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The New York Times didn’t wait to hear the evidence before lauding as meritorious Ellen Pao‘s employment discrimination claim against the one-percenters at Kleiner Perkins. Now they’ve got their own plaintiff, Marjorie Walker (“Here’s why I’m suing the New York Times for discrimination” (Guardian)), alleging that they discriminate against “older, minority and female employees” in favor of “young, high-end and primarily white” workers.

One common thread is that the Times doesn’t have any difficulty in making up its mind about these lawsuits. Just as they were quickly sure that Ellen Pao was right, they’re confident that Marjorie Walker is dead wrong:

A spokeswoman for The Times called the suit “entirely without merit” and said “we intend to fight it vigorously in court.’’ — “Suit Accuses New York Times Executives of Bias”

What do readers think? Ellen Pao’s argument was that the Kleiner Perkins partners wanted to make themselves poorer by bringing in a less qualified person as a partner (my initial posting on the lawsuit where I wondered what their motivation could be). Marjorie Walker and her co-plaintiff Ernestine Grant argue that mid-level managers at the Times are favoring workers under 40 rather than workers over 60.

Related:

• “Sheryl Sandberg, Jane Austen, and the Queen of Versailles” — in the middle is another story that the Times wasn’t enthusiastic about covering; one of its reporters turned an adulterous affair into child support profits worth roughly 100 years of income for a journalist (a fairly straightforward operation under New York family law)
• “It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit”, a post-lawsuit Times piece in which Ellen Pao is characterized as a “fighter” against sexism that the half-female jury found did not exist.
• “Ellen Pao Suit Against Kleiner Perkins Heads to Trial” is a typical pre-lawsuit piece that leads with a paragraph about how “many women in technology … are rarely hired, promoted or taken seriously, and are confronted on a daily basis by sexism and harassment. They feel demeaned and discouraged.” Ellen Pao having sex with a married partner is described with “Ms. Pao says a married colleague pressured her into an affair”. Kleiner Perkins’s defense is “a scorched-earth response.”
• “Lawsuit Shakes Man’s World of Tech” was an early Times piece stripped down to “even some of Ms. Pao’s critics concede that she is exposing an uncomfortable truth about Silicon Valley” (sadly, not the “truth” was not true enough for the jury to give Pao the $160 million she was seeking in her lawsuit (compare to $227 million she could have gotten for having sex with her boss))

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An evergreen subject for our media seems to be “female” athletes earning less than athletes who identify as “male”. “Roger Federer, $731,000; Serena Williams, $495,000: The Pay Gap in Tennis” is a recent example from the New York Times.

I’m wondering if games would be more interesting if there were no restrictions on gender identification. Certainly right now the singles game is typically pretty predictable and often the winner is simply the taller player. Could an amazing player 5’8″ tall reasonably hope to beat Novak Djokovic at 6’2″?

Why not deal squarely with the issue that huge strong players, regardless of gender ID, can overpower physically smaller players? We can group sub-tournaments by weight and/or serve speed rather than by gender ID. If we are concerned about pay equity then just have the prize money be the same in each group.

[Separately, what is there to stop a 6’4″-tall “male” player right now from putting on a skirt, saying “I identify as a woman”, and entering a woman’s tournament? Gael Monfils, for example, probably wouldn’t have too much trouble overpowering even a top player currently identifying as “Female”.]

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“MIT built its own Ellen Pao before the Ivy League did: Gretchen Kalonji” covers a UC chancellor who arranged a sinecure for her lover and ran up $600,000 in renovation bills before it all ended in suicide and litigation.

Today’s nytimes has “University of California, Davis, Chancellor Is Removed From Post” about Linda Katehi and “questions about the campus’s employment and compensation of some of the chancellor’s immediate family members.”

Do they really need to have someone in this position if it is so prone to nepotism?

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People seem to be excited about government regulations around self-driving cars. I’m wondering why this couldn’t be reduced to “Your self-driving car needs a $20 million liability insurance policy from an A-rated company.” The insurers aren’t going to underwrite high risks, presumably.

On a boat tour of Ft. Lauderdale’s rich waterfront houses, the captain/guide told us of his experience working on big private yachts. I asked him “If I am a rich douchebag can I buy a crazy long yacht tomorrow and, knowing nothing about boats, start driving it around?” He explained that Coast Guard regulations are essentially irrelevant because long before a regulation would require training or certification the boat’s insurer would insist on a licensed captain and perhaps additional crew members.

This is also true in aviation. A woman who got her pilot certificate yesterday can get into a $5 million Pilatus PC-12 and push the start button from an FAA point of view. But no insurance company would allow that.

Why not assume that underwriters are prudent and can evaluate the risks of self-driving vehicles at least as well as government workers and politicians?

[Maybe tweak this with a requirement also for comprehensive data and video logging in any self-driving car so that it is easier to determine if the self-driving vehicle caused an accident. But that would still be only a couple of paragraphs of regulation.]

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I watched a high-school senior, presumably an expert rider, teaching a 6-year-old to ride a horse. I asked her if she wanted some feedback on her teaching and she said yes, so I’m writing this for her and sharing it in case it is useful to anyone else.

Horse riding for beginners is a bit like flying in that people tend to develop tunnel vision and don’t have a lot of spare mental capacity to listen and process. The instructor thus must limit comments and corrections to only the bare essentials. The inputs to a helicopter are power (collective pitch) and attitude (pitch and bank). It is seldom helpful to say anything except suggestions regarding how to adjust these inputs. I’m not sure what the inputs to a horse in English riding, but it is probably worth figuring out what the most important ones are and limiting one’s corrections/suggestions to those inputs. “Sit up straighter” and “shorter reins,” for example, could be helpful.

While the beginner 6-year-old was on the horse, presumably just barely holding everything together, the teacher started a discussion about what had gone wrong in a previous maneuver (letting the horse turn himself right instead of forcing him to turn left). This probably could have been summarized as “Don’t let the animal win; you’re the boss!” but the real issue was dwelling on the unsuccessful past. Perhaps there is a place for a post-ride debrief but it doesn’t work to try to debrief while still at the controls in a moving aircraft so I don’t think it would work while sitting on a live animal. A deeper issue is positive reinforcement in training, which is equally important for humans and animals. From my “Teaching Flying” article:

I stood in a lift line at the Sante Fe ski resort once. A father and daughter were in front of us. The father said to the child “The reason why you failed…” and was interrupted by a veteran instructor next to me. He said “Don’t tell her why she failed; tell her why she succeeded.”

Perhaps more experience riders can comment with what they consider to be the most important tips for a novice riding instructor.

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“U.S. Economy Grew 0.5% in First Quarter, Slowest Pace in 2 Years” (nytimes) has a “glass is half full” ring to it. Our economy is growing, but less rapidly than in the past. The journalist and editors, as is typical for the American news industry, fail to to put this into context with the population growth rate of about 0.7 percent (Google it!). In other words, Americans on average were getting poorer in 2016, but it is impossible to learn that from reading the journalists’ interpretation of the data.

Readers: How can we explain this?

Related:

• countries ranked by GDP per person

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Some advice: Run down to the Renwick Gallery, next to the White House, to see their grand re-opening show: Wonder.

Must-see work that is being taken out after May 8: a room decorated beautifully with 5000 dead bugs by Jennifer Angus, a Chesapeake Bay in glass marbles by Maya Lin, and a cast-then-recreated-in-wood tree by John Grade. Not closing immediately, but still awesome, are a paper sculpture by Tara Donovan, a series of birds’ nests by Patrick Doherty (kids love this one), and a gossamer rainbow by Gabriel Dawe. A Janet Echelman overhead fiber sculpture is hypnotic and will remain indefinitely as part of the building.

It is kind of inspiring to see how great contemporary American art can be.

I was there with a smartphone (unfortunately not the briefly beloved Samsung S7) and took some snapshots.

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Robot cars will be safe but we’ll lose a lot of stories.

After a heroic-yet-unsuccessful struggle with a Samsung Galaxy S7 we ordered an UberXL from a friend’s iPhone. The driver showed up to our rented house in Ft. Lauderdale in a beautiful Infiniti SUV. He was a compact guy who looked to be in his mid-50s (but was probably more like 60) who had moved from Los Angeles to be closer to his wife’s relatives. “It was a huge pay raise because I got transferred to another office of my company [life insurance] at the same salary and don’t have to pay 10 percent income tax plus the cost of living is so much lower here.”

Why would he drive for Uber if he has a real job? “I get up early in the morning and found that I was watching way too much television. So instead I drive from 3:30 am to 10 am. You’d be amazed at the kind of people you meet during those hours.”

What were his best stories? “One college girl I picked up immediately passed out in the back seat. She hadn’t given me an address and I didn’t want to leave her on the street or call the police on her. So I spent about 10 minutes trying to wake her up and finally got an address. When we got there she was passed out again so I carried her and her purse into her rental, dropped her on the couch, and left.” His other late-night story started with an apparent no-show. “I waited and waited outside an apartment complex and the woman said that she’d be right down. Then a man about 38 years old gets into the car. He was confused and ashamed, but explained that he’d met the woman earlier that evening, gone to bed with her, and he’d been asleep only for about two minutes when she was tapping him awake and saying ‘There’s an Uber waiting for you, on me.’ He said ‘Now I know how women feel.'”

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… today is the day that Chipotle announces the extent to which its bacterial problems have affected earnings. I just want to say “thank you” to the chain for teaching me to how spell “food poisoning” in Chinese:

(photo: from Chinatown location in Washington, D.C.)

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On a recent trip to Cincinnati our Uber driver was an immigrant to the U.S. from the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. After roughly 10 years in the U.S., he was plainly savvy about the relative value that Americans put on bureaucracy versus hands-on work. He was studying for a PhD in Academic Administration.

I asked him what he and his Mauritanian friends and family thought about Mohammed Slahi, the author of Guantanamo Diary (my review). “There is a lot of disagreement [among Mauritanians, including in Mauritania] about whether he is guilty,” said our driver. “My personal belief is that he is guilty. He was too close to everything that was going on.”

Despite believing Slahi to be guilty, the driver did not believe that he should be in Guantanamo or that the U.S. should operate the Guantanamo Bay detection camp. Our driver believed Gitmo to be a place where Muslims were tortured, Korans were desecrated, etc. on a daily basis and that, at least in the minds of most Muslims worldwide, the U.S. operation of Gitmo justified jihad against the U.S. (He was silent on the subject of whether or not he personally believed that jihad against the U.S. was required and/or justified.)

Slahi’s actual book describes primarily incompetence and wasting of taxpayer funds rather than torture. If we are going to continue to run Gitmo (Obama is closing it any day now?), I’m wondering if we should open it up to pretty much anyone who wants to visit. If in fact we are not torturing people all day every day there, why let the rumors spread that we are? If anyone can visit at more or less any time and see anything for which there is no real reason for secrecy, wouldn’t that dispell negative rumors about Gitmo?

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