Clinton) into altruistic concern regarding an unborn child (whose life can be terminated, legally, in Massachusetts for another two months, potentially for cash compensation). It reminds me of that meeting here in the Boston suburbs where adults were supposed to learn how to talk to their children about the election result but instead kept turning the focus onto themselves. Her son won’t even be 8 years old before King Donald I is history. Which of Donald Trump’s points of view did she think might interest a 6- or 7-year-old child?]

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Here’s a photo from a Gulfstream (re)paint shop….

After the interior goes back in, so will this fine-quality VHS VCR (with flying erase head!) and DVD player, unless the owners want to invest $100,000 in $1,000 of modern electronics and $99,000 of paperwork.

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Folks:

The trackpad on the four-year-old Acer Chromebook seems to be dying. I may have gotten my $199 worth out of this machine. What’s the best choice right now for a Chromebook that can be used by a 7-year-old to edit Google Docs, surf the web, and send the occasional email? It could also be something that I can take on trips (I’ve been trying to travel with an iPad and keyboard case, but find that the keyboard is tough to type on and the Bluetooth connection is intermittent).

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

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The dismal scientists at Gallup came up with “No Recovery: An Analysis of Long-Term U.S. Productivity Decline.” Here are some excerpts:

Conventional wisdom — as reported in many major newspapers and media — tells us the U.S. economy is “recovering.” Well-meaning economists, academics and government officials use the term “recovery” when discussing the economy, implying that growth is getting stronger.

The study finds there is no recovery. Since 2007, U.S. GDP per capita growth has been 1%.

Think of our country as a company, America Inc., which has more than 100 million full-time employees, with about $18 trillion in sales and $20 trillion of debt. The most serious problem facing it is no growth. In addition, America Inc. has three soaring expenses threatening to bankrupt the company and its shareholder-citizens: healthcare, housing and education.

As this report notes, in 1980, these three sectors accounted for 25% of total national spending — today, they account for more than 36%. They also account for most of the total measured inflation over this period. And without inflation in these sectors, real annual productivity — defined as GDP per capita growth — would have been an estimated 3.9% instead of 1.7%.

Why does it matter if we’re spending all of our money on pimped-out houses, gold-plated health care, and Club Med-style universities? Isn’t that what rich people would do? The economists say no, it is just that we are inefficient and stupid:

• “The U.S. population’s health has stagnated or even declined on several measures since 1980, especially for the working-age population.”
• In 1980, the rent-to-income ratio for the median family was 19%; by 2014, it swelled to 28%. The costs of owning have also increased. … the evidence largely suggests that the quality of housing has at least slowed in growth if not deteriorated, even as prices have increased. People are now living in smaller homes that are older and located farther away from their places of employment. Government statisticians take into account quality when calculating housing inflation, and their data show a price increase of 250% from 1980 to 2015. [“Percentage of Young Americans Living With Parents Rises to 75-Year High” (WSJ, Dec 21, 2016) suggests that these data are correct.]
• The U.S. education system has failed to instill any measurable gains in the cognitive performance of children and young adults for decades, as U.S. students and adults struggle with poor rates of literacy and numeracy despite high spending growth.

Why don’t Americans want to leave a secure government or big company job to start something new? The economists blame the decline in entrepreneurial activity on health care inflation: “There is always an element of risk in creating a new business, but the rising costs of healthcare magnify that risk. In previous decades, an employed worker could quit his or her job and pay for healthcare expenses out-of-pocket if necessary. Now, out-of-pocket expenses for the non-insured are extremely high, so an employed worker who quits to start a business likely gives up a valuable healthcare plan and may have to impose those costs on his or her own fledgling business at a time when revenue is dangerously low.” How steep is the decline? “The number of new firms with at least one worker per capita has fallen by about half since the late 1970s.” (Unlike journalists and politicians, these folks at least seem to adjust for population size appropriately throughout this report.)

A chart on page 84 shows that the U.S. legal landscape for employers changed enormously during the early 1980s. Employment at will was thrown out in favor of “implied contract” such that it became expensive to get rid of an unwanted or no-longer-affordable employee.

Although it is not central to the report’s arguments, page 85 contains a seemingly false statement: “Sugar is also heavily subsidized in the United States.” I thought that it was the opposite. We have sugar import quotas to keep prices high in the U.S., no?

We are crazy inefficient: “It costs the average U.S. physician $83,000 per year to process claims or otherwise interact with healthcare payers.” These are pre-tax dollars, presumably, but it is still a huge number, exceeding what a young primary care doc would have to pay in child support after a one-night sexual encounter in Massachusetts.

The economists say that teacher pay is low but don’t explain how this squares with the hundreds of applicants for every open position and the low quit rate of teachers.

Out of 100 pages just 2 are devoted to suggestions for how to get out of this stagnation. The purported suggestions are in fact mostly “well, we tried all of this stuff before and it didn’t work.” The idea of lower tax rates is dismissed on the ground that it has already been tried. They don’t grapple with the greater-than-90-percent rates faced by some of America’s potentially most productive workers. Singapore has a top tax rate of just over 20 percent and no estate tax. So the older highly productive worker in Singapore looking to improve his or her children’s wealth would have a vastly greater incentive to work than a similarly situated American. Ireland certainly has prospered after cutting tax rates (higher per-capita GDP than the U.S. or the U.K.; this from a country that was formerly notable for its poverty).

Readers: What do you think of the doom and gloom in this report? Would it really be that hard to get Americans to put down their Xbox controllers, stub out their legal marijuana, turn off the football game, and get to work?

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