Category: Uncategorized

“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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Stellar evolution:

1. protostar
2. main sequence
3. red giant
4. white dwarf

I’m wondering if it would be fair to say that cosmologist Lawrence Krauss is transitioning from red giant to white dwarf.

Human energy output these days can be measured by Twitter. Let’s have a look at Professor Krauss’s feed:

May 10, 2014: I will echo Michelle Obama: Bring back our girls! And add: bring back our girls everywhere from the shackles of religious tyranny.

Aug 30, 2014: To Progressive Atheists in Melbourne and Radical Women. Thanks for inviting me to be a part of your protest event.

October 2, 2014: Texas continues its attack on Women.. especially poor women. Will it never end?

Nov 1, 2016: Here goes fuel for the hate mongers. I am pleased to support Hillary Clinton for President. She is very capable & will be a fine President. [i.e., the state government employee supports the candidate who promises to expand government]

Nov 1, 2016: Women’s rights, and climate change. Two reasons Trump needs to lose, and hopefully Democrats gain senate majority.

April 14, 2017: Trump proves that beyond grabbing them, he doesn’t care about women’s health and welfare. No big surprise.

May 28, 2017: Even without the pussy grabbing one look at this and you know this is the kind of creep you would want your daughter to stay away from.

June 1, 2017: All bad. Not content to attack the environment, the administration joins religious fanatics to attack women’s rights

As he was a media darling during the above output, I think it is fair to say that this was the professor’s red giant phase. What about after a star exhausts its nuclear fuel and can no longer support itself against the weight of its outer shell? Then it will collapse catastrophically, a victim of its own brilliance.

“He Became A Celebrity For Putting Science Before God. Now Lawrence Krauss Faces Allegations Of Sexual Misconduct.” suggests that is it now white dwarf stage:

Lawrence Krauss is a famous atheist and liberal crusader — and, in certain whisper networks, a well-known problem. With women coming forward alleging sexual harassment, will his “skeptic” fanbase believe the evidence?

“I didn’t care if he flirted with me, I just wanted to be around somebody important, and I also wanted to get a job in this field,” [Melody] Hensley told BuzzFeed News. “I thought I could handle myself.”

he asked her to come up to his room while he wrapped up some work …

When he pulled out a condom, Hensley said, she got out from under him, said “I have to go,” and rushed out of the room.

Krauss offers the scientific method — constantly questioning, testing hypotheses, demanding evidence — as the basis of morality and the answer to societal injustices. Last year, at a Q&A event to promote his latest book, the conversation came around to the dearth of women and minorities in science. “Science itself overcomes misogyny and prejudice and bias,” Krauss said. “It’s built in.”

How does the scientific method work when it comes to evaluating private sexual activity?

Krauss’s reputation took a hit in April 2011, after he publicly defended Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier who was convicted of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl and spent 13 months in a Florida jail.

Epstein was one of the Origins Project’s major donors. But Krauss told the Daily Beast his support of the financier was based purely on the facts: “As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people.”

Some scientists do not respect Hawaiian culture:

In April 2016, an Origins staffer angrily posted on Facebook about how Krauss “suggested that I should dress up like a hula girl while advertising for an event.”

Skeptics have become skeptical of skepticism:

“I’ve just become so disappointed and disillusioned with a group of people who I thought at one point were exemplars of clear thinking, of openness to new evidence, and maybe most importantly, being curious,” philosopher Phil Torres told BuzzFeed News. “This movement has tragically failed to live up to its own very high moral and epistemic standards.”

Certainly this is an astrophysics lesson for our time!

[Update: “Lawrence Krauss banned from Arizona State University campus following misconduct allegations”, which notes “ASU stated that the university had not received any complaints from ASU students, faculty or staff about Krauss.”]

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I’m heading out to Seattle today. A recent news story out of the city concerns the Amazon series Transparent. Example: “Jeffrey Tambor ‘Profoundly Disappointed’ with Amazon Following Transparent Firing” (Variety) The subtitle of the article:

“I can only surmise that the investigation against me was deeply flawed and biased toward the toxic politicized atmosphere that afflicted our set,” the actor said.

Only 2.5 years ago, the actor had a different perspective. “Jill Soloway Reveals Why Feminism Is the Secret to ‘Transparent’s’ Success” (The Wrap):

Rather than give explicit direction and forcing her cast to meet her expectations, Soloway said that she prefers a “feminist” approach, standing back and letting the actors “play.”

“I bring to work a feminist and feminine style of leadership,” Soloway said. “I’m here to pump air into the balloon and let this thing rise … everybody knows that the most important thing is that we have fun.”

The result, says the cast, is that there is no fear of making mistakes on set. They are free to try anything without worrying about being shot down. “You cannot make a mistake on this set. Nothing is ever wrong,” said Light.

The attitude starts at the top, but it continues all the way down, said Tambor. The entire cast and crew is committed to Soloway’s way of thinking.

“I’m telling you, people are dedicated. People are really getting this on every single level,” Tambor said. “And there is no reason it has to be otherwise. Except fear, male superiority, and horse shit.”

So the story-behind-the-story is arguably interesting as a demonstration of how human attitudes can evolve in a short period of time. But what about the story? What was interesting about this show that people wanting to keep watching? Also, if a show is about one transgendered person, how does it work to substitute a different actor or character in season 5?

[Separately, the dust-up proves that saying “I am not a predator.” is roughly as effective as a defense as saying “I am not a child molester” in family court!]

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The U.S. is supposedly populated by folks who adhere to “Judeo-Christian” values.

Gossip is prohibited by Leviticus, a book purportedly followed by both Jews and Christians (see Lashon hara for a summary of what Leviticus says about gossip).

Yet U.S. media is filled with gossip about President Trump and women who might have had sex with him (example from the New York Times).

I don’t remember this kind of article back in the 1970s, except perhaps in some supermarket tabloids. Can we infer from this that Americans have given up any goal of following the rules set forth in the Hebrew Bible?

Maybe one could argue that this is somehow actual “news” and not merely gossip? Good Housekeeping says “Only 48% of married women want regular sex after four years.” Thus roughly half of married Americans, unless they have decided to give up on sex altogether, would be candidates for an article on the subject of “Married Person X is having sex with Person Y and Person Y is not the spouse of Person X.” How can something be considered “news” when it is this common?

A journalist who describes himself as a “conservative Christian” recently posted one of these articles about Trump to Facebook: “Understanding Conservative Christian Silence on Donald Trump’s Porngate” (National Review). I responded with “Which part of the New Testament requires a Christian to keep track of others’ sexual activities? The Hebrew Bible specifically prohibits gossiping about other people. (See “Gossip, Rumors and Lashon Hara” for example.) As with most of my questions on Facebook, nobody answered! What is the answer? Are Christians allowed to gossip freely?

Or do we just add this to the list of stuff in the Bible that Americans don’t care about, e.g., Leviticus on male homosexuality, which has turned into “Gus Kenworthy’s kiss with boyfriend a ‘moment to celebrate'” (CNN). (But if being gay at the Olympics is actually a “moment to celebrate,” why aren’t Blades of Glory-style male-male teams permitted for skating and ice dancing? Why force athletes to promote a heteronormative message?) “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is in the Ten Commandments (Exodus), but in America today the married person who says “I really am enjoying having sex with my neighbor’s spouse” can be rewarded with 50 percent of the partner’s assets and 80 percent of the partner’s income going forward (varies a lot by state, though!).

If adultery is profitable, male homosexuality is celebrated, and we can be proud of our commitment to gossiping and keeping track of another adult’s sex life, what does it mean when someone in the 21st century U.S. calls himself or herself “Christian” or “Jewish”?

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