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I hope everyone is enjoying July 4th. We celebrate our traitorous rebellion against a legitimate government so that we could govern ourselves and yet it does not seem that our current government is any more responsive to the people than was King George III and his Parliament.

Politicians ask for our votes by saying that the current set of laws and/or implementations of laws is intolerable. Yet once they get elected and the paychecks begin to flow they don’t seem inclined to change anything. The Democrats controlled Congress and the White House during the early Obama years and they passed essentially one law: Obamacare. The Republicans have controlled Congress and the White House (admittedly with a President who has been a Democrat for most of his life) for 1.5 years and they have passed essentially one law: the corporate tax rate cut.

Concrete example of inaction: some states want to required childless able-bodied adults to work if they are going to receive Medicaid benefits. Instead of Congress passing a law to say whether or not this is legal, it is left to appointed judges to decide the question using old laws. See, e.g., “Judge Strikes Down Kentucky’s Medicaid Work Rules” (nytimes). This seems like a classic example of policy-setting that was traditionally done by Congress, not a solo judge or even a chain of appeals courts.

“Congress Is Weak Because Its Members Want It to Be Weak” (Commentary) explores this question:

About half a year from an election that could plausibly end their unified control of Congress for a while, congressional Republicans appear to have decided to spend this time doing essentially nothing. Even if bipartisan agreement is too hard to achieve, they have the opportunity, using the budget-reconciliation process, to take on serious legislative work with bare majorities. And they have a president eager to sign practically anything. But they are choosing to send him little of consequence.

People who run for Congress are still very ambitious and driven. But their ambition is now channeled away from the institution of Congress and redirected along two related paths. … Ambitious people have pride and want prominence. … many members of Congress have come to see themselves as players in a larger political ecosystem the point of which is not legislating or governing but rather engaging in a kind of performative outrage for a partisan audience. … They remain intensely ambitious, but their ambition is for a prominent role in the theater of our national politics. And they view the institution of Congress as a particularly effective platform for themselves—a way to raise their profile, to become celebrities in the world of cable news or talk radio, whether locally or nationally, to build a bigger social-media following, and in essence to become stars.

They can best use this platform not by engaging in the mundane work of legislating but by taking part in dramatic spectacles and by fueling the outrage that is now the engine of our politics.

I’m not sure that this article contains the answer, but at least it addresses the question. Why haven’t we seen more changes to our laws? The above social media theory is interesting, but I personally think it is that any significant change would be so painful for at least one lobbying group that party unity becomes impossible to maintain, e.g., the legislators from farm states will always vote for market-distorting subsidies regardless of party affiliation.

Something to ponder on July 4. Maybe readers have the answer!

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Every year our town sends up some fireworks in a field next to the school (currently proposed for demolition and reconstruction for $100 million). When we’re not watching fireworks we are passionate about providing sanctuary to the undocumented, complaining about Donald Trump separating adult and child migrants (at 1/100th the rate that the Massachusetts family courts separate adults and children?), and putting out Black Lives Matter and rainbow flags.

A few days ago, from our town mailing list:

Virtuous woman: I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to host a party for Greater Boston and that looks like what we are doing. Do we have to be listed in the Globe????

Response from a skeptic (not me!): do you really intend to say that townsfolks should be limited to attending only those festivities in their own towns?

Virtuous: Nope, it just does not have to be listed in the Globe. What does that do to our Public Safety Detail budget? It was a very low-key, bring your blanket walk in with kids and hang for a few hours?no barbecue back in the 70s. Crowds were not enough to make you get there hours in advance to park. Parking was not restricted as there was no need. Times have changed, clearly.

Another virtuous woman: I for one (and I may indeed be the only one) would like to limit attendance to our First of the New Year party to town residents and their personal guests. We stopped going because it had become such a zoo.

I was able to resist the impulse to suggest that we install checkpoints at our borders this evening and ask would-be migrants from other suburbs to show their documents…

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A lot of us would exhibit far more eccentricities if we didn’t have to go to work most days at a job where we can be fired. Those among us who need not work or have union jobs are free to let our personalities become ever more twisted as we age. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher is an interesting exploration of the mind of a mid-50s man who is a member of the college professors’ union: the American Association of University Professors. A tenured English professor, he lets his mind run free in a series of letters of recommendation to various committees.

A sampling:

I was barred from that [diversity] committee myself; my filibuster last year (I argued that the arts are a form of diversity) was sadly characterized as “divisive.”

It is 2:00 p.m., tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and here in my office the snow is accreting in small picturesque clumps against the ill-fitting window, which rattles in its Dickensian casement. The other faculty, including Ms. Handel’s advisors, have retreated like whack-a-moles into obscure campus locales or left town on vacation. Divorced, somewhat recently spurned, and therefore doomed to spend the holiday with two vegetarians from the Classics Department, I was apparently the only living member of the faculty the unfortunate Ms. Handel was able to find. That said: her proposal—entirely outside my field—appears to have merit. In particular, her examination of inventive phrases related to issues of gender identity—though of no interest to me—is probably worth sharing with a collegiate audience.

Iris Temple has applied to your MFA program in fiction and has asked me to support, via this LOR, her application. I find this difficult to do, not because Ms. Temple is unqualified (she is a gifted and disciplined writer and has published several stories in appropriately obscure venues), but because your program at Torreforde State offers its graduate writers no funding or aid of any kind—an unconscionable act of piracy and a grotesque, systemic abuse of vulnerable students, to whom you extend the false hope that writing a $50,000 check to your institution will be the first step toward artistic success.

Alex Ruefle has prevailed upon me to support his teaching application to your department, which I gather is hiring adjunct faculty members exclusively, bypassing the tenure track with its attendant health benefits, job security, and salaries on which a human being might reasonably live. Perhaps your institution should cut to the chase and put its entire curriculum online, thereby sparing Ruefle the need to move to Lattimore, wherever that is. You could prop him up in a broom closet in his apartment, poke him with the butt end of a mop when you need him to cough up a lecture on Caribbean fiction or the passive voice, and then charge your students a thousand dollars each to correct the essays their classmates have downloaded from a website. Such is the future of education.

I assume he listed me as a reference because of the retirement and demise, respectively, of his two thesis advisors: it took Ruefle fourteen years to earn the doctorate. During that time he became a fixture here at Payne, beginning his studies as a vigorous man and, after marrying and acquiring multiple children, staggering across the PhD finish line in late middle age.

[recommending a former undergrad for an industry job] Belatedly it occurs to me that some members of your HR committee, a few skeptical souls, may be clutching a double strand of worry beads and wondering aloud about the practicality or usefulness of a degree in English rather than, let’s say, computers. Be reassured: the literature student has learned to inquire, to question, to interpret, to critique, to compare, to research, to argue, to sift, to analyze, to shape, to express. His intellect can be put to broad use. The computer major, by contrast, is a technician—a plumber clutching a single, albeit shining, box of tools.

Good luck to her and to all of us, Camilla—and congratulations on the tenure-track line. We aren’t hiring in the liberal arts at Payne, and as a result I fear we are the last remaining members of a dying profession. We who are senior and tenured are seated in the first car of a roller coaster with a broken track, and we’re scribbling and grading our way to the death fall at the top. The stately academic career featuring black-robed professors striding confidently across the campus square is already fading; and, though I’ve often railed against its eccentricities, I want to proclaim here that I believe our mission and our way of life to have been admirable and lovely, steeped with purpose and worth defending. But we are nearly at the tipping point, I suspect, and will soon be a thing of the past.

3. Can you think of any reasons why the Pentalion Corporation should not hire the applicant? Yes. Pentalion is a subsidiary of Koron Chemical, a government contractor known to be a major producer of weaponry used overseas. I would not wish any current or former student to be employed by Pentalion; once its leadership masters the basics of punctuation, it should be closed down.

April 16, 2010 Office of Mental Health and Wellness Intervention Team Attention: Suzanne Gross, MSW, LP

Dear Ms. Gross, Having disposed of the budding psychopath, Mr. Wyatt Innes, I am sending to your office with this letter in hand a human bath of tears named Ida Lin-Smith, who tells me she called your office for an appointment and was turned away. I did not inquire as to her malady, but a simple glance in her direction suffices to inform me that she requires attention. Please offer her something more lasting and substantial than guided breathing or twenty minutes with a golden retriever.

This is an innovative form for a novel and it works pretty well considering that we have access to only one character. If you liked Confederacy of Dunces you’ll probably like it (Ignatius J. Reilly had his mom to support him so he was also able to let his personality develop fully).

More: read Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher.

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“Merkel, to Survive, Agrees to Border Camps for Migrants” (nytimes) is about the world’s smartest leader (she has a Ph.D. in physical chemistry!) substantially shutting down the pipeline of migrants into Germany’s welfare state.

The greatest American minds say that unskilled immigration makes a society better off. For example, “Immigrants Do Not Increase Crime, Research Shows” (Scientific American, from February 2017, just after the Trumpenfuhrer moved into the Reichskanzlei):

There are a number of ideas among scholars that explain why more immigration leads to less crime. The most common explanation is that immigration reduces levels of crime by revitalizing urban neighborhoods, creating vibrant communities and generating economic growth.

Several different Facebook friends recently posted this as a status. I responded with

If low-skill immigrants boost an economy and lower crime rates (as this article says), why isn’t there competition among countries to attract low-skill immigrants? Why would the U.S. have a big supply at the southern border, for example? Shouldn’t Mexico have snapped up Spanish-speaking migrants from Central and South America before they get a chance to cross the U.S. border?

The response was that wages were lower in Mexico.

If wages in Mexico are low and low-skill immigrants make an economy richer, shouldn’t Mexicans be even more eager than Americans to persuade migrants to settle? Why are Mexicans rejecting migrants? (see “Mexico fails to offer migrants asylum, Amnesty International reports”)

If you’re against inequality, which I hope that you are, shouldn’t you be upset that a lower-income country such as Mexico is being denied the opportunity to benefit from settling low-skill migrants? A rich country such as the U.S. getting yet richer by vacuuming up all of the low-skill migrants (and also enjoying a reduction in crime) is not a reasonable goal for anyone passionate about equality.

World Bank data show that Mexico has nearly the same labor force participation rate as the U.S. (61 percent versus 62 percent) so should be equally boosted by immigrant labor.

Ultimately the answer from the pro-immigration believers was that Mexicans are not intelligent enough to see the true value of unskilled immigrants and/or that Mexicans are racist. Somehow the topic switched to Europe. A low-skill immigration enthusiast wrote “For a while Merkel’s German govt seemed to be arguing that it was their answer to an aging population and growing need for workers. Sweden also. In the past year or so there has been a lot of pushback on that less for economic reasons than nativist.”

(i.e., it turns out that the people who disagree with him are nativist/racist)

My response:

so after several years of experiencing increased wealth and reduced crime due to low-skill immigration, Germans and Swedes have decided that it would be intolerable to keep getting wealthier and safer?

Apparently it is now official. Germans are so tired of getting wealthier and safer that they are building, well, concentration camps.

European readers: What happens now? Do all of the migrants who wanted to settle in Germany now go to some other European country? Do millions end up camped out at the German border indefinitely? Do fewer migrants show up because it is now tough to transition into the normal welfare lifestyle anywhere within Europe?

Related:

• unemployed = 21st century draft horse? (what happens to low-skill adults in the current U.S. economy)
• Revisiting the 21st Century Draft Horse posting

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“Supreme Court Labor Decision Wasn’t Just a Loss for Unions” (nytimes):

The Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory union fees for government workers was not only a blow to unions. It will also hit hard at a vast network of groups dedicated to advancing liberal policies and candidates.

Some of these groups work for immigrants…

If the purpose of a labor union is primarily to increase wages for its members, why would they try to increase competition at the lower end of the labor market? (see “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” by a Harvard economist for a summary of the literature).

Is the theory that the latest crop of immigrants and their children will never achieve the level of education, skill, and connections necessary to do the kind of work performed by members of current unions?

Or that compensation for union members is determined only by what local, state, and federal governments can afford to pay? That the overall size of the labor pool is irrelevant? (for example, unionized workers in a nearby town of Methuen, Massachusetts just got a raise, e.g., from $157,000 per year for a police captain up to $440,735; median household income in the town is $72,631) I wonder if they are banking on the inherent assymetry in public worker union negotiation. The union members bargain for money that will be paid to them and they will get to spend. The government officials on the other side are spending someone else’s money.

Or that union members are mostly government workers and more immigrants means a larger government and more opportunity to expand the union? Immigrants and their children are more likely to be on welfare. There are 30 unions getting money out of the New York City Housing Authority and one plumber made $369,152 in 2016. As the population expands we will need to build more free housing and hire more union members to administer and maintain the free-to-residents houses. Unions of nurses lobby for increased Medicaid funding (example). More immigrants means more people on Medicaid. How many undocumented immigrants will earn a bachelor’s degree and qualify as registered nurses so as to compete with current union members?

Maybe the answer is that union members (like I used to be!) are better-than-average people and they want to help immigrants out of altruism. If so, why does their altruism stop at the U.S. border? If they simply want to help non-citizens, why wouldn’t unions support aid groups that operate in poor countries?

It makes sense to me, as a graduate of Econ 101, that an employer of low-skill workers would advocate for more immigration (especially if middle-class taxpayers are going to pay for those workers’ housing, health care, and food!). But Cesar Chavez was anti-immigration for most of his career as a labor union official. From ABC:

From when he co-founded United Farm Workers in 1962 with Dolores Huerta, Chavez took a hard line on illegal immigration. He thought employers would use undocumented workers as strike breakers, and that temporary workers would undermine the wages of Mexican American residents and citizens. He even reported some undocumented workers to immigration authorities, Gutiérrez writes.

(He later modified this position, but it is unclear whether there was an economic rationale or only a sentimental one that offered no tangible benefit to union members at the time.)

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“What Trump Gets Right About Europe” sounds like an April Fool’s piece from the New York Times (e.g., it would be a blank screen), but in fact is authored by a German in a serious mood:

Mr. Trump’s anger at America’s allies embodies, however unpleasantly, a not unreasonable point of view, and one that the rest of the world ignores at its peril: The global world order is unbalanced and inequitable. And unless something is done to correct it soon, it will collapse, with or without the president’s tweets.

The Europeans have basically been free riders on the voyage, spending almost nothing on defense, and instead building vast social welfare systems at home and robust, well-protected export industries abroad. Rather than lash back at Mr. Trump, they would do better to ask how we got to this place, and how to get out.

The European Union, as an institution, is one of the prime drivers of this inequity. At the Group of 7, for example, the constituent countries are described as all equals. But in reality, the union puts a thumb on the scales in its members’ favor: It is a highly integrated, well-protected free-trade area that gives a huge leg up to, say, German car manufacturers while essentially punishing American companies who want to trade in the region.

Here’s where I get lost:

The eurozone offers a similar unfair advantage. If it were not for the euro, Germany would long ago have had to appreciate its currency in line with its enormous export surplus.

Sure, eurozone membership makes imports to Germany more expensive than they would be under the deutschemark; wage restraint has also helped maintain the competitiveness of German machinery. But how can the very same politicians and journalists who defended the euro bailout payments during the financial crisis, arguing that Germany profited disproportionately from the common currency, now go berserk when Mr. Trump makes exactly this point?

Suppose that the medium of exchange in Europe were gold doubloons or simply gold. Wouldn’t the distribution of manufacturing and wealth among European countries be pretty similar to what it is today? If so, why blame the exotic euro? If not… maybe someone can explain it below. And also explain how this would be different than what happens among U.S. states, which can vary dramatically in wealth or manufacturing output.

Related:

• “Fall of the American Empire,” a piece by Paul Krugman that appeared on the same day as the above article, but making pretty much the opposite points

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“Air ambulances, backed by private equity firms, leave patients with $45,000 bills” (LA Times) was sent to me by several different friends. A kid took a 66 nm helicopter ride, which would be about $500 round-trip in a flight school’s four-seat Robinson R44. The cost was $45,930 in a presumably magnificent turbine-powered machine. The parents’ presumably gold-plated university-affiliated health insurance plan paid out $6,704 for this trip, which should more than cover marginal operating expenses even for a deluxe turbine helicopter. But the operator has been fighting for three years to get paid the remainder.

The median charge to Medicare for a medical helicopter flight more than doubled to almost $30,000 in 2014, from $14,000 in 2010, according to a report last year by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Air Methods’ average charge ballooned, from $13,000 in 2007 to $49,800 in 2016, the GAO said. Medicare, the federal health program for people 65 and older, pays only a fraction of billed charges; Medicaid, the state-federal program for the poor, pays even less.

In other words, after every four flights the turbine helicopter operator bills enough to purchase a decent-condition four-seat Robinson R44. After every eight flights the turbine helicopter operator bills enough to purchaes a brand-new Robinson R44.

Thanks to the decision by Americans to spend all of their wealth on health care, this Medicare biller turns out to be worth more than a medium-sized airline:

Wealthy investors attracted by the industry’s rapid growth have acquired many of the biggest air-ambulance operators, leaving control of the business in the hands of private-equity groups. American Securities LLC bought Air Methods for $2.5 billion in March 2017. Rival Air Medical Group Holdings, which includes Air Evac and several other brands, has been owned by New York private-equity firm KKR & Co. LP since 2015. Two-thirds of medical helicopters operating in 2015 belonged to three for-profit providers, the GAO said in its report.

Despite the apparent glut, air-ambulance operators are profitable. Air Methods had an average annual profit margin of 9.1% from 2012-16. Over the same period, companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Health Care Providers & Services index had margins of 7.9%, on average. PHI, a helicopter company that operates medical flights and transports for oil and gas drillers, reported average operating margins of 15.7% from 2014-17 in its medical segment, compared with 10.4% for the benchmark index in the same period.

As with everything else in the U.S. health care system, analysis under Econ 101 cannot be done:

Seth Myers, president of Air Evac, said that his company loses money on patients covered by Medicaid and Medicare, as well as those with no insurance. That’s about 75% of the people it flies.

According to a 2017 report commissioned by the Assn. of Air Medical Services, an industry trade group, the typical cost per flight was $10,199 in 2015, and Medicare paid only 59% of that.

One part of Econ 101 that does seem to apply is that a monopolist will price according to someone’s ability to pay:

In West Virginia, the Cox family went through two appeals with their health plan. After they retained a lawyer, Air Methods offered to reduce their balance to $10,000 on reviewing their tax returns, bank statements, pay stubs and a list of assets. The family decided to sue instead.

“I felt like they were screening us to see just how much money they could get out of us,” Tabitha Cox said. “I think about people that really struggle — single moms, people that don’t have the financial blessings that we have. Bottom line, it’s just not fair.”

(Why would a single mom be someone who “really struggles”? Under West Virginia family law, the maximum parental profit from obtaining custody of a single child is about $24,000 per year. Any child support award obtained above that number will generally be put into trust for the child on reaching adulthood. Children are simply not nearly as profitable as in a lot of other U.S. states.)

I’ve read that a lot of U.S. states have more dedicated medical evacuation helicopters than does the entire country of Canada. In the old days police and/or military helicopters would be used as necessary (they have to make up all kinds of training missions to stay proficient; why not fly patients every few days instead?). Or patients would be transferred on highways in heavily equipped ambulances. The helicopter is an old technology, having been mass-produced starting in the 1940s. The life-saving benefits of getting to a trauma center were well-known even then and documented by automobile manufacturers in the 1960s (they sponsored studies showing that the cost per life saved would be much lower with helicopter ambulances than with airbags and maybe even than with seatbelts (which are cheap, obviously, but most minivans get scrapped with all 7 or 8 seatbelts never having been needed).

Why is it 70 years after helicopters began hovering off assembly lines that we have this industry and this debate?

Related:

• FAA punches a hole in the U.S. economy today (some expensive new regulations for the air ambulance industry that may partially account for the price increase)
• “Arizona family shocked by $47,000 air ambulance bill for their child” (Arizona Republic): “The bill for the 15-minute emergency flight totaled $47,000. When the family’s insurer agreed to pay a fraction of the cost, $5,000, the air-ambulance company came after the Brunners for the rest, billing records show.” (it is a one-hour drive between these destinations)

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Most add-ons to certified aircraft end up tangling the interior with USB cables, suction cups, etc. Levil Aviation has come up with an exception: the Broadcasting Outer Module (BOM). In kind of a throwback to the 1920s and 1930s, in which slipstream-powered instruments were popular for aircraft that lacked electrical systems (also gyros powered by vacuum pumps).

This is kind of a victory for advocates of more sane regulation under a NORSEE policy.

The device starts up when it senses engine vibration (maybe it will not work for the next generation of battery-powered aircraft?). It broadcasts attitude and heading to an iOS or Android device (i.e., everything in the panel could fail and you could stay safe in the clouds by reference to your phone). It contains its own pitot-static system for airspeed and altitude information. It has its own GPS plus ADS-B IN for weather and traffic data. So you get about $1 million worth of airliner stuff or $50,000 worth of light aircraft stuff for $2,000 plus the cost of the phone that you already own.

Vaguely along the same lines is the SkyBeacon ADS-B OUT transponder that replaces a wingtip light and installs in a few minutes. Instead of taking an airplane apart so that an avionics shop can rewire it to deal with all of the transponder requirements of the last 70 years plus the new one of ADS-B, this thing listens to the replies of the legacy transponder in the panel and adds a legal ADS-B OUT transmission on top of whatever the legacy transponder is sending.

Readers: What would be the next cool thing that could be mounted under an aircraft wing or out at the strobe/nav light spot? At a minimum, I would like to see the above two products combined! And a video camera added while we are at it.

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Back in 2017 I asked “Can engineering make us comfortable in 200-square-foot homes?” and wondered if it might be possible to design multi-purpose furniture for urban Americans with medium incomes.

Here in 2018 the gap between American incomes and American housing prices is even wider, e.g., “Full time minimum wage workers can’t afford the rent on a 2-bedroom apartment anywhere in the USA”. With our borders now open to anyone who can get hold of a companion who appears to be under age 18, nothing stops us from reaching Chinese levels of population density.

At those Chinese levels of density even a moderately prosperous worker will be considered fortunate to live in a studio apartment. Instead of depending on new engineering achievements, what about simply declaring that the existing technology of adjustable bed (see Consumer Reports) can function as the only non-dining seating in a home?

Readers: Who actually has one of these adjustable beds? If so, does it work just as well as a recliner chair for reading, watching streaming video on a phone or tablet, conversation with others in the home, and watching a wall-mounted TV? Could it work to design apartments with a small table for dining and an adjustable bed? So if there were four dining chairs and three people could squeeze in on the bed, you could have a total of 7 people gathering and sitting.

Question: Are these made in China? If so, it seems like a harsh comment on the state of American manufacturing considering that the simplicity and weight/bulk would tend to favor a local factory.

Related:

• Sealy adjustable bases (surround these with any bed frame? How can that work?)
• Serta adjustable bases
• Legett & Platt

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I know someone who works at Pixar. He is a reliable source of confident lectures on the moral superiority of Democrats, Californians, liberals, immigrants, bigger government. He is also a reliable source of confident denunciations of Republicans as sexist, racist, and stupid. Donald Trump, needless to say, is an affront to everything that is righteous by Bay Area standards.

“How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job” (Variety) thus caught my eye:

At Pixar, my female-ness was an undeniable impediment to my value, professional mobility, and sense of security within the company. The stress of working amidst such a blatantly sexist atmosphere took its toll, and was a major factor in forcing me out of the industry.

It was devastating to learn, right from the start, that women were open targets for disrespect and harassment –– even at a world-renowned workplace in the most liberal-leaning city in the country. I was likewise told to steer clear of a particularly chauvinistic male lead in my department. Much like John, this man’s female targets had been reporting his vulgar, unprofessional behaviors for years, but his position and demeanor remained much the same.

I had my first uncomfortable encounter with this department head in a company kitchen, just two weeks into my internship. He cornered me with sexual comments while openly leering at my body.

Cassandra Smolcic is a freelance graphic designer, photographer, and writer. She worked at Pixar from 2009 to 2014.

Maybe correct-thinkers in “the most liberal-leaning city in the country” do actually treat women in the workplace better? That’s because women are treated so much worse in states that voted for Trump? But how would folks in the Bay Area know since they never visit such places?

I emailed my source within Pixar to find out how it was possible for people at the company to have been simultaneously sanctimonious about Trump voters and running a workplace that was hostile to women. His response was that Pixar was recently woke. Things would be different and better going forward and, in fact, had already improved.

 

But that leaves us with things being pretty bad still in 2016, when Pixar employees joined with the rest of the Bay Area in jeering at Deplorables.

So… how can Bay Area folks talk about how much progress they’ve made in enabling women to work in their offices, something that became common nationwide roughly 100 years ago during World War I, while also sanctimoniously strutting about how much better their political philosophy is for the “vulnerable,” such as women? Where is their evidence that women in Deplorable-run enterprises faced more hostility than women at virtuously managed Pixar? Or than women interviewing for roles with Hillary Clinton-supporter Harvey Weinstein?

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