Category: Uncategorized

Based on media reports it seems that the Google employees spend a lot of time on stuff that isn’t helpful to end-users. For example, “How Google Protected Andy Rubin, the ‘Father of Android’” (nytimes):

The woman, with whom Mr. Rubin had been having an extramarital relationship, said he coerced her into performing oral sex in a hotel room in 2013

Mr. Rubin said in a statement after the publication of this article. “Specifically, I never coerced a woman to have sex in a hotel room. These false allegations are part of a smear campaign by my ex-wife to disparage me during a divorce and custody battle.”

[See this chapter on California family law for how Rubin’s defense in the family court is likely to go; Rie Rubin sued Andy in 2017 and her LinkedIn profile, with no conventional employment since 2009, suggests that she’ll be able to devote full-time effort to maximizing her child support profits. See this chapter on Nevada family law, with its default 50/50 shared parenting and capped-at-$13,000-per-year child support, for how Rubin could have saved his children the trauma of being the subject of custody litigation, himself a huge amount of time and energy that he’d have been able to devote to parenting rather than lawsuit defense, and his personal reputation (since Rie Rubin wouldn’t have had any financial incentive to disclose her defendant’s alleged sex habits) if he’d flown into KPAO from Vegas every day (see “Facebook uses a Malibu-flying engineering manager to promote careers in engineering”). The difference between Nevada and California child support guidelines? Sufficient for Rubin to have purchased a factory-new pressurized airplane and hired a professional two-pilot crew… every year of the marriage and for every year until the cash-yielding child turns 18. (e.g., Rubin could have bought a $2 million jet-powered short-field-capable Piper Meridian every year on January 1 and donated it to charity on Dec 31, times 20 years, for less the difference between what he will likely pay his plaintiff under CA versus NV law)]

On the chance that Google employees will cut back on having sex in each other’s hotel rooms, have a “work-in” rather than a “walk-out,” and manage to streamline their defenses of the various family court lawsuits, I wonder if it would be helpful to put together a wishlist of stuff that we humble users want them to work on. Here’s mine:

• Make Google Docs as good as spotting spelling errors as Microsoft Word was in 1985. Example: “acquishing” not flagged as misspelled (Millennial attempt at “acquiescing”).
• Fix Google Contacts. Example: I recently tried to add a phone number for a pilot working on his instrument rating. We had exchanged mobile numbers via email. Google’s Huge-Brained AI (TM) suggested that my own cell phone number should be added as his cell phone number. This despite the fact that I have a Google Voice account and use that number for two-factor auth, etc.
• Bring back or open-source Picasa. (see this 2016 post on the topic)
• Restore the portfolios that people took the time to add in Google Finance (2018 post)
  

Readers: What would you like to see Google coders work on?

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We in the temperate zones of Planet Earth have been waging war on folks at the Equator for the past few hundred years. We dig up dinosaur blood and coal, set it on fire, and fill with atmosphere with CO2. Who suffers most from the resulting warming? Folks who live at sea level near the Equator, where it was already too damn hot.

Suppose that, 25 years from now, the Chinese develop an awesome solar-powered CO2-extraction machine. Barack Obama dusts off his Nobel Peace Prize to get all of the correct-thinking countries to buy and run these machines until CO2 is reduced to a level that is optimum for the U.S. and similarly-situated nations.

What stops Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Ecuador, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, et al. from deciding to buy and run carbon sequestration machines until the Earth gets kicked back into its “going back towards an Ice Age” phase?

It is not as though these folks really owe us temperate-zone-dwellers anything, right?

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We have a new (better?) Congress as of today.

The Uber driver who picked me up recently in “North Bethesda” (Rockville!) happened to be an immigrant from Venezuela. His parents and siblings remain in Venezuela’s “second city”, as he phrased it, of Maracaibo. They are short of food and medicine, both of which he ships to them monthly. “Sometimes it gets through. Sometimes it gets stolen by the army or police.”

I asked him what, in an ideal world, the U.S. government would do to help his family and their fellow Venezuelans. He wanted to see a U.S. military invasion that would remove the current government.

On the one hand, our most recent invasions-followed-by-nation-building efforts haven’t worked out so well. On the other hand, we invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 and managed to get back out (Wikipedia).

We claim to be humanitarians, which is why we provide free housing, health care, food, and smartphones to low-income immigrants and their children. But, in theory, we could help all 32 million people in Venezuela to a much greater extent at a much lower cost than what we’re providing to tens of millions of welfare-dependent immigrants (at least one million in New York City alone, according to the nytimes).

If we don’t care about helping the vulnerable then obviously there is no need for us to bother. But then why do we spend $1.2 trillion on welfare? If we do care about helping the vulnerable, why don’t we set Venezuela back on its feet? How much resistance would current members of the Venezuelan military and police put up if we said “Staring Monday you’ll all be getting paychecks in dollars”? Are these folks truly fanatically devoted to their current way of doing things?

Plainly we couldn’t promise “free elections” since Venezuelans did freely vote for the current government (see Hugo Chavez: Great politician; poor administrator).

And probably we wouldn’t be successful in meeting expectations. Foreign Policy says “Venezuela was considered rich in the early 1960s: It produced more than 10 percent of the world’s crude and had a per capita GDP many times bigger than that of its neighbors Brazil and Colombia — and not far behind that of the United States.” The author is a brilliant “geoeconomics” expert, but apparently economists aren’t interested in long division because the article doesn’t include the word “population.” The population of Venezuela was 7.6 million in 1960 and dividing oil revenue by 7.6 million resulted in “per capita rich”. The same oil reserves divided by 32 million, of course, yield a disappointingly smaller number.

So of course we probably don’t want to invade Venezuela. But if we don’t, why do we say that our government acts in a humanitarian manner? Who needs help right now more than Venezuelans?

And if we don’t want to use our military for this, why do we need such a huge military? What other country would our new Congress want to invade?

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… but not Mexico?

“Barbra Streisand Can’t Get Trump Out of Her Head. So She Sang About Him.” (nytimes):

How are you feeling these days?

I want to sleep nights, if we take the House I’ll be able to sleep a little bit better.

And if they don’t?

Don’t know. I’ve been thinking about, do I want to move to Canada?

Escaping the tyranny of Republican rule makes sense, but why does Streisand want to go to the Frozen North (TM)? If she likes the LA climate, Mexico offers a variety of upscale neighborhoods with similar sunny warm and dry weather.

Related:

• Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: “Canada is a whiter country than the US. We have a much larger Asian population and a much smaller Black population.”

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Folks:

What are your election outcome predictions?

So much of the ballot in our town is taken up by candidates running unopposed that I haven’t put much effort into considering Massachusetts outcomes.

We have three ballot questions, though. Let me go on record with guesses regarding those.

Nurses want state-set staffing minimums. Nearly everyone in Massachusetts is somehow dependent on the health care industry, so I think this will fail. Max Weber would agree with my prediction, I think.

Question 2 is about forming a commission to complain about Citizens United (nothing is worse than free speech when people say stuff that the righteous don’t want to hear). I predict that this will fail due to its obvious futility. (Though maybe it will win because it enables people to show their righteousness while wasting only a few $million?)

Question 3 is about whether people who attempt to interfere with a biological male using the women’s locker room, for example, should be imprisoned for one year (a longer sentence than the typical Nazi war criminal served). I predict that the “Yes” votes win (preserve the current law, which allows those who fail to keep up with the LGBTQIA times to the pokey). There is no cheaper way to feel virtuous than voting in favor of something that will purportedly help the transgendered.

I haven’t studied the close Democrat/Republican races too closely (I am unable to vote in them), but my general assumption is that most Americans want a planned economy so they’ll vote for Democrats unless a corrupt or similarly flawed candidate is put forward. Then, on the other hand, Americans are fearful of change, so they’ll vote for incumbents. So I will guess that Democrats win 80 percent of the “close” races in which neither candidate is incumbent, 95 percent of the close races in which a Democrat is the incumbent, and only 50 percent of the close races in which a Republican is the incumbent.

Readers: What are your best guesses right now?

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… by voting for Democrats. From “Letter from [MIT] President Reif: Consoling each other and helping to heal the world”:

As our nation once again confronts heartbreaking mass violence, sending this annual reminder of MIT’s policies against harassment may feel to some as inconsequential and almost irrelevant.

By reminding us that violence, racism, harassment and bullying are out of bounds – period – our policies can help lead us from error. Yet they cannot lead us towards the light: the essential duty to treat each other with respect, sympathy, decency, humility and kindness; the responsibility each of us has to make sure that everyone at MIT can truly feel at home; the challenge of finding a way to repair our fractured nation. This work we must do for ourselves.

Our policies also demonstrate that official statements matter – for good or ill. For instance, a recent draft of a government policy would redefine gender in a way that would erase the dignity and lived reality of well over a million transgender Americans, including many members of our MIT community. And next week in Massachusetts, the civil rights of these Americans are up for a vote.

Is there a political party that an MIT community member could vote for that would oppose this effort by the Trump Administration?

Ultimately, nothing we do or say at MIT can reverse the fact that, from Pittsburgh to Jeffersontown, Charleston to Orlando, a baseball field in Maryland to the Boston Marathon, fellow human beings have been targeted and killed for being themselves.

“Orlando” is a reference to Omar Mateen’s shooting rampage? Is there any evidence that he targeted the Pulse nightclub because it catered to a gay clientele?

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I’ve been going back through some old blog postings here as part of the migration effort from Harvard’s server.

Here are some things that I got wrong…

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2003/04/17/the-death-of-the-media-lab/ (the Media Lab has boomed along with tech in general, though Joi Ito also can take credit)
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2003/04/15/you-can-get-a-lot-more-with-a-kind-word-and-a-gun/ (our Iraq “victory”)
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2003/04/24/outlining-and-the-presidential-campaign/ (idea: U.S. politics would become more rational and issue/policy-based)
• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2003/06/04/the-chinese-car/ (embarassing! a prediction that cars made in China would be dramatically cheaper, as little as $3,000 in 2003 dollars, about $4,200 today)

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A subclass of employees of Google today will stop working and “walk out” (to where? a suburban parking lot?).

The management of the company says that they support this walkout.

Can we infer from this that this subclass of employee is not considered productive or important by management?

See “The $90M Women’s Walkout At Google: Is Real Change Coming?” (Forbes) for how it turns out that the subclass is “employees who identify as female.”

(Also interesting from the Forbes piece is this characterization of the Google Heretic’s memo:

One instance that comes to mind is the ten-page memo that fired Google engineer James Damore wrote in 2017 explaining why women make bad engineers and arguing against the advancement of women in STEM

A perfect illustration of “people don’t remember what you say; they remember how you made them feel”!)

A flight school owner would never express happiness that mechanics or instructors were walking out. These employees are critical to generating revenue. What kind of message does the Google management send when it says “Go ahead and don’t bother to work on Thursday; the business will be just fine without female employees”?

Related:

• nytimes story on the walkout: “Last year, one engineer, James Damore, argued in an internal document that women were biologically less adept at engineering and that “personality differences” explained the shortage of female leaders at the company.” (i.e., three New York Times reporters were unable to read or understand Damore’s memo; nor could they be troubled to look at a Ph.D. neuroscientist’s “No, the Google manifesto isn’t sexist or anti-diversity. It’s science”) 

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Folks: As you may have noticed, as of today this 15-year-old blog is now integrated into my regular philip.greenspun.com server. Can you please test signing up for email alerts, commenting, and anything else that you might have done on the old (Harvard) server?

Thanks in advance!

Philip

——— squawks so far

“Your blog title comes across as “s Weblog” in my reader.”

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Joseph Stalin supposedly said, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”

I’m wondering if the death of Jamal Khashoggi proves Stalin right. Like other big nation-states, Saudi Arabia has done a lot of arguably bad stuff over the years. A few examples of things that might upset Americans:

• “Saudi Arabia government ‘funded dry run’ for 9/11, legal documents claim” (Independent, 2017)
• “Documents Back Saudi Link to Extremists” (nytimes, 2009)
• “Saudi Arabia criticised for 48 beheadings in four months of 2018” (Guardian)

There was minimal media coverage about the Saudis being involved in wars or terrorist acts that killed thousands. Why the blanket coverage and demands for action in response to the death of Jamal Khashoggi?

[Separately, is the U.S. in a position to complain about the Saudis eliminating someone they didn’t like? Don’t we blow up guys in Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. with drones? That’s not exactly due process.]

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