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My grand theory that “any law that can be passed already has been passed” seems to have been proven wrong. Both the House and the Senate have passed significant changes to U.S. tax rates, at least on business, but the changes are at least slightly different? When does the final bill reach the Trumpenfuhrer in the Reich Chancellery?

My Facebook friends are preparing for Armageddon. Here is a sampling:

[from a university professor who is guaranteed to get a paycheck until she is too senile to navigate into the office (i.e., she has tenure)] I just got out of a meeting of shell-shocked professors and deans, staring wide-eyed at the disaster that is about to befall higher education in America.

My physician friend explains how the GOP tax bill has the potential for catastrophic effects on her patients’ health, and describes her experience when calling various senators about the bill’s implications.

If you have Republicans representing your interests in government, please read about how they are stampeding to screw 99% of their constituents over with a tax bill they dare not debate in public, and which the father of Reagan’s tax bill regards as insane in its particulars.

To my friends in states with GOP senators who are wavering on this catastrophic tax bill, thank you for calling them!

The tax “reform” plan is as dumb and evil as the health care “repeal and replace” plan. Getting rid of the estate tax, which only affects the very wealthy, will be expensive.

… as a Middle Class New Yorker I am angry that I will face a tax increase under the Republican Party’s “soak the middle class” tax plan.

[from a former university professor] Speaking of taxes, this might be a moment to remember that the lying, treasonous, self-dealing, justice-obstructing, nepotistic, emolumental, sexually abusive moron has never published his.

From what I have heard, it is unclear why this is a disaster. Tax rates for both corporations and individuals will end up pretty close to what the UK runs (some of their personal income tax rates seem higher than U.S. federal rates, but when you add in what U.S. states and cities charge, the overall government rake should be the same). Why shouldn’t our government be able to live on what is sufficient to feed the UK government? Especially given the fact that the UK government rolls health care into their direct government spending. (I guess one could argue that the U.S. government is spectacularly inefficient compared to European counterparts and therefore needs a larger percentage of GDP.)

One question is what the real tax rates will be. Alternative minimum tax has been retained for both individuals and corporations? If so, how can anyone who is not a CPA even estimate his or her tax liability?

Estate tax is gone or not? (If so, there will be a lot accountants and lawyers needing to find new work! Most of the estate tax workarounds rely on professional advice.)

How about the hedge fund managers’ favorite tactic of stuffing all earnings into a Bermuda insurance company and thus deferring income tax liability for 50 years? Is there anything in the bill to make that tougher? (see also New York Post)

What about taxing the bogus “free tuition” that universities pretend to give graduate students? NSF and DARPA fund a lot of graduate students. Presumably they aren’t going to want to see their budgeted funds drained away by the IRS and put back into the Treasury for other agencies to spend. (See Ugliest part of the Republican tax plan: What if universities were forced to calculate the value of a graduate education?)

Readers: Does the stock market go crazy after this? Or are most publicly-traded companies already so good at tax-avoidance that the cash differences will be minimal?

Related:

• Harvard econ prof on how the old tax rates discouraged moderately successful Americans from working (people not rich enough to bring in the lawyers, accountants, and Bermuda insurance vehicles)
• What happens to the charity industry if the Republican tax plan goes through?
• Why young people don’t like the Republican tax plan: they are planning to be W-2 wage slaves
• The Republican tax plan was written by divorce litigators?

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Sometimes teenagers are the wisest among us. I promised to send something to my nephew, a high school student, and asked him to nag me if I didn’t inform him that it had shipped. His reply:

Please take your time Uncle Philip. I know you’re extremely busy especially now that your weblog needs to keep up with the Hollywood Cleansing -which is up to about three guys a day now.

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I asked a young violinist whether the world of classical music could be the next domino to fall as American society purges itself of accused sexual transgressors. “It’s rampant,” he responded. How can be positions be traded for sex, though, when many auditions are blind? “It is still possible to trade sex for access to the best teachers. I know of an 83-year-old teacher with a 26-year-old girlfriend. She seems to be okay with it.”

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One thing that Americans can’t do is use the term “Begging the question” correctly.

How about this real-life example that might stick in American minds…

friend: (pointing to open box on kitchen island) Look at this rifle that I got today. [an IWI Tavor]

me: (to the 11-year-old girl on the other side of the kitchen island, using a knife to sculpt a diorama for an English class) Why does your dad need another gun?

girl: Because he’s my dad.

What do logic- and philosophy-minded readers think? Was the girl begging the question?

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“How a half-educated tech elite delivered us into chaos” (Guardian) says that if only the nerds behind Facebook and Google had a humanities education, these Internet monopolies would enrich our lives instead of degrading them:

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, where he was studying psychology and computer science, but seems to have been more interested in the latter. Now mathematics, engineering and computer science are wonderful disciplines – intellectually demanding and fulfilling. And they are economically vital for any advanced society. But mastering them teaches students very little about society or history – or indeed about human nature. As a consequence, the new masters of our universe are people who are essentially only half-educated. They have had no exposure to the humanities or the social sciences, the academic disciplines that aim to provide some understanding of how society works, of history and of the roles that beliefs, philosophies, laws, norms, religion and customs play in the evolution of human culture.

As one perceptive observer Bob O’Donnell puts it, “a liberal arts major familiar with works like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, or even the work of ancient Greek historians, might have been able to recognise much sooner the potential for the ‘tyranny of the majority’ or other disconcerting sociological phenomena that are embedded into the very nature of today’s social media platforms. While seemingly democratic at a superficial level, a system in which the lack of structure means that all voices carry equal weight, and yet popularity, not experience or intelligence, actually drives influence, is clearly in need of more refinement and thought than it was first given.”

(Coincidentally, the author of the piece, John Naughton, had a career teaching humanities…)

The Guardian doesn’t seem to have done any fact-checking with Wikipedia, which says that Mark Zuckerberg had about $200,000 of education, including the humanities, in a Westchester County public school system before picking up additional humanities education at the Phillips Exeter academy for rich kids: “On his college application, Zuckerberg stated that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek.” Zuckerberg also had two years at Harvard.

Let’s assume that this can be legitimately described as “no exposure to the humanities.” And that explains why Facebook does not give greater prominence to approved points of view. Is that why Facebook is degrading us as human beings and degrading our society? The book iGen, however, suggests that Facebook is inherently bad:

In seven years, social media sites went from being a daily activity for half of teens to almost all of them. That’s especially true for girls: 87% of 12th-grade girls used social media sites almost every day in 2015, compared to 77% of boys. The increases in use have been even larger for minority and lower-income teens—in 2008, white and higher-SES (social scientists call this socioeconomic status, or SES) teens were more likely to use social media sites every day, but by 2015 the race and class differences had disappeared.

For example, 8th graders who spend ten or more hours a week on social media are 56% more likely to be unhappy than those who don’t. Admittedly, ten hours a week is a lot—so what about those who spend merely six hours a week or more on social media? They are still 47% more likely to say they are unhappy. But the opposite is true of in-person social interaction: those who spend more time with their friends in person are 20% less likely to be unhappy

Teens who visit social networking sites every day are actually more likely to agree “I often feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends” (see Figure 3.7; there are fewer activities on this list than for happiness because the loneliness measure is asked on fewer versions of the questionnaire). In contrast, those who spend time with their friends in person or who play sports are less lonely.

Forty-eight percent more girls felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared to a 27% increase for boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them more opportunities to feel left out and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media are also the perfect medium for the verbal aggression favored by girls. Even before the Internet, boys tended to bully one another physically and girls verbally. Social media give middle and high school girls a 24/7 platform to carry out the verbal aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls. Girls are twice as likely as boys to experience this type of electronic bullying (known as cyberbullying); in the YRBSS survey of high school students, 22% of girls said they had been cyberbullied in the last year, compared to 10% of boys.

Social media might play a role in these feelings of inadequacy: many people post only their successes online, so many teens don’t realize that their friends fail at things, too. The social media profiles they see make them feel like failures. If they spent more time with their friends in person, they might realize that they are not the only ones making mistakes. One study found that college students who used Facebook more often were more depressed—but only if they felt more envy toward others.

Azar, the high school senior we met in earlier chapters, is an astute observer of the patina of positivity on social media covering the ugly underbelly of reality. “People post pretty Instagram posts, like ‘My life is so great.’ Their lives are crap! They’re teenagers,” she says. “[They post] ‘I’m so grateful for my bestie.’ That is b.s. You are not so grateful for your bestie, because in two weeks she’s going to, like, cheat with your boyfriend, and then y’all gonna have a bitch fight and y’all gonna, like, claw each other’s ears off. That is what a teenager’s life is.”

More: Read iGen.

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When Bitcoin was new (and cheap!) I remember it being sold as a way to do payments efficiently, especially for small payments, e.g., across international borders.

I recently learned from a Bitcoin expert, however, that handling payments has become a weak spot for Bitcoin. “It costs at least $15 to get a transaction recorded by the miners,” he said. What if you don’t pay that much? “Your transaction will languish out there for a few days before finally dying. If you want it to settle within a few minutes you have to pay $15.” (the money for this fee is split up)

Does this make Bitcoin useless? “Think of it as a store of value, like gold bars in a vault,” he said. “It is not a replacement for a credit card.” So it is a digital Fort Knox, but it doesn’t hold anything other than numbers (and, of course, there is no way to lose by investing in Bitcoin because they’re not making any more numbers).

This guy has a couple of businesses centered around Bitcoin trading, etc. But he also bought a small quantity of Bitcoin back in 2010. How did that work out over the past seven years? He sought out my advice regarding which turbine-powered helicopter to buy for family weekend trips. (I recommended a used AStar for $1.5 million.)

[Should you dive in and buy? He thinks the price will fall in the short run, but eventually go to $100,000 to $300,000 per coin.]

Related:

• “One Bitcoin Transaction Now Uses as Much Energy as Your House in a Week”

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A few times on this blog I have referenced Garrison Keillor and/or Prairie Home Companion.

• From 2006: Mama Tried, reworked by Garrison Keillor
• From 2004: Your friend: the FBI

My link to the 2006 show is broken. Apparently everything the 75-year-old Keillor did has now been stuffed down a memory hole and the replacement is not very funny, e.g., “Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) is terminating its contracts with Garrison Keillor and his private media companies after recently learning of allegations of his inappropriate behavior with an individual who worked with him.” (YouTube hasn’t been thoroughly scrubbed yet, though, here’s an example.)

I will miss a June 2, 2007 show featuring Yvonne Freese, a teenager at the time, singing “God Help the Outcasts” (template used for a song to entertain the toddlers: “Mindy the Crippler”).

Readers: What will you miss about Garrison Keillor? Maybe this blog post will one day be the only Web-based evidence of his existence.

[Separately, does it make sense that it is easier to find sermons by Anwar al-Awlaki than TV or radio shows associated with those accused of mixing sex and business?]

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In the 1970s if someone had asked “Would your life be better or worse if phone calls were free?” I would have said, unequivocally, “better.” Now 95 percent of the calls that I receive are spam, usually with a robot on the other end.

If I could replace Donald Trump as supreme dictator, my first act would be to set a minimum price for (legacy network) phone calls of, e.g., 50 cents. There could be exceptions for friends-and-family circles. And maybe each phone line could get a monthly allowance as well. So the average resident of the U.S. would seldom incur this fee, but it would become uneconomic to use humans in India or robots in the U.S. to torture Americans with their own phones.

Phone companies are already heavily regulated, so I don’t see why this decree would be illegal. If the phone companies are getting crazy fat from these fees then presumably their monthly rates will come down a bit due to competition and/or regulation.

It doesn’t seem necessary to regulate voice communication via modern services such as Facebook, FaceTime, Skype, etc. Those services already require some authentication, right? And it is easy to say “just block anyone who isn’t on my contacts list”.

Readers: thoughts?

Related: Back in the 1980s, Ed Fredkin asked MIT students if they would resist a dictator who tried to install a bell right next to their heads in their bedrooms that could be run at any time of night. If we would resist the government imposing this on us, why would we do it voluntarily? (Of course, now the bell is in our pocket!)

Also related: Why wasn’t the phone system completely reorganized around 1985 such that people tell the carrier (a) when they’re available, (b) with whom they wish to communicate in the near-term? The carrier could then match up people who wanted to talk at a time when both were free to talk.

Finally: The country has its collective panties in a twist regarding net neutrality, with reasonable arguments on both sides about the extent to which the FCC should regulate Internet traffic. Meanwhile, everyone agrees that the FCC actually is supposed to regulate the legacy phone network and nobody complains that, under the FCC’s watch, the phone network has turned into an instrument of torture.

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Today on Facebook one of my friends decried that “women have tolerated a lot of inappropriate behavior” in the workforce and that the current expulsion of accused men from the workforce is “proportionally understated.” What’s interesting about that? She is a Ph.D.-educated prime working age childless American who quit her career after marrying a rich guy whom she had described as “unattractive.” So she’s passionate on the subject of how women are treated in a labor force of which she is no longer a member.

On a related note, Sheryl Sandberg linked to “Melinda Gates: The World is Finally Listening. Me too. Me too. Me too.” (TIME), noting that “This is such an important piece from my friend Melinda Gates. Stories about sexual harassment and assault … affect women all over the world, from every walk of life.” Here’s what Melinda Gates herself had to say:

2017 is proving to be a watershed moment for women in the workplace and beyond. Instead of being bullied into retreat or pressured into weary resignation, we are raising our voices—and raising them louder than ever before.

What workplace is Melinda Gates in? She is co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (executive team). There is one person at the enterprise who is nominally at the same level, but this is her husband and she may in fact be his supervisor (see “How Melinda and Bill Gates shared school drop-off duty, and changed a community in the process” for how Melinda got Bill, then CEO of Microsoft, to do kid drop-offs and pick-ups (at the time Melinda had no W-2 job)). If there are people at the foundation who are bullying her, why doesn’t she fire them? (or maybe assign them to work with Ebola victims in Africa)

we have been taught that being born female comes with a cost.

What cost did Melinda Gates incur as a result of being female? She was able to gain roughly $100 billion in spending power by marrying Bill Gates, so wouldn’t our first guess be that she would be $100 billion poorer if she’d been born male? Perhaps she is saying that she have obtained more spending power by working if she had been born a man. Wikipedia says that she has a bachelor’s in CS and an MBA. So she thinks she could have earned at least $101 billion with these credentials? Or is she saying that, had she been born as a man she/he would have persuaded Bill Gates to enter into a same-sex marriage so she would still have had the $100 billion in spending power from the marriage plus additional spending power from W-2 labor? (But Melinda Gates got married in 1994 and same-sex marriage was not possible prior to 2004 (Massachusetts).)

[Also, why is sex at birth relevant in our transgender-friendly age? Why isn’t it “identifying as female comes with a cost”?]

Melinda Gates is looking forward to justice in the future:

I hope that her words are this year’s legacy—and that there will always be women to talk to and ears to hear. Because if there are, then justice will finally be served for all of us.

She includes herself in “us,” I think, but doesn’t explain what injustice she has personally suffered.

With Sheryl Sandberg and Melinda Gates as their champions, and armed with a full understanding of their day-to-day challenges, can women all of the world now expect a brave new world of justice?

Related:

• Gender equity should be measured by consumption, not income?

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We have a 2014 Honda Odyssey EX-L whose lease is expiring. The minivan has only 22,400 miles on it. The dealer says that it is worth $21,000 as a trade-in. kbb.com estimates $21,507 (range of $20,652-22,361). The dealer says that he can sell it for close to $26,000 with a short warranty. kbb.com says that we could sell it to a private party for $23,335 (minimal warranty required in Massachusetts for a private transaction) and that a “fair purchase price” from a dealer is $24,304 whether “certified” or not.

Let’s assume that what the dealer sales manager told me is the best information. He’s planning to make about 24 percent gross profit on the sale while taking a minimal risk of warranty expense (a three-year-old Honda with 22,400 miles shouldn’t melt down). Isn’t this kind of a fat margin for American retail?

[As evidence for the “fat margin,” the actual owner of the dealership keeps a “business” jet at our local airport (his dealerships are all local, so it is tough to see how the jet could be used for business) and has a Bell 407 standing by for shorter hops.]

Separately, as part of the new car shopping process I test-drove a 2018 Honda Odyssey Elite with acoustic side glass as well as the acoustic windshield that comes on the EX-L. It seems to measure roughly 1 dB quieter than the cheaper EX-L model. On smooth pavement at 70 mph, therefore, the meter was showing just 63-64 dBA. It is definitely quieter than the 2014 model, but I am not sure that it is noticeably quieter than the EX-L. The cost of ownership is about $2,000 per year higher. The rear entertainment system (low-res screen that flips down from the middle of the ceiling) adds some annoying complexity to the user interface. Turning it on disables the main audio system from playing in the middle or back of the vehicle. Turning the rear entertainment system off, however, does not automatically restore audio to the middle and rear seats. The enormous alloy wheels on the Elite are polished to a shine that would appropriate for driving around during Reno’s Hot August Nights. I prefer the more understated look of the EX-L, not that anyone is likely to be looking at us in our minivan.

Related:

• Honda Odyssey 2018 versus the previous generation

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