Category: Uncategorized

Our elected officials have given us Massachusetts taxpayers the opportunity to pay some of General Electric’s bills. “GE confirms it’s heading to Boston” (Boston Globe, January 13, 2016):

General Electric Co., one of the most storied names in corporate America, said Wednesday it will relocate its global headquarters to Boston.

The decision marks the end of a high-stakes competition to woo GE from its longtime campus in suburban Connecticut, besting New York, Providence, and other cities, and further solidifies the region’s reputation as a magnet for innovation.

GE said it will have roughly 800 people in Boston: 200 from corporate staff and 600 digital industrial product managers, designers and developers split among various divisions.

GE has not yet picked a site for its new offices, but is focused on the Seaport area. [sort of a new downtown area, across the water from Logan Airport and featuring lightning-quick trips to the airport]

City officials said they are prepared to offer as much as $25 million in property tax relief. The state package could be valued as high as $120 million and could include a variety of benefits, such as grants, tax incentives, infrastructure improvements, and help with real estate acquisition costs.

So we get to buy GE a building because “at nearly $150 billion a year in revenue, GE ranks eighth on the Fortune 500” they apparently don’t have the cash to buy one themselves. It is good to know that we beat Providence (“the economy is so bad in Rhode Island right now that the Mafia had to lay off three judges”), but it seems abusive to tax $21.50/hour workers (our state’s median wage) to pay $181,250 per job to have some GE folks here.

Those 200 corporate staffers will be doing a lot of flying out of Hanscom Field (currently 368 operations per day) unless their special deal with the state government includes discounted landing fees at Logan Airport.

How about the GE spouses? If they are considering suing a GE executive, should they do it now in Connecticut or wait until the couple is subject to Massachusetts law? The states are similar in that both are among the most favorable in the U.S. for plaintiffs hoping to profit from a marriage and/or custody of children and both states set up a winner-take-all battle in which one spouse will typically get the house, children, and profitable child support. Both states are good from the point of view of a plaintiff who needs a judge to find a prenuptial agreement invalid to unlock savings accumulated prior to the marriage. Both states are good for plaintiffs who hope to get a judge to order a defendant to pay the legal fees on both sides.

If it has been a short-term marriage with children, a lawsuit is probably more lucrative if filed in Massachusetts. From the Connecticut chapter of Real World Divorce:

Connecticut has a similar system to Massachusetts in that the guidelines in theory apply only up to a certain income ($4000 per week or $208,000 per year) but judges routinely extrapolate the percentage to higher incomes. Child support is not nearly as profitable in Connecticut, however, because the amounts are smaller and the percentages are based on after-tax income rather than pre-tax income. For example, the $208,000 per year after-tax top-of-the-guideline defendant would pay 11.83 percent of “net income” or $473 per week ($24,596 per year). To earn $208,000 per year after taxes in Connecticut, a person would have to earn $365,000 per year pre-tax. In Massachusetts, that would yield $40,000 per year at the top of the guidelines plus 11 percent of the income over $250,000 per year, i.e., another $12,650 per year for a total of $52,650. Combining this with the 23-year period versus the 18-year period, the same child has 2.74X the cash value in Massachusetts compared to Connecticut. …

As in Massachusetts, a Connecticut child support recipient need not personally take care of a child in order to profit from child support. Roisman says that judges will separately order a defendant to pay for day care or other commercial child child care expenses.

Despite the penchant for extrapolation, Roisman thought that it would be challenging for a plaintiff to get more than $200,000 per year in child support, no matter how wealthy the defendant.

Connecticut is similar to Massachusetts in the philosophy that a stay-at-home parent is entitled to continue that lifestyle at a former spouse’s expense:

Roisman would expect the mother [following a 10-year marriage] to receive alimony for as long as 16 years (until the 2-year-old is in college). “There is no formula for alimony, but you can’t expect that mother to go to work with a two-year-old. The alimony amount would be larger at first and would give the mother an opportunity for advanced education. The court would look at the father’s expenses to maintain his apartment, the mother’s expenses, etc. There is no limit to the number of years, unlike in Massachusetts.”

As noted in that last sentence, staying in Connecticut may be better for the spouse who hopes to profit from alimony. Massachusetts in theory limits alimony payments following a defendant reaching full Social Security retirement age (not always enforced by judges) and, for a marriage of 10 years plus 1 day, alimony would be for no more than 7 years (statute). [Don’t let GE relocate you to Germany, where it might well be 0 years! Texas is also bad…]

How about those of us who don’t work for GE and aren’t married to anyone at GE? I think that we will end up paying more than the $145 million in subsidies. Once the 800 GE employees come into the heart of the city and drive up real estate prices (since let’s hope that they aren’t dumb enough to try to commute), we’ll be told that there is a housing affordability crises. Taxpayers will need to fund 800 new units of affordable (i.e., more or less free) housing in central Boston at roughly $1 million per unit. Let’s say that the real estate demand from the GE folks drives up rents and purchase prices for other residents (since most don’t qualify for free government-provided housing and it is difficult to get approval to build new projects in Boston). Assume an average of $1000 per year for 50,000 units? So over 20 years this will end up costing us $2 billion plus whatever time and frustration we have to deal with due to the increased traffic and public transit congestion.

How much of that do we get back in tax revenue? We can assume that these GE folks earn an average of $200,000 per year? And they’ll pay about 10 percent of their income in state and local taxes? (the state’s tax burden is 10.3%). That’s $16 million per year. So after 125 years the folks who already live here come out ahead? That doesn’t seem right but I’m not sure what else is missing. The extra taxes paid due to local vendors enjoying higher sales now that GE is here?

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Erika Christakis made Yale students feel unsafe by suggesting that they could wear the Halloween costume of their choice (previous posting). Now this person (I don’t want to be cisgender-normative and assume that Christakis identifies with a particular gender) is making the rest of us feel unsafe with “The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids” (Atlantic, Jan/Feb 2016). What are we getting for all of the money that we are investing in preschool?

A major evaluation of Tennessee’s publicly funded preschool system, published in September, found that although children who had attended preschool initially exhibited more “school readiness” skills when they entered kindergarten than did their non-preschool-attending peers, by the time they were in first grade their attitudes toward school were deteriorating. And by second grade they performed worse on tests measuring literacy, language, and math skills. The researchers told New York magazine that overreliance on direct instruction and repetitive, poorly structured pedagogy were likely culprits; children who’d been subjected to the same insipid tasks year after year after year were understandably losing their enthusiasm for learning.

The author blames the attempt to teach reading at an earlier age than industrial child care operations in other countries. Yet bright children can read at 18 months (John Stuart Mill could read Greek at age 3! He then went on to learn a bunch more stuff.) and reading unlocks a lot of doors for a child. So perhaps the problem is more the way that American preschools try to teach reading, i.e., at a slow enough pace that even a child in the 25th percentile of ability could follow along.

[Separately, the Yale controversy is the gift that keeps on giving. A Facebook friend was complaining that, due to the increasingly bureaucratic and litigious nature of the U.S., United Airlines was now insisting that children through age 15 traveling solo be signed up for the $150 “unaccompanied minor” handholding service. In his view this was an unreasonable grab for cash. It was immediately pointed out to him that “Perhaps they will need to extend this out to 22 or 23 for Yale undergrads…”]

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Folks:

I’m coming to the horrifying conclusion that we do actually need desktop applications and Microsoft….

I’m trying to print a group of email messages from Gmail. I want these printed to PDF and, ideally, including attachments. I would have thought that I could select the messages in question, e.g., everything with a particular label, and click “print all to PDF” but there is no such option. Yahoo Mail, despite the $365 million paid to the CEO, doesn’t have this feature either. Thunderbird is awesomely easy to connect to Gmail but what it does is offer to print one message at a time and the attachment won’t be opened up and included.

Outlook 2016 is a nightmare to hook up to Gmail. Microsoft doesn’t have an “I am a Gmail-using idiot so set everything up for me” option (you end up having to type custom port numbers and select security protocols by name). Outlook 2016 also doesn’t comply with Google’s latest security requirements so you need to go deep into the Gmail settings and allow lower security clients. When you’re all done, at least for those of us who have Acrobat Pro installed, you’re rewarded with options to push an entire folder or group of selected messages out to PDF. It isn’t perfect because it seems to make one PDF per message and then gather them all into a portfolio. There is no option to have just one big file. (This third party tool may make it easier to deal with the output.)

Does anyone have a better idea?

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This New York Times video re-enacts part of the deposition of a $940/hour (presumably American-educated) expert witness.

Related:

• Smartest Kids in the World Review

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I didn’t watch the broadcast but the official transcript of President Obama’s State of the Union speech is available on our government-sponsored news site. Some parts that I found interesting…

Let me start with the economy, and a basic fact: the United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world. We’re in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. More than 14 million new jobs; the strongest two years of job growth since the ’90s; an unemployment rate cut in half.

I’m guessing that the TV show did not present the falling labor force participation rate in the U.S. or the flat rate in Singapore (note: Americans produce about 65 percent as much, per capita, as people in Singapore (CIA)).

In the coming years, we should build on that progress, by providing Pre-K for all,

… so that they will do worse in school starting in second grade (Atlantic).

Health care inflation has slowed. And our businesses have created jobs every single month since [Obamacare] became law.

With immigration swelling the population numbers, if businesses weren’t creating jobs every month there would be a catastrophic decline in the labor force participation rate! (i.e., the economy needs to create jobs every month to accommodate the new arrivals (chart)).

That spirit of discovery is in our DNA. We’re Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers and George Washington Carver. We’re Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson and Sally Ride. We’re every immigrant and entrepreneur from Boston to Austin to Silicon Valley racing to shape a better world.

Perhaps Obama is auditioning for a place on the next Turkish Airlines commercial. And Grace Hopper’s efforts on COBOL certainly helped a lot of older programmers keep their jobs circa 1997-1999. But, when we adjust for population size, can Americans claim to excel in the “spirit of discovery” compared to other groups? And does a spirit of discovery lead to long-term economic success? The Portuguese and Spaniards discovered a lot more of Planet Earth than have Americans and yet they have not been prospering recently.

We’ve launched next-generation manufacturing hubs, and online tools that give an entrepreneur everything he or she needs to start a business in a single day.

Could it be that the “online tool” he is talking about is a pharmacy selling Clomid? And the business yields a tax-free return starting either after about three months or after nine? If not, Obama’s statement is hard to square with the fact that the U.S. is not among the top 10 countries for “economic freedom.”

Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer.

Nixon was right back in 1971!

Look, if anybody still wants to dispute the science around climate change, have at it.

Lesson for listeners: Millions of people will listen to you talking in an authoritative tone about science even if there is no evidence of you having taken a college-level science or math class.

The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.

Why do we have enemies then? If money buys effective military power, shouldn’t all of our enemies have been defeated by now?

The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.

If their conflicts date back millennia, why would you admit millions of these folks to the U.S. as immigrants and expect them to stop fighting?

For more than a year, America has led a coalition of more than 60 countries to cut off ISIL’s financing, disrupt their plots, stop the flow of terrorist fighters, and stamp out their vicious ideology. With nearly 10,000 air strikes, we are taking out their leadership, their oil, their training camps, and their weapons.

These guys are tough enough to out-fight the military forces of 60 countries and to survive in spite of 10,000 air strikes.

If this Congress is serious about winning this war, and wants to send a message to our troops and the world, you should finally authorize the use of military force against ISIL.

Our military dropped bombs 10,000 times on people without authorization from Congress?

That’s how we forged a Trans-Pacific Partnership to open markets, protect workers and the environment, and advance American leadership in Asia. It cuts 18,000 taxes on products Made in America, and supports more good jobs.

My friend who runs a software-heavy company certainly would agree with this, as long as Obama meant “supports more good jobs in Vietnam.” The CEO recently fired all of the California-based programmers and replaced them with programmers in Hanoi.

Fifty years of isolating Cuba had failed to promote democracy, setting us back in Latin America.

The Castro brothers apparently weren’t afraid of our expensive military.

Right now, we are on track to end the scourge of HIV/AIDS…

… because there is no way that HIV can evolve to become resistant to whatever drugs we develop. It didn’t happen with bacteria and antibiotics so it won’t happen with a virus. (And did Obama show a picture of the American scientist who discovered HIV?)

That is why I will keep working to shut down the prison at Guantanamo: it’s expensive, it’s unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies.

If he has been president for 7 years, with a Congress controlled by his own party for at least part of that time, why hasn’t he succeeded in shutting down Guantanamo? And can it be reopened as a Club Med for Bostonians? The overnight low will be 15 degrees tomorrow!

That’s why we need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion.

There will be no more affirmative action or other race-based policies then?

I see it in the American who served his time, and dreams of starting over – and the business owner who gives him that second chance.

… because his criminal record makes him ineligible for a lot of government jobs (“Christmas Spirit: Statute of limitations on teenage misbehavior?”) that would pay better (CATO).

Readers: What interested you about the speech and/or any responses from other politicians?

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It turns out that we went 112 years as a republic without a president giving a State of the Union speech (history — which reveals that a remarkable 32 million people tuned into the last one!).

If you don’t like the speech, you’re a racist, at least according to the Wall Street Journal‘s “Obama Is a Man of Political Paradox”:

[Barack Hussein Obama’s] job-approval rating in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in December stood at a mediocre 43%. … Hehas never reached … the levels of unpopularity endured by his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose job-approval rating stood at 34% at this point in his presidency. … Has Mr. Obama always confronted a ceiling in how widely he would be loved or even accepted because he is the nation’s first African-American president?

As the person who identifies as “African-American” is better-liked than the person who was identified as a “privileged white male,” a reader might perhaps be forgiven for erroneously believing that the numbers suggest the opposite. (See also the native-born American explaining to an Asian immigrant our current national mood: “we are so passionate about creating a race-blind society that we will think about and talk about race every minute of every day.”)

Given that the economy is stagnating (see “How Rich Countries Die” and “The Redistribution Recession”) and the main foreign conflicts are also mostly at stalemates (Syria/ISIS generates headlines every day but it is a slow-moving war by historical standards), I’m wondering what historians will pick out as salient about the Obama Presidency.

I’ll go first:

• The beginning of the end of roughly a century of multinational companies being headquartered in the U.S. (see Wikipedia’s history of inversions and “How Tax Inversions Became the Hottest Trend in M&A” (WSJ, August 5, 2014))
• The beginning of a wave of municipal bankruptcies and insolvencies (e.g., Wikipedia Chapter 9 list plus Puerto Rico). These are more a function of economic stagnation (since only Chinese- or Singapore-style per capita GDP growth and/or Nigerian-style population growth could make the promised state/local government worker pensions affordable) than specific presidential action but presidents tend to get remembered for stuff that happened when they were in office.

Readers: What do you think historians will remember about the Obama years?

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I’m listening to The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World in my car. What are your prejudices about people in ancient times? Were they short of stature? Frail? Short-lived? According to the professor, the minimum height to enlist in the Roman Army was 5’10” (they reduced it to 5’8″ when they got desperate for recruits).

How tough were these guys? They could carry close to 100 lbs. on 20-mile, 5-hour marches. If pushed they could march for 30 miles in a day.

How long did they live? They joined the army at roughly the same age as today’s soldiers, around 20 years old with an upper limit of 36. They were entitled to retire with the ancient equivalent of a pension after 25 or 26 years of service (compare to the U.S. military’s 20-year rule).

Obviously these were the taller and tougher men of ancient Rome.

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All of our politicians seem to agree that economic inequality is bad. It seems plain that our government is run by politicians. Why then does the government run the Powerball lottery, with a maximum prize this week of $1.3 billion (as with other government-promulgated numbers, be sure to discount for fraud! The after-tax value of an immediate payout of $806 million would be under $500 million I think)?

By the time this lottery is run, one or more Americans will be crazy rich while most of the rest of us will be slightly poorer (from having purchased losing tickets).

Am I wrong or is this like driving around in a Volkswagen diesel car with a “save the planet” bumper sticker on the back?

Related:

• the lottery winner in Massachusetts family court

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I’ve been working with an instrument student in the helicopter recently. Sometimes we fly an old-school ILS approach into KLWM that is equipped with an outer marker beacon (Wikipedia offers audio and visual examples). Thus she hears a loud tone upon reaching the final approach fix at which point the pilot typically has to do a bunch of things, e.g., decide whether or not to continue based on the latest weather report, start descending, advise ATC of one’s position, check fuel/engine gauges/warning lights, etc.

When we go to newer ILSes or GPS approaches, however, she doesn’t get any reminder that it is time to get serious about flying. If she happens to be looking down at the Garmin GPS receiver she may notice a change in the text displayed but certainly the aircraft, bristling with processors, doesn’t make any real effort to communicate with us. Back in the 1950s they figured out that pilots should be given audio wake-up calls at the final approach fix and also at the missed approach point (don’t see the runway? add power and climb out). Are humans today smarter somehow that these are no longer necessary? The Garmin GPS knows what the final approach fix and missed approach point is on every approach in its database. It is connected to the audio panel already. Why doesn’t it synthesize a voice warning: “Final Approach Fix” or “Missed Approach Point”? Why not at least use what we have in the aircraft to recover what we are losing as marker beacons get decommissioned?

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Goebbels: A Biography shows how much damage can be done by misconceptions regarding economics. The private diaries of Goebbels indicate that the National Socialist leaders of Germany believed that natural resources were the only and/or primary foundation for a nation’s wealth. For people coming of age in the early part of the 20th century, this made sense. Argentina was rich, the United States was rich, Russia was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, England was rich based on natural resources acquired through her empire. The modern examples of resource-poor countries becoming rich via intelligence, education, and hard work did not exist. South Korea and Taiwan did not exist as technology centers. Switzerland was not the industrial leader (and richer per capita than the U.S.) that it is today.

Here are some excerpts from the book showing what German leaders believed regarding how to achieve prosperity:

In the middle of October Goebbels published an article in Das Reich in which, along the same lines as Hitler’s remarks, rather than focusing on ideological differences he commented in a relatively pragmatic way on the “war aims” for which this continuing conflict was being fought: “This time it’s not about throne and altar but about grain and oil, about space for our growing numbers, who cannot live and cannot be fed in the restricted territory in which they have had to stay up until now.”

With the aim of winning the population’s support for the forthcoming military efforts, at the end of May he published an editorial in Das Reich with the title “What’s It All For?” In it, while not outlining actual political war aims, he nevertheless tried to give “the ordinary man” a foretaste of life in a future Greater German Reich. Concerned to persuade his readers of the rosy prospects that lay ahead, he produced a kitsch vision of the postwar world: “We are dreaming of a happy people in a country blossoming with beauty, traversed by wide roads like bands of silver which are also open to the modest car of the ordinary man. Beside them lie pretty villages and well laid-out cities with clean and roomy houses inhabited by large families for whom they provide sufficient space. In the limitless fields of the east yellow corn is waving, enough and more than enough to feed our people and the whole of Europe. Work will once more be a pleasure and it will be marked by a joy in life which will find expression in brilliant parties and contemplative peace.”

On the following day Goebbels took part in a meeting of Reich leaders and Gauleiters at which Hitler made a three-hour speech in order to convince this small group of elite functionaries of his own confidence in victory; the alternative to “total victory” was “total destruction.” The aims of this war, Hitler concluded, were very wide-ranging and would require many more sacrifices; however, these would be justified since the war “would make possible the lives of millions of German children.

The excerpts above also show how wrong politicians can be about the long-term goals of the citizens who elected them. The National Socialists talked about “clean and roomy houses inhabited by large families” and “our growing numbers,” just a few decades before the birthrate among ethnic Germans plummeted.

Related:

• Germany wins World War I… 100 years later

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