Category: Uncategorized

Harvard Medical School is running a crowd-sourced Network of Enigmatic Exceptional Responders to see if Big Data can help win the War on Cancer (kicked off by President Nixon in 1971). There is an interesting WBUR story about the project.

Given the amount of damage that computing has done to health care via incompatible and impossible-to-use electronic medical records perhaps computer nerddom can redeem itself with a cure for cancer?

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At least according to my Facebook friends, the U.S. is in crisis because we can’t figure out what to do with migrants who stream across the border with companions under 18 years of age (or at least who say that they are under 18!).

As noted in Americans separating children and parents at the border and within and How does our government deport children? it seems that we are forced by our current interlocking laws to operate an open borders policy for anyone who can get hold of a child before coming into the U.S. Because the child cannot be imprisoned in our current facilities and the child cannot be separated from adults claiming to be his or her parents, the adults and children who are here contrary to our immigration laws must be set free to roam this great land of Sanctuary Cities.

It is kind of interesting that the country that permanently separates more native-born children from parents than any other (comparative statistics on what our family law system does: “The USA stands out as an extreme case”), an activity that excites little interest and no media coverage (unless it is a Hollywood plaintiff), is now mad with passion regarding the temporary separation of foreign children from parents (my own state of Massachusetts, for example, which has historically been very pro-separation of children from loser parents in its winner-take-all family court system (e.g., if the winner parent wants to move to California with the child), has sued the Trump Administration to demand that migrants be set free in Texas).

I wonder if there is a middle ground that can satisfy at least some people on both sides of this issue: facilities sort of like the debtors’ prisons that were run starting in medieval times, e.g., Marshalsea. Obviously the physical quality of the community would be up to a 21st century standard rather than a 14th century standard, but the basic idea would be the same: families could all be in prison together and adult members could go out and work during the day.

[Credit for this idea to a European friend who is a student of history. He noted that it was bizarre that a nation that was so passionate about divorce, custody, and child support litigation would find the treatment of migrant children to be intolerable. He drew a parallel to the Bad Old Days in Europe as well: “In the 18th century there were kidnappers in Europe. You’d pay them and get your kids back. The difference between kidnappers and an American pussy worker is that you have to pay her, but you don’t get your kids back.”]

Readers: Could this work if we simply didn’t call it a “prison”? Could we combine it with Sanctuary Cities? From Compromise: Unlimited Haitians for communities that prepare to welcome them?

What if Trump were to offer immigration proponents an unlimited supply of people, without any preference for those capable of working, on condition that immigration advocates use state and local tax dollars to pay for their housing, health care, food, and walking-around money? So if people in San Francisco want to build a 1000-unit apartment complex for Haitian immigrants, and folks will be permanently entitled to live there by paying a defined fraction of their income in rent ($0 in rent for those with $0 in income), and San Francisco commits to build additional apartment complexes in which any children or grandchildren of these immigrants can live, why should the Federal government stand in the way of their dreams? (Of course, the city and state would also have to pay 100 percent of the costs of Medicaid, food stamps, Obamaphones, and any other welfare services consumed by these immigrants or their descendants.)

So being in “family immigration prison” would simply mean that you didn’t have the right to move. A Sanctuary City would welcome you, park you in a public housing development that its citizens had funded, and let you live there for however many years it took for your asylum application to be considered (and then, in the event of a negative finding, obstruct your deportation?).

Basically we would have the same de facto open borders policy that we have today for anyone who can find a convenient baby or toddler, but the “families” admitted under this policy wouldn’t have the same freedom to move from city to city or state to state as legal U.S. residents.

Related:

• Promise of divorce ruined by children (Australia parental relocation study) (notes on a talk about how Australia has tried to balance the interest of adult plaintiffs in family courts (they want to have sex with new friends while spending the income of their former spouses) with the interest of children (they want access to both biological parents, even parents who are court-deemed “loser parents”))

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Although the TV show Silicon Valley has a lot of accurate-sounding dialog regarding various software tools, it depicts young childless workers living in a group house.

This is a little different than Pakistanis working in Dubai, for example, where a middle-aged man would export himself to labor and leave the wife and kids behind.

This summer, two of my middle-aged friends with wives/kids are taking up residence in an all-male hacker house on the very eastern edge of Palo Alto (roll out of bed and land on the 101!). They’ll travel back to Boston periodically to see the family while they try to earn more money than would be possible in the comparatively moribund software world of Boston.

Neither of these guys has enough money to buy a family-sized house in Silicon Valley.

Is this a trend that others have seen?

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One of our neighbors is departing the Land of the Deplorables (TM) for Canada (folks protest Trump’s election and the country’s newfound hostility to non-whites by moving to our yet-whiter northern neighbor rather than to, e.g., Mexico?). She has been upset for more than a year by Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia, his lack of respect for women who were paid to have sex, and his stated passion for enforcing U.S. immigration laws. The tipping point for her was an attractive job offer from a Canadian employer.

She’ll still be a U.S. citizen, but she doesn’t want to be a Massachusetts citizen any longer. Write-in votes here won’t help advance her passion for higher taxes and an expanded government. “I want to choose a state where my vote matters,” she noted. I suggested Michigan or New Hampshire, the states that were closest in the 2016 Presidential Election. “No,” she replied. “It has to be a state that is tax-free.” (Michigan imposes a 4.25 percent income tax; New Hampshire is widely believed to be tax-free, but that’s only for W-2 income; dividends and interest are taxed at 5 percent)

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“Supreme Court Widens Reach of Sales Tax for Online Retailers” (nytimes):

Overstock said the decision would have little impact on its business but argued that with more than 12,000 different state and local taxing districts, the ruling would present a “compliance challenge” for internet start-ups. Chief Justice Roberts made a similar argument in his dissent.

Folks on Facebook discussing this seem to assume that there are roughly 50 sales tax jurisdictions in the U.S. so a retailer need only do a simple calculation and write at most 50 checks per quarter to remit the sales tax actually collected. The reality is that up to 12,000 different checks would need to be written on a quarterly basis, e.g., after a sale to a single customer 3,000 miles away the retailer would have to do the following:

• figure out the city in which the customer lived (zip codes may span multiple cities)
• figure out the county in which the customer lived (zip codes may span multiple counties)
• run three multiplications involving state, city, and county tax rates (this is the easiest part!)
• write a check to the state
• write a check to the city
• write a check to the county

There are software packages designed to help with this (see Avalara, for example) and obviously buying stock in this kind of bureaucracy-on-top-of-bureaucracy enterprise would have made sense a month ago! But I wonder if the increased regulatory burden creates opportunities for new companies that can make life simpler for a retailer.

(Separately, I think that this shows one of the strengths of the European way of doing things. A retailer would have to deal with only a single VAT authority for both calculation and remittance. A friend pointed out that the true religion of the U.S. is regulatory compliance, in the sense that all of the time people used to spend praying in churches in the Middle Ages is now devoted to filling out forms, conducting training seminars, etc. This could be an example? Where the European deals with 1 sales taxing jurisdiction, the American will deal with 12,000.)

Readers: What do you think of all of this? Does it make sense to have a national sales tax policy enforced by 12,000 different entities? Does it make sense in the first place to tax a retailer in Hawaii selling to a consumer in New York City? The Hawaiian store is not getting any services from New York State or New York City. If “sales tax” is actually supposed to be a consumption tax on the consumer, wouldn’t it make more sense to impose the tax globally rather than nationally? Why not have the government mine a citizen’s or resident’s credit card statements and tax everything purchased anywhere on Planet Earth? If it is a consumption tax, what’s special about consuming from Hawaii or while sitting in New York as opposed to consuming something in France?

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I’m halfway through The Industrial Revolution by Patrick Allitt, a historian who was born in England and got a Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley (so he knows both sides of the Atlantic quite well).

His short explanation for the American Civil War is that it was primarily over tariffs, which benefitted the industrial North and harmed the agricultural South.

Tariffs and trade wars are back in the news these days. Will higher tariffs lead to internal political discord within the U.S.? If so, how will the lines be drawn? The North-South split no longer makes sense when it comes to manufacturing. This map shows that Alabama and the Carolinas have a larger share of their economies devoted to manufacturing than New York or Massachusetts.

Separately, the historian says that immigration to the U.S. (mostly from southern and south-eastern Europe) and to England (mostly from Ireland) resulted in lower wages for industrial workers, often down to the subsistence level. Also that U.S. workers found it impossible to unionize and gain political influence to the same extent as workers in England because of the continuous flow of immigrants and lack of shared culture. Today, of course, we have voters who say that they support both expanded immigration and expanded unionization and/or higher compensation for union workers. The lectures suggest that these two goals cannot be achieved simultaneously.

Finally, the professor talks about how the industrial revolution led to a shift in economic philosophy. In a primitive society, he says, people have a no-growth mindset. The only way that people can get wealth is by taking it from others. Therefore there cannot be social harmony unless the rich people are constantly giving gifts to the average member of the society. In the 19th century, however, there was a shift to a growth mindset in which people expected to become wealthier via an expanding pie, not by fighting someone else for a piece. Somehow, at least in the U.S., politicians have brought a lot of voters back to pre-industrial thinking such that they’re obsessed with the gifts (taxes) being provided by rich people.

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“A Russian Oligarch’s $500 Million Yacht Is in the Middle of Britain’s Costliest Divorce” (NYT):

In December 2016, a High Court judge ordered Farkhad Akhmedov, a Russian billionaire who has owned a home in England since the ’90s, to pay the equivalent of $646 million to his ex-wife, Tatiana Akhmedova. He refused, arguing that the couple had been divorced in Russia more than a decade ago.

For more than a decade, Russian oligarchs have been parking their families and some chunk of their net worth in England. A deal was implied: The oligarchs got a haven from the pitiless realities of Putin-era Russia, and Britain got an influx of very rich people.

Now some oligarchs are learning that life here has hazards of its own. That goes even for nonresidents like Mr. Akhmedov, who never became a British citizen. Eager to keep British tax collectors away from his money, he limited the number of days he stayed in England to a maximum of 180 a year. (More recently, the number was reduced to 90 days.)

The plaintiff in this divorce lawsuit is on the defense:

A sunny woman with a mild Russian accent, Ms. Akhmedova wore ripped denim jeans, a batch of string bracelets and a T-shirt that read “Free as a Butterfly.” …. “I don’t want to play the victim, because it’s not my nature,” she said. “But I have to defend myself.”

The NYT accepts uncritically the plaintiff’s narrative that the defendant wouldn’t agree to give her anything via settlement:

She’s also startled by Mr. Akhmedov’s campaign to keep her from pocketing one cent of his $1.4 billion fortune… Ms. Akhmedova said she had always wanted to settle out of court, quietly and for far less than she was awarded.

The journalists never became curious as to why a plaintiff who wanted to settle out of court for minimal dollars hasn’t done so even, for example, after this recent tough-to-collect judgment was issued. The obvious explanation is that the defendant who was clever enough to make $1.4 billion is a completely irrational person?

A reader from Connecticut (one of the best alimony jurisdictions on the planet, though children are more lucrative in neighboring Massachusetts) commented:

Another poster case as to why marriage is an archaic institution designed to enrich lawyers and keep court employment high.

Here we have a British law firm, paying a Russian wife, to go after the assets of his Russian husband, when neither is a British citizen nor permanent residents in Britain.

It drives home the point that if you are married or have been married, the ownership of any asset you thought you had, is up to a cadre of greedy lawyers and enabling judges.

The only way to win is not to play.

For those who are upset that there aren’t enough female founders, it appears that at least one woman’s enterprise has been funded:

[the plaintiff] is living off a lump sum provided to her by Burford Capital, a litigation finance firm, which is helping to fund the legal efforts and will take a percentage of any results.

Related:

• divorce law in England (they don’t recognize prenups and, unlike in many U.S. states, it is easy to attack a defendant’s pre-marital savings, even after just a year or two of marriage)

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Despite my pessimism regarding Tesla’s ability to compete with companies that have deeper engineering benches, e.g., Honda and Audi, I’m optimistic that the U.S. car and truck fleet will eventually be mostly electric. Even if this is economically inefficient, it will enable wealthy city-dwellers to push all of the noise and pollution associated with energy conversion into suburbs and exurban areas.

I’m wondering if this will further drive the trend toward urban real estate being more valuable than suburban. One of the drawbacks to city life has tended to be noise and most of the noise comes from cars and trucks. If there is no more diesel clatter, will the cities become dramatically more pleasant?

On the topic of suburbs being devalued by traffic congestion:

• Boston’s strange housing market (Arnold Kling, 2018): “I have a hypothesis about the cause of house price divergence [city up; suburbs flat] in the area. Boston has peculiarly bad transportation woes.”
• “Wealthy people are abandoning the suburbs? Can Google save our lifestyle?” (me, 2013): “Are the suburbs finished because we’ve melted down our transportation system? Or will Google’s computer-augmented cars save the suburbs by making much more efficient use of existing roads?”

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“Einstein’s travel diaries reveal ‘shocking’ xenophobia” (Guardian):

After earlier writing of the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he goes on to say: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

Einstein is kind of the secular Jesus in that people quote him whenever they want to justify a personal notion. Ivy League colleges are under attack for their policy of discriminating against Asian-American applicants, most of whom are of Chinese descent, in admissions. Will Harvard and Yale now start quoting Einstein?

Related:

• Discrimination against Asian-Americans in Harvard admissions
• All-Asian bad; half-Asian good (“never go full Asian” for college admissions!)
• College administrators: Why are there so many rich white and Asian people buying our $300,000 product?
• “Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on Personality Traits, Lawsuit Says” (nytimes)

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We hit the 50-comment limit quickly a few days ago with “How does our government deport children?” Can we infer from this that immigration is the great issue of our time?

This posting is to highlight some content that I added at the end of the original posting and to provide a renewed forum for discussion.

Related from Facebook:

• From our Native American senator, Elizabeth Warren: “Cardinal O’Malley is right. Tearing children away from their families is cruel and unconscionable — and goes against everything our country stands for.” and “At our town hall in Newburyport yesterday, people wanted to know: how can we stop the horror of the Trump administration ripping children from their parents? #KeepFamiliesTogether” (Warren sued her own husband and successfully separated two children from the person who had been their father; she also advises other women to keep a divorce litigation fund at the ready)
• “By now you’ve likely seen all the headlines about the children being separated from their parents at the border. It makes me sick, and sad, and I don’t know what to do. I’ll admit to writing this post in anger, but I know I’m not the only one with these emotions. When we hear that 2,000 children are being taken from their parents, what can we do?” from Mayim Bialik, an actress who sued her husband for divorce in 2012, thus separating her own children (age 4 and 7) from their two-parent family.
• “There is no excuse for inflicting these abuses and trauma on children. The Administration must immediately reverse course. #KeepFamiliesTogether” and “I’m standing in solidarity with the activists and families standing up to our government’s human rights abuses along the southern border. Government should be in the business of keeping families together, not breaking them apart.” from California Senator Kamala Harris. Wikipedia says “The family lived in Berkeley, California, where both of Harris’ parents attended graduate school. Harris’ parents divorced when she was only 7 and her mother was granted custody of the children by court-ordered settlement. After the divorce, her mother moved with the children to Montreal, Québec, Canada…” (i.e., the government of California was in the business of separating what had been Kamala’s own family; see Promise of divorce ruined by children (Australia parental relocation study) for how this kind of complete separation of children from the loser parent is getting tougher)
• “As a father, as a parent, I can not in good conscience abide this removal of children from their families. It is a cruel and inhumane action.” over “Here’s How You Can Help Fight Family Separation at the Border” (Slate). (Other than posting on Facebook, he is not personally doing anything to help. He lives in New York so if his wife decides that she wants to spend more time having sex with new friends, he will be separated from his own children except for every other weekend.)
• The above Slate article was also linked-to by a divorce, custody, and child support litigator here in Massachusetts. As we are a winner-take-all state when it comes to family law, she will spend nearly every working day separating children from a loser parent.
• direct post from Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse: “Catch-and-release – combined with inefficient deportation and other ineffective policies – created a magnet whereby lots of people came to the border who were not actually asylum-seekers. … Human trafficking organizations are not just evil; they’re also often smart. Many quickly learned the “magic words” they needed to say under catch-and-release to guarantee admission into the U.S. Because of this, some of the folks showing up at the border claiming to be families are not actually families. Some are a trafficker with one or more trafficked children. ” (posted by a passionate Hillary supporter with “One of the only actually informative statements I’ve seen on the family separation debacle.”)
• “13 Facts the Media ‘Pros’ Don’t Want You to Know About ‘Family Border Separation’” (from a Deplorable via private message; he noted “And if you intended to seek refugee status, why break in, why not just go to the border guard and say you want to be a refugee? If you do that, there is no arrest and no child separation. That means that the people who are arrested only lie about being refugee after they are caught.” He added “at least the anti-gun kids are out of the news”)

How about this last comment? Is it correct that families are kept together if they show up at a standard border crossing and say “We are applying for asylum”? (But then we are back to the question of why these folks, if not Mexican, didn’t apply for asylum when they arrived in Mexico?)

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