Category: Uncategorized

Raymond Moore lost his job running a big tennis tournament for saying that female professional tennis players “ride on the coattails of the men.” (CBS News)

I attended the March 31, 2016 Miami Open and explored the issue a little.

Here are photographs of the stadium during the final set of a women’s singles match and a men’s singles match. The women’s match was a more important semifinal event while the men’s match was just a quarterfinal. On the other hand the men’s match was slightly later in the day so could be attended by people who were stuck at work later. (On the third hand, tickets were kind of expensive and it seemed that nearly everyone with a 1 pm “day ticket” showed up pretty close to 1 pm and was at least somewhere within the grounds (there are multiple courts as well as restaurants, shops, etc..))

Here are photographs of the stadium during the women’s and men’s matches. Readers with great eyesight can try to estimate which match was better attended.

I then queried the folks sitting around me (Section 423, which gets afternoon shade!). An extended family had come from Mexico and was staying at the J.W. Marriott downtown for the entire event. Both sexes within the family preferred to watch the men’s game, would have come to a male-only tournament and would not have invested the time and money to come to a female-only tournament. On my left was a family from Guatemala with a 10-year-old tennis-playing son. They were staying in a different Marriott on the beach. The wife was an expert tennis player and said that she preferred watching the men’s game. The Guatemalans said that they wouldn’t have come to see an all-female tournament but would come to watch only men. Behind me was a Japanese national who had come to see Kei Nishikori.

A financial executive friend says that women are on average paid more than men in practice because (a) women get maternity leave while men generally don’t (or don’t take it), and (b) women get the right to sue their employer for discrimination and that right has a cash value even if only a fraction of women actually do sue and/or get paid (see Ellen Pao).

Readers: What do you think about women tennis players getting paid the same in cash compensation as men? Plainly in this day-and-age they are not going to suffer a pay cut. Is this disgraced Moore guy right, though, that they should at least be a little grateful that the men show up to the same tournaments?

[Separately, as my co-spectators were from countries that are often characterized as “corrupt” by American media, I asked them what they thought about U.S. politics versus Mexican and Guatemalan politics. The consensus among the Latin Americans was that local politics in the U.S. is cleaner, but that national politics is at least as corrupt. “When the Clintons can get money from private companies and foreign governments after leaving office and before taking office again, that’s as corrupt as anything anywhere in the world.” (One of my Millennial Facebook friends, who might be expected to support Hillary due to holding a government job (schoolteacher), recently wrote “I’m just gonna say it: You have to be pretty ignorant to vote for Hillary. Who cares if she would be the first woman president, she’s a corrupt bitch, only in it for power and money.”)]

Full post, including comments

Just when you think that nothing worse can happen in a Robinson R22 than flying with a student… “Marooned Among the Polar Bears” chronicles a 50-year-old Russian pilot’s rescue following an autorotation through IMC into the Arctic Ocean.

Full post, including comments

We flew to Boise and drove to Sun Valley, Idaho earlier this month because the standard instrument approach into the nearby Hailey, Idaho airport (KSUN) requires better-than-vfr 1800′ ceilings. There is an RNP approach for jets equipped with the most sophisticated equipment and whose operators have obtained specific authorization, but even that requires 1000′ ceilings rather than the standard 200′ ceilings for a regular approach. On the afternoon of our arrival the clouds were generally 800′ or 900′ above the runway and therefore in theory the scheduled airlines wouldn’t be able to land. An attempt to land that is aborted into a “missed approach” requires pilots to thread the plane through the mountains on a GPS-guided path, which is a higher workload than “add power and climb out straight ahead”. If an engine quits during part of this process a yet higher level of pilot technique is required to avoid contact with mountains.

As we drove through a wide flat valley of alfalfa farms we wondered “Why didn’t they just put the airport here, an extra 15 minutes away from the ski resort? It would be an idiot-proof standard procedure for a tired regional jet crew to follow. Why subject passengers to the risk of a $19/hour first officer not being his or her sharpest at the end of a 5-day trip?”

[There are practical problems with this airport as well as safety problems. Regional jets must land north and depart south. If the wind is blowing at all, a maximum tailwind limitation will be exceeded for one part of the “turn” and therefore the flight must be diverted to Twin Falls, Idaho and passengers put on a two-hour bus ride. Locals say that they’ve come to expect landing in Twin Falls (“Twin”) rather than in Hailey.]

It turns out that we were not the first to ponder these questions. From a 2009 USA Today article, “Feds say Sun Valley-area airport doesn’t pass ‘hazard test'”:

Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration say the airport in the central Idaho town of Hailey must eventually be closed and replaced because it doesn’t pass the “hazard test.”

Jason Pitts, manager of the 12-state FAA Northwestern region’s flight procedures office, said ridgelines that surround Friedman Memorial Airport mean aircraft that abort landings can’t meet FAA standards of 2,000 feet above the highest terrain as they climb to higher airspace to make another approach.

Pitts said they’ve looked at approaches from every angle, and “sorry, the answer is no” to any technologies that would change the FAA decision. He spoke to the airport’s governing board — the Friedman Memorial Airport Authority — earlier this week.

Officials are considering three sites south of the current airport to build a new one. The FAA plans a preliminary decision in November 2011 on the possible location of a new airport.

We could have picked a vastly safer airport location in about an hour by looking at an aeronautical chart and knocking on some farmers’ doors to ask who would be willing to sell. Yet after seven years passengers continue to be subject to a level of risk that is more like what you’d expect for an air traveler to a remote corner of Nepal.

What has the combination of federal and local government accomplished? Instead of buying out a farmer and laying down a 1.5-mile strip of asphalt, in 2015 the government spent $34 million in tax dollars on improvements to the airport declared fundamentally unsafe in 2009 (source).

If we assume that the typical visitor to Sun Valley is paying 40 percent of his or her income in taxes (federal income, state income, local income (e.g., New York City), property, sales, gas, etc.), why don’t the governments in question demonstrate at least some interest in keeping these people alive?

Full post, including comments

“Helicopters Are Unlikely Victim of Oil Downturn” (WSJ) has some mournful tidings:

Industry executives said a fifth of the 1,900 helicopters serving the oil-and-gas industry world-wide are idle or underemployed, and expect this overcapacity to worsen before it improves.

Helicopters used by the oil-and-gas sector account for 26% of the global commercial fleet, according to AgustaWestland, a unit of Finmeccanica SpA.

Mr. Mannion said the industry will have to look—for the first time—at options for storing unsold helicopters. Manufacturers said limited indoor storage facilities in hangars had created a need for alternative solutions. Mr. Mannion said the alternatives included shrink-wrapping or Heli-Cells—inflatable climate-controlled canopies originally developed to protect expensive classic cars.

Market leader CHC, which went public two years ago, has seen its market value wiped out after peaking at $1.3 billion, and the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange in January.

Lockheed Martin, which paid $9 billion for Sikorsky last year, expects the unit’s commercial sales to slide to $375 million this year from a peak of $1.5 billion in 2013.

Related:

• Lockheed Martin buys Sikorsky for 1.1X revenue

Full post, including comments

This New Yorker magazine article on the sex offender registry gives some insight into how adult Americans can profit financially when teenagers have sex (and not through the typical path of “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”). Here are some excerpts:

[Anthony] Metts [unwisely agreeing to be interviewed without an attorney present] told [police] that when he was eighteen he dated a girl who was three years younger. And he’d also had a brief sexual relationship with a girl more than three years younger, whom he met during his junior year of high school, when she was a freshman.

When the officers turned the information over to the Midland District Attorney’s Office, the D.A. filed two felony indictments for sexual assault of a child, based on the age-of-consent laws in Texas at the time.

He decided to take a plea deal: a suspended sentence and ten years of probation.

Metts, who was twenty-one by then, read the terms of his post-plea life. For the next decade, he’d be barred from alcohol and the Internet; from entering the vicinity of schools, parks, bus stops, malls, and movie theatres; and from living within a thousand feet of a “child-safety zone.” A mugshot of his curly-haired, round-cheeked face would appear for life on the Texas sex-offender registry, beside the phrase “Sexual Assault of a Child.” And he would have to start sex-offender treatment.

The treatment plan was extensive. He was told to write up a detailed sexual history, and then to discuss it with a room full of adults, some of whom had repeatedly committed child assaults. … To graduate, he would have to narrate his “assaults” in detail: “How many buttons on her shirt did you unbutton?”

The plan also included a monthly polygraph (a hundred and fifty dollars) and a computerized test that measured how long his eyes lingered on deviant imagery (three hundred and twenty-five dollars). He would also have to submit to a “penile plethysmograph,” or PPG. According to documents produced by the state of Texas, the PPG—known jokingly to some patients as a “peter meter”—is “a sophisticated computerized instrument capable of measuring slight changes in the circumference of the penis.” A gauge is wrapped around the shaft of the penis, with wires hooked up to a laptop, while a client is presented with “sexually inappropriate” imagery and, often, “deviant” sexual audio. Metts would be billed around two hundred dollars per test.

The PPG was invented in the nineteen-fifties by a sexologist from Czechoslovakia, and used by the Czech military to expose soldiers suspected of pretending to be gay in order to avoid service.

When Metts balked at what felt to him like technological invasions—not least the prospect of having a stranger measure his penis—he was jailed for ten days. A new round of weekly therapy sessions (thirty dollars for group, and fifty dollars for one-on-one) then commenced.

Eventually, he agreed to acknowledge how he’d “groomed” his “victims”: in one case, they’d gone to dinner, a movie, and—for a Halloween date—to a local haunted house.

Metts settled into his new life in the oil fields, reluctantly accommodating an array of strictures that he regarded as pointless. Each Halloween, for instance, he reported to the county probation office with dozens of other local sex offenders, and was held from 6 to 10 P.M. and shown movies like “Iron Man 2,” until trick-or-treating was over. “If someone’s that dangerous that they need to be locked up, what about all of the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year?” he asked me.

In 2006, he fell in love with a deputy sheriff’s daughter. One night, he took her out to his favorite Italian place in Odessa, ordered two steaks with risotto, and arranged for the waiter to bring out a dessert menu that read, among the à-la-carte selections, “Will you marry me?” She said yes, and a baby girl soon followed. “My daughter was a blessing and a miracle to me,” Metts told me. But it also introduced him to a troubling new aspect of his life on the registry.

Metts, then twenty-four, learned that he wouldn’t be allowed to see his daughter. His status banned him from living with her, and thus with his wife.

One night, a former classmate saw Metts buying a sandwich at Walmart and shouted a slur at him; she’d seen his face on the registry for “Sexual Assault of a Child.” Rattled, he went to Buffalo Wild Wings to down a beer, and got busted. Metts had a record of technical violations, so a judge ordered him to wear an electronic ankle bracelet, administered by a private monitoring company that charged several hundred dollars a month. The device would notify the authorities of any infractions—stepping too close to a mall, park, bar, or church, or leaving the county without permission.

In the eighth year of his ten-year probation term, Metts decided to reënter the world.

He’d failed to charge his ankle bracelet properly, and the battery died at around 5 P.M. Shortly before midnight, his probation officer arrived at his door: she’d be filing to revoke his probation. A few weeks later, Metts was led into a courtroom in hand-cuffs, leg cuffs, and a chain around his waist connecting them. “I looked like Hannibal Lecter without the mask,” he told me. The judge’s name sounded familiar: she had helped prosecute his original case. … The judge took some time to think it over. The next morning, she sentenced Metts to ten years in prison.

This past July, I drove around Midland, Texas, trying to find the girls—now women—who were involved in Anthony Metts’s case. Having no luck with doorbells, I left notes, and two days later I got a call from one of them. “I never wanted Anthony to be prosecuted,” she told me. “It was a consensual relationship—the kind when you’re young and you’re stupid. My mom knew about it. We’d go on dates, drive around, hang out.” She was shocked to learn of Metts’s fate: his nine-plus years of probation, his current decade of incarceration. “I told [law enforcement] that I didn’t feel like he should have to be prosecuted,” she said.

Obviously life in the U.S. hasn’t work out well for Mr. Metts (nor for any of the other people profiled in the article who got onto a sex offender registry; the registry idea plus the Internet plus the fact that sex with a 15-year-old may be described in the same way as sex with a 3-year-old means that holding a job is generally impossible). But the groups of adults who profited financially from the two teenagers having sex includes at least the following: (1) police officers, (2) prosecutors, (3) defense lawyers, (3) judges, (4) court officials, (5) prison guards and managers, (6) probation officers, (7) therapists, (8) polygraph technicians, (9) penis testing technicians, (10) electronic bracelet vendors, (11) electronic bracelet monitoring technicians.

Full post, including comments

The Wall Street Journal says that most European countries are insolvent if you account for current Social Security and other government pension promises. Excerpts from a recent article:

State-funded pensions are at the heart of Europe’s social-welfare model, insulating people from extreme poverty in old age. Most European countries have set aside almost nothing to pay these benefits, simply funding them each year out of tax revenue. Now, European countries face a demographic tsunami, in the form of a growing mismatch between low birthrates and high longevity, for which few are prepared.

Europe’s population of pensioners, already the largest in the world, continues to grow. Looking at Europeans 65 or older who aren’t working, there are 42 for every 100 workers, and this will rise to 65 per 100 by 2060, the European Union’s data agency says. By comparison, the U.S. has 24 nonworking people 65 or over per 100 workers, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which doesn’t have a projection for 2060.

The pension squeeze doesn’t follow the familiar battle lines of the eurozone crisis, which pits Europe’s more prosperous north against a higher-spending, deeply indebted south. Some of the governments facing the toughest demographic challenges, such as Austria and Slovenia, have been among those most critical of Greece.

While a few countries—including Norway, the U.K. and the Netherlands—have considerable savings in public funds or employer-sponsored pension plans, many others have little.

Across Europe, the birthrate has fallen 40% since the 1960s to around 1.5 children per woman, according to the United Nations. In that time, life expectancies have risen to roughly 80 from 69.

In Poland, birthrates are even lower, and here the demographic disconnect is compounded by emigration. Taking advantage of the EU’s freedom of movement, many Polish youth of working age flock to the West, especially London, in search of higher pay. A paper published by the country’s central bank forecasts that by 2030, a quarter of Polish women and a fifth of Polish men will be 70 or older.

With their berry sales, the two [married Polish retirees] have a combined posttax income equal to $6,400, about 60% of Poland’s median for two people. … Her first daughter, 46-year-old Anna Mazurek, lives across the lane in Zaraszów. She teaches school—earning about $1,375 a month—cares for two children and spends many hours minding a shop she and her husband built. … Once a year, the pension plan sends her an estimate of her benefits when she retires. The most recent was about $138 a month. A spokesman for the plan said it would provide at least $224 before taxes, a legal minimum the calculator doesn’t take into account.

An hour’s drive away in Lublin, a picturesque medieval town close to the Ukrainian border, her sister, Małgorazata Olechowska, works as an office manager for an EU-funded nonprofit for about $1,600 a month. She pays at least a third of her income in taxes, including 9.76% that is earmarked for retiree pensions. Her employer chips in an equal amount. The government pays all of that straight out to current pensioners, supplementing it with other tax revenue.

Could this be what causes the EU to fall apart? Unlike the U.S., European countries don’t tax citizens who live elsewhere. So if a high-income Polish citizen moves to London, the Polish government stops getting any taxes from that person. In a world where income is increasingly concentrated in the most successful cities, countries without a London, Paris, or Amsterdam could be hard-pressed to meet unfunded pension liabilities. Those countries that have saved up, such as Holland and the UK, may be reluctant to share the pain when the EU recognizes that EU-wide taxes are necessary to bail out the various countries.

Readers: What do you think? If Europeans thought about their forthcoming day of financial reckoning would the financially soundest countries try to get out?

[Separately, the income numbers for the Polish women profiled are interesting. The sister who works in Lublin makes about $1000 after taxes. What if she read “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage,” came to the U.S. on vacation, had sex with an American, and went home pregnant? If she had sex with an American earning $250,000/year in Massachusetts, for example, she would get a tax-free $3,333/month wired to her in Poland, thus enjoying 4.3X the spending power compared to her current situation. If she saved up all 23 years of Massachusetts child support, minus $250/month for actual child-related expenses, that would be a nest egg of approximately $850,000. If such a nest egg earned a 2 percent real return starting at age 30, the result would be a $1.7 million fund at age 65. Applying the conventional “spend 4 percent per year” rule, the sister would be able to spend $68,000/year (in today’s dollars) from her nest egg starting at age 65. Thus the trip to Boston or Martha’s Vineyard at age 20 would result in a healthy child (we hope) and at least a 10X improvement in old age pension. Note that the child, once reared to adulthood and working, would improve the dependency ratio in Europe.]

Full post, including comments

Folks:

Puerto Rico is embroiled in a debt “crisis” that seems to have stretched out for several years. Here’s a plea for help from a Puerto Rican who has chosen to live and work in New York: ” I’m not a politician or an economist. I’m a storyteller. [shades of Team America!] … Puerto Rico’s $72 billion debt, which is equal to about 68 percent of the island’s gross domestic product, thwarts efforts for economic development.”

As noted in a June 2015 posting (see below), the U.S. as a whole has debt that is over 100 percent of GDP, according to the Federal Reserve Bank. Puerto Ricans don’t pay federal income tax so they aren’t responsible for that debt. Nor are Puerto Ricans responsible for debt run up by the 50 states. Finally Puerto Rico seems to have recorded a lot of debt that would be private in other parts of the U.S., e.g., for utilities, as public debt. Thus it would seem that Puerto Ricans are actually less indebted than typical Americans (albeit they don’t have a printing press for dollars the way that the federal government does).

Why has this level of debt supposedly resulted in a crisis? Readers last time said that it was high interest rates. If Puerto Rico could borrow at the same rates as the U.S. Treasury then they would be fine. Suppose that the Federales paid off the creditors (bailout for Hillary’s friends on Wall Street and the future payers of Obama speaking fees!) and lent the island’s government money at the same rates being paid by the Treasury. Would Puerto Rico then be in good shape? If not, why is the debate primarily around debt? Shouldn’t it be about “Why do people want to invest in other states and countries around the world but not in Puerto Rico?”

Related:

• Can Puerto Rico be a laboratory for the future of the rest of the U.S.?
• If Puerto Rico owes 70% of GDP, why is that a crisis? (from June 2015; the good thing about the “news” is that it is the same every year)

Full post, including comments

Here’s a map that explains one reason old people head south: “State Estate and Inheritance Taxes in 2014”. The cross-border differences are almost as interesting as those in the Minnesota and Wisconsin family law statutes. Why does Minnesota rely on estate tax while Wisconsin does not? I asked an estate planning lawyer once why California, given its constant struggles to find more tax dollars to spend (as a percentage of residents’ income, the state already spends more than all but 4 states). He replied “They would love to grab that, but estate taxes are prohibited by their constitution and the constitutional amendment process is extremely cumbersome.”

[Separately, if Warren Buffett stays in Omaha, Nebraska, the maps suggests that any budget problems may be resolved!]

Full post, including comments

“Chicago Pension Nightmare” is a Wall Street Journal article that is inaptly headlined from the perspective of a government worker:

On Thursday the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the city’s pension reform, which required city workers to chip in more to their retirement plans, raised the retirement age and cut back on cost-of-living adjustments. … The ruling further limits Mr. Emanuel’s fiscal options as pension payments take an ever-growing share of city revenues.

Absent an epidemic disease killing all of their retired employees, Illinois and Chicago will run out of money, of course. The only question was who wouldn’t get paid. The courts have answered “The former workers will get paid.” That means that bondholders won’t be paid.

Politicians can’t resist promising lavish payments to be drawn from future tax revenues. Unless the U.S. makes it illegal for politicians to hand out defined-benefit pensions, in my opinion investors should avoid state and local government bonds. (The federal government is different because it has a printing press for dollars so it can pay both bonds and pensions as long as it can afford paper and/or computer memory.)

Readers: What do you think? Who wants to defend bonds from U.S. states and cities?

Related:

• “US Treasury pushes Congress to pass Puerto Rico bankruptcy plan” (Guardian), which can be translated as “people who lent money to Puerto Rico won’t get it back”

Full post, including comments

 

Consider this part of the following Hillary Clinton ad (I saw it broadcast in Columbus, Ohio):

“Her life’s work has been about breaking barriers and so would her presidency, which is why for every American who’s not being paid what they’re worth, who’s being held back by student debt or a system tilted against them, and there are far too many of you, she understands that our country can’t reach its potential unless we all do,”

Could political messages from heavily-funded, consultant-advised candidates such as Hillary be the best guide to the current psychology of the American people? From the above it would seem that we can infer that American voters want the government to set wages (so that everyone can be paid “what they’re worth”), presumably as part of a planned economy. They also want the government’s welfare program for universities made explicit by turning all of that extra tuition cash that was shoveled out as loans to be converted to gifts. (If these are in fact the things that we want, why not vote for Bernie?)

Readers: What else can we learn from political ads that you’ve seen? And is looking at ads from the most popular candidates a sensible approach to understanding our country?

[Separately, the ad may show the incompatibility of traditional English grammar with current gender thinking. “for every American who’s not being paid what they’re worth” would ordinarily be “for every American who’s not being paid what he or she is worth” but that doesn’t work if there are more than two genders.]

 

Full post, including comments