Category: Uncategorized

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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Readers:

An Irish helicopter pilot friend and I are escaping our respective families and winter weather from Dec 9-17 on Royal Caribbean’s Empress of the Seas (itinerary). The basic cabins are absurdly cheap, about $100 per-person per day. This includes a bed, three meals set up to minimize the risk of food poisoning, and entertainment. Should be cheaper than staying home!

It would be awesome if some of you can join. We can evaluate socialism first-hand in Cuba and give Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a full report. We can take some photos of Labadee and send them to Donald Trump so that he can see just how wrong he is about Haiti (as, of course, he is wrong about everything).

Our experience in Haiti will be authentic, according to Wikipedia:

The resort is completely tourist-oriented, and is guarded by a private security force. The site is fenced off from the surrounding area, and passengers are not allowed to leave the property. Food available to tourists is brought from the cruise ships. A controlled group of Haitian merchants are given sole rights to sell their merchandise and establish their businesses in the resort.

Royal Caribbean offers high-speed statellite Internet at a reasonable (considering the satellite link) price. So “have to work that week” is no excuse!

Please email me (philg@mit.edu) if you can join.

Related:

• “Baltic Sea on Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas“ (2016 cruise with Mom)

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“Two Students Hooked Up. It Was Clearly Consensual. He Still Spent $12,000 Defending Himself.” (Reason) contains more detail than you’d want about the activities of a couple of UC Davis students. It is interesting, though, because it shows the minimum time and cost of a college sex tribunal defense. The official investigation began in January and was terminated in May. The defendant incurred legal bills of $12,000 as well as more than three months of uncertainty regarding his university education.

The mom in this story is not too pleased about the situation. Perhaps parents should budget for legal defense costs when sending sons off to college? Or encourage enrollment at an online university such as Western Governors University instead? If the teenage boy is at work during the day (perhaps in an all-male occupation?) and on the computer doing a class at night, how much trouble can he get into?

Related:

• “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football)” (where “winning” means spending more like $1 million on legal defense)

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