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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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“With New Cannabis Cafes, You Can Smoke ‘Em Where You Bought ‘Em” (WBUR) describes our new regulations:

Sometime soon in Massachusetts, you’ll be able to walk into a cafe, ask for a marijuana product, and consume it right there without heading home first.

The state agency responsible for regulating legalized marijuana approved a policy on Monday that will allow for such establishments, so-called “cannabis cafes,” to open — where one can buy a cannabis product and then legally consume it on the premises, just like buying a drink at a bar.

Related:

• TimeOut on Amsterdam “coffee shops” (apparently, not actually legal)

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“Mom died in 1993, but her daughter kept cashing her Social Security checks for 24 years” (Sacramento Bee) describes a situation that I would imagine to be fairly common. Social Security checks come from the Federal government, but deaths are recorded by local governments?

How is this system supposed to work such that the Federales figure out it is time to stop sending checks? What if the Social Security recipient has emigrated to Mexico or Portugal? (Social Security checks keep coming after emigration, but Medicare entitlement is limited to treatment within the U.S., I think)

As the U.S. population keeps growing and the chance of bureaucrats and beneficiaries encountering one another in person, will this become more common?

Related:

• “Agencies can’t always tell who’s dead and who’s not, so benefit checks keep coming” (Washington Post, 2013)

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From our town mailing list:

Sort of Off Topic since this forum is not ‘Wayland Talk’ but I noticed that some of those ‘Stop the Wayland Monster’ signs now cropping up in [Happy Valley] so I figured it has something become more relevant here. Does someone want to give a somewhat unbiased overview of the pros and cons of this development

Wayland is a suburb where a typical house sits on at least one acre of land (1/2 acre is the zoning minimum; Happy Valley has a 2-acre zoning minimum). A developer is trying to build a four-story apartment complex characterized by opponents as “89-bedroom” (about 45 apartments if they average two bedrooms each).

I know a passionate Bernie/Hillary supporter who lives near the site and summarized his point of view in my response to the list:

My understanding, from a Wayland resident who lives near one of these proposed buildings:

1) immigration into a nation of 325 million is good and needs to be supported with passionate political effort

2) immigration into a town of 13,444 is bad and needs to be fought with passionate political effort

This yielded a firestorm of responses. Example 1:

People who are living there locally are probably objecting to a huge development in their neighborhood that is going to overload the roads and services, add noise and will change the peaceful enjoyment of the area.

American-style auto-centric development is brutal. It makes sense to develop in either in areas with adequate public transportation and services or in small cities trying to reach a critical mass where transportation services other than cars become viable.

So we should grow the U.S. population, but make sure that our own “peaceful enjoyment” is not affected? There are other areas of the U.S. with uncongested roads and underutilized services where the next 100 million Americans will be happy to settle?

The hot-button word “immigration” sparked righteous thoughts, despite the fact that the “immigration” I was talking about was from Sudbury or Framingham to Wayland (i.e., most likely a native-born American moving from one suburb to another):

I missed something: How did this turn into an immigration debate?
Where should immigrants live if not in our cities and towns? Immigration works well if integration is possible, and that is best achieved for small numbers of immigrants in small communities.

The mandate of having 10% affordable housing is very reasonable and needs to be enforced in some way, otherwise it is not going to happen. Wayland proved that point. I am grateful to those in our town who have worked hard to make sure we have 10% of affordable housing, not just because it protects us from unwanted developments, but because diversity is good for all of us.

I.e., diversity is good, but maybe 89 new people (average of 1 per bedroom) is too many for a town of 13,444? A pro-immigration sentiment from another anti-development fellow citizen:

Thank you! And, we should remember that all of us were immigrants at one time, unless you are Native American.

Some of us are first generation, and some of us 5th or more, but, immigrants all.

[To my knowledge there aren’t any Native Americans who have chosen to purchase 2-acre lots in our town so we didn’t hear from them regarding how immigration has worked out from their perspective.]

The simplest response to my note:

Well said. I personally find the Wayland persons comment bigoted and ignorant.

Related:

• How was the immigration of Akayed Ullah supposed to benefit native-born Americans?
• How was the immigration of Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov supposed to benefit native-born Americans?
• How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?

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“Investigation finds Swedish scientists committed scientific misconduct” is a featured piece in Nature about a purportedly fraudulent paper published in… Science (coincidentally, Nature‘s main competition).

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“What Happens if the Tax Bill Is a Revenue Disaster?” (nytimes) is a piece by Nobel laurate Paul Krugman. He uses his macro-sized brain to predict how Americans and American enterprises will react to this bill and thus what the likely impact on revenue is.

My comment:

Thanks, Professor Krugman, Your last prediction about the markets and the economy that I can recall was in November 2016: “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. … If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

I don’t follow the stock market closely. Was there, in fact, ever any kind of recovery for the S&P 500?

On a more serious note, why do we think it would be possible to come up with an accurate prediction? For individuals there has been a lot of research on the tendency of people to work more as rates are lowered or work fewer hours as tax rates are increased. But do we have any data or experience with corporations? Given the complexity of the tax code for business it doesn’t seem as though a simple “look at the rates” approach would work.

Was there any economist who predicted that U2 would move its songs to an offshore Netherlands trust or use corporate shells in Malta and Guernsey for property investments? (The Sun) Since it has never previously been tried, how can anyone know what would happen if it were possible to pay the IRS a straight 20 percent instead of paying armies of lawyers and accountants and offshore functionaries?

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One of the things that drives children, especially teenagers, crazy about adults is our poor memories, which lead to us repeating ourselves. The problem gets worse as we get older. Since our phones are always listening (and sending the audio back to Vladimir Putin’s office?), why not have our phones keep track of everything that we’ve ever said to everyone. The phone can then vibrate if we’re advising a younger person of something that we’ve already noted. For the fifth repetition and beyond, perhaps a Bluetooth shock band can zap us. This could reduce embarrassment for adults and improve relations between adults and teenagers.

Readers: What do you think? Useful?

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