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Since at least 2015, Harvard students have had a full menu of gender ID options available to them (“Harvard allows students to pick new gender pronouns” (Boston Globe)). Yet recently I had to fill out a form from the Harvard IT department and the choice was stark: “Male” or “Female”.

[Separately, Harvard uses the same term for someone who is going to be on campus temporarily as the FBI uses for a wide range of suspected criminals: “Person of Interest“.]

What about be the change that you want to see in the world?

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I enjoyed opening night at Seattle Opera’s Beatrice and Benedict (Berlioz). The production is in English, with supertitles for when they are actually singing, and the acting is superb. The young attractive people who are considering marriage are actually young and attractive. The set is huge and impressive.

The libretto remains mostly relevant to our time. Benedict worries about entering into a marriage that will devolve into “frigidity” (a 52% probability today, according to Good Housekeeping) and/or “wearing horns” (roughly a 20% risk today, according to “Women Are Now Cheating As Much As Men, But With Fewer Consequences” (NY Mag)). Beatrice worries about losing her freedom (this was written before the advent of unilateral on-demand divorce).

Given the the core opera-going demographic is now “ancient, Russian, or gay” I feel that it is important to report on seat comfort. The box seats appeared to be in fixed positions, just like those in the orchestra. It is possible to put one’s feet underneath the seat in front and therefore there is a lot more legroom than in some halls. Sadly they don’t offer the power recliners that have become standard in movie theaters! A reader who is a subscriber says that one should ideally be within the first 20 rows due to a lack of amplification (though for this production the singers were wearing microphones).

Is it possible that a man and a woman both hostile to the idea of marriage will end up married? get tickets and find out!

[Separately, I toured a couple of aviation museums at Paine Field the day after the opera. One member of our group was a young engineer at Boeing. He said “Except for me and a couple of other young people, everyone in our group is an older guy. They’ve all been divorced by their wives.” (see Washington family law for the details)]

Related:

• Metropolitan Opera La Traviata at the movie theater
• Trump: the Opera

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From Beautifully Cruel (the story of Tracey Richter-Roberts):

[after she had divorced the physician Tracey met] a dentist, Robert Kellner (pseudonym), was a Loyola alumnus. He’d done a one-year residency there, with four and a half years of surgical training at that same well-respected Chicago hospital where Tracey’s friend worked. A board-certified dentist, Dr. Kellner was qualified to conduct oral and maxillofacial (trauma, reconstruction, and cosmetic) surgeries. “If you ever need any help around your office,” Tracey told Dr. Kellner after the introduction, “I am available. I can help.” It’s important to note that many sources from this period of Tracey’s life claim she wore revealing clothing, especially her blouses, which often showed more than a respectable amount of cleavage, accentuating her rather large breast implants. Many said that Tracey dressed to show off what she had.

“And she started by reprinting some of my forms, my consent forms and stuff like that,” Dr. Kellner recalled later during a court proceeding. “You’ll need a new computer,” Tracey told her new boss one day. “So get one,” he said. He handed Tracey the business credit card. Tracey ordered the computer, but had it delivered to her house. “I need to configure it,” she explained when the dentist and his assistant, weeks afterward, asked where the computer was.

At first, Tracey was great. Any issues with the computers, she was able to fix. Dr. Kellner said at this time they had a great working relationship. As time moved forward, an attraction mounting, perhaps against his better judgment, Robert Kellner began taking Tracey out on dates.

Tracey made a few bizarre moves here and there, but she seemed to be helping out. She had even convinced Dr. Kellner that she had devised some sort of program in the company’s computer system to generate invoices and letters on his stationery head easily, without having to bother the doctor all the time with paperwork. All the local practices were doing it, Tracey explained. “We need a fine-point, a medium-point, and a felt-tip” pen, Tracey said. She came into the office with papers in her hand. “I want you to sign your name and see what looks like the best [signature], and I am going to scan it into the computer so the girls can just use your signature on your doctor’s letters.”

It wasn’t long, however, before Tracey, according to the doctor’s testimony during a court proceeding, began making fraudulent charges on the business credit cards, using that signature-signing device to facilitate her crimes. One charge was a trip to Australia (no doubt that first time she flew out and married Michael Roberts—this, mind you, at the same time she was also having sex with Robert Kellner). Then she charged a continuing-education course and a weekend getaway at an expensive resort. Dr. Kellner called the travel agency when he found out that a trip to Australia had been charged to his account. He was furious. “I’m not paying for this,” he said. “I’m disputing these charges.” The agency explained that Tracey Roberts had charged the trip under what was his clear authority. He had signed off on the charge, literally. How could she do this? he asked. “We have a fax here,” the travel agent clarified, “with a contract that says you agreed to the trip.” Tracey had taken his office stationery/letterhead and, along with his computerized signature, she produced letters, contracts, and other documents with his signature, one of which gave her the authority to charge any trips she wanted.

Given that signatures, however obtained, can easily be scanned and applied to new documents with the simplest PC programs, why does anyone still accept a signed document as evidence that a person signed it? Why isn’t there, for example, at a minimum some sort of video required showing the person actually signing? In the smartphone and webcam age, it wouldn’t be tough to gather these videos.

There is a bit more in the book about these two and the scanned signature…

It was after the travel agency/fraud fiasco and the $18,000 loan he had given her.

When [Tracey] got there, his assistant was at the front desk, … “When you leaving?” Tracey asked the woman as she waited for him to finish up what he was doing in the back office. “I need to talk to him alone.” … “Hey, she’s dressed like she’s going out and she smells like a French whore,” the assistant told Dr. Kellner.

When the assistant left, Tracey went back to see Dr. Kellner. “Look, I’m sorry for everything,” she said, … “I have this fantasy,” Tracey explained further, “and I want to make love to you while we’re under nitrous oxide.”

Tracey had Robert Kellner go first. He sat in the chair, put the mask on, and inhaled.

Inside the room, the dentist had a tackle box of meds he used during surgeries. … Tracey mentioned that maybe she should start an IV of something in order to get him to that special place sooner. They had not done anything sexual by this point. He allowed Tracey to “start an IV in my arm and give me a little Versed.” … Versed is also a drug said to “cause forgetfulness of the surgery or procedure.” … One of the last things Dr. Kellner remembered, when later asked in court what happened next, was Tracey walking toward him with the tackle box in her hand. Yet, as he watched her approach, he realized she had a “napkin wrapped around the handle” of the box—so as not to, he later guessed, leave any fingerprints behind.

Next thing the dentist recalled, he was waking up at four o’clock the next morning. Tracey was gone.

The letter, in the form of a “contractual agreement,” was written on the doctor’s letterhead and generated by his office. Dr. Kellner had signed it—and so had Tracey: This agreement between [Dr. Kellner] and Tracey Richter Roberts—which meant she was married to Michael when the sexual escapade in the office took place—a patient and occasional contracted employee of [Dr. Kellner], is entered into [in August 1997]. … Whereas, Dr. [Kellner] admits to willfully misrepresenting his ability to resolve TMJ pain that Mrs. Tracey Roberts began to experience, the contractual agreement continued, with the sole intention of getting [her] to consent to a “fictional” procedure that would require conscious sedation. … [Kellner] secretly intended to remove and replace articles of Tracey Roberts’ clothing, fondle her breasts and genitals, take photographs of her, and make subliminal suggestions. It went on to say he admitted to having an “addictive personality . . . from deviant sexual behavior to pharmacological.” … The “contract” went on to describe the incident in graphic detail. It claimed Tracey had awoken after the anesthesia mask accidentally slipped off her face during the TMJ surgery to find herself “clad in red thigh-high stockings, no panties, and stiletto heeled pumps that were too small.” It also said her dress had been pulled down below her neckline to expose her breasts and that the dentist was straddling her, one of her legs up on his shoulder. He was “masturbating onto her chest,” the contract said. … Dr. Kellner offered to “reach a mutual agreement” with Tracey that might “spare” her the “embarrassment, humiliation, and stress” of pressing charges against him. … Beyond a settlement fee of $150,000, Dr. Kellner was to pay Tracey’s way to a conference and annual meeting, hotel, air fare, expenses, “and purchase two round trip tickets for Mr. and Mrs. Roberts to travel to Australia this Christmas.”

When Tracey realized the doctor was not going to pay her shakedown, she turned around and filed a civil lawsuit against him. In it, she claimed the supposed sexual assault was malpractice.

The litigation keeps attorneys busy for a while, but let’s circle back to why a signature has any value at all! If not notarized, why?

More: Read Beautifully Cruel

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“The Gender Pay Gap Is Largely Because of Motherhood” (nytimes, 2017):

To achieve greater pay equality, social scientists say — other than women avoiding marriage and children — changes would have to take place in workplaces and public policy that applied to both men and women. Examples could be companies putting less priority on long hours and face time, and the government providing subsidized child care and moderate-length parental leave.

So childless Americans slaving away in the cubicle farm so that their child-blessed coworkers can enjoy parental leave would make the gender pay gap smaller.

“Germany’s Booming Economy Leaves Female Workers Behind” (WSJ, Feb 26, 2018):

An entitlement to generous parental leave, for instance, creates an incentive for young mothers to take long career-damaging breaks, experts say.

But childless Germans working harder to subsidize Germans with children… that makes the gender pay gap larger!

The two apparently contradictory economies do have something in common:

“Female engineers are hard to come by,” said Christian Thiele, spokesman for machine-tool maker Paul Horn GmbH, adding that the company was shifting its focus toward hiring more women.

Related:

• When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?
• Paid Maternity Leave: Employers or Taxpayers should Pay?

 

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The standard argument for why Donald Trump is wrong when he says that he wants to shut down immigration from violence-plagued countries is that the U.S. government will “vet” potential immigrants and screen out those who are prone to waging jihad or likely to perpetrate other forms of violence.

I always wondered how this was going to work, especially since the people being screened would be coming from a culture in which neither speech nor documents are in the English language. Would it be the U.S. military, which failed to notice the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, for example? The FBI that failed to heed flight instructor warnings about the 9/11 hijackers? The FBI that, after being tipped off by the Russians (they were our friends back then, but we hate them now?) about the Tsarnaev family, investigated and cleared the Tsarnaev brothers?

Now we’ve got a new data point in that the FBI was tipped off to Nikolas Cruz’s likely behavior (Miami Herald) and yet failed to prevent the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. The local police also got some tips. Compared to screening potential immigrants, this was an easy situation for law enforcement. The people offering the tips were native English speakers describing events that had occurred within the U.S. The potential criminal was a native English speaker. There was no need for an interpreter and no need to verify information about an event that had occurred on the other side of the planet.

Government does some great stuff (as you’d hope given $4 trillion per year in federal spending alone), but should we give up on the idea that government can usefully predict which people are most likely to commit violent acts?

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I’m headed to Dallas after this Seattle sojourn, arriving Wednesday evening and returning to Boston on Friday. In theory the trip is all business, but I might be able to sneak away to do a little sightseeing downtown. What do folks recommend? How about the George W. Bush Presidential Library? That seems like it would be good for a laugh, at least, when remembering that Democrats said that they would never find a Republican president whom they would hate more.

Would anyone like to meet for coffee downtown on Thursday or Friday morning? Feel free to comment here or email me privately. Also, I should be free on Thursday evening if anyone has a brilliant cultural event suggestion.

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The British do-gooders at Oxfam are having a PR problem (e.g., “Oxfam abuse scandal is built on the aid industry’s white saviour mentality”). It seems that they spent 80 percent of donated funds on prostitutes, booze, party music, Burning Man-style outfits, and drugs, and then just wasted the rest.

I want to step back, however, and ask “Why was anyone from Oxfam ever outside of Britain?” Surely there are capable people and companies in every country. Instead of flying people out from Britain, why not just pay whatever it costs to hire the best locals? Send them cash and supplies and let them do whatever the do-gooders want done. In terms of supporting the local economy and “building capacity” as aid industry professionals like to say, wouldn’t it be better to pay a local company to do a job than to fly people in from the U.S. or the U.K.?

Related:

• “Unicef Official Resigns Over His Past Conduct Toward Women” (Oxfam alumnus in trouble at Save the Children)

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“Why (almost) no one wants to host the Olympics anymore” (Vox):

Pyeongchang, South Korea, built a brand new Olympic stadium to host the Winter Games this year. The 35,000-seat stadium cost $109 million to build. And it will be used just four times before it’s demolished.

The cost of the stadium will come out to an astonishing $10 million per hour of use, according to Judith Grant-Long, a scholar of sports at the University of Michigan.

The 2004 Games garnered bids from 12 cities around the world. For the 2020 Games, the pool shrank to five bidders. Then the 2022 Winter Olympics and 2024 Summer Olympics managed to get only two bidders each.

In fact, for the 2024 Games, the International Olympic Committee decided to do something unprecedented: Instead of choosing between the only two bidders, Paris and Los Angeles, it decided to award Paris the 2024 Summer Olympics and give Los Angeles the 2028 Summer Olympics. Experts say the IOC decided to give them out at the same time for a simple reason — it was afraid no city would want to host the tournament by the time the 2028 bidding started.

Wikipedia says that there are fewer than 3,000 athletes that absolutely needed to gather at the 2018 Olympics. You could house them all, plus coaches, in a medium-sized university’s dormitories (adjust the academic calendar to give the students three weeks off!).

How about the spectators? There are a lot more people who want to signal their virtue by attending Hamilton than can fit into the current theater. Do the producers build a $200 million monster venue? No. They show their commitment to social justice by raising ticket prices to $1,150 per seat (Variety) and have a small, but satisfying, gathering of the righteous.

Let’s consider security:

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the cost of security at the Olympics skyrocketed. The first Summer Olympics held after the attacks were the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. Those games cost more than $15 billion, and a big part of that was because the city spent tons of money trying to protect the games from a potential terrorist attack.

Sanderson says that post-9/11 security “adds between $2 and 5 billion to the price tag to start with.”

If Olympic ticket prices were tripled so that small venues were not overloaded, fewer people would show up and therefore fewer people would need to be screened.

[Separately, note the drag on economic growth; a world that spends $5 billion on security screening is precluded from spending that $5 billion on machine tools, education, etc.]

Since it is mainly a TV event, what would be wrong with using pricing to keep the Olympics gathering to a manageable size?

Readers: What have you enjoyed most about these Olympics? I began to appreciate curling for the first time, though the kids ran out of patience after about 30 minutes. And it is fun to have a 4-year-old demand fast-forward when half-pipe competition is being shown (“I don’t like back-and-forth”).

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Digital computers and software supposedly change fast. Therefore it should be more challenging to predict how they will evolve compared to other parts of society and technology. New Yorker magazine looks at this question by cracking open a book from 1968 about the world of 2018.

It turned out to be easy to predict where computers would take us:

What “Toward the Year 2018” gets most consistently right is the integration of computing into daily life. Massive information networks of fibre optics and satellite communication, accessed through portable devices in a “universality of telephony”—and an upheaval in privacy? It’s all in there. The Bell Labs director John R. Pierce, in a few masterful strokes, extrapolates the advent of Touch-Tone to text and picture transmission, and editing the results online—“This will even extend to justification and pagination in the preparation of documents of a quality comparable to today’s letterpress.” And it’s Ithiel de Sola Pool—he of the free love and controlled economies—who wonders, five decades before alarms were raised over Equifax, Facebook, and Google, how personal information will be “computer-stored and fantastically manipulative” in both senses of the word: “By 2018 a researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low IQ (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records),” Pool predicts.

Writing just a year before arpanet went live, the Harvard information scientist Anthony Oettinger envisions “a kind of gargantuan version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex”—a hypothetical electromechanical text and audio-visual reader—which is about as good a summary of the Internet as you can find from 1968. But Oettinger, a veteran of U.S. intelligence-panel work on information overload, was no Utopian: his essay is titled “Electronics May Revolutionize Education, But Is Unlikely to Solve Problems of Human Frailty.” He’s particularly skeptical of how well governments would adapt to this mega-Memex: “Putting broad-band communications, picture telephones, and instant computerized retrieval in the hands of such an organization is like feeding pastry to a fat man.”

The smartest folks of 1968, however, were terrible at predicting anything involving “nuclear.” Nuclear breeder reactors for electric power did not become popular, as predicted. Folks in 1968 couldn’t see that the U.S. was about to discard the nuclear family in favor of alternative means of child production and rearing (see Real World Divorce for statistics on how the U.S. became the country where children are least likely to live with their two biological parents).

A reviewer on Amazon says “This book is really a remarkable document of how huge the technological changes were in the period from 1918 to 1968; they merely assumed the rate of change would remain unchanged. Well, as it happened, progress slowed down rather a lot.” So maybe the toughest thing to predict is the rate?

Related:

• Amazon shows a new copy available for $2,340(!)

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… why not change America instead of the Constitution?

As has happened after every mass shooting, my Facebook feed is saturated with virtuous anti-gun sentiments. Some of them squarely attack the Second Amendment, e.g., by citing this New York Times Op-Ed (interesting because the article’s first example of a current Constitutional right is immigration). The handful of Deplorables among my friends are outraged and defend their beloved freedoms with statistics showing a downward trend in U.S. gun violence. An AR-15 doesn’t kill people; a pissed-off American with an AR-15 kills people. The Deplorables assume that their attackers are rational and ask questions such as “If the population doubles, would you expect the number of mass shootings to go up, down, or remain the same” (Harvard-educated liberal arts majors respond “the same”! Also, “think of the children”).

Apparently all options are on the table now. Although I am not a gun owner myself I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler to reengineer the U.S. instead of changing the Constitution so that the gun nuts could be deprived of what is currently their right.

We could start by assuming that any mass shooting will result in a media frenzy and national despair. Thus we need to reduce the absolute probability of a mass shooting anywhere in the U.S., not try to comfort emotional folks with “as a statistical percentage of our current population of 1 billion, this wasn’t as bad as back in the supposedly good old days.”

Mass shootings should scale at least linearly with population growth. If there were 1 person in California and 1 in New York with an empty territory in between it wouldn’t be possible for there to be a mass shooting. With 100 million people the probability should be 2X that compared to 50 million, assuming everyone’s mood stays the same given the higher density. Right now we’re at 327 million residents, mostly in cities packed like rat habitats in a cruel academic experiment. How about a goal of cutting population back to 180 million, the 1960 level? So we eliminate existing cash payments to Americans who have babies and also eliminate low-skill immigration.

Traffic makes people angry. Just last week my regional neighbor Graciela Paulino got angry and shot a fellow user of the collapsing road network (Lowell Sun). How about congestion pricing for the road system so that there is never a traffic jam?

School makes young people angry, apparently. Why not offer the angriest the opportunity to learn in some other environment other than the one-size-fits-all public high school that motivates some to come back with guns?

Criminality is heritable (example: Swedish national adoption study). Why not offer criminals and children of criminals cash incentives to live in a serene environment where criminal tendencies won’t be triggered (so to speak)? And, if we believe the research eggheads, we wouldn’t want to accept immigrants from any society where violence is common or immigrants whose relatives had been criminals.

Suburban isolation seems to be unhealthy for everyone. In the non-profit ideas page that I wrote for my crazy rich Google friends I proposed that, instead of shipping barrels of cash to Africa (like Melinda Gates is doing with the money that Bill earned!), American billionaires could fund “Latin American-style Towns for the U.S.” Then we could all go down to the town square every evening and chat with friends and, ideally, not shoot any of them.

Having a lot of time on one’s hands seems to lead to mental health problems and mental health problems lead, in some cases, to mass shootings. Why not terminate all of the government programs that enable Americans to be idle and brooding for years or decades? (High school itself could be considered one of these programs! It is not intellectually demanding for anyone of above-average intelligence (i.e., 50 percent of people) and therefore gives students plenty of time to brood and plot.)

I’m sure that the above ideas only scratch the surface, but the posting is really about floating an idea: rather than having a huge Constitutional fight and increasing the overall level of hatred that Americans with different political views have for each other, why not try to redesign our way out of this situation?

Readers: What do you think? Could we reengineer U.S. society so that substantially fewer people are motivated to become mass shooters?

[Here’s a post from a Facebook friend who works as a teacher in California, plus excerpts from her follow-up comments:

Why do so many people think gun control is the answer to the problem. That’s as preposterous as the war on drugs. Guns and weapons are nothing new under the sun, but anger seems to be rising in the youth and in the world. We need to heal our broken people and gun control just is a band-aid to the real problem.

[in response to a proposed ban] That’s just it though, u think they won’t have access suddenly. That’s just not reality. Drugs are illegal yet…

Making something illegal is not gonna make the problem disappear. Who here was able to get alcohol before they turned 21? Buy drugs? Make drugs? Pretty sure no law stopped you. Even if they banned all fire arms, do u think that fire arms would disappear??? You’re wasting your time with this argument. Don’t criminalize good people for owning a gun. It’s just gonna create more problems. We don’t live in a country where guns don’t exist so stop pretending. I don’t even eat animals because I hate violence obviously I’m not one to want a gun, but reality is reality.

]

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