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I’m halfway through Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis as an audiobook, which is critical to appreciating the English criminal argot. The action occurs in a fictitious blighted section of London:

In dusty Diston (also known as Diston Town or, more simply, Town), nothing— and no one—was over sixty years old. On an international chart for life expectancy , Diston would appear between Benin and Djibouti (fifty-four for men and fifty-seven for women). And that wasn’t all. On an international chart for fertility rates, Diston would appear between Malawi and Yemen (six children per couple —or per single mother). Thus the age structure in Diston was strangely shaped. But still: Town would not be thinning out.

Des is a 15-year-old being taken care of by his 21-year-old uncle:

[Lionel] was served his first Restraining Directive when he was three. Three years and two days: a national record … Lionel’s first Restraining Directive would have been called a BASBO, or Baby ASBO … ASBO, which (as all the kingdom now knew) stood for Anti-Social Behaviour Order.

During one of his periodic stays in prison, Lionel wins the lottery and becomes a rich celebrity. Des graduates from college and becomes a reporter, which does not endear him to Uncle Lionel:

“See, I’m a man in a predicament. I got this nephew. After his mum sadly died, I raised him meself. As best I could. Not a bad lad, I thought. Here and there he let me down. Loose tongue. Such is youth … Then what’s he do? Turns bent on me. Goes to the university, gets his head full of ideas. Studies uh, Criminology. And now he’s finking for a living …”

Lionel’s new wealth and fame gives him access to a broader class of female partners:

“DILFs, Des. All divorcees. The lot of them! You know how they do it? First they— first they get theyselves hitched to some old banker for ten minutes. Then they independent for life! And oh, they in gorgeous nick, Des. Superb. And I said to her, I said to this DILF, How old are you anyway? And guess what she said.” “What.”“Thirty-seven! Which means she’s probably forty-three! Think. She’s almost Gran’s age— and there’s not a mark on her. Pampered all they lives, they are. Beauty treatments . Massage. Yoga.”

Lionel settles on a celebrity/poetess named Threnody. A journalist comes over to do a profile on the couple:

“‘Pop the top off for us, love,’ murmurs Chris. ‘Threnody’ isn’t slow to oblige. And there are the famous boobs (first unveiled last year)— more like pottery than flesh, and pointing upward. “‘They weren’t cheap,’ says Asbo. ‘She told me what they cost. And that’s f*** all,’ he adds, ‘to what she’s blown on her a***.’

Lionel orders Champagne by the pint but has some trouble with a steamed lobster at a fancy restaurant:

then he went back inside to confront the scarlet fortress of the crustacean. … Bending low over the table, he positioned the jagged limb in the instrument’s clench; then he applied maximum force— and caught a jet of hot butter right in the eye! … The key moment came ten minutes later, when he threw down his weapons and reached for the enemy with his bare hands. “I’m sorry you seemed to have such trouble with your entrée, sir.” “… Well, you know how it is, Cuthbert. You win some, you lose some.” “Do take the napkin, sir. Take a clean one. Here … That looks really quite nasty. Might need a stitch or two.” … He swung himself down the steps and out into the alley, his tie half off, his jacket, shirt, and waistcoat colourfully impasted with butter and blood. He felt very hungry.

Amis is a great writer but I don’t think this book works as well on the page as it does being read by someone who can do the correct accents.

[I’m also in the middle of a book in print form: The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy (seeing if the depth and persistence of the 2008-? recession can be explained simply by the fact that we chose to pay people not to work).]

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A friend linked to a U.S. Department of Labor Facebook page. Top left is a video decrying the fact that the U.S. does not have a mandated-by-law 14-week maternity leave system like Germany’s. Presumably if we did have a law to force employers to offer paid maternity leave the U.S. Department of Labor would need a larger budget for hiring employees to enforce the regulations. There are already laws preventing employers from discriminating against pregnant women in hiring so presumably this wouldn’t be a simple regulation to draft, review, enact, monitor, and enforce. Otherwise a qualified pregnant woman could show up for her first day of work two days prior to a scheduled C-section, then collect 14 weeks of pay for being at home, then return to work for two days and quit.

Could this be the formula for infinite government spending? We pay taxes so that government workers can lobby us on Facebook for more government programs that require additional taxes?

[Separately, I’m not sure about the merits of adopting one element of German law in isolation. Germany has a completely different legal system, for example, in which lawyers’ fees are limited by a formula according to the amount in dispute. You couldn’t have a lawsuit in Germany that consumed $2 million in legal fees regarding the number of weeks of maternity leave to which a woman was entitled. Marriage has a lower cash value in Germany relative to work, especially since a 2009 change in the alimony law. A marriage in the U.S. that would yield “permanent” or “lifetime” alimony would potentially yield no alimony at all in Germany (that two divorced people will have an unequal spending power is not considered inequitable in Germany and adult dependency is disfavored). Compared to the college+work alternative, children have a lower cash value in Germany as well. A one-night encounter with a high-income German that results in pregnancy yields a tax-free cashflow of about $6,000 per year when the same child might yield $100,000/year or more for a Wisconsin, Massachusetts, or California parent. The victorious parent’s revenue stream is cut off at age 18 (though a child may be able to collect until the first college degree is completed) compared to age 23 in Massachusetts, for example. Thus the economic incentives faced by Germans making life decisions are different.]

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It seems that Starbucks has abandoned its “race together” campaign in which Americans were supposed to talk about race while sipping their $5 coffees. On a recent trip to the Pacific Northwest I found that Starbucks was actually very useful in starting a conversation. A group of us were dining in a high-end restaurant in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. One of us asked for espresso after dinner. The waiter told her that they didn’t have an espresso machine, but only served regular coffee. I asked in my brightest and most hopeful voice: “Do you use Starbucks-brand coffee?” It seemed to set the waiter’s brain on fire.

My personal theory is that America’s museums are best suited to continuing the dialog that Starbucks has abandoned for crass commercial reasons. Next to the coat/bag room in each museum they can post a large sign reading “White men: Check your privilege.”

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A friend on Facebook who also happens to work at Facebook posted the following:

‪#‎ellenpao‬ fired despite her results & despite them being credited to less competent men. ‪#‎whendoesitend‬ I am so happy to be at Facebook now where Sheryl Sandberg leads on culture. The stories I could tell about other places.

She linked to a story on Business Insider about the trial in Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins. Right next to the story that she referenced was a link to “A woman has hired Ellen Pao’s lawyers to sue her former employer Facebook for sex discrimination and harassment.”

Related:

• Ellen Pao’s new job?
• Litigious Minds Think Alike: Divorce litigators react to the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit
• Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins wrap-up

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With the potential for some changes to Obamacare due to a pending U.S. Supreme Court case there has been discussion about what states might do. To keep the system rolling, for example, all that a state would need to do is set up its own exchange (could a state avoid the expense and embarrassment of a healthcare.gov-style debacle by using humans in a call center filling out paper forms and faxing them to insurers? There is at most one transaction per subsidized person per year.). Yet some states have resisted this task and also have resisted the expansion of Medicaid. Journalists often present this as an ideological decision, but I’m wondering if there isn’t a practical angle.

From a politician’s point of view, it could make sense to adjust the number of people collecting various forms of welfare. Given that few welfare recipients vote for Republicans (some numbers), a Republican politician might seek to limit the number of voters getting various forms of welfare, including Obamacare subsidies, in order to have any chance of winning an election. (More than 20 percent of Americans get Medicaid now (Kaiser), which is enough to form a solid base of political support.)

What about the economics? Given that poor people are generally poor it would seem that there is no way for a state’s economy to be boosted by their presence. Unless some politicians want to keep poor people around as reliable voters, New Jersey should therefore seek to cut welfare benefits to the point that its poorest citizens will move to neighboring Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York, and Connecticut. Yet generally we observe that states go in the opposite direction. Welfare benefits are enhanced each year in most states. Are Americans becoming ever more generous? Perhaps the answer is, as the City of Ferguson discovered, there is money in poor people. There are a lot of Federal hand-outs that can be obtained only if a state contains poor people. For example, the Feds will pay for most of Medicaid, thus boosting nearly 20 percent of a state’s economy (the health care industry). The Feds also pay enough for public housing that building apartments for poor people is one of the most lucrative corners of the commercial real estate business (very tough to break into, however, and dominated by big companies such as Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (story)). The Feds give out food stamps, home heating assistance, and general cash assistance, all of which are spent in a state’s local economy.

Poor people are more likely to be convicted of various federal drug offenses, which results in the federal government paying for courthouses and prisons in a state, plus paying salaries and benefits for the government workers who staff those buildings. Poor people are often hit with orders to pay child support that they cannot pay. The presence of deadbeat parents in a state entitles a state to a share of the $6 billion federal child support enforcement budget (video). Arguably a state could become reasonably prosperous without any productive industry if 20 percent of its citizens agreed to become drug dealers with out-of-wedlock children. The remaining 80 percent could be federally paid judges, clerks, district attorneys, court-appointed lawyers, child support enforcement officers, sheriffs, prison guards, etc.

Presumably to boost a state’s economic health it is better to have a rich citizen than a poor citizen, but could it be that a state government will collect more revenue by retaining the poor people that it does have?

What do readers think? Do politicians seek to manipulate the number of welfare-eligible voters in their districts? Do state policy-makers consider poverty in the larger economy when deciding whether to adopt policies that will attract more or fewer poor Americans to their states?

Related:

• February 2015 posting asking “Just how many government workers can a poor American support?”

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A friend pointed me to this article about California’s latest $1 billion seawater desalination plant. I’m wondering if Californians have discovered a method to drive infinite global warming:

• take all of your freshwater and sell it below cost/value to farmers who will then let it evaporate (in fact, sell it so cheaply that they will grow rice as though they were farming in monsoon-soaked tropical Asia)
• take an entire African country’s electricity budget and spend it to run desalination plants to replace the water previously wasted

Is there a reason that I have overlooked for why California is now going the same route as Qatar?

[Of course, desalination may make sense for Qataris. Qatar is much drier than California. Qatar is much richer per-capita than California. Qataris aren’t in the business of hectoring others regarding global warming, environmentalism, politics, etc.]

 

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I have an HP 2605 color laser printer workhorse that periodically gets dust inside and needs a multi-hour cleanout before it will print colors properly again (step-by-step process). I am thinking it is time for a new multi-function printer. My last purchase (for a different office) was the older model of this HP multi-function color laser printer and it has worked reasonably well, though the scanner is painfully slow and noisy (so I use a Fujitsu ScanSnap for anything that I can). Supposedly this can handle 40,000 pages/month (though perhaps this is not quite true since the “recommended” volume is 1000 to 2000 pages). I print at most 300 pages per month. Can I get better color photo quality with one of the high-speed HP inkjet printers? HP OJPro x576dw is an example. One reader review on Amazon says that it has terrible photo quality. Another says that the photo printing quality is much better than laser printers. I don’t want to compromise black and white sharpness for printing PDFs of patents and other boring business stuff. I also like the idiot-proof nature of laser printer toner replacement. But I’m wondering if I am just prejudiced in favor of laser printers because I have been using them since 1979 (starting with the awesome Xerox Dover!).

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Folks:

It has been such a lovely winter in Boston that it is with deep regret that I must abandon the city in order to assist a friend with ferrying his family to Florida for the upcoming week. Would anyone like to get together for coffee in Naples, Florida on Wednesday, March 25? Or join me for a bird photography outing in the Corkscrew Swamp sanctuary or perhaps out on Sanibel? Please email if interested.

Thanks!

p.s. Suggestions for photography in the Naples area would be welcome. I’m mostly going to be testing out a Canon EF 200-400mm but I will bring a Sigma 35/1.4 as well.

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Free-range parenting, and by implication the opposite (helicopter parenting), seems to be in the news all the time (example from today’s New York Times that talks about the “narrowing of the child’s world has happened across the developed world”).

At the same time I have been poking around to find a new car seat for our son (will be 16 months old when the seat arrives). I’m discovering that the goal of safety advocates is to keep children rear-facing until they are age 4 or 5. All of the articles talk about how this makes children 50 or 75 percent “safer” but there is no mention of the actual statistical risk. Is the risk of injury in an accident being reduced from 10%/year or from 0.0001%/year? None of the articles include this information. Nor do any say “You could cut your child’s risk to zero by leaving him or her at home, buying a house that is walking distance to school (and where no streets need to be crossed), not signing up for Russian Math or Kumon unless those are offered within walking distance from your house, etc. You could also cut the risk in half by getting a minivan instead of a compact sedan. You could cut the risk by at least another fact of two avoiding driving at night, in the rain, or when you’re tired.”

Personally I try to avoid schlepping children around in cars because it seems like a second-rate environment for a child to learn/develop. But to the extent that they must travel in a car with me I try to use the time to point out stuff that we can see out the window. I’d be interested to hear from readers, e.g., in Scandinavian countries where supposedly rear-facing until older ages is common, how in-car conversations about the scenery work when a child can’t see the same things as the adults in the car.

Parents spend so much time these days trying to make sure that every possible moment is spent on some sort of enrichment activity. Could it be that the rear-facing idea reduces the child’s mental enrichment to the point that the reduction in injury risk is not worth it? (“There is no level of acceptable risk” is not a sensible answer because if a parent truly felt that way the child would almost never be in a car at all (see above).)

[Separately, I recently got a letter from the school superintendent here in our (rich) suburb of Boston. This lists a lot of hazards facing children but car accidents are not among them. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you are a parent, at some point it is likely that your child or someone they know will face one or more of these issues…

• Mental Health
• Substance Use/Abuse
• Domestic Violence
• Learning Differences
• Bullying
• Stress
• Suicide Prevention
• Eating Disorders
• Sexual Health
• Autism Spectrum
• Resiliency

… Don’t wait until your child is facing an issue to become educated. Prepare yourself now. Early awareness and intervention are the best methods of prevention.”]

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Folks:

Today marks the release of Patchmania for the iPad/iPhone. It is a free download with in-app purchases. So I would be interested to hear from game-loving iOS users what they think of the puzzle game. I love it (on an iPad 3), but I’m wondering if that is because I know the developers.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

Related:

• post about this game being tested at the California Department of Motor Vehicles

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