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A newspaper article about wish.com inspired me to try out this shop-direct-from-China service. As noted in my recent posting about Apple, computer nerds are predisposed to think that a distributed computer network will result in disintermediation, e.g., with consumers buying from manufacturers rather than retailers.

Here’s what I learned…

• the process does work in that ordered items arrived in the mail 7-10 days later
• the Chinese word for “polyester” is “silk” (three “silk neckties” ordered from the site arrived with fabric tags saying that they were made from polyester)
• stuff direct from China isn’t all that much cheaper than stuff on sale at a department store or at Amazon

Comparing what I got from wish.com to what I get from amazon.com, I am reminded of Richard Pryor’s comment in Live on the Sunset Strip:

I went to Arizona State Penitentiary to do a film with Gene Wilder [Stir Crazy] … and it was really strange because it is 80 percent black people in there … [and] there are no black people in Arizona. … [I thought that imprisoned black men were being persecuted by Whitey; they were] nice people just got a bad break. … I was there six weeks and I talked to some of brothers there. Thank God we got penitentiaries. [video clip]

Bottom line on wish.com: Thank God we got retailers!

 

 

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“Mass. has Banked Over $3M in Dispensary Fees & Not a Single Marijuana Seed Has Been Planted” and “The First Medical Marijuana Dispensary in Mass. Will Open Today” suggest that the new industry of legalized marijuana in Massachusetts is going to be dominated by crony capitalists. It looks as though virtually anyone in the state would qualify for medical marijuana (list of qualifying conditions) since PTSD is on the list (“I can’t recover from the trauma of not being to purchase marijuana legally.”) as well as “chronic pain.” I’ll be interested to see (assuming that glaucoma does not prevent me from seeing) if the prices are much higher than in California and Colorado.

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In looking through the Supreme Court’s opinion on same-sex marriage, I’m trying to figure out how their reasoning compares to my own posting in support of same-sex marriage.

The majority point out that

the annals of human history reveal the transcendent importance of marriage. [Angelika Graswald would agree, but perhaps for different reasons]

The ancient origins of marriage confirm its centrality, but it has not stood in isolation from developments in law and society. The history of marriage is one of both continuity and change. That institution—even as confined to opposite-sex relations—has evolved over time.

A third basis for protecting the right to marry is that it safeguards children and families and thus draws meaning from related rights of childrearing, procreation, and education.

Without the recognition, stability, and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser.

Fourth and finally, this Court’s cases and the Nation’s traditions make clear that marriage is a keystone of our social order. Alexis de Tocqueville recognized this truth on his travels through the United States almost two centuries ago: … In [an 1888 case] the Court echoed de Tocqueville, explaining that marriage is “the foundation of the family and of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.”

These aspects of marital status include: … child custody, support, and visitation rules [Bizarrely included because the federal Family Support Act of 1988 explicitly require that states make it just as profitable to collect child support after a one-night encounter as after a 10-year marriage; every jurisdiction nationwide also has the same rules for custody and visitation regardless of the existence of a marriage between the litigants; see the “History of Divorce” chapter.]

Roberts notes that

[Marriage] arose in the nature of things to meet a vital need: ensuring that children are conceived by a mother and father committed to raising them in the stable conditions of a lifelong relationship.

Therefore, for the good of children and society, sexual relations that can lead to procreation should occur only between a man and a woman committed to a lasting bond.

As the majority notes, some aspects of marriage have changed over time. Arranged marriages have largely given way to pairings based on romantic love. States have replaced coverture, the doctrine by which a married man and woman became a single legal entity, with laws that respect each participant’s separate status. Racial restrictions on marriage, which “arose as an incident to slavery” to promote “White Supremacy,” were repealed by many States and ultimately struck down by this Court. [Left out one big change: marriage can be dissolved any time by one party unilaterally]

Scalia says

Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms? And if intimacy is, one would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie. Expression, sure enough, is a freedom, but anyone in a long-lasting marriage will attest that that happy state constricts, rather than expands, what one can prudently say.

Thomas restricts his opinion to narrow legal questions and doesn’t shed any light on what he might think of as “marriage.”

Alito points out that

If this traditional understanding of the purpose of marriage does not ring true to all ears today, that is probably because the tie between marriage and procreation has frayed. Today, for instance, more than 40% of all children in this country are born to unmarried women. This development undoubtedly is both a cause and a result of changes in our society’s understanding of marriage.

Today’s decision usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage. The decision will also have other important consequences.

Except to a limited extent for Scalia and Alito, the Supreme Court in making this ruling inhabited a parallel universe in which no-fault divorce did not exist, in which states did not provide multi-million-dollar financial incentives for breaking up a child’s home (see Real World Divorce), and in which certainly nobody would get married in order then to pick up a green card through the Violence Against Women Act. Many of the quotes are from the 19th century. The Supreme Court exhibits a lordly indifference to family law and to their brethen who are divorce litigators. The word “divorce” does not occur in the opinion (except as part of a cited book title), though it is the only time that courts get significantly involved as a result of a marriage. The word “alimony” does not occur. The multi-billion dollar child support industry is mentioned just once, without a note that Census data show that 93 percent of the recipients are of one gender or that guidelines make it twice as profitable to have three children with three different co-parents compared to having three children with one sex partner. If there are any Americans who get married for financial reasons, or with an eye toward a near-term divorce lawsuit targeting their spouse’s premarital property and future income, we can’t learn of their existence from reading this opinion.

The Supreme Court has thus invited all American couples, regardless of their birth genders or current genders, to join a 19th century world of “for better or for worse and til death do us part” marriage (chart).

The divorce litigators whom we interviewed were similarly welcoming, but for different reasons (from History of Divorce):

“When I read arguments by opponents of gay marriage,” said one attorney, “I don’t recognize their description of straight marriage as some sort of sanctified institution. With no-fault statutes that kept the old alimony, property division, and child support rules, straight people made a mockery of civil marriage a long time ago. Marriage today is a way for a smart person with a low income to make money from a stupid person with a high income. What difference does it make whether the gold digger and mark are of the same sex?”

Readers: What will be the implications of this decision, aside from the obvious additional marriages and divorces in some of the fringe states? And what’s next for marriage? Can the majority’s reasoning be applied to further expand marriage, e.g., to polygamous unions?

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Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania includes more detail than you would expect to want about a ship that sank 100 years ago (Wikipedia), but Erik Larson makes it work. The magnificent cruise ship sank just after the Germans decided to start sinking merchant ships anywhere near England, a precursor of the total war that would characterize World War II. Larson describes the debate within the German military regarding the morality and wisdom of attacking civilian ships where the loss of civilian lives was inevitable. Larson says that the decision in favor of unlimited war was primarily due to popular support for submarine warfare, which the German public saw as offering a path around the stalemate in the trenches.

The significance of the event in retrospect is unclear. The U.S. did not enter World War I until two years after the sinking. If the U.S. hadn’t entered the war, however, German submarines might in fact have succeeded in crippling England. Larson says that a ship departing England early in 1917 had a roughly 1 in 4 chance of being torpedoed.

The book has a little something for everyone. There is naval architecture, social life about a transatlantic liner, family life, life on board a submarine, and a lot about English code-breaking capabilities (just as in World War II, far ahead of corresponding American efforts).

Recommended if you like history.

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“Supreme Court upholds health care subsidies” is a Boston Globe article that is typical of the press coverage of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the federal government can ladle out tax dollars in all 51 jurisdictions nationwide. In practice it is the insurance companies and health care industry that receive these dollars. Even a purportedly “subsidized” American will typically pay more for health care than his or her counterpart in a country where the industry consumes a lower percentage of GDP. Yet this manna from Washington is characterized as something that individual voters receive: “The justices said in a 6-3 ruling that the subsidies that 8.7 million people currently receive…” (emphasis added, from the Globe article).

Without any mention of the fact that U.S. federal and state governments established policies that have driven up the cost of health care, it is easy to see how someone reading one of these articles would be grateful for the beneficence of the central planners.

Related:

• “The Soviet comrade tours Washington, D.C.” (USDA driving up food prices with market restrictions and then giving 50 million Americans food stamps to help pay the new higher prices).
• “Insurance and Hospital Industries Relieved as Supreme Court Upholds Health-Law Subsidies” (WSJ, 6/25/2015), noted that “Hospitals have benefited from a rise in paying customers under the law” and “’It is business as usual and that is good for us,’ said Alan Miller, chief executive of Universal Health Services Inc.” and “Much of the health-care industry’s attention will now be focused on the possibility of huge insurance deals that could knit together some of the industry’s biggest players and challenge the negotiating power of hospitals and doctor groups.”

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The government says that you need to be a woman (definition? see below) to be on the $10 bill and also to be dead. I propose that the “dead” restriction be lifted. Let’s keep the focus on the future, not the unenlightened past.

Many countries select prominent authors. Given the limitation to a living woman I think that would have to be Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate.

Movies and music have replaced writing in a lot of Americans’ lives. Why not Madonna? Or a movie director or actress? Everyone feels elevated by Meryl Streep. How about Oprah Winfrey? I would be happy every time that I opened my wallet if I could see a portrait of Oprah.

The future may be an America where everyone can be a victim. The natural choice would then be Ellen Pao. She has been identified by the New York Times and other national media as a heroine to American women. She has demonstrated racial and sexual preference tolerance as well with her marriage to a gay black man. Actually if there were a dual portrait of the happy couple the $10 bill would thereby include a trifecta of American victimhood (female, black, gay).

Lenore Weitzman has perhaps had more impact on America’s children than any other woman. As noted in the “History of Divorce” chapter, her political work was instrumental in states adopting the current (highly profitable) child support guidelines. The economic incentives resulted in millions of additional American children living without two parents. Weitzman also enabled an adult American to tap into the resources of multiple adults simultaneously (formerly the money was in alimony rather than in possession of children and one could tap just a single alimony payor at any one time).

Caitlyn Jenner raises some definitional questions. What would it mean to be a “woman” for the purposes of this affirmative action campaign? Does she have to have two X chromosomes? A female-style body, whether naturally or artificially created? Simply a Rachel Dolezal-style identification with things feminine? Jenner was a great athlete and shows that it is possible to inspire Americans over many decades.

Ideas from readers?

[If the death requirement is not relaxed, my personal vote is for Sacagawea. Via her achievements as an explorer and diplomat she was instrumental in leading the expansion of the U.S. from a coastal nation into a continental one. She made a multi-thousand-mile road trip, a quintessentially American phenomenon. She did the trip on foot and while carrying and nursing a baby. The downside of choosing Sacagawea is that would encourage Americans to dream about our past as a sparsely populated frontier nation, not think seriously about our future as nation of 400 or 600 million.]

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Facebook is alight with people saying that they are opposed to citizens of South Carolina displaying a Confederate flag. In response to one of these posts I noted that “It takes a lot of courage to advocate tearing down the flag of an army that was defeated 150 years ago.” In response to a post from a software developer who is frantically removing the flags from a catalog shopping site: “When Confederate flags are outlawed, only outlaws will have Confederate flags.”

Obviously the flags, whatever their symbolism might have been in the old days, will have to go now that they are associated with the Charleston church shooting. But reflecting back on Walter Scott (previous posting), it occurred to me that South Carolina will be getting rid of this symbol of slavery (“no longer available at Walmart”) while keeping its system of actual slavery in place.

What is the definition of “slavery” today? According to antislavery.org, “Someone is in slavery if they are: forced to work – through mental or physical threat; … physically constrained or has restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement.”

As in most states, South Carolina maintains a population of people who are “forced to work.” These are the losers of custody and child support lawsuits and/or alimony lawsuits. If they do not keep working and earning whatever a judge has decided they are capable of earning so that they can pay whatever a judge ordered them to pay, they are subject to the penalties listed on this South Carolina Department of Social Services site. These include “license revocation,” which would seem to fit the antislavery.org definition component of “restrictions placed on his/her freedom of movement” and “passport denial,” which also fits. Penalties also include imprisonment, to which Walter Scott was subjected three times.

Who is the owner, entitled to receive the fruits of a slave’s labor, of a modern-day South Carolina slave? In some cases it is the successful child support plaintiff (child support revenue is potentially unlimited in South Carolina, but in practice it may be tough to get more than a tax-free $600,000 per year (chapter) from a single child). However, in other cases it is the government (mostly federal) that is the slave owner because whatever money can be extracted from the slave is kept by the government as a reimbursement for various welfare benefits to which the person who won custody is entitled via the “single parent with no job or low income” status.

[South Carolina law is written in a gender-neutral manner, and theoretically the opportunity to profit from possession of children is theoretically available to both men and women. However, 100 percent of the people collecting child support surveyed by the U.S. Census Bureau in March 2014 in South Carolina were women.]

Thus South Carolina will soon be rid of the visible symbols of slavery while having plenty of actual slaves moving in and out of its prison system and courtrooms. (How many exactly? MSNBC says that “Two surveys of county jails in the South Carolina conducted in the last decade found that at least one out of every eight incarcerated people were there because they had been held in contempt of court for not paying child support. “)

[A friend pointed out that the slavery of Walter Scott in 2015 was different from slavery circa 1815. I think it is fair to disagree about what to call someone who, if he can’t work for whatever reason, must go to prison. But I don’t think that it is accurate to call him “free”.]

Related:

• April 12, 2015 posting on Walter Scott
• April 8, 2015 posting on Walter Scott

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I was chatting with some friends about Tim Hunt, the Nobel laureate who lost his jobs after saying “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.” I hadn’t appreciated one parallel with that masterpiece of 21st Century cinema: The Other Guys. One of the disgraced scientist’s core points was that at least some women reacted badly to criticism. To demonstrate just how wrong Hunt was, i.e., that women can in fact handle harsh words, he needed to be packed off into a quiet retirement so as to avoid the risk of any additional women being exposed to potentially upsetting statements.

Corresponding scene in the Will Ferrell/Mark Wahlberg movie:

• Allen Gamble (after watching his partner dance ballet): “Hey, I didn’t know you could dance.”
• Terry Hoitz: “We used to do those dance moves to make fun of guys when we were kids to show them how queer they were.”

Related:

• Tim Hunt and Ellen Pao

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The scrap between Taylor Swift and Apple Music (Variety) is an important reminder that computer scientists are often dead wrong about how technology will be used by business. People who had ARPAnet connectivity to their desktops in the 1970s and early 1980s envisioned a fully distributed business environment to go with the fully distributed network. You’d be able to buy any book, newspaper, or movie but you’d get it from the publisher’s server or perhaps the author’s. You’d be able to buy products direct from manufacturers, with retailers disintermediated. Certainly nobody predicted that a company such as Apple would be able to take 30 percent of the recording industry’s revenue because the record companies were incapable of setting up their own servers. Taylor Swift should not have been able to get into a dispute with Apple because consumers would be getting their music direct from Taylor Swift’s server, perhaps paying a Visa card-style transaction fee to a payment processor.

Technology by itself suggests Econ 101-style efficient markets with more vendors and fewer middlemen/middlewomen (is there a gender-neutral term for a rent-collecting middleman? would we want one?). And the way that Internet was rolled out to consumers has happened almost exactly as the 1970s users predicted (except that the winning protocols and standards, HTTP and HTML, turned out to be far simpler than predicted!). The real-world use of technology, however, has to a significant extent resulted in business structures that are opposite to what was predicted.

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Every time I look up something related to medicine it seems that the folks who call themselves “scientists” have reversed their previous conclusions. Americans have been told to finish every course of prescribed antibiotics, for example, contradicting the common sense idea to stop ingesting pills once you’re perfectly healthy.

Here’s a Discover Magazine article from 2014 confirming the common sense perspective and referring to published medical research papers as “science.” Here’s another one from The Guardian, reporting on a paper from Australia.

Related:

• Incompetence of medical researchers leads to doubt regarding climate change?

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