Category: Uncategorized

The NYT specializes in articles promoting subsidies to encourage Americans to have children (paid parental leave, tax credits, free pre-K day care, free day care for older children (“K-12”), etc.) and articles promoting expanding U.S. population via immigration (by one Boston+Seattle every year from immigrants (1.5 million in 2016) and one Austin, Texas every year from children of immigrants (roughly 1 million per year).

Mixed into this daily soup, however, is an outlier: “California Housing Problems Are Spilling Across Its Borders”:

A growing homelessness crisis. Complaints about traffic congestion. Worries that the economy is becoming dominated by a wealthy elite.

Those sound like California’s problems in a nutshell. But now they are also among California’s leading exports.

Just ask the citizens of this city, where growing numbers of Californians and companies like Tesla have migrated to take advantage of cheap land and comparatively low home prices. A four-hour drive from Silicon Valley, across a mountain range and a state line, Reno is finding that imported growth is accompanied by imported problems.

As a result, the Reno housing market has gone from moribund to scorching. As of February, the median home price in the metropolitan area was about $340,000, more than double its recessionary trough of about $150,000, according to Zillow.

Today the typical Reno rent is just under $1,700 a month, up about 30 percent from five years ago, according to Zillow. One result has been a surge in Reno’s homeless population. The city’s shelter, just a few blocks past a bus station, is overflowing with residents and recently added a propane-heated tent to accommodate all the extra people.

It is not that interesting that a country that is comparatively bad at building infrastructure can’t handle population growth (more than 3X over the past 100 years). What’s interesting, though, is that the readers, who have been fed a constant diet of pro-population growth articles, are beginning to sound like zero-population growth zealots:

“Overpopulation” the term that must NEVER be mentioned. It has to always, be something else.

When I was a kid, US population was 160k. Now it is 320k. California and a lot of other places were a lot cooler back then. And we didn’t have to fight over water.

At a certain point you can’t blame Californians. Blame the overall out of control overpopulation of this planet, the concentration of knowledge and wealth in certain corners of the country and world, and not enough arable/desirable land to house the 8 billion miracles.

It is called overpopulation. How this escapes our national political conversation is beyond me, and urgently needs to be discussed.

California would not be so terribly overcrowded, and housing cost would not be nearly as high, if we did not have many millions of illegal immigrants in our sanctuary state.

We must consider immigration, both illegal and legal, as having an impact.
Where do we keep putting the millions of people who come into our country annually? We’re most certainly not building enough new housing anywhere. Another huge issue is water. Not an endless resource.

Dear nyts, lefties, open border types, etc. do you STILL not see the connection between the most generous, liberal, near open borders immigration policies in the world and the crowding that is going on in this country?? Sorry, but common sense tells us, that to continue to pack ever more people into a finite space is going to lead to exactly what is happening pretty much everywhere in this country that is anywhere desirable to live. Btw, Idaho is now the fastest growing state in the country. The u.s. is the third most populous country on earth. Most of the people coming here are from rediculously over populated countries. Anybody care to make any obvious connections and see where this is leading us?

Ah yes, “intelligent growth”, another PC term that simply means more of the same with a nod towards at least acting like something approaching rational thought is guiding the insanity that is driving the country forward. Give us examples of places where “intelligent growth” has been implemented.

Overpopulation used to be an issue supported by the left. Since it is mostly driven by third world growth, the PC police put an end to it. They decided it was prejudicial against those people.

Just remember capitalism’s biggest lie: Growth pays for itself.

And start considering that the planet has too many people and that we must do something about it.

The quest for constant growth of population and GDP is killing all non-human life on Earth and is the fundamental reason for every environmental problem. In addition, every immigrant from a developing country to an industrialized country increases their carbon footprint, resource use, and negative impact on the ecosystem worldwide.

If NYT readers won’t support government policies to further accelerate U.S. population growth, who will?

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“5 Women Accuse the Architect Richard Meier of Sexual Harassment” (nytimes) contains an interesting nugget:

Richard Meier, the celebrated architect and Pritzker Prize winner who designed the Getty Center in Los Angeles, established a graduate scholarship in January at his alma mater, Cornell University’s architecture school. Intended to honor the 55th anniversary of his practice, the scholarship was designed to “recruit and retain the most talented women applicants.”

How are universities able to do this? Let’s leave aside the question of fluid gender and what it would mean to be among the “women applicants.” We’ll assume that there is some definitive way for a university to decide which applicants are “women.”

How is this legal for a university that gets a river of taxpayer funds? Women are a majority of college students, roughly 56 percent (see Atlantic), so the argument can’t be that this is for a favored minority group and therefore discrimination is virtuous.

Separately, I wonder if we could get university bureaucrats excited about the idea of funding for a luxurious social club limited to undocumented immigrants (we can’t fund their tuition because they shouldn’t have to pay any; see Free college education for anyone willing to identify as “undocumented”?).

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We were chowing down on fresh cookies at Rectrix Aviation yesterday and Sheryl Sandberg appeared on the TV. Mercifully the volume was down at zero, but a text summary underneath read “Sandberg: We welcome regulation.”

An 8-year-old asked “What does that mean?”

My answer: “It means that Facebook is a monopoly and they want the government to help them exclude competition.”

Related:

• Lean In (book review)
• Facebook uses a Malibu-flying engineering manager to promote careers in engineering (my favorite Facebook-related item)
• Facebook is bad for us (psychologists have proven it!)

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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture (Brian Dear 2017; Pantheon) tells a story of business blindness.

The programmers of the powerful CDC mainframe had all of the technical knowledge, and more, of the PC pioneers, but they didn’t want to drop everything and rush to the PC. The business folks behind the mainframe were similarly mentally locked into their well-trodden paths of sales and applications.

The CDC/PLATO folks actually built a modern distributed system, with a microprocessor in every terminal (“desktop PC”) and communications lines back to a server.

Instead of orange pixels, they were grayish white. The new terminal, called the IST (short for Information Systems Terminal), looked more like an early personal computer. A big, wide, heavy base, with a black grille in front, to which a detached keyboard was connected via a thick cable. On top of the base was a monitor, a special elongated CRT with a square display featuring exactly 512 x 512 black-and-white pixels and, mounted directly over the surface of the CRT’s glass, a reflective, acrylic touch screen with barely visible gold wires crisscrossing across the display. During the nine months of development, the price of CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) memory chips had plummeted even further than Hill had anticipated. “According to the really long-haired predictions,” says Hill, “it was going to come down, by six or eight to one, and it came down about ten to one, right when we were doing our development. The result was that we could produce a memory-mapped video terminal, which as far as I know had never been done before, because it was cost-prohibitive.

“We produced what in effect was a PC,” says Hill, “in 1975.” When one considers the year this machine was developed, and compare it to what else was available at that time, it is suddenly apparent that CDC had just leapfrogged over the entire microcomputer field. Here is Hill describing his machine: “[ It had an] 8080 microprocessor, it had plugin cards, it had a separate monitor, with a cable going to the main box, it had a separate keyboard, it had plugin modems, plugin memory, plugin communications, and we even had a plugin disk driver, that wasn’t part of the standard stuff, but we had it networked, so it was revolutionary. And our big problem was producing it at low cost. And we did that. That terminal came in with something like a $ 1,300 cost, in the first few terminals. And that was beyond everybody’s belief.” By the time the IST was ready to be sold to consumers, the marketing people had marked up the price to over $ 8,000, says Hill. It was the beginning of a long line of very bad decisions at CDC. Hill believed the terminal should have been sold for $ 100 above cost. “If we’d done that, we would have flooded the market because people knew they could use it for other things. It would take loadable programs— we could load programs down from the mainframe into that terminal.”

Note the last sentence. The system had the same capability as a modern Web browser that may download a Java or JavaScript program from the server.

The author says that CDC had roughly $1 billion in revenue in 1969 ($7 billion in today’s mini-dollars) so it was about one seventh the size of IBM. Management went all-in on computer-delivered education, which meant trying to sell to governments such as the Soviet Union, Iran, and Venezuela. The U.S. government delayed the Soviet sale due to security concerns and then killed it after the invasion of Afghanistan (imagine how many trillions of dollars we could have saved if we had let the Russians support the secular government in Afghanistan and not supported the Mujahideen!). The Iranian deal fell apart due to political instability:

CERL and CDC created Persian-language support in PLATO as part of the demos, and eventually the Shah’s government agreed to a deal. However, it required that the IST terminals had to be made in Iran (or at least have a decal with “Control Data of Iran” and Persian script on it affixed to the screen bezel). In the end, the Ayatollah Khomeni and the Iranian revolution ended CDC’s hopes in that country. Several of the government ministers, including Prime Minister Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who had attended the demos back in 1975, were executed. CDC personnel had to evacuate the country, and the company lost a lot of money.

The Venezuela dream didn’t pan out either…

“Venezuela was more corrupt than Iran, if that was possible…. In South America, the Venezuelans were known as the ‘Iranians of South America’ and not just for their oil reserves. You could get anything you wanted in Caracas— anything. Like many CDC international offices, CDCVEN [the acronym CDC used for its Venezuelan business] had its own guy specializing in local bribery and ours was good.” This was CDC’s fixer for Venezuela, “used for more local practical bribery associated with licenses, permits, getting employees and families out of scrapes, etc.” … “My short version,” Smith once explained in an email, “is the PLATO buy became entangled in Venezuelan politics and did not survive the massive political infighting and jockeying for a bite out of it for all concerned (including two or more of our own guys). I do not believe we lost it because we did not bribe. True there was a corporate public effort to clean up our act (I have seen CDC bribe all over the world— even in places like Germany, supposed to be un-bribable) but HQ never backed off of doing business along those lines (anyway it was very difficult to stop the local CDC folks from making deals HQ did not know about). In a lot of countries it was the only way to do business. When the U.S. government started with pressure on U.S. companies to not bribe they started our downfall in the business world….

Are you a big believer in social impact investing? So was the imperial CEO of CDC:

Morris tried to explain to [William] Norris the benefits of pursuing business and education markets at the same time— charging more to business customers so they could charge less to education customers— but Norris did not see it this way. “Norris logically could see it that way,” said Morris. “But his concern was, ‘I’m doing this because I want to make a social impact on education. And if you guys go and turn your attention to selling in the business environment, you’re going to start forgetting about education, and start forgetting about our end goal. I want you to concentrate on education. Okay?’ And so based on that, we did concentrate on education, I still think today if we had sold into the business environment we would have been able to fund more of the stuff that was getting the price down and achieving the educational objectives that we were out to achieve.”

“Addressing society’s major unmet needs” became Norris’s rallying cry, a remarkably progressive mantra for a tech company in the 1970s and 1980s, and one that the rest of the industry and financial world regarded with befuddlement or derision.

In 1984, Randall Rothenberg wrote a profile of Bill Norris and Control Data for Esquire magazine. The article never ran. However, Rothenberg’s recollections of the article’s conclusions shed light on the predicament Norris and CDC were in, particularly with regard to PLATO. “Control Data,” he says, “was an example of what we’d later call industrial policy; its expertise was in seeking government funding for technology projects relating to supercomputing. When the government market for supercomputing for military and economic applications began to dry up (because of, e.g., the advance of minicomputing), CDC, instead of adapting its business model, began to seek new uses within a government welfare structure for its existing supercomputing technology. Using the technology for training, small business development, etc., was a logical extension of this. What CDC could not do was diverge from a model predicated on powerful central control. The whole notion of distributed systems— in computing, in social welfare, in anything else, it seems— was totally foreign to it. So the inapplicability of its technology to the social-welfare aims it was seeking to address was something the company could not work around. Put another way, it had come up with the perfect Great Society solution— twenty years late.”

CDC and PLATO were successful in some markets:

Those industries [that bought and used PLATO] were aviation, including airlines like American and United; power utilities, including nuclear and electric; the financial industry; manufacturing; and telecommunications. “Basically it turned out that they were the industries that were regulated,” says Glish.

PLATO was used to train air traffic controllers within the FAA:

The program was so successful— and the FAA’s budget was so tight— that the aging CYBER computer (and the formerly white terminals, yellowing over time under years of fluorescent light) was still running TUTOR lessons twenty years later, well into the 2000s. Some of the original courseware developers would over the years retire only to be rehired by a desperate FAA needing them to fix or update the lessons they’d developed years earlier— since TUTOR programmers had become scarce.

I think the book teaches an important business lesson. Here was a company that had the capital and the people do make near-infinite money if they had simply shown up in the marketplace and given customers what they were asking for. Instead they got fixated on telling customers what they should want and on selling to a particular cluster of customers. They died (company history) during a time period when enterprises all over the world were greatly expanding their IT budgets and when investors were willing to pay absurd multiples of profits for IT vendors.

More: Read The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture

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One of my Facebook friends complained about Trump’s proposed $10 million military parade:

Our government is actually wasting money this way amidst so many real economic issues? … If they care about vets, invest that money in veterans’ affairs: in their hospitals, in their mental health support programs. In prosthetics and lowering costs of medications, in improving the VAs. This parade is an outrageous waste of resources.

I pointed out that she and Donald Trump were mostly on common ground. Both are passionate about increasing the funding for the VA. Trump’s proposed budget for FY2019:

President Trump proposes a total of $198.6 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). This request, an increase of $12.1 billion over 2018, will ensure the Nation’s Veterans receive high-quality health care and timely access to benefits and services.

A lot of folks think that the VA’s health care system should be eliminated. From a retired colonel (NBC):

The relationship between the VA and the American public used to be a very close one. The VA was founded and then expanded to a huge size to serve the needs of veterans at a time when we had lots of them, when nearly every household included someone who wore, or once wore, a uniform.

That’s no longer the case. Most Americans no longer know anyone in uniform, and so for many, military service, and the obligation to take care of those who serve, has become an abstraction. We say we love our troops, but that’s because we don’t have to be the troops.

And now we have a huge bureaucracy that most citizens know little about, and our expectations have been mismanaged. We think this large government structure can take care of our veterans, but it can’t, no matter who is in charge, or how much money we throw at it. Bureaucracies are excellent at doing routine things in a routine way, but as any physician can attest, medicine is not routine.

We have created a large bureaucracy with thousands of hospitals, clinics, waiting rooms and employees to deliver medical care, and it needs to be abandoned. It makes no sense to have a parallel universe to take care of our veterans, separate doctors, separate facilities, equipment and even protocols. There is no reason that veterans who would otherwise wait for months to be seen at a VA health clinic can’t be seen by private doctors, the same doctors who treat everyone else. The procedure doesn’t need to be complicated: patient is seen by private doctor, private doctor treats patient, doctor sends bill to government, government pays doctor.

[A friend worked as a doctor at the VA and described union agreements and bureaucracy that made it impossible to serve patients properly. Unionized nurses would refuse to assist with critically ill patients when it was time for their break. A unionized nurse also tied up one of his colleagues with a harassment complaint (both the survivor and the abuser identified as non-lesbian females so it was not a “sexual harassment” dispute).

She and Trump both want to keep pouring money down this hole, though (though she characterized the $12 billion bump for FY2019 as “not enough”). I asked “If you see the issues as related, why get into a fight with Trump over a $10 million parade when you agree with him on the VA funding issue ($200 billion per year; 20,000X the cost of the parade)? Are you willing to let him have his parade if he gives you the bigger VA budget that you want?” The answer was “no”.

Since it is not guaranteed that Congress will approve this requested increase, why wouldn’t she go down to Capitol Hill and lobby for support? She has no children or job to hold her back (she has more than 20 years of education and is in “prime age” for working, but is not seeking employment).

[Note that I wouldn’t personally choose to spend $10+ million (out of a $4 trillion total federal budget) on a parade in D.C., mostly because I am generally opposed to taking money from taxpayers in the Midwest to pay for more free fun stuff that residents of the imperial capital can enjoy.]

Trump was a Manhattan Democrat for most of his life, so it should be the case that my coastal Facebook friends would find at least some things to agree on with him. But instead they are outraged and enraged 24/7 on every conceivable issue. I assume that this is rational behavior, but why? What are they getting out of it?

Related:

• Mitt Romney and military funding (a 2012 post on how to save $1.8 billion per year easily)
• Russian military budget (the VA turns out to cost 4X what the Russians spend on their entire active-duty military)

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Just one issue of Avweb…

• Cirrus SR22 lands on top of a Cirrus SR20 (nobody was injured, fortunately)
• Alaska floatplane pilot flies low enough to hit his friend in a boat (sad non-fatal outcome)
• School officials panic in their $100 million concrete bunker at the sight of a Cessna 152 (pilot of this 1,080 lb. (empty) machine arrested; reader comment: “It’s a brave new world. Deemphasis on the brave.”)

The news was not all bad/strange:

• Pipistrel, a Slovenian pioneer in this area, is cranking out 60+ electric-powered trainer airplanes a year now (could save the industry as the last of the piston-competent mechanics retire)

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We still need a new car and, except for the broken Apple CarPlay, are happy with our Honda Odyssey. So I went down to the local dealer and drove a base Clarity plug-in hybrid and an Accord EX.

(Why not keep having the old car fixed when it fails? Americans are no longer willing or able to work as automobile mechanics (see nytimes). Actually I wonder if there could be a good business exporting seriously broken cars to Eastern Europe or some other part of the world where there are a lot of skilled craftspeople. If a car needs more than 15 hours of labor to repair, ship it out!)

A lease on the stripped Clarity has come down in price a bit, but stripped is pretty stripped, e.g., there are no power seats. The worst part of the Clarity is a bizarre touch-screen slider volume control. Considering that the touch screen on our Odyssey freezes up every three or four drives, having it be the primary means of controlling audio volume wouldn’t be my first design choice. Given that a car is often in motion (well, maybe not in a U.S. populated by 327 million people using a road network designed for 150 million), how could it ever be the case, for a frequently-used control, that a touch screen is better than a knob that can be adjusted by feel?

If Honda’s brilliant engineering minds had in fact settled on this interface for all of their cars I would be prepared to consider the possibility that they were right and I am wrong. But the Accord EX has the same touch screen…. surrounded by physical buttons and two knobs (one for volume, one for tuning). Does Honda expect a different species of animal to be behind the wheels of these two cars? If not, why wouldn’t one design choice be considered optimum by the engineers at the same car company?

[Honda’s 2018 line-up seems to embrace the idea of at least three different types of human brains, actually. The Odyssey EX-L has the touch screen and, unlike either the Clarity or the Accord, a single physical knob (power/volume). It lacks the physical button surround of the Accord. Maybe this design harlequinade will stop aviation nerds from complaining about the deep menu structure of the Garmin G1000?]

Similarly, Honda can’t seem to make up its collective mind regarding what safety systems should be included in a car. The Clarity lacks the blind spot monitoring system that is on the Odyssey and the Accord. The Accord lacks the “beep if you’re about to back into something” feature of the Odyssey. It seems like a bad idea for a multi-car family to have one car with features A, B, C, and D while the other car has only A and C. The driver will get complacent in the car with more safety systems and then be rudely surprised in the less intelligent car.

The Clarity has current capacity stamped right next to its USB outlets. The Accord does not. Interestingly, Honda has chosen capacities of 1.5A and 1A for the front USB outlets of the Clarity. The machine has a powerful enough electrical system to push a car 50 miles down the highway, but it can’t charge an iPad with 2.1 amps? Maybe it would be too much to ask for USB-C quick charging in a 2018 car, but why not a full power USB outlet if they are going to bother with one at all?

The Accord EX is not as nice a highway cruiser as the vault-like Odyssey EX-L. There is no acoustic glass and consequently there is plainly a lot more road noise. The Accord has power seats, like in the Odyssey, but no memories!

Readers: What’s a good sedan that can be leased for $300-400/month and has at least comparable driver idiot-proofing to the latest Honda Odyssey? Also, one member of our household is an animal-lover and would prefer not to sit on the dead skin of an unfortunate cow (i.e., she prefers cloth upholstery, as featured in luxury Robinson R44 helicopters).

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My friends who are still mourning Hillary’s loss like to say that (1) public school teachers are “underpaid,” and (2) workers need to be unionized. [What’s their mourning process, you might ask? Lately it seems to be full-time speculation about which women agreed to exchange cash for sex with a certain hated billionaire 12 or more years ago.]

The West Virginia teachers recently went out on strike. A Facebook friend interrupted his stream of Trump hatred to post “Solidarity forever. Most people in politics just talk about doing things for working people.” on top of an article about the Legislature giving unionized government workers a pay raise in hopes of ending the strike. (Now the median-earning “working people” in West Virginia will pay higher taxes so that the above-median-earning teachers in West Virginia can move farther away from the median. Also, it is likely that Medicaid funding will be cut so the poorest folks in West Virginia will be financing this raise as well.)

His friend added “The best part is it’s inspiring teacher strikes in other states, too!” and I couldn’t resist pointing out the apparent contradiction of Americans voting to spend $700 billion per year on K-12 schools and then celebrating when those schools were shut down. My response: “That IS awesome. There is nothing worse than children being in school.” (This was a most definite #NotFunnyAtAll!)

Although it was fun to rile up the righteous, let’s circle back to these dual beliefs. Teachers are underpaid and unions secure fair compensation for workers. If nearly all public school teachers are unionized and, at least in some states, they have the right to strike, how can they be underpaid? And if they are grievously underpaid, despite being unionized, shouldn’t they stop paying union dues? (maybe they will get their chance, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in the recently argued Janus v. AFSCME)

Related:

• BLS data on quit rates for public school teachers: They are only about 1/3rd as likely to quit their jobs compared to an average private sector worker, so apparently they are gluttons for punishment, showing up every day in exchange for an unfair wage. Or maybe this explains the difficulty that American K-12 students have with the critical thinking part of the PISA test. Teachers are unable to recognize how much better off they’d be if they quit their underpaid jobs and took different jobs. How can they then teach students to think critically about their own situations?
• BLS says that high school teachers need a bachelor’s degree and earned a median $58,030 annually two years ago.
• BLS says that the median worker with a bachelor’s degree earned $1,278 per week at the end of 2017. So if the school year is considered to be 40 weeks, that would be $51,120 per school year. (i.e., even if the value of health care, pension, and union protections against being fired were worth nothing, teachers earn an above-median cash wage among college-educated Americans)

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There is nothing that my Massachusetts- and California-based Facebook friends like better than heaping abuse on Americans who are too stupid to live on the coasts (Gulf Coast doesn’t count as a Big Brain Coast!). The latest issue that excites them is an abortion law update in the South: “Mississippi Governor Signs Nation’s Toughest Abortion Ban Into Law” (NPR). The law restricts abortions after 15 weeks of gestation.

Premature babies were one topic that we studied last month during my sojourn at the local medical school. Preterm babies can be expensive, so much so that self-insured employers will try to avoid paying for fertility services, such as in-vitro fertilization (IVF), due to the risk that triplets will be born and punch a $300,000 hole in their budget (not all triplets are dramatically premature, of course, but $300,000 is the average cost).

We learned that, from a medical point of view, babies can be viable and will receive treatment after 22 or 23 weeks of gestation (about 70 percent will survive; some babies are surviving birth after only 21 weeks of gestation; a recent example from England). There is an ICD-10 code for babies born at less than 23 weeks.

Here in Massachusetts, abortion is available without any reason through 24 weeks of gestation (the law), but also beyond that date “if a continuation of her pregnancy will impose on her a substantial risk of grave impairment of her physical or mental health.” I’m not sure why, in practice, this leads to any restrictions on abortion. What is likely more harmful to mental health than having a kid, whose own physical and mental health cannot be known in advance, around 24/7? What is more likely to interfere with regular gym visits and other physical health-promoting activities than being responsible for a child? (Note that, based on our interviews with family law attorneys, Massachusetts is one of the U.S. states in which it is most common for abortions to be sold at a discount to the net present value of projected child support cashflow; see “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”)

So… U.S. society is now at the point where we have people who are outraged if anyone proposes limiting spending on extremely premature babies (a bill of $2-5 million for one child would not be unusual), but they’re also outraged if anyone proposes to restrict the ability of a woman to choose an abortion several weeks after the gestational age at which babies are currently viable (given unlimited health care spending).

This reminds me a bit of a “meet the midwives” event at Mt. Auburn Hospital here in Cambridge a few years ago. Given that it was Cambridge, it seems safe to assume that the audience was at least 94 percent faithful Democrats who supported abortion at 24 weeks (6.5 percent of Cambridge voted deplorably in the 2016 election). Yet they talked about their own 12-16-week pregnancies as though the developing children were already fully human and very nearly out and about.

Readers: Let’s assume that, given the money being poured into this area of treatment, technology and technique will keep advancing such that younger and younger babies are medically viable. Instead of 70 percent of babies being viable at 23 weeks, for example, we’d have a 98-percent survival rate (maybe for $20 million per baby) and 85 percent of children born at 22 weeks would survive. Would that lead to voters and legislators who are currently happy with the 24-week limit changing their minds?

Related:

• chart of abortion laws by state, circa 2013 (nytimes)

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A Facebook friend linked to “Should there be a Jewish Inclusion Rider?”

… Frances McDormand, … taught us all a new phrase: Inclusion rider. Within minutes of her speech, the phrase was trending on twitter. News outlets spent the ensuing days explaining the term, and interviewing media researcher Stacy Smith, the woman who coined it.

In a nutshell, the inclusion rider is a clause that actors can ask to be included in their contract, demanding at least 50 per cent diversity in the contributors to a film, be it performers or crew. The idea is that a film should accurately reflect, both on and off screen, the demography of the location in which it is set and/or made.

I wondered what an inclusion rider would look like in the Jewish community. And, in particular, how it would impact on the inclusion and representation of women. What would happen, for example, if every man offered a role in a Jewish communal organisation insisted that the organisation accurately reflected the demographics of our community? What would happen, if every male speaker at a communal event insisted that there were an equal number of female speakers? What would happen, if every time a man was invited to appear on a panel, he insisted that an equal number of women were invited too, finally putting an end to the depressingly ubiquitous “manel”.

So to any men reading this, I ask the question. The next time you are invited to speak at a shul event, will you ask how often women are also invited to speak? The next time you are asked to become a trustee of a communal organisation, will you check how many women sit on the board before making your decision?

Here’s my comment on the article:

If she is passionate about diversity, rather than quotas set aside for Jewish women, would it make more sense to have quotas for Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, etc. at the gatherings that she describes?

[One area where my Facebook friend does not seem to want a quota for Jewish women is in wage-earning. Although her children are now grown and there would be no obstacle to her taking a job, she lets her husband bring home 98 percent of the family’s income.]

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