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Massachusetts is one of the most lucrative states in which to profit from having been married or having had a child (see our family law). The profitability of marriage per se, however, was scaled back in 2012 due to an “alimony reform” that limited the period under which a plaintiff could profit from alimony based on (a) the number of years of the pre-lawsuit marriage, and (b) whether the person profiting from alimony was living in a “marriage-type” relationship. (Because alimony profits are terminated when a profiteer remarries, it has become conventional in Massachusetts to simply live together with a new sex partner while continuing to bank funds from the former sex partner.)

Following the new law there ensued dozens of lawsuits over whether the changed rules impaired alimony profits secured prior to the cut-off date. Apparently the law was ambiguous. A recent attempt to clarify the situation was killed by Will Brownsberger (lawyer) and his committee, which includes Cynthia Creem, a practicing divorce litigator who earns more than $500/hour arguing these ambiguities.

The comments on the legislator’s page “Retroactive application of new alimony rules” shed light on the experience of being a Massachusetts resident.

From the sole female commenter who seems also to be an alimony payor:

My ex is hiding behind a BiPolar disability and also collecting SSDI [genius!]. He is physically and mentally able to support himself yet I am forced to pay my abuser $550 every WEEK! Why? Because iofbantiquated laws? Because no one had the courage to do the right thing? Is there no relief for me? My children are in their mid 30’s. I shouldn’t have to support this person who is playing every angle of every system so that he can to be a freeloader. … No one is entitled to a lifetime of free support and no one should be fired into involuntary slavery… my marriage license didn’t come with directions. If I signed a contract, I wasn’t given the terms of the contract that contained a lifetime slavery clause. Isn’t that fraud? Even a pack of cigarettes come with warnings. Shouldn’t marriage licenses?? [Her “No one is entitled to a lifetime of free support” statement would be true in Texas or Germany!]

From the new female partners of the divorce lawsuit losers:

It was very clear during the ARA process in 2011 that the intention was for the changes to apply to already-settled divorces. As to the argument that payees would have negotiated differently if they had known that the terms could be changed: Trust that my husband would have negotiated differently during his divorce from his ex-wife if he had had all the facts, as well. If he had known she had been siphoning money from his paychecks during their entire marriage and had secret accounts; if he had known she had been cheating on him with women since their engagement; if he had known that she would be cohabitating for the next fifteen years …

My partner was married for just under 20 years and has been divorced for over 20 years. He has paid child support and college tuition and over $400K in alimony so far. His divorce judgment was completely unfair, as his ex-wife was perfectly capable of working and could have made a very comfortable living without all his additional money.
As we both look toward retirement, the yearly alimony cost continues to hang over our head. Why should we have to work longer to give someone else our hard-earned money. That makes no sense.
I, too, was divorced, but I am an independent, employed, self supporting parent who wouldn’t want to be dependent on anyone to support me for the rest of my life. It sets back women’s rights back a hundred years. [she needs to review the updated definition of feminism!]

I was widowed at 36 left with three young children to raise on my own. In time I remarried, never realizing that the corrupt State of MA would actually use me and my tragic situation to subsidize my husband’s adulterous ex wife who was co-habitating with her still married boyfriend. Her wicked lawyer tried to bring me into the case, trying to gain access to my deceased husband’s estate and my Fatherless children’s bank accounts. They did all this so that they could prove my husband had enough money with me contributing so he could pay her more. He gave his ex 3/4 of his money and I was left to support the household on my own. Even after we had another child together they left me without any help. I could write a book on all the injustices that the state put me and my young children through. Alimony and child support are a joke. Women use the money for fancy houses, new cars, and luxury vacations. There is something seriously flawed with a system that leaves 99 percent of women rich and the men destitute. Women are then able to go to their second marriages with 3 incomes and men who even try to get remarried can’t even contribute to their households. if they have children with their second wife, these kids are not allowed the same standard of living because they are second class citizens.

My husband is 67 years old and has no hope of retirement if his alimony burden of $400 a week, plus 25% of his yearly bonus (for a total of $25,000 a year) isn’t eliminated or at the very least reduced. His ex-wife collects disability and most likely nets more income each week than he does! His 401K was split 50/50 in the divorce. Why should he continue to pay her out of his retirement income too?

Why is it fair or correct that a person receiving alimony should live in a marriage type relationship and still collect alimony? This is not 1974 where cohabitation was considered improper.

My husband was divorced two months too early and now has a lifetime of alimony to a woman who has chosen to work part time. The 20 hours a week she works as a child-care worker is equal to the hours I spend commuting to my job at the federal courthouse in Boston, and then I work a 50-hour week. She lives in a brand-new townhome and we are residing in an attic of an 1800’s home (three-story walkup).

From the men:

my ex is now very well financially secure. She has a wonderful job, making a six figure salary, all three children are independent (ages 25-31), her home is fully paid off, no debt, a new car every few years, wonderful vacations multiple times per year, etc. She has a boyfriend of over 6 years that she refuses to marry so that she doesn’t lose the alimony payment. My divorce was finalized over 15 years ago. I had no issue with paying the alimony during the period of transition and I went above and beyond the divorce agreement by paying well over 90% of the three children’s private (2) and public college tuition costs, when my obligation was 50%. My ex is financially stable and I find it totally unfair to have to pay alimony for the rest of my life.

My ex-wife has a four year college degree, she is very healthy and chooses to work 4 hours a day, and only during the school year, as I struggle to make end meet. She has no interest in becoming self sufficient, she has me supporting her for the rest of my life. She has enjoyed vacations out of the country and several cruises to the Caribbean, I work, period. I will never be able to retire, and as I am now 60 years old, having worked since the age of 14, the thought of working until I die, or my health fails dramatically is nothing I look forward to. I was under the mistaken impression the Alimony Reform Act would allow me to retire, or at least be able to work beyond retirement, and put a way money to retire, as currently my retirement money has and continues to go towards alimony.

Sorry folks but repeal of lifetime alimony must have been a devastating blow to the divorce industry, if given a choice between waiting out a perhaps unjust 10 year sentence or throwing away tens of thousands of dollars or more seeking justice in a kangaroo court, most rational people probably do the math and choose the former. More than just doing the math, a tenner in Gulag parlance is an injustice that the spirit can survive. The lifetime sentence is something that the spirit can’t survive, like a chain that bites deeper into the skin as time goes on. On the business end a slave for life is much easier to defraud than someone doing a tenner, the false hope the divorce industry sells can’t get a very good price when the victim knows he or she will walk away a free person at some point.

I wonder how you’d enjoy your ex-spouse (in my case, ex-wife) enjoying the life or Riley with her live-in boyfriend of five years, another for six years prior, while I send along her weekly checks to support her drinking habits! I am left to support one in college and saddled with all of the $80,000 tuition of the other. She doesn’t make any payments on either. She works for cash so as not to jeopardize her eligibility for alimony. You have no idea how hard this is to watch her enjoy her financial freedom, out in the bars every night with her co-habitant boyfriend!

I was a young man when I got divorced at the age of 27 years old. For over the next 30 years I was paying alimony to a spouse who was working and cohabitating all those years. … I am an old man now and am still working. I live a simple lifestyle compared to former spouse and boyfriend who have had it all.

My alimony was based on my working salary of over 100k per annum. When I retired in 2003 after 37 years of government service, my salary dropped to 65k. I have had to go through all of my 401k to support this alimony, to the point where I may have to file for bankruptcy. At 72 years of age this is grossly unfair to have to pay my ex spouse $560 per month, especially considering that she now receives a trust fund from her deceased boy friend.

I will never understand why it is that I need to continue alimony to my ex-wife through retirement when she already received 1/2 my pension and 1/2 my 401k.

I think it would be interesting to interview people preparing to get married and then live in Massachusetts and see if reading the above comments affected their enthusiasm either regarding (a) entering into a civil marriage, or (b) continuing to reside in Massachusetts and running the risk of ending up like of the commenters. [Option (c), entering into a prenuptial agreement that controls alimony, is not possible to do with any certainty in MA; see Massachusetts Prenuptial Agreements.] Is love so powerful that it can sweep away all caution? Or is it simply that most people are’t familiar with these outcomes, reasonably predictable in the event that the lower-income partner files a divorce lawsuit? (we did a quick survey in Harvard Square and found that college-educated adult residents knew virtually nothing about Massachusetts family law)

Related:

• What will people do for love?

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A Facebook friend posted “Words fail me … #Trumpanitcs” on top of “Trump Pushes Republicans in Congress to Oppose Funding Hudson Rail Tunnel” (nytimes):

President Trump is pressing congressional Republicans to oppose funding for a new rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, using the power of his office to block a key priority for the region and his Democratic rivals, according to several people with knowledge of his actions.

Mr. Trump urged Speaker Paul D. Ryan this week not to support funding for the $30 billion project, two people familiar with the conversation said.

$30 billion for a short tunnel? The world’s longest and deepest tunnel, opened in 2016, cost roughly $10 billion (Wikipedia). I accepted the assumption that the president of a country that is $21 trillion in debt wouldn’t oppose this purely on the grounds of efficiency and a theory that, if $30 billion must be borrowed, it could be better spent elsewhere. The same friend, when professing his love for Hillary Clinton and/or hatred for Donald Trump, tirelessly beats the inequality drum. So I asked

If you’re concerned about inequality, why would you want the Federal government to subsidize this $30 billion project anyway? Wouldn’t it make inequality in the U.S. more extreme if low- and middle-income taxpayers in the Midwest or South have to pay for a train tunnel to be used by high-income residents of the NY/NJ region? If it actually does make sense to spend $30 billion, why not have NY/NJ fund this themselves?

The consensus response among the virtuous Trump-haters on the thread:

The mid-west has not pulled its own weight in federal taxes in 40 years

Pull their weight means those states get more in Federal funding than they pay

ÇA subsidizes about 5-7 of those states if you count the state budgets as well, and more like 10 if you only count federal tax xfer

In fact if these states were to pay back the coastal Blue states over the next 30 years and balance their own budgets, they would have to triple their state taxes on average

if “we are concerned about inequality,” should’t we be asking states that aren’t solvent and can’t afford the price of admission to politely exit through the rear door?

These folks don’t have any problem with individual Americans being on welfare for decades and, in fact, consistently vote to expand government handouts (free housing, free healthcare, free food, free smartphones, etc.) to individuals. But they don’t like Americans collected into a state not “pulling their weight”? [Note that the assumption that a river of cash is flowing from correct-thinkers to Deplorables may be incorrect: “Against a national average of $1,935 in intergovernmental spending per American, red states receive just $1,879. Blue states get considerably more, at $2,124 per resident.”]

Taxpayers in KY and AL don’t even fully fund the projects they receive. They fund NOTHING out of state

we give them HUGE subsidies, and yet they believe they get none.

if they are going to vote to cut the benefits they receive, let’s accommodate them

I asked why it mattered what “they” believed (assuming any of these virtuous coastal dwellers actually have personal contact with Deplorables in the Midwestern and Southern states). Would it make sense to deny state assistance to people who don’t believe the same things as the elites? Someone living in means-tested public housing has to leave and pay market rents because he or she has incorrect beliefs? They want to reduce inequality, but only among those who believe the same things that they believe?

On the subjecting of voting, I pointed out that fully one third of folks in West Virginia virtuously voted for Hillary Clinton. Why punish them because of the incorrect political beliefs of their neighbors? Aren’t they already suffering sufficiently in having to live near Trump supporters?

Maybe some of those low income states need to be depopulated?

It’s painful, but if a state’s economy for example grew around coal and coal is no longer in demand (or auto manufacturing, steel production, etc) how can one possibly fix that other than by the most artificial means?

I responded by pointing out that schoolteachers in West Virginia are on strike right now and say that they get paid less than teachers in other states. Why not give them the $30 billion so that this inequality is rectified? None of the inequality-obsessed coastal dwellers wanted to do that.

Why is it obviously fair, though, for someone in Kentucky to pay for a tunnel for use by the Wall Street folks who trashed the economy in 2008? Suppose that it were true that Kentucky has been collecting federal welfare for decades. If there is still inequality, with people in Kentucky being less wealthy than people in New Jersey and New York, wouldn’t it make sense to increase the federal welfare flow to Kentucky rather than trying to pull the money in reverse for this new tunnel?

In short, if the answer for a low-income individual is “more welfare” (not to be confused with “more cowbell”) why is the answer for a low-income state “less welfare”?

[We can’t say that the U.S. has historically run this way, can we? During the Great Depression, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority was created to build infrastructure in a comparatively poor region of the U.S. They didn’t have a “let’s make the rich states even richer” spending plan back then, did they?]

Related:

• “The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth” (nytimes) on how New Yorkers will pay themselves $400/hour when they do get hold of tax dollars harvested in Alabama and Kentucky
• Oresund Bridge (5-mile suspension bridge and 2.5-mile tunnel connecting Sweden and Denmark, built essentially without taxpayer funds for roughly 1/10th the cost of this proposed NJ/NY link (a 2.5-mile tunnel))

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Hasn’t it been more than a year since America’s best investigators sunk their teeth into the meaty subject of Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential election? What are their results?

I keep seeing “Russia bad” in the headlines, but can’t figure out what has been determined, other than some Russians have accounts on Facebook and/or run ads on Facebook (but can they possibly be more contemptuous of folks who disagree with them than my actual Facebook friends?)

The Empire State Building was completed in 13 months. In our digital age when the malefactors have purportedly done everything digitally (i.e., at the speed of light), why hasn’t this investigation been wrapped up after 13(?) months?

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Who watched the Oscars? My friend’s 11-year-old daughter made him watch it and then mocked what she felt to be the crude promotion of women as a class (she doesn’t see her own female gender ID as a handicap, a failure of our local school system?).

If these folks are serious about shielding Americans from the products of white males, why not shift from U.S. production to importing movies from China and India? Both countries have comprehensive film industries that are generally free of white male influence (Iran also makes some great movies, but maybe some directors there would be considered too white?). Profitability could be increased because production costs are lower in China and India? The U.S. industry can still make some movies, but have them all directed by Harvey Weinstein’s former shower buddies?

Readers: If you watched the Oscars, what did you take away from the show? Did the movies that won deserve to win?

Related:

• “When the Grip Is a Woman (and the Gaffer and the Camera Operator, Too)” (nytimes celebrates gender-based employment discrimination)

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The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture (Brian Dear 2017; Pantheon) is about a mainframe-based computer system that died before most of today’s young coder heroes were born.

The book is kind of interesting, nonetheless, for what it reveals about human hopes that machines will take over our most onerous chores. We have a vacuum cleaner and a dishwasher, so why not a robot teacher for the youngsters that the government paid us to create?

Harvard professor B.F. Skinner arguably kicked off the idea of teaching by machine circa 1954:

Skinner’s machine is a plywood box some fifteen inches high, wide, and deep. The hinged top opens so that a scroll of pleated paper tape can be loaded inside. Typewritten onto the paper are arithmetic problems to be solved by the student; the answers to each problem are encoded as small holes, like in a player piano, punched in very specific places to denote a corresponding value. When the box top is shut, you can read the math problems, one at a time, through a small opening in the top of the box, showing a small, exposed area of the paper. You might see a math problem, such as “3 + 2,” through the viewing window on the top side of the box. To answer the problem, you manipulate a series of what Skinner called “sliders” that can be moved up or down through slits in the wood, serving as number scales. This particular math problem is looking for a one-digit answer, so only one slider need be moved into place. The correct slider to move is the one that causes numbers to appear in the hole under the “3 + 2.” Pull the slider toward yourself and the number increases up to 9. Push it away and it drops to zero. Once you’ve formed your answer you can attempt to turn a big black knob on the front side of the box. If the answer is correct, the knob turns freely and the scroll advances to the next problem. This is how you know your answer is correct. If the knob is locked and the scroll won’t advance, you know you’re wrong.

Down the river at MIT, Skinner’s ideas were not popular:

Instead of a machine teaching a student, Papert was in favor of children teaching machines, and in so doing, learning about mathematical concepts, not to mention gaining skills in computer programming. “I find Skinner somewhat of a contradiction,” Papert once confessed to this author, “because as a person he’s intellectually very rich and multi-sided and very literate and likes poetry and I think is a great person. When he thinks about children and education, there’s a lot of richness. The form in which it takes when it gets out into the world is extremely,” he said, pausing for a moment as if to choose the next word carefully, “pernicious. He has a very pernicious doctrine. The pernicious doctrine being that you can break up knowledge into fragments and guide children toward acquiring the knowledge like you might involve the behavior of a rat or a pigeon. I find that a contradiction. I find when you think of Skinner as a whole person, he’s so far away from this kind of thinking and practice of education, well, I’m full of wonderment that he isn’t the main critic of the way that his ideas are being used in the world.”

The idea of computerizing teaching was written about as early as 1958 in a paper by three IBM employees: Gustave Rath, Nancy S. Anderson, and R. C. Brainerd. They’d written a system for students on an IBM 650, but noted that it really needed to be time-shared for efficiency (bizarrely, after citing these IBMers for proposing time-sharing, the author of this book has fallen so deeply in love with his University of Illinois PLATO subjects that he attributes the invention of time-sharing to them, circa 1960 (Wikipedia says that the idea goes back to 1954 and John Backus, who was developing Fortran at the time for IBM. and that the first practical implementation was by John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp (God’s own programming language), at MIT in 1959)).

The original PLATO system (“Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations”) ran on the tube-based ILLIAC I mainframe, with its roughly 5,000 bytes of RAM (compare to 4 GB on the latest smartphones, so that’s roughly 1 million times more memory!). Thus the very first implementation relied substantially on a computer-controlled slide projector within the “terminal”.

People forget just how capable early computer nerds were. The University of Illinois team behind PLATO was in theory mostly about delivering an educational experience, but they were not shy about building hardware, including plasma displays, or systems software, such as their own time-sharing operating system and their own computer language: TUTOR.

They also experimented with adding custom hardware for teaching:

“Alphabat,” designed to help young children learn the letters of the alphabet, was a new lesson authored by Amy Alpert (daughter of Dan Alpert), one of the high school kids who like Mike Walker worked on PLATO-related projects with Bitzer as mentor. “Kids who identified the correct letter on the screen were given an M& M,” says Mike Walker, “which was ejected by a contraption powered by a washing machine relay…. It was a bit too powerful and occasionally obliterated the piece of candy.”

National Science Foundation was funding a handful of competitors for computer-based training:

Whereas PLATO was open, flexible, and devoid of any particular instructional theory limiting lesson authors to developing lessons that followed a particular design, TICCIT would reflect a single instructional theory burned not only into the software, but into the hardware as well, right in the keyboard with its special keys for RULE, EXAMPLE, PRACTICE. The culture of the TICCIT lab at BYU could not have been more different than CERL. For one thing, staff meetings were far more formal affairs, always starting with a prayer. Meticulous minutes were kept, typed up in memos, and filed away.

The fact that the projects were so radically different appealed to NSF. They already loved PLATO and had been familiar with Bitzer and Alpert for years. They recognized that TICCIT represented a wholly different approach, both at the scale (supporting a maximum of 128 color TV terminals running on a minicomputer, versus PLATO IV’s much heralded 4,096 terminals running on a supercomputer) and in terms of its instructional design model. “TICCIT was prepared,” says Arthur Melmed, “to demonstrate a certain kind of interaction in a relatively efficient way, and I thought that deserved a crack.” In 1972 both systems received roughly $ 5 million each from Congress. The race was on.

The idea of gamified learning was moderately successful on PLATO back in the 1970s:

Torpedo, another lesson focused on similar fractions problems, presented a situation where a student could play against other students or play against PLATO. The player operated a submarine deep in the ocean, above which swam occasional fish, octopi, and other creatures, and at the surface was a ship. The ocean surface served as the number line, this time horizontal, and the player needed to move their sub backward (by entering the desired negative amount, be it an integer or a fraction) or forward, and then the sub would fire a torpedo upward in an effort to hit the enemy ship. If some creature were in-between, it might get hit by the torpedo instead. The game resembled the popular video arcade game Space Invaders that would come out years later, although with Space Invaders there was no need to know anything about fractions; players simply moved a joystick left or right and fired away.

But it didn’t work in general:

December 1975 was the end of the first semester of the “demonstration year” for NSF and the Educational Testing Service (ETS). Testing revealed that the kids utilizing the elementary reading PLATO lessons were reading at a far lower level than the kids who were in the control classes. “The PLATO lessons were actually having a negative impact upon the kids,” says Yeager.

On the third hand, prisoners liked it:

The PCP project revealed interesting insights into the use of PLATO by its user population. “You couldn’t find,” says Siegel, “a more disadvantaged, disenfranchised, turned-off, uneducated group of people than the kind of people you found in prisons. And as you can imagine, survival in a prison means maintaining a kind of tough-guy image. If you are thought of as weak, bad things are likely to happen to you…. And so typically what happens is, a lot of people will not even opt for educational classes because that’s seen as weak. Or if you’re sort of required to sit in an educational class in a prison, you’re likely to try to misbehave or be the class clown, or act in some way that shows your disinterest. Not because you really are, but because you can’t afford to be wrong in front of your peers. So when the teacher says, ‘Where does the comma go in this sentence?’ and you don’t know the answer to that, you say something that indicates you don’t need to— that that’s irrelevant, or those aren’t the words that someone would say, but it would be the equivalent of that sort of blowing it off. You would blow off the task in front of your fellow classmates. That’s the sort of environment that we were stepping into.”

The inmates discovered not only the advantages of Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback, but the fact that they were free— in the middle of a prison where there is no freedom or privacy to speak of— to learn, privately, at their own pace, and without fear of ridicule or threats of bodily harm or worse. The computer provided a way to learn that they were not used to. No tough-guy act was required, nor would PLATO have even known how tough a guy you were. You could answer a question and be told you were wrong and why you were wrong, and it was okay. You could answer a question and be told you were right, and that was okay too. PLATO provided a safe space for learning.

The original idea of PCP was to develop some courseware for inmates and then deploy it at a handful of Illinois prisons. The Department of Justice funding was expected to last only a few years. It had originally come from the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford. When Jimmy Carter was elected, the Democrats looked around for funding to cut, and the PCP project was put on the chopping block. “They saw these kinds of projects as pet projects of the Republican administration,” says Siegel, “and so there was a freeze on all of these projects. An indiscriminate freeze, I mean they didn’t look at ‘Is this a good project or a bad project’— it was a Republican project: bad idea. And we were shut down.”

Was all lost when the Great Father in Washington diverted the river of cash? No, the state of Illinois liked the system well enough to support it with state tax dollars for another 10+ years. (On the third hand, maybe this, plus pensions, contributed to Illinois being out of cash now!)

Control Data Corporation, the vendor of the mainframe on which PLATO had been running, took over the project and began to commercialize everything. The director of the lab at University of Illinois struck a deal with CDC where they would pay big royalties on the hardware and systems software where he had been a co-inventor, but small royalties for courseware that other folks had written. The course authors were enraged, but began fighting over the scraps nonetheless.

The effect the CDC-Illinois deal had on CERL was significant. “It became like independent little companies inside the laboratory,” recalls former

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The sidewalks of Dallas are, just as readers warned me, littered with dockless shared bicycles. Ofo, a Chinese company, seems to be the market leader. There are at least four competitors, I think. Each system offers bikes in just one size. If you’re 5′ tall you’ll find that nearly all of the bikes fit well. Over 5′ tall and I would suggest Spin.pm, the only company whose seats can go up high enough to accommodate a 6′ tall rider. (If you’re a knee surgeon, Dallas will be an awesome market in a year or two; riding with the seat too low is a reliable way to burn up one’s knees.)

All rely on smartphone apps and GPS. “They’re popular with the local homeless,” said one local resident. “Fortunately, all of them seem to have iPhones.”

Given the difficulty of convincing consumers to download and subscribe to multiple apps and the economies of scale from having bikes be dense on the ground, a market shake-out seems likely. Unless Dallas is taken over by hobbits, I hope that Spin is one of the survivors!

If this becomes popular, cities are going to need to build a lot more bike racks!

Related:

• “Asian bike-sharing companies find road is tougher in Europe” (Financial Times, February 28, 2018): “After a spate of thefts and vandalism decimated its fleet of bicycles, Hong Kong-based start-up GoBee said last week it would pull out of French cities just days after quitting Italy.” Apparently today’s Europeans are not as law-abiding and/or trustworthy as today’s Asians!

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Somehow I missed “Why is liberal California the poverty capital of America?” (LA Times, January 14, 2018) until now. My California friends are always heaping scorn on the rest of the nation (“stupid” is the most common adjective applied to non-Californians). California has always been a poster child for technocratic government and collecting the best American minds into top-down bureaucracies to get stuff done. What’s the result, according to the article?

Guess which state has the highest poverty rate in the country? Not Mississippi, New Mexico, or West Virginia, but California, where nearly one out of five residents is poor. That’s according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which factors in the cost of housing, food, utilities and clothing, and which includes noncash government assistance as a form of income.

California state and local governments spent nearly $958 billion from 1992 through 2015 on public welfare programs, including cash-assistance payments, vendor payments and “other public welfare,” according to the Census Bureau. California, with 12% of the American population, is home today to about one in three of the nation’s welfare recipients.

Maybe there are some statistical issues here? California has a lot of immigrants and immigrants are usually eligible for welfare:

55% of immigrant families in the state get some kind of means-tested benefits, compared with just 30% of natives.

Also, I wonder if these numbers accurately factor in the market value of the free housing provided to California welfare recipients. If you live rent-free in an apartment in San Francisco or Berkeley that would sell for $1 million on the open market, are you “poor”? Maybe your consumption of resources is unbalanced, but you’re certainly consuming a lot.

But the problem may be solved soon by revised central planning:

Looking to help poor and low-income residents, California lawmakers recently passed a measure raising the minimum wage from $10 an hour to $15 an hour by 2022 — but a higher minimum wage will do nothing for the 60% of Californians who live in poverty and don’t have jobs.

I’m not sure it is interesting that Californians are good at collecting welfare. I do think it is interesting that Californians maintain their “everyone else is stupid” attitude when they put up such high “percentage living in poverty” numbers. If the folks running the government in California for the past decades are smart, committed to equality, and backed by enormous sources of taxpayer-derived cash, why are there any poor people at all in California?

Related:

• War on poverty hasn;t been given a fair chance?
• Visit to Berkeley, California (2010): “For roughly 60 years, Berkeley has offered more services to its residents than virtually any other city in the U.S. The schools are expensively funded. Welfare programs have been lavish. People can borrow a full set of tools from the public library. There is a non-profit organization on every block. Yet Berkeley has a poverty rate of 21 percent, higher than the state average of 12 percent (source). The school system tracks student performance by race and ethnicity so that they can reveal to local employers that “white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse” (source). Anywhere else in the country one would be considered a vicious racist for claiming that black and Latino high school students are intellectually inferior to white and Asian students, but in Berkeley broadcasting this information marks one as a concerned humanitarian. Sixty years of failure had not daunted any of the East Bayers with whom I spoke; all were in favor of even bigger and more expensive government.”

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Since I was the last person on Planet Earth to see Black Panther, I’m not going to worry about spoilers.

The king dies. The rest of the movie was about people fighting over succession. Why? There was a perfectly functional queen. Why couldn’t she rule for 20 years? Why was a successor required?

Maybe the answer is “the queen didn’t like to fight all the time.” But Wakanda never sought to fight wars with other countries and had all kinds of advanced defensive technology that other countries couldn’t match. Why would Wakanda have needed a leader more aggressive than TV’s Mr. Rogers?

What about the ending? The wealthiest and most powerful nation on the planet picks a project that a retiring city politician might undertake? How was it different from Derek Zoolander’s School for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Want to Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too?

Before you answer “It’s a made-up movie, stupid,” consider that my Facebook friends and the media have assured me that this movie offers important Black History Month lessons.

[I saw the movie at Seattle’s Cinerama, restored at tremendous cost by Paul Allen. The $15/hour minimum wage seems to mean that they can’t afford to hire people to clean up popcorn in between shows. Seattle shows that a fair world is a dirty world? (Separately, the city was packed with panhandlers sleeping on the sidewalks. Are there city workers who ensure that they collect at least $15/hour for the hours during which they are actively asking for money?)]

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Donald Trump has threatened to impose substantial tariffs on steel and aluminum. Assuming that he is more successful at thwarting these metallic immigrants to the U.S. than he has been for human immigrants from violence-plagued countries, what might it mean for American programmers?

Back in the 1980s there were trade barriers that raised the price of steel in the U.S. compared to the world market price (see this Brookings Institution report from 1987). Steel that cost $100,000 in the U.S. could be purchased for $76,000 elsewhere.

A Babcock and Wilcox subsidiary west of Houston made “air-cooled heat exchangers” for industrial plants. These worked like car radiators, blowing air over fluid flowing back and forth through finned tubes. Each one was a steel structure roughly the size of a house and was custom-engineered via a process that included roughly one person-year of work. The company was struggling because Korean competitors were offering finished heat exchangers at a retail price, delivered to the U.S., that was about the same as what Babcock and Wilcox would pay for the raw steel.

Computervision (CV) sold B&W on the idea that CAD would restore their competitive edge. A mostly automated design process would cut the marginal cost of engineering and reduce the time to market. CV was a pioneer in the market currently dominated by AutoCAD, but the system would need an additional software program on top of the basic drawing system. Programmers at CV worked at this unsuccessfully for about a year.

In 1984, I stepped in, through a start-up company, to help build a Lisp Machine program that could process a declarative specification language for 3D structures and, with customer specifications as the input, generate a 3D model and parts list as the output. The CV system would be used to render final engineering drawings. This program served as the foundation of ICAD, which was the most popular application program for the Lisp Machine and led to a plurality of Symbolics sales. Any company that made a customized product that could be broken down into 3D boxes was a candidate for development of a rule base for automating the design in response to customer needs. I described it as “the world’s best CAD system if you have a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering… AND a Ph.D. in computer science.” The company was eventually sold to Oracle and the code became part of their sales configuration software.

That’s my personal experience with steel trade barriers!

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Thoughts and prayers for my American Airlines flight back to Boston from Dallas tomorrow evening. Here’s the terminal forecast for Logan Airport (“KBOS”):

KBOS 012331Z 0200/0306 10006KT P6SM BKN140
FM020300 04010KT P6SM OVC050
FM020700 04015G24KT 4SM -RA BR OVC012
FM021000 04020G30KT 2SM -RA BR OVC008 WS020/05055KT
FM021400 03026G40KT 2SM +RA BR OVC008 WS020/04065KT
FM021800 03028G54KT 2SM +RA BR OVC008 WS020/04075KT
FM022300 03030G58KT 1 1/2SM -RA BR OVC020 WS020/04060KT
FM030400 01025G49KT 1SM -RASN BR OVC020 WS020/03055KT

For non-pilots… tomorrow at 6 pm wind will be from the Northeast at 30 knots gusting 58 knots (03030G58KT). Visibility will be 1.5 statute miles with light rain and mist. The sky will be overcast with clouds starting at 2000′ above the ground. The rarely seen “WS020/04060KT” means that at 2000′ above the ground the wind will be from magnetic 040 (compared to 030 on the ground) at 60 knots and thus there will be up to 30 knots of wind shear (WS). It calms down at 11 pm… to 25 knots gusting 49. A normal day in Patagonia!

[Friday morning update: American canceled this flight. The forecast had improved to “01024G43KT P6SM OVC015 ” so it is unclear why. The company rebooked me to fly on Sunday morning at 9:15 with a long layover at LGA. I would get into Boston at 7:30 pm. I tried contacting them by phone, but was put on hold for an hour.]

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