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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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“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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