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One of our guides during a recent trip to Israel described a public debate over the extent to which the society is fair to women. He pointed out that women can retire with the same pension at age 62 versus 67 for men. Women serve 1-1.5 years less in the military (and are exempt from the draft altogether if they get married before age 18). Women who do serve in the military are exempt from reserve duty as soon as they become pregnant for the first time whereas men can be and are called up until the age of 40-50). “Women complain about their status but they never mention these advantages.”

Some of the advantages for women are limited to those who get married and/or have children. An Israeli attorney pointed out that a woman could simply marry at 18, have a few children, and then sue for property division, alimony (but maybe only from a rabbinic court? example; also see this one regarding a $90,000 one-time payment), custody, profitable child support (even if the children live with their father), etc. as soon as she was tired of her partner. Women are automatic victors in any custody lawsuit for a child under six (though this may be changing soon; compare to some European countries where women automatically win custody regardless of the age of the child[ren] and to U.S. states where the law is gender-neutral but the statistical probability of a child being with the father at least 50 percent of the time is less than 10 percent).

Israeli law has some built-in bias towards traditional family norms. Currently only a married heterosexual couple can hire a surrogate mother within Israel (that may be changing, however; see “AG: Single women should also be able to use a surrogate” for how single women (but not single men or gay male couples) may gain equal status in this area).

Women cite to the fact that Israel has a larger gender gap in pay than most other countries (OECD). [Note to investors: You can therefore make some staggering profits by setting up a company in Israel and hiring only women!]

Related

• Child support litigation in Israel

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I’m in Paris, I don’t think that any Republican can win the U.S. Presidency (previous posting), and my vote in any general election is irrelevant (since I vote in Massachusetts), so I haven’t watched or read about the Republican convention. My Facebook feed is alive with expressions of outrage from Hillary Clinton supporters (did they imagine that the convention was set up for them?), but they don’t describe anything substantive having happened.

Readers: What happened at the convention? Is there any new information?

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One area where Jews and Arabs once had a common interest was in growing food on the irrigated desert (guides point out that every tree you see in Israel was planted within the last 100 years or so). Unskilled workers in need of a job would pick fruit. Some of these jobs have been replaced by machines, but Palestinians coming in from the West Bank and Gaza have been substantially replaced, according to our guide, by Thais who fly in to work for 2-3 years (food can be grown and picked more or less year-round in Israel so it wouldn’t make sense for them to come just for one harvest season).

Thus Israeli is now a pilgrimage site for Buddhists!

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I was chatting with an NYU professor. She recently taught a class at the university’s Abu Dhabi campus. I asked her what the students were like and she said that only four were Emiratis and “they were all girls; Emirati boys can’t be bothered since they know that they will never have to work.” It turned out that young people from all around the world competed for all-expenses paid slots at this college and the vast majority turned out to be foreigners.

As someone who hates to see money poured down the administrative drain I have long been a fan of UBI-style ideas (see my 1996 food-and-shelter idea, for example). But I’m wondering if experience in the Middle East should be studied before we go too far down this road. A lot of oil-rich Arab countries offer the basics of life to all of their citizens. U.S. and European taxpayers have been providing food, shelter, healthcare, and education to Palestinians since 1950 through a UN agency. The result seems to be low participation in employment (but maybe we will match them soon!) and a high birthrate: Qatar has the 6th highest population growth rate on the planet (CIA Factbook); the Gaza Strip is not too far behind at #13 (CIA Factbook).

Tel Aviv cab driver on the subject: “I told my kids that the only place ‘Success’ comes before ‘Hard Work’ is in the dictionary.” (works better in Hebrew, presumably; he had worked at a desk job for 36 years before retiring from that to drive a cab)

Related:

• Technology Review on UBI
• Why do robot alarmists and universal basic income advocates support expanding immigration?
• Wall Street Journal hires crackhead to analyze the economics of universal basic income?

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A friend of a friend is running for Congress in a district outside of Massachusetts. One big element of her campaign is that rich people and rich corporations should not have a large influence on American politics. She came to Boston to raise money at a private party in a 6,000 square-foot house that Zillow says is worth $3.5 million. Elizabeth Warren spoke in support of this candidate noting that she shared the goal of wanting every citizen to have equal power and not having politicians controlled by distant rich supporters. Neither politician addressed the apparent contradiction of coming to a different state to raise money from rich people whose interests may or may not align with those of the prospective Representative’s actual constituents.

The two women agreed on a range of issues. The state politician that they hate the most is some guy who “voted against equal pay” multiple times (this was in the state where the Congressional race is happening, not in Massachusetts). Free trade agreements are bad. President Obama is a godlike figure in most respects, but his support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is misguided. Previous trade agreements should be reevaluated and potentially repudiated. (Nobody explained how this was different from Donald Trump’s campaign promises.) One thing that was especially bad about the TPP is that some aspects of U.S. sovereignty would be compromised and handed over to a transnational bureaucracy (“offshoring of power”). (Nobody explained how opposing this was consistent with telling the Brits to stay in the EU.) In the opinion of these female politicians, what is key to their support is that voters care passionately about women’s rights, especially the right to an on-demand abortion without any conditions.

The audience applauded loudest for the following propositions: (1) breaking up big banks, and (2) protectionism.

There were a lot of lawyers present and they got Elizabeth Warren on the subject of approving Obama’s federal judge nominations. Warren riffed on the subject of how federal courts are super friendly to big corporations (this will come as news to Fortune 500 companies facing patent infringement lawsuits in Texas).

The candidates and the audience agreed that Black Lives Matter though as it happened the gathering did not include any black people.

Stylistically it was possible to see how a novice politician becomes a professional. Elizabeth Warren used the word “fight” in nearly every sentence; her young protégé used the word “fight” only about one third as much.

Private audience reaction to the talk was less enthusiastic than the public reaction. An attorney specializing in Asian-U.S. deals noted that the TPP would have little effect due to existing bilateral agreements already incorporating most of its provisions. He said that Senator Warren greatly overestimated American economic power. “It’s not 1945 anymore,” he said. “Singapore and Hong Kong are richer than we are; Taiwan and Korea will surpass us soon.”

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What if you own (or lease) an electric car and can’t charge it at home? This Technology Review article describes what it is like.

I charge my car in public parks and mall parking structures around Los Angeles, using a diversity of charging networks run by startups such as Chargepoint and Blink. I typically pay $5 to $10 to charge up. Every single station has been, for years, mediocre to terrible. The stations are often broken due to software or hardware problems, and remain out of service for weeks. Competition among electric car drivers for these public charging stations is fierce and intensifying. It’s practically impossible for me to find an open charging station during the day.

Even so, I see Teslas parked alongside Nissan Leafs, Chevy Volts, electric Ford Fusions, and electric Fiats like mine every time I visit my local public charge stations in Los Angeles (about every other day). I’ll often end up helping a confused and harried Tesla driver operate the charger. If I mention the free supercharger stations available only to them, they usually seem vaguely aware of them, but either don’t have enough charge left to reach one or can’t be bothered to drive out of their way.

Related:

• How to get a free car: lease an electric car (but sadly, not a Tesla)
• Smug, Rich Bastard for a Weekend (Tesla X review)

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Top executives in Silicon Valley often have a huge cushion due to a monopoly position and high costs to customers to switch. John Chambers, who built modern-day Cisco, is an exception. While Cisco has a great brand name it has to fight for every sale given that, by definition, its boxes must be able to communicate with all of the rest of the world’s routers and switches.

What does someone like this think of our upcoming presidential election? The MIT alumni magazine, Technology Review, asked him:

Between Trump and Clinton, who has the better technology policies?

If you’re asking, “How do you give middle-class America a pay raise? How do you create opportunities? How do you make the country more competitive on a global basis in a way that allows everybody to benefit? How do you change health care and education?”—well, those questions are all about a digital agenda, and yet I’ve not heard a single candidate articulate a vision on that.

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Folks:

I leave today for Paris. Would any French readers like to get together on Saturday morning, July 23? Or perhaps on Thursday or Friday of this week? If so, please email me (philg@mit.edu). Happy to chat about any of the subjects that I’ve written about, e.g., technology, travel, photography, and economics.

Mom and I are going to be on a Royal Caribbean cruise. I should be available to meet up at the following times:

• July 26, 4 pm: Helsinki
• July 30, 1 pm: Talinn
• July 31: 3 pm: Riga
• August 1: any time 11-6, Klaipeda (Lithuania)
• August 3, morning or evening: Rostock (Germany)
• August 4: 10a-4p, Fredericia (Denmark)
• August 5-6, flexible: Copenhagen

Thanks in advance for making the effort!

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I met a suburban elementary school teacher at our local airport. She has just finished her second year and is brimming with enthusiasm for the job. “Could you do nothing and still get paid the same?” I asked. She said “Pretty much.” I asked if there were any burned out older teachers in her school who did as little as possible. “Most of them,” she said.

Related:

• The public schoolteacher on incentives to work hard

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I was about to throw my Windows 10 laptop into a bag for a trip when I reflected that I hadn’t used the machine for about 10 days. So I fired it up and watched it spend about 2 hours syncing Dropbox (via LAN sync from a desktop machine on the same network; I had a few GB of new photographs and expert witness materials). Twelve hours later I decided to look at “Check for Updates” to make sure that Windows had taken care of itself. In fact there were still about six updates to be downloaded installed and the machine wasn’t scheduled to deal with them until the next morning at 3:00 am. So I told the machine to “install now” and then “restart now”. Part of the sluggishness may be that this 2012 machine has a mechanical hard drive (I wanted to upgrade to a Lenovo X1 Yoga, but they couldn’t ship an OLED version in time for this last summer trip so what is the point?).

I’m wondering if we’re at the end of an era where the Internet isn’t fast or ubiquitous enough to do everything in the cloud but we aren’t tied to our continuously connected desktops. Thus we become sysadmin slaves to our laptops (unless the laptop is our primary computer).

Related:

• My 2005 plea for turning the mobile phone into the desktop computer via a dock (the iPhone was introduced two years later, in 2007, so if this were actually a good idea one would think that it would have been done at some point in the last 8 years)

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