Bizarre car purchasing scheme in a not-yet-fully-globalized economy

Car and Driver magazine offers a story about a world globalized enough that people in China want the same cars that are offered in the U.S., but not globalized enough that the price is the same in China and the U.S.: “How I Bought Millions of Dollars’ Worth of Luxury Cars and Got Blacklisted by Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes, and Porsche”

the current base price of a new Range Rover is $88,345 here, but it starts at 1,518,000 yuan in China, which is about $240,000.

an enterprising individual can make $10,000 this month buying luxury cars. You need a heartbeat, a driver’s license, and that’s about it.

See also “How Michelin Is Trying to Reinvent the Wheel: Michelin’s flexible wheel protects a car’s footwear from crumbling roads.” in which we learn that Americans insist on buying tires and wheels that would make sense on smooth European roads (see “U.S. versus German infrastructure spending and results“) and the inevitable current result is purchasing a lot of replacement wheels and tires (but we’re still saving the planet if these are mounted on a Tesla?).

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All genders are welcome, but the future belongs to only one?

From a recent trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts… The Womencrafts store (established 1976) says “Welcome: all genders” and simultaneously features T-shirts that read “The Future is Female”:

(Also “Families Belong Together” in a state where women are more than 3X more likely than men to go down to the local Family Court and ask the judge to break up a child’s family.)

Separately, the sign says that they welcome “all beliefs”. I wonder how they would react to someone in a MAGA hat who said “I believe that Donald Trump is doing a fine job as president. I believe that homosexuality should be discouraged. I believe that government-funded welfare programs should be eliminated.” I will gladly pay any brave reader willing to make a video of going into that shop wearing a T-shirt with the above slogans! Or even just a “The Future is Male” T-shirt in the same font!

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Americans should stay on welfare unless they can jump to the upper-middle class

The U.S. is a great place to live if you’re rich. There is no wealth tax and income tax rates, though much higher than in the most efficient countries (e.g., Singapore, Estonia), are still lower than in many European nations. Prices are low and there is no VAT so you can consume like crazy.

The U.S. is also a great place to live if you’re poor. You’re entitled to a lifetime of free housing, free health care, free food, and free smartphone. If you start at age 18 and navigate the policies and waiting lists you might find yourself in an apartment with a market rate of $60,000 to $100,000 per year in the heart of one of America’s most desirable cities, e.g., San Francisco, New York City, or Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What if you’re on welfare and want to give up some of your 168 hours per week of leisure time to work? According to a post by Greg Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard, you’ll face a 76 percent marginal income tax rate unless you can vault beyond the middle quintile of income. You will have a slightly higher spending power as a middle-earner compared to if you were a bottom-quintile earner, but for most people it wouldn’t be worth the loss of freedom and aggravation that are entailed in having a full-time W-2 job.

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Best Thai cave rescue graphics?

The Thai cave rescue operation is one of the more complicated three-dimensional events that has dominated the world news. I’m wondering if readers have found interesting graphics that explain to laypeople the stratigraphy, the techniques being used to extract the boys, etc.

Here’s what I’ve found…

Readers: What have you found that is better/interesting?

Separately, when this is over will we Americans tighten up our (currently rather generous) standards for “hero”, “courage”, and “brave”? The rescuers are volunteering for a dive that requires multiple tanks of oxygen and swimming for miles underground. They’re doing this knowing that one expert diver, a former Thai Navy SEAL, has already died.

[Example of how Americans use “courage”? See “West Hollywood to Honor Stormy Daniels as ‘Profile in Courage’”:

Adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, who has earned international headlines for her legal battle with President Donald Trump over an alleged affair she claims the pair had a decade ago, will receive a key to the city Wednesday in West Hollywood. … “In these politically tumultuous times, Daniels has proven herself to be a profile in courage by speaking truth to power even under threats to her safety and extreme intimidation,” according to a statement from the city.

see also Salon, “Stormy Daniels is a feminist hero, and “Cassandra Smolcic, a graphic designer who worked at Pixar Animation Studios for five years, has become the first woman to go on the record about disgraced former chief creative officer John Lasseter, with her full name attached. In a brave 12,500-word essay…” (in other words, the author bravely denounced a man who had already been “disgraced” and fired; see “Pixar and being lectured by our Bay Area superiors“).]

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Amy Coney Barrett nomination would stop working parents from demanding more help?

The media claims that Amy Coney Barrett, an appeals court judge, is being considered by Donald Trump for the Supreme Court. Most people would agree that being an appeals court judge or a Supreme Court Justice is a demanding job. Americans generally say that it is impossible for them to rear one or two kids and work without a shower of financial and other assistance from childless workers and taxpayers (see “When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?” for example). Yet Judge Barrett has 7 children, according to Wikipedia, two of whom are adopted. Is the answer a stay-at-home spouse who is responsible for all child-related tasks? Wikipedia says that her husband has his own demanding full-time job (Assistant U.S. Attorney).

In addition to driving our social, ethical, intellectual, and financial superiors in Silicon Valley nuts (what could be worse for these advocates of everything female than to see a woman nominated to serve on the Supreme Court?), would the nomination of Judge Barrett finally stop Americans with kids from demanding that the childless pitch in via higher taxes and longer workers hours?

Related:

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Debrief from a Cirrus SR22 Instrument Proficiency Check

In case this is helpful to other flight instructors, my email to a renter at our flight school. He has thousands of hours of flight experience, mostly in light aircraft, but some that are quite a bit more complex than the (mercifully and wonderfully air-conditioned) Cirrus SR22 that we flew.

Thanks for inviting me up into the sky today. Here’s a debrief…

Consider flying with the FPL [flight plan] block on the PFD [primary flight display; shows if airplane is upside down or not] up all the time as a reminder of which flight plan leg is active. This is especially important on approaches.

Remember to use the PFD soft key at the bottom of the PFD and then the BRG1 key to give yourself a GPS pointer to the FAF [final approach fix; a point in space] whenever you’re on vectors to final (LOC or GPS).

Consider whether you want to start flying the SR22 just like a jet. Given the capable autopilot, I think it is possible to fly single-pilot in the SR22 the way a two-pilot crew would have in an old King Air or early jet.

What would that mean?

1) have the flight director up all the time, at a minimum. So you’re flying the flight director or, if you can’t program it to give you helpful guidance, clear it with the red A/P disconnect button on the yoke (this also makes engaging the autopilot less risky because you always know what the A/P would be doing)

2) pay careful attention to the autopilot mode displays at the top of the PFD so you know what the autopilot thinks it is trying to do, e.g., HDG, and what it is planning to do next, e.g., LOC [localizer, a ground-based radio navigation signal] or GPS.

3) run all of the checklists on every flight. So if you’re going to the Midwest with a non-rated passenger, have the passenger run the checklists. Maybe there is a way to make peace with that horrific G1000 checklist system on the MFD (experiment on next enroute leg). Otherwise, paper! (remember that an airline crew will run every checklist even on a single trip around the pattern) Being disciplined about running a go-around checklist or a climb checklist means you’ll never forget to retract flaps or turn off fuel pump or whatever.

4) brief every instrument approach, even if just to yourself

This is how the airlines keep everything safe even when both pilots are exhausted toward the end of a 5-day trip so why not adapt it for GA? I’m not going to be at my best on Sunday evening returning from the beach in the SR20 so I will use the climb, cruise, and descent checklists to correct any mistakes (fortunately I will be using the Avidyne MFD so I won’t have to stretch my brain out to full power just to bring up said checklists!).

A few more small points…

a) consider not touching anything after landing until across the hold short line. Wait for 50 knots, then start applying the Cirrus’s feeble brakes, then wait until stopped to touch the flaps, lean the mixture, turn off fuel pump, switch to Ground, etc.

b) Cirruses up until -G5 (?) have pathetically wimpy brakes that are prone to overheating. You can taxi all the way from the Old-Ts to Rwy 29 runup area with maybe two touches of the brakes (once turning out of Old Ts and once turning Sierra to Echo). It may require full rudder deflection but the plane will respond any time power is above 1000 RPM

c) move heels back a touch for landing and takeoff so that you can’t hit the brakes accidentally. This is a bitter lesson learned by PC-12 owners (flat-spotted tire is $2,500; brakes on the PC-12 are not anti-lock, unlike any other airplane in the price category).

Something else I learned, from the Department of Complete User Interface Failure: this guy has about 75 hours of SR22/G1000 time, a Ph.D. in engineering, and thousands of hours of flying experience yet is not proficient with the G1000. If he cannot reasonably maintain G1000 proficiency should we ask “For whom was this G1000 designed then?” (I myself have a type rating in a twin-engine business jet that relies on the G1000 and fly the G1000 with customers periodically. I never feel truly at home with the system. I wonder if the latest G1000 NXi version is better.) See “Avidyne versus Garmin G1000 glass cockpits” for more on this issue. As I have gotten more experience with both systems I have come to appreciate the Avidyne more and the G1000 less. The Avidyne PFD has not failed in any way for years (since a software upgrade). The G1000 still has more redundancy but it is clumsy for a mostly-VFR airplane.

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World Cup Tax Litigation

“8 Soccer Players At The World Cup Who Have Been Caught Up In Tax Scandals” (Forbes) is World Cup news that Americans can understand.

One interesting angle is that value-added tax can be collected on a human:

In 2014, Spanish tax authorities set their sites on another soccer transaction: Luis’ move from Deportivo La Coruña to Atletico. The transaction was subject to value-added tax (VAT)

Buried at the very end is an explanation for why the litigation is so often with the Spanish government:

Years ago, the so-called “Beckham Rule” was made law in Spain to allegedly benefit England’s David Beckham, who moved to Spain to play for Real Madrid. Under prior Spanish law, you could elect to be taxed as a nonresident if you lived and worked in Spain, if you met certain criteria. The law was short-lived and wrapped in 2010 (perhaps, not coincidentally, after Beckham left Spain). Most of the recent allegations aimed at soccer players have their beginnings in 2011 and after.

I wonder if any of this is reasonable. Consider the Brazilian who plays soccer in London on behalf of a team in Spain… why does he or she pay income tax only to Spain? In the U.S., for example, professional sports team players have their income apportioned to the states where games were actually paid (See Why isn’t the Super Bowl always in a tax-free state?). Maybe they also do that in Europe, but these licensing deals and then taxed only in the country of official residence? But the licensing deals wouldn’t exist without the games being played.

European readers: Can you try to explain to us Americans why the World Cup is worth watching?

Related:

  • “Taxation and International Mobility of Superstars: Evidence from the European Football Market” (December 2009 draft from London School of Economics and UC Berkeley, Klevin, Landais, and Saez): “the level of top earnings tax rates has a large and significant impact on the migration decisions of football players. … The large tax induced migration effects we uncover translate into significant effects in the performance of football clubs across countries.” (i.e., when you watch the World Cup you are actually seeing competition among tax codes)
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What is the best photo organization and sharing tool currently? (replacement for Google Picasa)

A neighbor recently asked for a camera recommendation for a 12-year-old and also a way to organize and share photos.

A few years ago I would have recommended Google Picasa, which was a great mixture of the best of desktop (responsive and powerful) and the Web (good for sharing). Google decided to throw away everyone’s years of work, though, by de-supporting the application, then causing uploads to fail as of March 26, 2018 (so if you spent years with Picasa adding to a collection (“Album”) that was synced to the web you can’t add a recently-taken photo to the collection). They didn’t release the software as open-source. As far as I know they didn’t make a real migration tool that preserves all of the database information on the high-res photos that remain on one’s desktop, e.g., that Photo X belongs to Album Y. (It looks as though there is an independent project called P2Lr that will migrate Picasa to Adobe Lightroom.) I think that they also managed to break a lot of old links from web content into Picasa uploads. Maybe in software the flip side of “woken” is “broken”? (See USA Today for what folks at Google are doing instead of taking care of loyal Picasa customers. WIRED shows that the male/female ratio at Google has remained constant for at least four years, so Picasa customers can virtuously blame white males for their suffering.)

Adobe Lightroom is sort of an obvious choice in the sense that Adobe has paying customers and presumably cares enough about them to preserve their work. However, it is $120/month including 1 TB of cloud storage. That seems like a fair price, but a 12-year-old might need/want something free?

What do readers think?

[Separately, the family of the 12-year-old is considering “Nikon D3400 dSLR (18-55mm)” for the kid. I’m not sure what she wants to take pictures of so maybe the kit zoom actually is a good starter lens? Certainly they are a lot better quality than kit zooms from 20 years ago.]

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Market-leading regional jet manufacturer worth only $4.75 billion

Boeing and Embraer are doing some kind of complex partnership (press release). Here’s the interesting part for me:

The transaction values 100 percent of Embraer’s commercial aircraft operations at $4.75 billion

Wikipedia shows that Embraer is the market leader in regional jets produced. The company is profitable (Motley Fool). Yet this division, which produces most of the company’s revenue, is worth less than 1/10th as much as unprofitable Tesla (market cap $52 billion) or unprofitable Uber (estimated value $72 billion after losing $10+ billion).

Given the limited value of an off-the-charts successful outlier such as Embraer, how can sane people invest in the airplane manufacturing industry? (I will be at Oshkosh later this month and expect to see a full range of insane folks, many working for tiny enterprises with yet-to-be-certified products)

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A feminist makes a documentary about Men’s Rights Activists

Currently streaming on Amazon Prime is The Red Pill, a documentary about Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs).

The director, Cassie Jaye, establishes her politically correct bona fides by talking about her previous documentaries, which celebrated “reproductive rights,” “single motherhood,” “LGBT rights.” She characterizes same-sex marriage as marriage equality (why not divorce litigation equality? See “I Got Gay Married. I Got Gay Divorced. I Regret Both.” (nytimes), for example: “Am I sorry that [my girlfriend and I] got legally married? Yes, I am. Not only did marriage fail to keep us together; it sentenced us to an agonizingly drawn-out, devastatingly expensive divorce.”; see also the litigator quoted in History of Divorce: “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?”).

She shows inflammatory articles by Paul Elam, founder of A Voice for Men. Then she goes to meet the guy, who turns out to be remarkably mild-mannered.

A small low-energy gathering of MRAs in Toronto is met by an angry mob shouting “MRAs, go away, racist, sexist, anti-gay.” The MRAs are accused of being fascists, Nazis, and “pathetic” by the mob, which is prevented from attacking them by some lightly armed Canadian police.

Ms. Jaye opens by giving the MRAs, who mostly seem to be in their 50s, space to talk about the ways that women are now advantaged in the U.S. and Canada:

  • women are the majority of college students (see “Why Men Are the New College Minority” (Atlantic))
  • “pro-choice” is really “pro-choice for women only because they’re denying men any kind of choice once the child is conceived”; the woman can choose have the baby and either stay with the father or harvest child support profits, abort the baby in exchange for a payment related to the net present value of the expected child support cashflow, or, if there is nothing to be gotten out of the father, have an abortion without a cash payment
  • young men are failing to launch, staying with their parents long past the expected age
  • that men earn more should be interpreted as men having less power than women, not more; the man who gets up at 4:00 every weekday to work on a garbage truck or works 70 hours/week driving a taxi is not getting “power over his wife,” but “losing power over his life” (see “Feminist focus on W-2 wages instead of spending power“)
  • women may be seen as “sex objects,” but men are often seen as “success objects”
  • women may be pressured by social norms into rearing children, but men are pressured by social norms into working as providers
  • “every society that survived survived based on its ability to train its sons to be disposable. Disposable in war, dangerous work, and indirectly therefore disposable as dads” (Warren Farrell); 4584 Americans were killed on the job in 2013; 93 percent were men; 98 percent of deaths in our most recent wars have been suffered by men

The action segues to Warren Farrell trying to speak indoors in Toronto. There is a huge group of shouting feminists outside heaping abuse on anyone who is choosing to go in and listen. Ms. Jaye gives the backstory on Warren Ferrell, a soft-spoken guy who was a participant in the 1960s and 1970s Equality Feminism movement. Ferrell says that he parted company with feminists when he couldn’t accept that men were oppressors and women the oppressed.

After 37 minutes in, the documentary shifts to interviews with feminists.

  • MRA is a backlash from men threatened by opportunities opened up to women, angry because they can’t get the good jobs and school positions because women have taken them
  • no person looking at the data can possibly say that women have an advantage
  • men are not discriminated against under the law and, in fact, are advantaged over women

The MRAs come back to talk about men being consistent losers in family court:

  • the woman who loses a job because she is a woman can apply for a job elsewhere; the man who loses custody of a child cannot go looking for another child over whom to obtain custody
  • the heroic New York City police detective on whom the movie Serpico is based, lost over 90 percent of his police pension to a child support plaintiff based on an out-of-wedlock pregnancy and despite testimony from friends of the plaintiff that she had planned to “trick” Serpico (presumably by making false statements about her birth control status?). “Everything that he goes through in this movie, including getting shot, to earn his pension she won by sleeping with him one night.” (see nytimes, 1983: “The state’s highest court ruled today that a former New York City police officer, Frank Serpico, must make full support payments for his child born out of wedlock, even though he said the child’s mother had told him she was using contraception. The tribunal, the Court of Appeals, determined unanimously that the ‘mother’s alleged deceit has no bearing upon” Mr. Serpico’s ”obligation to support his child.'” (it is unclear how the $11,340 could be 90 percent of the guy’s pension; that’s only about $30,000 in today’s money, 15X the profits obtainable from having a child in Sweden, 5X the profitability in Germany, and 2.5X the profits obtainable in Nevada, but still nowhere near a retired cop’s pension); more details may be availabe in an old Playboy Magazine article (not searchable))
  • (presumably in the case of a low- or medium-income father) unmarried women are able to give children up for adoption without the father’s consent

Men talk about spending 5 years of income on custody litigation defense, ultimately losing, and finally being permanently separated from their former children. (About one third of children of American divorces in winner-take-all jurisdictions are able to maintain long-term contact with their fathers, i.e., there are tens of millions of American citizens who have been permanently separated from one parent by a state-run family court.)

[The film does not recognize that it is not meaningful to talk about “family court” or “family law” on a U.S.-wide basis. In my home state of Massachusetts, for example, 97 percent of residents collecting child support are women, which should track the percentage of custody lawsuit winners; see also our statistical study of a month of divorce lawsuits in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. And the woman who has sex with an already-married radiologist in Boston can get paid more than if she’d gone to medical school and worked as a primary care doctor. But Massachusetts is not the U.S. The same sex act in nearby Pennsylvania would yield a 50/50 shared parenting outcome and comparatively modest child support profits. Much of the suffering endured by men interviewed by the director wouldn’t have occurred if they’d simply chosen to live in a state where it is more lucrative to go to college and work than to have a brief sexual encounter. They don’t need a Men’s Rights Movement. They needed to read Real World Divorce and then get a U-Haul to a state where they couldn’t be targeted.]

The hostility of mainstream film reviewers to this movie becomes understandable at 53:20 where the filmmaker says “I’ve always thought of feminism as the fight for gender equality… but I’d never heard about the injustices going on in family court.”

[She is wrong on this turn of phrase, of course. Given the same facts, family court decisions are completely different from state to state, but as these decisions are handed out by judges in courts the disparate results are all justice by definition.]

She interviews Michael Messner, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at USC, to hear him give the explanation that it is unreasonable for men to ask for an equal parenting role after separation when in an intact couple it may be the woman doing most of the parenting (e.g., if she is a stay-at-home mother and he works as the breadwinner). Implicitly he is saying that the correct approach to resolving custody disputes is the approach taken by his home state of California, i.e., try to use court orders to continue involuntarily whatever the division of labor was during the voluntary relationship. (See the “Summary” chapter of Real World Divorce for the three types of systems used in the various U.S. states.) This “preserve and extend the status quo” system tends to be the best for lawyers because it results in the most intensive litigation. For example, witnesses can testify about who took the children to their pediatricians four years prior to the trial. Professor Messner laughs at the ideas that fathers, after divorce, “suddenly” want to step in and be parents rather than simply paying their plaintiffs to be parents and visiting the children occasionally. It would be absurd for a man to consider rearranging his daily schedule merely because his wife had decided to start having sex with neighbors and then filed a divorce lawsuit against him.

The filmmaker improperly develops sympathy for biological fathers in “surprise pregnancies” at around 56:00, noting that they are “at the mercy” of the mothers (e.g., who can choose abortions or to become sole custodian child support profiteers, both undesirable outcomes from the point of view of fathers, in the filmmaker’s view). Katherine Spillar, director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and an editor at Ms., says that all of this could be resolved if men talked to women before having sex. She suggests condoms, for example, but does not note that quite a few lucrative children and/or abortion sales have been produced after used condoms were retrieved from trash cans and/or following oral sex. (See “Hamptons bachelors are getting vasectomies so gold diggers can’t trap them” (New York Post) for where the arms race ends.)

A guest whose husband does not want more children shows up in front of a talk show audience of women. The audience claps in favor of the option to “trick” the husband by discarding birth control pills.

We learn that a group of women who are Men’s Rights Activists call themselves the “Honey Badger Brigade”. Unfortunately, their motivation is not explained or explored. “We have a huge blind spot when women do bad things,” says one.

The question of domestic violence by women is explored. A friend of an abused man seeks assistance for the friend and learns that none of the taxpayer-funded organizations for aiding domestic violence would serve a man in any way. The filmmaker notes that out of 2,000 domestic violence shelters nationwide, only one is for men. She notes that CDC statistics on “intimate partner violence” show that men are nearly as likely to be hit (1 in 4 lifetime chance versus 1 in 3).

[Feminists say that it is not fair to look at raw numbers. In the Domestic Violence chapter of Real World Divorce, see the explanation from Professor Goodmark, former Co-Director of the Center on Applied Feminism at the University of Baltimore School of Law. She wrote that women are engaging in “violent resistance” (fighting back rather than initiating violence) or simply “to express anger or frustration” or “to obtain physical domination in the moment” but these are insignificant compared to what men do (“the generalized control over all facets of a partner’s life that characterizes intimate terrorism”).]

Erin Pizzey is next up. She founded a women’s shelter in 1971 and has now crossed over into the Men’s Rights Movement. She says that women who had violence in their childhood become perpetrators of domestic violence as adults: “They want to live on the knife edge of crisis and danger.” Pizzey committed heresy by saying that “women could be equally violent as men” (especially against their own children) and consequently has been excommunicated from all domestic violence conferences. Pizzey notes that

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