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My Facebook friends are super excited about media attention around Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation establishing that payments were made to various (non-Russian?) women in exchange for them not talking about the men with whom they allegedly had sex back in 2006. Supposedly this violates Federal campaign finance laws.

Two questions…

Prostitution is illegal in most U.S. jurisdictions. But the women have not said that they were working as prostitutes or that Donald Trump hired them as prostitutes. From what I have read, the women say that they were affiliating with a rich old married guy because they had an inner fondness for rich old married guys. Therefore, whatever happened between them and a rich old married guy (if anything did actually happen) was perfectly legal. I can see why it would be illegal to use cash to cover up evidence of a crime, but why would it be illegal to pay women to keep quiet about an embarrassing, but legal, event? If a political candiate had once ordered a Ford Pinto in a 1970s orange color, would it be illegal to pay a car salesman to keep quiet about that unfortunate lapse of taste?

Why do my Democrat-voting friends want Trump impeached? Wouldn’t that elevate Mike Pence, currently a non-entity, to Presidential status and therefore make it easy for him to win the next two elections as an incumbent (Americans are always fearful of change)?

[Rolling back the clock a bit, why did Republicans want Bill Clinton impeached back in the 1990s? Woudn’t that just have made it easy for Al Gore to win the following elections?]

Separately, if these women had not been paid to keep quiet back in 2016, what would the news media have done with their stories? A big headline: “Candidate had sex back in 2006”? Wouldn’t the New York Times need some corroboration for a story like that? Without paperwork around a payment, what corroboration would there have been? No photo or video evidence of the events described seems to have been uncovered. In the Ford Pinto hypothetical above there would be a signed order for the embarrassing car, but did Stormy Daniels issue cash register receipts for her work in 2006? Even with corroboration, what would be the relevance to an election? We’re not supposed to judge peoples’ legal lifestyle choices in our society, are we? The NYT does not take the position that the American who is faithful to his or her spouse is a superior human being to the American who has sex with various neighbors and sues his or her spouse for divorce, alimony, and child support, right? If there is no official position that stable and faithful marriage is evidence of superior morality, why would it be news that someone was having sex outside of marriage 10 years previously?

Related:

• “STORMY DANIELS’ DIVORCE Since She’s the Breadwinner … PAY CHILD SUPPORT!!” (TMZ)

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More lessons from my sojourn among the medical students…

As they gather more data, the insurance companies are getting smarter every year about kicking incompetent providers out of their networks. Eventually your private insurance company’s network will include only doctors with reasonably low rates of complications.

What about the doctors who are no longer in any private insurance company’s network. The good news for them is that Medicare/Medicaid can’t kick out anyone. They pay anyone who is licensed and legal to treat patients. When they do work with private insurers they make them sign contracts forbidding them from steering patients away from bad providers.

Big Data will thus inevitably create doctors, hospitals, etc. who see only Medicare/Medicaid patients? And these will be the worst providers in the U.S.?

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As a mail-order customer of the Trump Winery (nothing starts a conversation faster in Massachusetts than bringing Trump-brand sparkling wine to a party!), I get periodic emails from the enterprise. Today they picked a holiday to celebrate. August 26 is National Dog Day and Women’s Equality Day (celebrating the 1920 19th Amendment). Possibly due to the fact that the winery offers leashes and collars, the marketeers decided to pick National Dog Day. (But maybe Eric Schneiderman and his ladyfriends were customers for these Trump logo items?)

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I recently visited a family in Boulder, Colorado whose 8-year-old son has figured out which way the political winds blow in that town: “I hate Trump.” Mom was in full accord with the child, but the father was unwilling to devote a large amount of brain space to righteous hatred. “Our neighbors find out that we’ve gone to Colorado Springs and they’ll say ‘How could you do that? I would never spend any time with people there.’ But if aliens visited Boulder and Colorado Springs they would say that people lived in exactly the same way in the two towns. They drive SUVs. They shop at Whole Foods. Hardly anyone walks or bikes. Maybe the Colorado Springs SUV has a ‘Focus on the Family’ bumper sticker and the Boulder SUV has a ‘Free Tibet,’ bumper sticker, but there is no practical difference in lifestyle.”

What about folks in Boulder? Don’t they spend more time and money helping the vulnerable? “No,” the father said. “Probably the Colorado Springs residents do more because they work through their churches instead of just posting on Facebook.”

How about the climate change alarmists at NCAR? Do they practice what they preach regarding CO2 reduction, at least when they’re not jetting off to climate change conferences? “I bike up that hill all the time for exercise. Most of the traffic on that road is SUVs occupied by one person.”

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“Asia Argento, a #MeToo Leader, Made a Deal With Her Own Accuser” (nytimes):

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault … Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

… the 2013 hotel-room encounter was a betrayal that precipitated a spiral of emotional problems, according to the documents.

Mr. Bennett’s notice of intent asked for $3.5 million in damages for the intentional infliction of emotional distress, lost wages, assault and battery. Mr. Bennett made more than $2.7 million in the five years before the 2013 meeting with Ms. Argento, but his income has since dropped to an average of $60,000 a year, which he attributes to the trauma that followed the sexual encounter with Ms. Argento, his lawyer wrote.

Ms. Argento asked the family member to leave so she could be alone with the actor. She gave him alcohol to drink…

For my late-1970s high school classmates, drinking alcohol and having sex were popular after-school activities (albeit not with movie stars). Today, however, it seems that an afternoon of consented-to sex can result in millions of dollars of harm to a teenager. Assuming that sexual activity among the young tracks the age of consent, I wonder if we should be able to see a correlation between age of consent and economic output. European countries have different ages of consent (Wikipedia), typically within a range of 14-16. Most U.S. states set the age at 16 (Wikipedia), but there are a substantial number at 17 or 18.

[Separately, I wonder if Donald Trump is running a time machine. When the New York Times accuses him of having encounters ]with various paid women back in 2006, these are reported as recent event. Yet for Ms. Argento, sex in 2013 is “years earlier” when viewed from the perspective of 2017. Does time move at a different pace for Donald Trump than for other people?]

Readers: Could teenage sexual activity explain the U.S.’s lackluster GDP per capita growth rate?

Related:

• “Judge awards $1MILLION to Oklahoma boy who had sex with his eighth-grade English teacher in her classroom” (Daily Mail): The judge wrote in her opinion that the child ‘reported feelings of depression, isolation and self-blame,’ and that he felt humiliated after news of his sexual relationship with the teacher spread. [The school district paid out $125,000 as well.]

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A friend’s 17-year-old asserts a male gender ID (I refrained from pointing out that a room packed with cosmetics is not traditionally part of the male teenager lifestyle). The incomplete and non-surgical/non-hormonal transition is from heterosexual female to homosexual male.

Given that this gender-fluid person will soon be applying to colleges, I’m wondering if the new gender ID will be helpful. Except for elite schools, I think that admissions standards are lower for students identifying as “men” (the majority of college students identify as “women” and schools seek to avoid a gender ID imbalance).

Readers: What do you think? Is this 17-year-old best-off applying as (1) simply male, (2) transgender, or (3) gay male? College admission forms are heavy on race-related questions, but do they even ask if someone falls into an unusual gender or sexual-preference category?

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From a tenured (non-STEM) academic friend on Facebook:

What a great turnout at the session”And Yet She Persisted : Tools to Succeed as a Woman Academic”. I, along with 8 other female academics, shared stories of persistence. … probably the most personally meaningful session I ever participated in,

(A friend previously asked if a book titled “She Persisted” was about Massachusetts divorce plaintiffs.)

This was over a photo of a room filled with people… all of them appearing to identify as “female” (would it be okay to run a “Tools to Succeed as a Male Academic” session with an all-male audience? Women receive more than 50 percent of PhDs so men building careers are now in the minority.).

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We just had a family vacation at a hotel just over the bridge into Cape Cod (“Work is the best vacation,” was Senior Management’s summary after breaking up sand fights between the 4.5- and 3-year-old). Our hotel and the restaurants in Falmouth, Massachusetts were staffed primarily with Eastern Europeans and folks from the Caribbean.

“They’re here from May through September,” explained one of the rare local waitresses. “I’ve learned all of the Serbian swear words.”

Our hotel was within a reasonable commute from the unemployment capitals of Massachusetts (Fall River and New Bedford). Rather than paying all of the bureaucrats and paper-shufflers to get these foreigners here on temporary visas, wouldn’t it make more sense to hire jobless natives to clean rooms and bus tables?

“They’re all on Section 8 [free housing] and MassHealth [Medicaid; free healthcare],” explained a manager, “so they’re happy to work for cash, but we have to pay W-2 so it doesn’t make sense for them to take a temporary job and risk losing their benefits.”

Given that the $75/night motel rooms on the Cape are now renting for $500+/night, why wouldn’t some of the foreigners seek to profit from Massachusetts’s unlimited child support system? I asked a few of the H-2B guest workers what they thought would be the maximum financial windfall from a brief interlude with a hypothetical dentist visiting from the Boston suburbs. They typically estimated annual cashflow of $5,000 per year (the correct answer for a sexual encounter in Germany), with a maximum estimate of $10,000 per year for 18 years (in fact, the guidelines provide for $40,000 per year for 23 years with additional judge-set amounts when a defendant earns more than $250,000 per year). They were aware that it was possible to collect child support without having been married, but not aware that it was possible to collect it while residing back in Eastern Europe, nor that a state-run bureaucracy existed to collect the money for them.

What did the guest workers like best about the Cape? Those from the Caribbean said “the cool dry weather.” Those from Eastern Europe said “the chance to improve my English.”

The H2-B workers seemed to be doing all of the jobs except management. There were Eastern Europeans checking guests in and out at the front desk. There were Caribbeans waiting tables as well as busing them.

While I was there a #Resisting friend posted this on Facebook:

I was going to get on Facebook to rant that we should all ignore the white supremacist march in D.C., but it seems that we (on my FB feed) are already all ignoring it. Excellent. But I will rant anyhow: 400 people wouldn’t even make the news if there were no counter-protestors (I know, from having been in marches that size). By comparison, there are probably more than 50000 tourists in D.C. right now. “Real” rallies in D.C. have at least 100000 people.

Her friends responded that it was actually only a gathering of 10 to 30 haters and thousands of righteous folks who hate the haters (plus thousands of overtime-collecting police officers?). My response, which garnered 0 “likes”:

Today I attended a gathering of roughly 200,000 white people. Traffic was slowed to a crawl and local services were overwhelmed. A handful of counter-protesters had been brought in from Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. The white supremacists said that they called their movement “Cape Cod.” (Census data regarding the 93% whiteness)

Our best tip for Falmouth with kids: Flying Bridge Restaurant, from which everyone can watch boats in the marina. If the food is slow to arrive the kids can walk up and down the edge of the marina. Maison Villatte is a great/authentic French bakery, though not a great choice for kids due to long lines in the summer (waiting to be served by an authentic Russian H2-B visa holder!).

Related:

• “DHS to issue 15,000 more guest worker visas amid clamor over labor shortage” (Washington Post, May 25, 2018)

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Folks:

I’ll be in Denver (Golden, actually) from Monday morning through Thursday morning. Would anyone like to meet for breakfast at the Table Mountain Inn on Tuesday morning (August 21)? 0800? Alternatively…

• the Wings over the Rockies Museum on Monday morning
• the Morrison Natural History Museum on Tuesday or dinner before Rodrigo y Gabriela
• Boulder on Wednesday
• Thursday morning breakfast at the Table Mountain Inn
• Beaver Creek on Saturday or Sunday

Let me know! Email philg@mit.edu or text me at 617-864-6832.

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I’m hoping that readers can help me out here…

The trial of Paul Manafort is basically over. When it started there were headlines saying that he had evaded taxes on $60 million of income by keeping the money in offshore accounts.

Yet the government itself presented evidence at the trial that Manafort was broke. See “Bookkeeper says Manafort was broke in 2016 and lied to banks” (CNN).

If he’d ever had $60 million in taxable income (i.e., actual profit from running his lobbying business), how could he be broke? Did he spend $60 million on personal non-deductible consumption?

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