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I was at Harvard Bookstore the other day and happened upon A is for Activist, a board book for toddlers (video of the author reading). This is a second edition from 2013 and the author seems to have been ahead of his (“her” by now? T is for “trans” according to the book) time. F is for Feminist, but oddly C is not therefore for Child Support nor is L for Litigation. C is in fact for “Co-op” (also “Cats”) and L is for “LGBTQ”.

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When you combine the treacly sentimentality of Facebook with a Hallmark Holiday such as Father’s Day one’s literary expectations must be set low. Nonetheless, I found something interesting in an MIT friend’s feed:

When I was born, sophisticated families fed their babies with formula, instead of nursing. And my father, who was not a control freak by any means, somehow made it his job to prepare my formula each and every day because he trusted no one else to do it, including my mother or our housekeeper. Now I realize that lack of trust might sound a bit mean, but you must understand that my mother never cooked a meal in her life, and was quite willfully perplexed in the kitchen. When my father died, she lost nearly 40 lbs in the following months, because she had no idea how to prepare food. My dad had cooked for her the prior quarter century and was such a good cook, she had no reason to learn.

Anyway, back to when I was an infant, my father insisted on preparing my formula daily, despite his busy schedule. He worked for General Electric at the time, and occasionally would have to fly from Detroit to Schenectady for a multi-day trip. And when he did, he had GE fly him back home every night and out every morning, just so he could prepare my formula. This went on for well over a year. Fortunately, my father was well-liked and highly valued, so he got away with costing his company extra money (sorry shareholders!)–just so he could be a good dad.

[What period of American life are we talking about? She was born in 1961.]

Readers: What’s the best thing that you saw yesterday on Facebook related to Father’s Day? Please cut and paste into the comments!

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“Where More Women Are on Boards, Executive Pay Is Higher” (nytimes) says that public company CEOs can boost their pay (i.e., their stealing from shareholders) by putting women on their boards.

Certainly it seems likely that through a combination of pressure and demographic shifts there will be an increasing percentage of public company board members who identify as women. Should we expect this pay boost for in-house looters to be persistent?

[Separately, like other reports that count up men versus women, I’m not sure how this article makes sense in an age where cisgender-normative prejudice is frowned upon. How can anyone know what the gender composition of a corporate board is given that people might change their gender ID tomorrow morning and/or might have changed it some months ago but without changing names?]

Related:

• Economic Recovery Plan for the U.S. (November 2008 document suggesting shareholder-driven corporate governance)

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“Afghan Lovers Begin an Asylum Odyssey in New York” is about two would-be legal immigrants who are currently in New York City: “Even if they win asylum in the United States, both are illiterate, with little experience living or working beyond the potato fields of their home in Bamian Province.”

The same newspaper runs stories just about every week about excessive income inequality in New York City, i.e., expressing shock that a Goldman Sachs partner earns more than someone who is illiterate.

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Stormy Peters, with whom I have indirectly worked by (slightly) helping KidsOnComputers.org, what may have seemed like an anodyne article on how a woman might be able to attend a tech-related conference without “feeling harassed”. She titled this “Events are not cesspools of harassment.” Publication led to… well, a cesspool of harassment being dumped on Peters’s head by commenters on the article’s page and on Twitter. (I would hesitate to say “female commenters” in our transgender age, but most had names such as Holly, Renee, Sarah and other traditionally female monikers.)

Instead of a craven apology for her ThoughtCrime, Peters followed this up with an ironic summary and analysis of the criticism. Commenters were predictably even more enraged by this one, e.g., Holly Wood’s “I see you’re in a fairly lofty position at your company. Are you a supervisor of some kind? While I know I’m wildly outside your area of expertise, I would not ever consider working for you.”

Peters finally throws up her hands and tells the commenters to, if they have such great ideas, write them up in long form.

[It is curious to me that there are women who like to go to conferences but don’t like working in tech because of harassment and don’t like tech conferences. Why wouldn’t they quit to work in some other field? Or if they are drawn to conferences per se why wouldn’t they go to a dermatology or radiology conference in Boston, have sex with a drunk physician, and then harvest $100,000 per year tax-free for 23 years under the Massachusetts child support guidelines or, if not interested in children, sell the abortion? The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the median web developer, a typical “tech” job, pays a pre-tax $65,000 per year (occupational outlook handbook). Is that a high enough rate of pay to compensate for all the pain and suffering these commenters say that they are enduring?]

I asked a software engineer who currently identifies as a woman what would happen if a man had written an article with the same text as Stormy Peters’s original. “He would have been fired immediately,” she responded.

[Not very related: I asked a federal government worker what would have happened to him if he had set up a personal email server to use for official business, Hillary Clinton-style. “I would have been fired immediately,” he responded.]

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I am in love with Sony APS-C mirrorless cameras for their image quality (dynamic range so much better than anything from Canon), their compact size, and the back-saving flip-up rear LCD. I started with the NEX-6, moved to the A6000, and now have the A6300. The worst thing about the camera compared to a trusty Canon EOS body has always been the autofocus. Sony’s response to this is “Just give us $1000 for the new model, which has the best autofocus imaginable.” After playing around with the “green idiot mode,” however, I am shocked at the number of out-of-focus images. This is not a question of picking the wrong part of the scene but of an image in which literally nothing is in focus, perhaps due to “release priority” rather than “AF priority” (manually settable but the setting may not affect behavior in green idiot mode) combined with a generally inferior ability to autofocus.

Any readers with this camera? Does the purported Emperor of Autofocus actually have no clothes?

 

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I talked to a high-end trusts, estates, and foundation lawyer. I asked him if there was any difference in setting up foundations in various U.S. states. He said “Delaware is kind of the go-to place, but South Dakota is becoming more popular because of the professional trustees there offering lower fees.” He said to avoid Florida. “Most states it is the Attorney General who is responsible for supervising foundations and trusts, but in Florida it is the Department of Agriculture and they can be very aggressive due to the potential for taking advantage of the elderly.” Any other tips? “Stay out of California and New York. Their tax departments are like third world countries’.”

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I know that North Carolina is the State of Hate (TM) while Massachusetts is all about love, but I went for my annual workout and found this sign at the Boston Sports Club in Waltham:

How is this different from the North Carolina law that marks the Ignorant Southerners as haters? (And, as is well-established, haters are going to hate.)

One of my Facebook friends resolved the apparent contradiction by saying that the Massachusetts lovers who put up the sign meant to write “gender” rather than the biological or birth certificate-derived “sex.” Massachusetts lovers and North Carolina haters have more or less the same laws regarding amending the sex designation on a birth certificate. If we put up this sign are we actually distinguishable from the haters of North Carolina?

[Separately, will they have to take down this sign if the new transgender bill becomes law? (The governor says that it will.)]

Related:

• TIME article on how Massachusetts was the first (1887) to insist, by law, on the separation of the sexes in bathrooms.

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One corner of American society where regulators and lawyers do about 10 times as much work, measured in dollars, as primary producers: aircraft operations from places other than public airports.

What has typically happened in Massachusetts is that a property owner will get approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to land an airplane or helicopter. The FAA looks at the question of safety and, to a lesser extent, noise and impact on neighbors. Then neighbors or town officials look at the gleaming aircraft in someone’s backyard and try to shut down operations via zoning laws.

After at least four years of litigation, the question seems to have been resolved by a May 2016 decision of the Appeals Court in Hanlon v. Town of Sheffield (15-P-799). Essentially the holding seems to be that the town has to seek approval from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s aeronautics division prior to shutting down someone’s FAA-approved operation.

Related

• We can get stuff done in Massachusetts… it just takes 30 years (new runway at Logan)
• Stamford, Connecticut police ticket a medevac helicopter pilot for landing at a hospital

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I was chatting with a 25-year-old from Los Angeles, where the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp lawsuit is unfolding (posting 1; posting 2). By the time the dust settles, Amber Heard will likely have gotten paid more for every time that she had sex with her defendant during their one-year marriage than this 25-year-old, an arts educator, will earn in a year. Yet the 25-year-old was not envious of these profits nor skeptical of Amber Heard’s claim that the person from whom she was seeking tens (or hundreds?) of millions of dollars was also, conveniently for her financial lawsuit, a person who had been beating her up. “We were taught not to engage in victim-blaming or slut-shaming,” said the 25-year-old.

Related:

• USA Today on Amber Heard’s previous experience with the domestic violence industry

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