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Here are some excerpts from a December 14, 2015 New Yorker story about a hit TV show about a transgender senior citizen:

Sometimes, though, Soloway sounds not entirely unlike that women’s-studies professor she played. “A patriarchal society can’t really handle that there’s such a thing as a vagina,” she said. “The untrustworthy vagina that is discerning-receiving.” Soloway, who recently turned fifty, was wearing leggings and blue nail polish and a baseball cap that said “Mister.” She sped past a stretch of Craftsmen bungalows, whose front yards were studded with bicycles, jade plants, and toys. “So you can want sex, you can want to be entered, and then a minute later you can say, ‘Stop—changed my mind,’ ” she continued. “That is something that our society refuses to allow for. You don’t feel like it now? You’re shit out of luck. You know why? Because you have a pussy! To me, that is what’s underneath all this gender trouble: most of our laws are being formed by people with penises.”

The eldest sibling, Sarah, leaves her husband to pursue an affair with her college girlfriend, after they reunite at the school that their children attend.

Every decision on the show is vetted by Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker, trans activists and artists whose work about their relationship appeared in the most recent Whitney Biennial. “We monitor the politics of representation—if we catch things in the writing stage, it’s kind of optimal because then there’s time to shape it,” Drucker told me. “We’re kind of starting over with ‘Transparent,’ and with the trans tipping point in general.”

But, if trans people are scapegoats for the right, they are also requiring the left to undertake a momentous shift in thinking. “We’re asking the whole world to transition with us to a less binary way of being,” Drucker said. “It’s the next step in the fight for gender equality: removing the habit of always qualifying a person as a man or a woman. If we start thinking of each other as just people, it allows us to identify with each other in a way that has never really been possible before.”

“A really interesting thought exercise is to say ‘they’ and ‘them’ for all genders,” Soloway instructed me. I was confused, so she explained. “If you said, ‘I have to go pick up my friend at the airport,’ I could very easily say, ‘What time do they get here?’ So there is a structure for talking about your friend and not knowing their gender—and it’s perfect English.”

in the second season, Ali Pfefferman would go to graduate school for gender studies, and that she would have an affair with a magnetic and much older female professor.

Soloway and her husband were in an amorphous process of separating, which is ongoing. [Read the California chapter of Real World Divorce to find out how, even if there is a near-term settlement, litigation regarding alimony could continue until one of them dies.]

Will migrants from traditional cultures, and the children of those migrants, such as Soloway’s fellow Californians Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, agree with some of the above ideas that are valorized by this popular show?

I decided to test the question by asking adult grandchildren of Middle Eastern immigrants. They are Muslim and nobody in the family drinks alcohol, but their female family members do not wear hijabs. The children had grown up in rich liberal suburban neighborhoods and attended public schools. A native-born American casually talking to these folks would hear no accent and nothing about religion. What was the verdict on Transparent and the above ideas?

• Transgender: “I don’t have a problem with people getting surgery or wearing whatever clothes they want, but why do I have to hear about it? I never cared one way or the other before.”
• Lesbian love: “It’s okay to be gay if you are private about it. Breaking up your children’s home so that you can enjoy sex with someone other than your husband is not okay. Telling other people all the time that you are gay is not okay. Telling children that you are gay is not okay. I don’t want children exposed to a gay schoolteacher.”
• Soloway herself divorcing: “People who don’t value family should not be imposing their belief system on others via the media. If I had children I wouldn’t let them watch television.” Won’t they hear about all of the shows from their friends at school? “I would look for a private Muslim school so that they aren’t exposed to these ideas when they’re not ready for them.”
• Women as victims of a patriarchal society and gender studies as a major: “They major in gender studies and then complain that they don’t get paid as much as a doctor? Nobody in our family would be allowed to major in gender studies.”

If we assume that the above excerpts accurately reflect the cultural direction of native-born Americans, and that the above reactions accurately reflect the farthest that a immigrant’s child can go in the direction of assimilation, how can we expect immigrants from traditional cultures, or any children that they have while here, to adapt (at least within our lifetimes)? And, given that acceptance of values that are in conflict with traditional culture or religion may not be considered a virtue by some immigrants, why would we expect them to adapt?

[Separately, I decided to extend my co-authors’ survey results regarding Massachusetts family law (see about halfway down this intro chapter). These smart young people were familiar with non-working divorcées living in $1+ million houses, driving luxury cars, etc. However, they were unaware that having sex with three high-income professionals could yield the same income as studying for and joining that profession. They wrongly believed that child support revenue following a one-night sexual encounter was somehow limited and generally less lucrative than child support cashflow following a marriage. They wrongly believed that it was illegal and therefore impractical to sell an abortion for cash. Although the children of divorce with whom they were familiar had no more than every-other-weekend contact with their fathers, they wrongly believed that Massachusetts law favored a 50/50 shared parenting arrangement. They wrongly believed that Massachusetts law makes a divorce lawsuit more profitable in the event of fault, e.g., if a defendant were having an affair.]

Related:

• “Reports of Attacks on Women in Germany Heighten Tension Over Migrants” (New York Times, 1/5/2016): “The descriptions of the assailants — by the police and victims quoted in the news media — as being young foreign men who spoke neither German nor English immediately stoked the debate over how to integrate such large numbers of migrants and focused new attention on how to deal with the influx of young, mostly Muslim men from more socially conservative cultures where women do not share the same freedoms and protections as men.”

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The saga of oven repair that nearly exploded the house continues. Whirlpool doesn’t have the parts to fix the 36″-wide dual-fuel range. It is still under warranty so they have offered to give us a credit against one of their new 36″ dual-fuel ranges. These are crazy expensive (will be “stupid expensive” instead of “crazy expensive” after our credit). Here’s one example: a Kitchenaid KDRU767VSS. There is a slightly cheaper model that doesn’t have the “steam-assist” oven. That raises the question… do we want or need a “steam-assist” oven?

Readers: Does anyone have experience to report using one of these high-end Kitchenaid 36″-wide ranges? Experience with a steam-assist oven of any type?

Separately, I would like to take a moment to thank the architect who designed this kitchen for the previous owner of the house (and architects everywhere). Without his initiative in picking a 36″ range width, instead of the standard 30″, Whirlpool would be giving us a free replacement instead of charging us thousands of dollars for an oven that contains enough steel to build a minivan.

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Burton Malkiel, who inspired the index fund revolution (e.g., Vanguard) and wrote A Random Walk Down Wall Street, offers some 2016 investment advice in a WSJ editorial:

Perhaps the most useful metric to assess valuations is the cyclically adjusted price-earnings multiple (CAPE). This is the ratio of today’s market price to a measure of average earnings over recent economic cycles. CAPEs for broad stock-market indexes do not help in predicting returns one year ahead. But they do have a reasonably high correlation with average returns over, for example, the next five to 10 years.

Today the CAPE stands at over 26 for the U.S. market, well above its long-run average. The CAPE is 20 for Japan, 15 for Europe and under 10 for emerging markets—below their long-run averages. I am not suggesting that you try to time the markets and shift from one to another based on these metrics. But I do suggest that if your equity portfolio is composed entirely of U.S. stocks, you might add some foreign stocks in 2016.

I.e., if you already own U.S. stocks, buy foreign stocks with any new money to invest!

Readers: What are your investment strategies for the coming year?

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Amazon’s new book review interface results in a rather strange user experience when the original author is Homer (though of course scholars now recognize that Homer was not the author of The Iliad, but rather it was another Greek with the same name).

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Roughly every year it is time for me to ask readers what kind of accounting software they like. I’m advising a small LLC. Here are the characteristics:

• one to three W-2 employees at any one time, paid via a payroll service (sadly this still ends up generating a huge amount of administrative hassle, including threatening notices from various government agencies)
• about 15 customers, none of whom pay by credit card and many of whom have to be invoiced and, if they don’t pay, reminded (figure up to three hardcopy checks deposited per month)
• revenue of perhaps $500,000 per year; profits perhaps of $50,000 per year
• about 30 vendors, most of whom can be paid by credit or debit card

I’ve used QuickBooks Online for an LLC that I used to run. The main hassle was typically re-connecting with the online banking service of the small bank that the LLC used. Hold times for help could be epic, e.g., 30 minutes, but once connected the people seemed to know what they were doing. I can’t figure out how to use 99% of the system and it is fairly costly considering that it is maintaining a handful of database tables. Is there anything better out there? (An advantage of QuickBooks Online is that the accountant could also log in and pull down what he needed for doing taxes, fix any chart of accounts problems, enter capital equipment for depreciation, etc.)

This LLC has the flexibility right now to select a new bank for its checking account. Are there any that people especially like? Other than Bank of America, are some better for debit card fraud protection? Are there any where customers can send physical checks directly to the bank? (“lockbox” service, but not with the crazy fees that the big banks have for this and for only a handful of payments per month; it is really about making sure that important checks don’t get lost or buried)

What about an online accounting and/or bookkeeping service? Are there any that will do all of the invoicing and following up? Categorizing the comparative handful of expenses for this company (“bookkeeping” per se) doesn’t seem like a huge task once software such as Quickbooks Online is in place.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Related:

• my 2011 posting on the same subject

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It is common in our media and on Facebook to see analogies drawn between migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other war-torn regions and Jewish refugees from Germany in the 1930s. Initially the analogy seems apt. After the National Socialists were elected to power, Germany became a dangerous place for Jews, though the full scope of the danger wasn’t clear until the 1940s. For at least the 500,000 Jews who lived in Germany prior to the electoral victories of Hitler (or the roughly 250,000 who were still there just prior to World War II), in retrospect it seems to at least some Americans that we should have accepted them as refugees. People who live in Syria today are also in danger. Therefore we should accept them as refugees because we might regret it 70 years later if we do not.

If we are going to look back to the World War II era in Europe, are Jews the correct group to serve as an analogy and talking point? Jews constituted just one percent of the German population and were a minority group elsewhere in Europe. They were being targeted for discrimination, random violence, and ultimately institutional death camps due to their ethnicity/religion. Most of the migrants seeking admission to Europe and the U.S., however, don’t fit this description. Perhaps Christians who have remained in Muslim countries would be analogous to the Jews of Europe circa 1935 or 1940 (depending on whether there is an active shooting war near their home), but a Muslim citizen of a Muslim country that has become a war zone? Wouldn’t the more appropriate analogy be to a Christian living in a war-torn part of France, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, or Russia? Or to a Christian living in London during the German bombing campaigns? Or even to a soldier in any of the armies fighting during World War II? The average soldier certainly did not choose to go to war and would have preferred to be resettled in Minnesota.

This doesn’t necessarily affect the question of whether or not it makes sense to offer U.S. or EU citizenship to anyone currently living in a war zone. Perhaps it would have made sense to bring 50, 75, or even 100 percent of the European and Russian population in the 1940s in order to protect them from World War II (i.e., potentially hundreds of millions of people). If there are only a handful of places on Planet Earth where people can live without killing each other, why not have everyone live in those places? However, people keep saying “Jews” and “Holocaust” in the context of “Should we accept a refugee who is of the same religion and ethnicity as most other people in a country having a civil war?” If the analogy is inapt then presumably the conclusions that people are drawing are wrong.

[Separately, if Americans are in fact enthusiastic about Jewish refugees, we could take in the entire population of Israel under the proposed new standards for migrants/refugees. The states of the Arab League declared war on Israel in 1948 and only Jordan and Egypt have subsequently agreed to peace treaties. Thus Israel is an official war zone and everyone there is theoretically subject to the risk of violent conflict at any time the Arab countries (plus Iran as a new belligerent) feel strong enough to initiate new battles. (Arab citizens of Israel and Arabs living in the adjacent territories are equally at risk from any conflict, so they would qualify as refugees entitled to U.S. residency as well.)]

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“Islamic State’s Authentic-Looking Fake Passports Pose Threat” (WSJ, December 23, 2015):

Islamic State has likely obtained equipment and blank passport books needed to make Syrian passports when the group took control of the Syrian cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour, those officials said. It has also gained control of materials to make Iraqi passports when it occupied the Iraqi city of Mosul, a Belgian counterterrorism official disclosed for the first time.

Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, has recently sent document experts to Leros and other Greek islands to pick out fake passports. But there are now only 10 experts, and identifying a fake that has been printed on real Syrian passport books with real equipment is very difficult, a Frontex spokeswoman said.

 

It seems strange that in our electronic age paper passports are still in use. The U.S. passport is an electronic device with a paper cover (source), but other countries are apparently still relying primarily on paper (which means that we who accept travelers or immigrants from those countries are also relying on paper). Biometric passports are apparently in the far distant future for most countries.

Given the amount of time and energy that goes into fretting about people who move from one country to another, why isn’t there more discussion of biometric passports?

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Who has predictions for 2016 to share? I’ll go first…

Software: the iPhone will continue moving in the direction of Android and Windows. More capability, but also more crashes and unpredictable behavior such as slow response time.

Hardware: the beginning of the end of Intel’s dominance? As the desktop continues to die and the newest chips aren’t that much faster than the old chips (just more cores), why should anyone know or care what the CPU is inside a tablet or notebook computer?

Televisions: the premature death of OLED? Could it be that LCDs with higher dynamic range and/or ridiculously low prices will strangle OLED in its crib?

Politics: Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election by the same margin that Barack Obama had in 2012. Does it matter who is unfortunate enough to win the booby prize of the Republican nomination (previous posting on the unwinnability of this one for Republicans)? I don’t think so, but I will guess that it will be Ted Cruz based on the fact that he is a professional politician, unlike Donald Trump. With government spending now at roughly 50 percent of GDP, the election is important. As the government has grown (chart) people are more passionate about getting on the right side of this rich entity. The vote should basically come down to people who benefit from a big government (either they collect welfare, free housing, etc., work for the government, or have a close family member who works for the government, or work for a government contractor or crony (e.g., health care)) versus people who are economically disadvantaged by the government growing larger (e.g., people who pay taxes but don’t have an obvious way to collect a lot of benefits in return).

Economics: As predicted by Mancur Olson, the U.S. economy continues its stagnation, with per-capita GDP growing only slightly (of course the total GDP can still grow robustly if the U.S. population grows larger, e.g., through immigration). If we model the half of the U.S. economy that is now centrally planned by government as being like the former Soviet Union, we would expect half the economy to grow at an annual rate of between 0 and 0.75 percent. If we model the other half as being like a modern high-income free-market economy, such as Singapore or Hong Kong, that half could grow at a 3-4 percent rate (maybe at the higher end of this range due to the dead cat bounce that we’re probably still in following the Collapse of 2008). That leads to a maximum potential long-term average per capita GDP growth of about 2.4 percent, but let’s assume that the tangle of regulations imposed by the planned portion of the economy drags this down to 1-1.5 percent. If you live in one of the handful of desirable cities in the U.S. the result of this “growth” will be a reduction in your spending power due to (a) higher taxes, and (b) inflation in the cost of housing and services.

Work: The growth of the American welfare state will continue with higher minimum wages and other regulations discouraging companies from hiring the least-able Americans (see also “Can Puerto Rico be a laboratory for the future of the rest of the U.S.?” and “unemployed = 21st century draft horse?”). Higher tax rates and more lucrative child support guidelines in some states (e.g., Kansas), plus the message from politicians and meida to women that they can’t get fairly compensated in the workforce, will contribute to a continuation of the 15-year slide in the labor force participation rate of women. An increasing percentage of young women will be primarily stay-at-home wives (The inquisitive gender studies student and Sheryl Sandberg) or profit from their fertility without being married (chart showing a peak shortly after the Federal mandate for states to develop guidelines that made it easy to calculate the profits from a casual sexual encounter or short-term marriage (History); see also divorce litigators’ analysis of Ellen Pao’s career options)).

Leisure: With fewer people working and higher costs for employers making hotel rates grow faster than official inflation there will be a lot of demand for fun stuff that Americans can do from home, e.g., streaming video, video games, etc. I predict that the first virtual reality headsets will arrive in 2016 as planned but that consumers will be slow to adopt these innovations.

Health care: With no changes in financial incentives, I expect no changes in this sector (nearly 20 percent) of the U.S. economy. Due to the fact that viruses are smarter than humans, I expect no major breakthroughs in treatments.

Government: More outsourcing to cronies. From a bureaucrat’s point of view, a contract with a crony provides a great way to say “no” to the public. Instead of “We don’t want to give you that service,” a bureaucrat can say “We contracted out that function for five years to Vendor X and the contract doesn’t require them to give you that service. It is a great idea, though, and I’m sorry that they aren’t doing it.”

Businesses: Big companies will manage to work around new regulations and taxes. The keys to continued profits will include a combination of purchasing political influence, turning U.S. operations into a subsidiary of a foreign corporation headquartered in a country with lower tax rates (e.g., via an inversion), and expanding in growing markets overseas. Operating a small company in the U.S. will be increasingly untenable, unless it is a startup that can expect to be acquired fairly quickly. “Go big or go home” will continue be the message, e.g., communicated with double the effective tax rates on small corporations compared to large ones with their crews of full-time tax attorneys, offshore subsidiaries holding patents, etc.

Stocks: Due to the above, the S&P 500 should continue to grow in after-tax value at the same rate as world GDP (about 3 percent), even if the U.S. economy stagnates. (i.e., I am predicting that the S&P 500 will be approximately 60 points higher a year from now.)

Education: Mediocrity will continue to be accepted by Americans at all levels of the educational system. The U.S. will continue to spend more on this sector than all but a handful of countries (OECD chart), but most people in the education industry won’t have any incentive to achieve high performance. Incumbent nonprofit colleges will keep fighting back against for-profit colleges and increase their share of government handouts.

Cars: Innovations in self-driving and electric-powered cars will be significant and heavily publicized, but hard to deliver. Thus by the end of 2016 consumers will try to avoid buying a new car and/or enter into short-term leases in hopes that by 2017 or 2018 there will be mass-market cars with dramatic innovations.

Internet: Continued slide in readership and participation for anything that isn’t Facebook.

Income Inequality: Will continue to widen. Politicians who get a boost from complaining about income/wealth inequality will open the doors to a lot of immigrants with zero income and zero wealth, thus immediately worsening the statistics. Population growth from this immigration combined with the obstacles to building in the U.S. will favor existing owners of real property (i.e., Americans who are richer than the median). Increased complexity from regulations, taxes, and tax differentials from place to place and from company to company (e.g., depending on political connections) will favor the cleverest and best-educated (i.e., Americans who are probably richer than the median).

ISIS prediction: We won’t hear too much about ISIS in Syria by the end of 2016. Backed by the Russian military (will they trademark the phrase “What a real ally looks like”?), the Syrian government should be able to get its territory back under control. So ISIS will contract to almost nothing in Syria and grow in Iraq.

Migration into Europe: Every current migrant will tell 10 friends or family members about how well it is working out. Roughly one third of the friends/family will act on the advice. Thus there will be approximately three times as many migrants coming into the EU at the end of 2016 compared to now.

Readers: Your turn now!

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Happy New Year to all of my readers (except of course Jews, Chinese, and anyone else who has not succumbed to the hegemony of the Gregorian calendar)!

2016 will be the 26th year of the World Wide Web. There were a lot of competing wide-area hypertext system back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but Tim Berners-Lee had the simplest idea and it has come to define “the Internet” for many people (Facebook being the definition for the newest users!).

The microprocessor and network switch folks probably deserve more of the credit for enabling server-mediated collaboration, but we can still celebrate the standards that were successful.

As an example of just how revolutionary this world is, according to The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, the great scientist was nearly bankrupt from the expense of publishing his results.:

[Born into wealth,] Humboldt desperately needed the money from his annual stipend because the cost of his publications had left him, he admitted, ‘ poor as a church mouse’. He had to live on what he earned but he was useless when it came to his finances. ‘The only thing in heaven or earth that M. Humboldt does not understand,’ his English translator had remarked, ‘is business.’

Just imagine if the Web had existed 200 years ago. Humboldt could have put his results out on a free weblog site or pushed them into the old Los Alamos preprint server (now arXiv.org). Perhaps he would have gone insane from trying to format everything in TeX, though…

Readers: If you’re an example of the triumph of hope over experience and therefore still making New Year’s resolutions, please share them in the comments section!

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So we finally managed to escape the house/kids/dog to see Star Wars the Force Awakens.

Here are some questions about the economy of the past/future/whatever….

In some of the early scenes the scavenger girl is polishing up space junk before selling it to a dealer. In a world full of intelligent robots (“droids”), why are there any humans (or human-like creatures) performing manual labor and living far below the standard of an American classified as “impoverished”?

The planets depicted don’t seem heavily populated. Thus it would seem that there has been no Malthusian expansion of population such that everyone is down to a subsistence level. If there are whole planets full of resources and the possibility of droid labor, why wouldn’t everyone be living large, e.g., in a plush McMansion built by local droids?

Interplanetary/interstellar travel seems to be pretty cheap, as evidenced by the existence of bars catering to people from all around the galaxy. If it is affordable to go inter-stellar to get a drink with friends, it should be affordable to transport otherwise scarce materials from one planet to another. Therefore the existence of poverty can’t be explained by a shortage of a particular material. (And where was the parking lot for that bar, by the way? Why didn’t we see the ships in which the customers had arrived? Were they all using an Uber-like service?)

Can it be that having enough wars to fill up nine movies has destroyed most accumulated wealth?

Why are they bothering to wage these wars? Are there massive tariffs to be collected from trade? (Thus giving rise to Han Solo’s smuggling career.) We don’t see anyone paying sales tax or income tax in the movies. What’s the point of owning a planet if you don’t get tax revenue?

Readers: What is the explanation? (And, separately, has everyone recovered from the emotional trauma of not being reunited with Jar Jar Binks?)

Related:

• “Star Wars: The Economics Of The Galactic Empire” overview from Investopedia
• overview from Wookieepedia
• “What ‘Star Wars’ teaches us about economics” — it is all about inequality
• “What ‘Star Wars’ gets wrong about blacks and women” (Washington Post) — it is all about race and gender within one of the many galactic species
• “An economics professor explains how the Empire built the Death Star” — it is all about the form of government

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