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Last night I was part of a team of four expert reviewers at an exclusive screening (at the Burlington Mall) of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Our thoughts on the film, in no particular order…

The First Order fights just like the U.S. military during World War II. All of the officers are incompetent and make decisions that lead to defeat by numerically inferior forces. However, it doesn’t matter strategically because they can keep cranking out an infinite number of additional starships and other weapons.

Characters in the movie are obsessed with their parents and connections to those parents. Yet the film comes out of California, which led the no-fault divorce revolution that resulted in the U.S. having the world’s highest percentage of children living outside a two-parent family (some stats). If the parent-obsessed filmmakers are representative of Californians and most of them think that parents are important to children, why would they run a winner-take-all family court system in which one parent will inevitably be discarded? (unlike neighboring Nevada, a 50/50 shared parenting state)

Californians like to talk about their commitment to equality (way better than “inequality” certainly!) and how people are entitled to various human rights, e.g., to shelter, food, health care, etc., simply by showing up and identify as “human.” Yet the characters don’t accord equal rights to human lives. A whole space ship of colleagues can be blown up and that isn’t nearly as sad as if one more fleshed-out character is injured.

Californians also like to talk about their passion for science and hatred for those who are “anti-science”. Yet they’ve made a movie in which the vacuum of space carries sound waves and bombs fall under the influence of Earth-style gravity regardless of where in the universe they happen to be.

As with previous Star Wars films, the movie doesn’t make obvious economic sense. They have capable robots, but people still lust after money. Why isn’t there an infinite supply of everything? Population growth does not seem to have kept up with the improvements in tech. In fact, there is no place in the entire universe that is as crowded as today’s Los Angeles or San Francisco. The richest people in the galaxy are arms dealers, but why should they make more than a normal return on investment? The First Order seems to be the legitimate government and also the consumer of 99 percent of the weapons. Why wouldn’t they run their own arms factories or use low-bid contractors?

Why can’t these advanced folks have some better autopilots? When the goal is to have a space ship fly “straight and level” (see above for how Earth-style gravity operates everywhere!) it is necessary to have a human pilot on board. Also, why not swarms of drone attack aircraft?

Speaking of gravity, the description of the Force sounds a lot like Isaac Newton’s first theory of gravitation. Maybe the Force will turn out to be gravity?

The Star Wars screenwriter’s task has been greatly simplified compared to in the 1970s and 1980s. What would characters say when they think the entire galaxy is about to be doomed by an evil dictatorship? When the universe as they know it is coming to an end? Simply go to Facebook and cut and paste from any discussion of a proposed federal law or state election.

Related:

• Why are some people hating Star Wars: The Last Jedi?

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Christmas Eve and time to gather the extended family. From a Massachusetts case titled “Adoption of Paula”:

The mother and the father met in January, 1981, and commenced living together shortly thereafter. In addition to the parents, the household included the father’s father, his two children by his first marriage (Robert and Belinda) and Paula, the mother’s eldest daughter. The parents had five daughters in rapid succession, the first of whom, Phyllis, was born on October 11, 1981. They married in 1984.

Both parents were episodic users of drugs and chronic abusers of alcohol during their marriage. The parents’ relationship was characterized by a high level of conflict. The father physically abused the mother. He also hit the children, focusing this violence in particular on Paula, who was not his daughter. The mother was aware of his treatment of the children. After confrontations with her husband, the mother would “run” from the household. She would be absent for periods ranging from a few days to several weeks at a time. At first, she took the children with her. When the number of children increased, she would leave them behind. The care of the younger children was often delegated to Robert and Belinda, especially when the mother left the home.

Dangerous weapons were openly displayed in the home. In addition, a number of transient people, many of them adolescents drawn by the availability of drugs and alcohol, frequented the home. Some of these people also acted as caretakers for the children.

After the mother left the marital home, she became involved with a man and became pregnant by him (with Elizabeth). This man died of an overdose of heroin in July, 1989. When Elizabeth, born on March 9, 1990, was an infant, the mother participated in a residential drug treatment program at the Medford Family Life Education Center. She was terminated from the program almost immediately for violation of the program’s rules. She spent nights drinking with a new boy friend, attempted to bring alcohol into the shelter, and left Elizabeth with other program residents for extended periods of time.

At the time of trial, the mother had been living with Gerald, the father of her son, James, born on July 16, 1991, and had named him as a potential caretaker of her daughters. There were allegations that Gerald had physically abused his children by other women, and had the potential to repeat this violent behavior and that the children, with the exception of Phyllis, regarded him with reservations as a caretaker. Several people had observed episodes of his inappropriate physical contact with some of the children, and in particular with Phyllis, whose sexualized behavior placed her at high risk.

The father has remarried and at the time of trial, had three additional children by his new wife. He testified that he was not seeking custody of his children (Phyllis, Jennifer, Susan, Kimberly, and Diane), but took the position they should be returned to their mother’s custody.

That’s 13 kids total. Wouldn’t it be interesting to follow up with these children and see what kind of adults they’ve become?

Happy Christmas Eve to everyone and I hope that your dinner table is surrounded by less fractious family members than the above.

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A Chinese-American physician friend just sent us her “Happy 2018” card (not technically “Christmas card” but the order is red with white snowflakes and there is an “oh what fun” in script across the front, so I fear that this is tainted with the Christmas spirit).

The accompanying letter violates a few conventions for the genre. For example, on the merits of children being 9 and 10: “At last I can count on sleeping through the night, interrupted only by my own bladder.” On the joys of cat ownership: “They went on a spree of indoor urination after [the dog] died [age 12], anointing three couches, an armchair, and a mattress before finally winding down. We now have a hammock in the living room for visitors.”

Readers: What are the best Christmas/New Years messages you’ve gotten in 2017?

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Some of my Happy Valley neighbors were debating whether or not to organize a potluck New Year’s Day party in a town-owned building. They then got into an argument about whether this is even legal. Finally someone found a 2014 law: “An Act Relative to Potluck Events”. Thus it seems that our legislators have defined the term “potluck” for us.

I had prepared to send a message to the list “I found a 25 lb. bag of gluten and also 10 lbs. of peanuts and 5 lbs. of walnuts. I can make a gluten-nut pie for the event.” Fortunately, before I could send the email, the neighbors decided that their legal skills weren’t sufficient to interpret the potluck law and therefore the idea was abandoned.

Hope this helps if you’re organizing a holiday event…

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If you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas present, DxOMark has reviewed the Leica M10. This $7,000 digital camera body puts up image quality scores similar to a 1.5-year-old compact Sony. Don’t forget to budget $2,000+ for a lens!

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… print labels from Google Contacts.

(It doesn’t seem to be all that easy from Microsoft Outlook either, requiring a “mail merge” operation.)

We would expect even the least experienced human assistant to learn that every December it is time to print contact addresses onto labels so that they can be placed on Christmas cards. How are computers supposed to take our jobs if they can’t handle the seemingly simplest tasks?

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My Facebook friends are predicting doom and gloom as a result of the new tax rates that Congress recently passed:

• The deep problems with the tax bill seem obvious to me and (most of) my FB friends.
• Traitors. History will judge them harshly.
• I saw an article the other day (can’t remember which paper, NY Times?) which pointed out a loophole in this tax bill where companies would actually benefit by moving abroad.
• This abomination of a tax bill also eliminated the alternative minimum tax for businesses. It might drive up the deficits $100-$200 billion in year one alone.
• Heartbroken
• Helping these people [photos of undocumented immigrants] should be more important than a tax cut for the rich.

The smartest minds of the media are even more down on the legislation:

• The G.O.P. Tax Bill Is Unworkable (New Yorker)
• The Most Frightening Aspect of Trump’s Tax Triumph (New Yorker): “The lies told by powerful men—and the thanks heaped on the most powerful man of all—are the language of a dictatorship.”

The $20 trillion in debt previously accumulated was just fine, but the predicted deficits due to these changes in tax rates will kill the United States economically. That’s a shame, but of course the U.S. is only a small portion of the world. Currently concerned citizens can plan a personal exit strategy, no? In fact, shouldn’t they be able to exit rich if they know about an impending collapse that other investors are ignorant of?

Let’s assume that the U.S. government is in fact starved for revenue as a result of having a corporate tax rate similar to the UK’s plus a whole bunch of crazy deductions, e.g., the R&D tax credit, that have built up over the years. That will lead to a larger deficit, right? And the larger deficit will mean the U.S. has to borrow and/or print money. So the dollar should go down and interest rates on Treasury bonds should go up? The above doomsayers express 100 percent confidence in their predictions. Can they become rich by shorting the dollar and shorting Treasuries? If so, what’s the best way for them to make crazy upside without having a big downside exposure? (i.e., what are the most efficient option-style instruments that are sensitive to big drops in the dollar and big rises in interest rates?)

[A money-expert friend suggests options on the TLT ETF for anyone certain of a collapse in Treasury bonds. He also noted that there are currency ETFs, such as UDN (option chain for this USD index).]

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In the Age of Harvey there is a lot more demand for the criminal justice system to sort out what happened between two adults in private settings such as hotel rooms and dorm rooms. The smartphone age has given the same system a lot more material to chew on. Here’s a Daily Mail story about the state’s case against a defendant falling apart in the middle of the trial due to the fact that the police failed to highlight the contents of text messages between an accuser and the accused. (Separately, note that the defendant needed to spend two years paying lawyers and preparing for potential imprisonment; imagine the sangfroid it must have taken for him to reject a plea deal!)

Readers: What do you think? The criminal justice system was set up to handle black-and-white situations where A hit B or C stole something from D and none of the evidence was in electronic form. Does the case described in the Daily Mail suggest that the system isn’t likely to fit well with shades of grey (so to speak) and evidence that is primarily electronic?

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One of the joys of a cross-country light-airplane trip is that I can fire up Netflix without having to watch Masha and the Bear. In the Fort Worth Marriott I was finally able to watch Finding Vivian Maier, about the street photographer whose work found an audience only after her death in 2009 (age 83).

The work is interesting of course. And folks my age will appreciate the silver halide darkroom scenes. But the movie is also interesting due to the challenge of reconstructing the life of a recently deceased person who had no spouse, no kids, and no close friends and family.

Another interesting angle is that taking care of children is supposed to be the hardest job in the world (Bill Burr and the Republicans handing out tax credits seem to agree on this), but Vivian Maier was able to work as a nanny while also working as a prolific street photographer (something had to give, though, and she apparently never had time to promote and market her work).

Standards for child care were apparently a lot lower back in the 1970s. Families that hired Maier knew scarcely anything about her background, e.g,. they were confused as to whether she was French or American. Maier would sometimes get angry or frustrated with kids and deal with them in ways that would be unacceptable today, e.g., abandoning them on a city street, hitting them, or force-feeding a 5-year-old girl.

Maier shared some things with Garry Winogrand, perhaps America’s best-known street photographer. Both were in questionable mental health. Both left thousands of rolls of exposed-but-not-developed film. [See Garry Winogrand show at the National Gallery of Art]

The movie requires more of an attention span than the iPhone generation can typically muster, but if you’re old enough to remember Ilford and Rolleiflex, I recommend the documentary.

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The other day I emailed a fixed-based operator (FBO) to inquire about a fuel stop. I didn’t get an answer and we ended up going to their competitor, thus denying them a return on what is probably at least a $5 million investment in the hangar, lounge, fuel trucks, etc. It is a pretty bad business practice to ignore customers so I dug a little deeper and found out that my email had been caught by a spam filter. I asked if they were going to publish this address at all, why not set the spam filter to “low”? Their response:

We had to raise the spam filter due to the countless emails that came through and looked like they were legitimate only find out the hard way through a network virus they were not. It’s unbelievable the effort people put in trying to scam you. We would receive emails that look as if they came from our headquarters, but in fact were spam.

The regular phone system has already been made useless due to spam (see Set a minimum price for phone calls?) and now maybe we can declare straight-up email as also useless for this kind of public-facing role? Those “contact forms” on sites are kind of annoying, but maybe that is a good answer? (but they usually get sent to someone’s email, right?) What about publishing a Whatsapp address or similar?

Related:

• Swiss pour cold water on our Internet dreams (Internet predicted to have negative value to business)

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