Calling in an airstrike on my own position (iOS 11 and refusal to leave Photos in iCloud)

My war with iOS 11 is over.

Background: The “pocket camera” feature of a typical smartphone represents roughly half of the value of the device to me. Thus when Apple silently changed the format of photos to HEIC, which few Windows applications can understand, half of the value of my iPhone 7 Plus was destroyed.

One of the strategies that I tried for getting back to something useful was enabling Dropbox’s “Camera Uploads”. This caused Dropbox to try to upload every photo that I had ever taken with any Apple device connected to iCloud. You might think that enabled camera uploads would give users the option to say “just pictures that I take from now on, not ones that I took 2 years ago,” but you’d be wrong.

Dropbox would make an API call within iOS that would result in the full-res photo being downloaded from iCloud before it was pushed back up into Dropbox’s cloud. This quickly filled up the iPhone’s memory, rendering the device useless. Although I had deinstalled Dropbox and “Optimize Storage” for Photos was selected, the phone would not drop the copies of stuff from iCloud.

I tried disabling and reenabling iCloud. I tried resetting all settings.

Finally, in homage to embattled Vietnam platoons, I called in an airstrike on my own position, wiping the entire device and restoring from a recent backup. Although the backup post-dated the “full storage” debacle, apparently iCloud photo copies are not stored additionally as part of the backup. The iCloud caching function went back to its normal behavior, holding onto only a few GB on the device.

[Separately, the phone says that 7 GB are devoted to “System”. That seems like a lot for a Unix variant. Does it start out this porky or is that huge size somehow related to the fact that I was using an iPhone for a long time under iOS 10 and then upgraded (rather than reinstalled) iOS 11?]

Thus ends my personal story for Veterans Day. I think it illustrates how fortunate we are that some of our most difficult struggles are with sysadmin.

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PBS propaganda series about Vietnam

“Making history safe again: What Ken Burns gets wrong about Vietnam” (Salon) is an interview with a professional historian, Christian Appy, who says that the government-funded TV station promotes, as far as possible, the idea that the government-funded Vietnam War was a just and good idea. The government-funded TV station particularly pushes the idea of “American exceptionalism” in this $30 million series, which is useful when you’re asking people to pay taxes at 2X the rates of the most efficient countries. The U.S. government is an exceptional force for good on Planet Earth and therefore taxpayers should be happy to fund it with up to 100 percent of their earnings.

Readers: Who has watched this series? How does it compare to what you’ve learned from other historical sources? What else are you thinking about on this Veterans Day?

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Kayakers defend Angelika Graswald

“Woman Who Sabotaged Fiancé’s Kayak Is Sentenced to Up to 4 Years” (nytimes) is interesting for the comments from experienced kayakers who say that unscrewing the drain plug couldn’t have been sufficient to kill the (life-insured) fiancé. On the one hand, this makes sense because Ms. Graswald could have made more money by going through with the marriage and collecting alimony or child support (see Angelika Graswald Life Insurance versus Child Support net present value calculation) and therefore the financial motive isn’t completely solid. But, on the other hand, a surfer/kayaker in California did and filmed the test (he sank).

That one guy with an action cam can end the speculation is one of the things that I love about the Internet.

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Attributing failure to sexism

“A Smart Breast Pump: Mothers Love It. VCs Don’t: The financial struggles of a young startup beloved by mothers highlights a blind spot of the male-dominated venture capital industry.” (Bloomberg) was linked-to by a Harvard professor friend on Facebook. She introduced the article with “Here’s a startup with an excited market, meeting a real need, but having a hard time raising VC funding bc boobs are hard to talk about in board rooms.”

We know that these entrepreneurs raised $6.5 million. But now they’ve spent all of it and couldn’t raise more. The entrepreneurs, the Bloomberg journalist, and the Harvard professor are confident that sexism and/or venture capitalists not wanting to discuss breast pumps explain the failure to get the next stage of funding. But does stating this as a fact make it true?

Let’s see if there could be another explanation…

The market leader in this field is Medela, a Swiss company with 1,740 employees and more than $500 million per year in revenue, mostly thanks to Obamacare mandates that insurance companies give customers a new breast pump for each new baby. I know people who have four kids and… because Americans get a new Medela pump “free” (i.e., paid for by other Americans) with each kid, four Medela pumps (two brand-new in boxes in the closet, one that gets used, and one that was unboxed and used temporarily somewhere). The basic Medela product gets 4.5 stars from 1,675 Amazon customers. Medela is in every Target, every CVS, every Walmart, etc.

The founder of the startup, Janica Alvarez, has a master of science in bioethics (LinkedIn). Her co-founder, Jeffrey Alvarez, has a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering (LinkedIn) plus an MBA.

What if this startup can out-compete Medela? The other successful companies in this sector are Philips (Dutch, with nearly $30 billion per year in revenue) and Ameda AG, a private Swiss company founded in 1962 (hard to find revenue numbers).

So the proposition was “fund innovative Americans with minimal credentials and experience to compete with boring Europeans who have nothing more than Ph.D.s in the relevant fields, a centuries-old tradition of craftsmanship, and billions of dollars in current revenue.” Investors in Theranos tried this against Siemens and, starting in 2015, learned that hopes and dreams did not magically materialize.

[Of course it is possible that a clever engineer who doesn’t work at one of the current market leaders could design an improvement to the existing products. But then it is just as possible that the market leaders can respond with their own improvements and push the improved version into every Target, CVS, and Walmart a few months later.]

Is this an example of Americans having reached the stage where we can blame all of our failures on an -ism?

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Social Justice Education Facilitators

Oberlin College is hiring Social Justice Education Facilitators via this web page:

Job Summary: The Social Justice Education Facilitators (SJEF) helps with the creation and implementation of the MRC’s social justice curriculum and education program.

Responsibilities: Be trained to facilitate Power, Privilege, and Oppression Training, Beyond the Binary Training, and Microaggressions Trainings; … Document and organize various resources on anti-oppression work

Qualifications: They must also have a working knowledge on the various forms of oppression, including but not limited to: race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, citizenship, etc.

Unfortunately, social justice doesn’t seem to pay a fair $15/hour wage (only $8.15/hour).

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Review of Ellen Pao’s book

“The Self-Styled Martyr of Silicon Valley: The odd tale of Ellen Pao” (Commentary) is a review of Ellen Pao’s Reset book (see Ellen Pao writes something kind of interesting). The review summarizes the facts:

Pao is a former corporate attorney and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who went to work for the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins and then, in 2012, filed a $16 million gender-discrimination lawsuit against it. She alleged workplace retaliation by a partner at the firm with whom she had a brief affair. Then she alleged that she was fired in retaliation for the lawsuit. Potential damages could have run as high as $144 million.

Is it true that she was an “entrepreneur”? Wikipedia says that she worked for a couple of established companies, such as BEA Systems, prior to joining Kleiner Perkins. Is any non-government job in the U.S. now considered “entrepreneurship”? [And remember that she could have made a lot more than $144 million without risking an unfavorable jury verdict; see Litigious Minds Think Alike: Divorce litigators react to the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit]

Apparently Pao is working her kid pretty hard for the book, having the sad little nine-year-old wonder about the gender balance of a “coding camp.” (Did this happen organically? I’ve seen a lot of gender-unbalanced groups of children and never heard one comment on the gender balance.)

We learn that Pao is a good example of The Son Also Rises and also regression to the mean. Her parents both have engineering PhDs; Pao earned a bachelor’s in engineering and then a law degree.

Based on my experience as a software expert witness, Pao’s description of big law firm life isn’t recognizable:

Pao goes to work for Cravath, Swaine & Moore, … one male partner would always lose his copy of the documents they were working on and would have to look over the shoulder of one of his female underlings. She saw him one day staring down the shirt of one of her female colleagues …. In another instance, “a senior partner would… plant himself just outside the doorway of my colleague’s office, licking an ice cream cone while staring at her.”

Perhaps due to the fact that law firms bill by the hour, I’ve never seen one lawyer simply stand in a hallway for any reason.

The reviewer is as skeptical as the jury regarding Pao’s stated reasons for her failure to make senior partner at Kleiner:

This is all perfectly believable [including the senior partner putting on a display of idleness for everyone else at Cravath to see?], but the problem is that things went downhill for Pao when she started sleeping with one of the other partners—one Ajit Nazre, who was married and had children. … how old do you have to be before you recognize yourself as a walking cliché? Sleeping with a married guy at the office who promises to leave his wife for you?

Apparently estimating the probability of your married sex partner suing his or her spouse is not a subject taught at Princeton or Harvard!

Pao’s conversion (as seen in Bruno) of Buddy Fletcher from homosexual to heterosexual is touched on only lightly in the review: “Fletcher had relationships with men before he married Pao.” This review is the first place that I’ve seen a description of Mr. Fletcher blazing a trail recently followed by some Hollywood celebrities:

It’s no surprise that Pao’s book doesn’t get into the fact that Fletcher himself has been accused of sexual harassment and discrimination by employees. In 2003, Fletcher was sued by a man he’d hired to manage his home in Connecticut. The man alleged that Fletcher made sexual advances toward him. A few years later, Fletcher was sued by another property manager, who claimed he had been fired after refusing Fletcher’s sexual advances. Both men reached confidential settlements with Fletcher.

Who else loves Ellen Pao as much as I do? “The case did make Pao a feminist talking point for a time. She notes that she earned praise from Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg for her brave stance.”

In some ways the most interesting part of the review is that proof by repetition succeeds. The author of the review is Naomi Schaefer Riley. Her Wikipedia page indicates no technical training and no experience ever working for a tech firm or even living in a part of the country with a significant tech industry presence. But she feels comfortable talking about the bad stuff that happens in Silicon Valley:

For all her faults, Pao is not wrong about the “brogrammer” atmosphere at these companies. … At many Silicon Valley firms, men really do act like they are in a college dorm. Their conversations and behavior are completely inappropriate for work,

How does Ms. Riley know that the 35-year-old programmers vesting-in-peace at Google are partying like fraternity brothers? What is the evidence that the typical Silicon Valley firm includes “conversations and behavior” that are more “inappropriate” than what might occur in a car dealership or an airline crew lounge?

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Our robot overlords want to keep us addicted to opiates (Google Ads censorship)

We decided to experiment with using Google AdWords to promote Medical School 2020, our book about what it is like to attend medical school.

Here are excerpts from an email that we received:

Ad Text:

Thinking about Medical School?
Learn what it is like.
Follow our anonymous hero through four years. One chapter every week.
http://fifthchance.com/MedicalSchool2020

Ad Status: Disapproved
Ad Issue(s): Unapproved substances

====================
Disapproval Reason
====================
Unapproved substances: Ads aren’t allowed to promote certain unapproved substances, irrespective of any claims of legality. This includes promotion of products containing or related to ephedra.

The text does contain the names of some drugs, including “heroin” and “opioids” and “oxycodone.” But I hope that most human readers would consider this part of a discussion regarding opiates rather than a promotion of opiates!

Could it be that our robot overlords don’t want humans talking about these issues?

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Apple’s new (lowercase) Jersey home

“After a Tax Crackdown, Apple Found a New Shelter for Its Profits” (nytimes) is a interesting companion to our debate about corporate taxation (which some of us can sort of vote on today, depending on where we live). To me the most interesting part is the scale of the virtual offshoring:

Since the mid-1990s, multinationals based in the United States have increasingly shifted profits into offshore tax havens. Indeed, a tiny handful of jurisdictions — mostly Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands — now account for 63 percent of all profits that American multinational companies claim to earn overseas, according to an analysis by Gabriel Zucman, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Those destinations hold far less than 1 percent of the world’s population.

Apple is now generating huge profits in (old) Jersey.

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How can young Americans adapt to a post-Weinstein world?

The New York Times asks “Will Harvey Weinstein’s Fall Finally Reform Men?” and comes up with a weak “maybe”:

This reckoning is all to the good, even if it is far too late. It feels as though a real and lasting transformation may be afoot — until you remember that this isn’t the first time women have sounded the alarm.

Remember former President Bill Clinton, whose popularity endures despite a long string of allegations of sexual misconduct and, in one case, rape — all of which he has denied. Mr. Clinton did eventually admit to the affair with an intern, Monica Lewinsky, that nearly toppled his presidency, but he pointed out that it was not illegal.

Then, of course, there’s the current occupant of the Oval Office, who won the election only weeks after the public heard him brag about grabbing women’s genitalia [I interpreted Trump’s statement, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything,” as a hypothetical regarding what some American women were willing to do in order to be close to Hollywood stardom, not as a story about something he’d actually done]

The key is to foster work environments where women feel safe and men feel obliged to report sexual harassment. “People need to be afraid not just of doing these things, but also of not doing anything when someone around them does it,” Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook

This may turn out to be the year when the tide finally turned on sexual harassment. The elements for a permanent cultural shift are certainly in place. More women have entered the work force, and the pay gap with men is closing, though not fast enough. More women than men are graduating from college;

In the end, though, the most lasting change will have to come from men, who are doing virtually all the sexual harassing. Boys must be raised to understand why that behavior is wrong, teenagers need to be reminded of it and grown men need to pay for it until they get the message.

Although in theory women could be denounced by men and, in a transgender age it is tough to know what “women” or “men” in the workplace might refer to, the New York Times seems to think it is men who be denounced and then “pay for it.” So let’s look at what young American men might do. Some will be social justice warriors, of course, and seek to improve their fellow humans. Let’s be grateful that we have those altruistic souls among us. In a society of 325 million (and growing!), however, it is more realistic for most people to adapt to changes rather than to try to make changes.

Let’s consider the young American man. Depending on the state in which the encounter took place, if he has sex with a woman he risks losing, at her exclusive option, roughly one third of his after-tax income going forward (see “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”). Depending on the state of residence, if he marries a woman and has kids he is exposed to losing, at any time of the woman’s choosing, his house, the kids, and roughly half of his income going forward (see Real World Divorce, but note that this is not true in states such as Nevada). These risks cannot be insured against, though they can be largely prevented by staying out of the workforce.

Onto this we add the new risks of career termination from sexual harassment allegations. In the old (not necessarily good) days, a woman could not start a complaint with “I went to this married guy’s hotel room and then…” or with “Twenty years ago, this guy tried to…” Either statement would have reflected negatively on the woman (why did she go to the hotel room? why did she wait 20 years?) and therefore wouldn’t have been uttered. Perhaps more importantly, the statement couldn’t have gotten media attention or an infinite life on the Internet. A woman might be able to spread rumors about a man in a small town, but he would be free to relocate and get a job in a distant city. A potential employer in California wouldn’t have any way to learn that the man had been denounced in Upstate New York. Consider the man who reads Medical School 2020, invests four years and $300,000 in medical school, invests another five years in training, and then works 70-hour weeks to build a practice. All of this investment can become worthless overnight in terms of employability.

Let’s consider more direct risks. A financially successful American can be sued at any time for sexual harassment or sex-related misdeeds. Unlike with criminal cases (which also can be consequential and costly to defend), there is no “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. The defendant will lose if the plaintiff is slightly more believable. In the best case, the result of defending such a lawsuit will be a $1 million bill for legal fees and no payments to the plaintiff. The worst case, however, cannot be known in our Common law system. The only limit is a jury’s imagination. Consider Erin Andrews, for example. A jury found that that she had suffered $55 million in damages from being filmed naked by a guest in an adjacent hotel room. As that is typically more than a hotel would have to pay for negligently killing a guest, it would have been impossible to predict an award of this size and, again, likely impossible to insure against.

Older Americans tend to be stuck in a rut. We have to keep doing whatever we’re doing. But maybe a young person could avoid the above risks by making smart choices?

I posted a comment on the NYT article suggesting that perhaps American men were already adapting…

American men are already in the process of being reformed! Every year a smaller percentage of them expose themselves to accusations of sexual harassment because their labor force participation rate falls. If Joe Millennial is at home (means-tested public housing, please!) playing Xbox 24/7, who is going to bother to accuse him of saying or doing something inappropriate? I haven’t heard of anyone whose SSDI check was cut off because of misbehavior.

The best way to avoid litigation in the U.S. is to be asset-free and income-free (welfare payments don’t typically count as income that can be attacked by a plaintiff, though SSDI can be harvested by a child support or alimony plaintiff). The right to live in a $1 million city-owned or city-obtained-from-a-developer apartment is more secure than technical ownership of a $1 million apartment (can be attacked suddenly by a civil plaintiff or gradually by a city via higher property taxes to pay for retired government workers’ pensions and health care).

If the welfare system in an American’s preferred state of residence is not especially generous, he can look at being on the receiving end of child support, alimony, and property division profits. If he marries a high-income woman and quits his job after the first child is born he can set himself up to be the “dependent spouse” and “primary parent” (or at least a 50/50 parent) and thus be entitled to a free house, alimony, child support, etc. (see the example of a man married to a fund manager in Massachusetts Prenuptial Agreements)

If the man is unwilling to let go of 1950s ideas of masculinity and insists on working, how about a union job? An employer cannot simply fire a union worker, e.g., because of an anonymous denunciation about behavior 20 years earlier. Among union jobs, I vote for unionized airline pilot because most interactions with co-workers are recorded electronically (pilots with children should be careful about where they live, however, because in winner-take-all states that look to the “historical pattern of care” in deciding which parent will be the winner, the airline pilot is almost guaranteed to become the loser parent; this can be avoided by establishing residence in a state that defaults to 50/50 shared parenting).

What about the Big Hammer: emigration. The American man who emigrates at age 18 will save a fortune in college costs (universities anywhere else in the world are vastly cheaper, and sometimes entirely free). If he settles in a Civil law jurisdiction, his exposure to lawsuits of all types is greatly reduced and the outcome of any lawsuit is much more predictable because it is codified (e.g., Erin Andrews would have received a pre-specified amount, not an amount that could only be known by looking into the hearts and minds of the jury). A Dutch friend: “You’re a lot less likely to be sued because the plaintiff has to pay all of the court’s costs and, if she loses, the defendant’s legal costs. The legal fees are a percentage of the amount at stake and the amount at stake is written down in a law.” The American man who emigrates to a civil law jurisdiction also greatly reduces his exposure to divorce, alimony, child support, and custody lawsuits (see the International chapter of Real World Divorce). The profitability of children is capped in most civil law jurisdictions, thus reducing the financial incentives to plaintiffs. Alimony may be entirely unavailable, e.g., in Germany. Custody may be determined by statute, e.g., “woman always wins” or “always 50/50,” thus eliminating the possibility of a custody fight. The chance of children living without their two parents in many European civil law jurisdictions is only about half of what it is in the U.S.

Of course, I’m sure that many people in Common law jurisdictions will get through this era of denunciations and manage to (a) dodge lawsuits from a spouse, (b) dodge lawsuits from sexual harassment accusers, and (c) continue to be able to work in the careers that they’ve chosen and trained for. After all, most Russians were able to get through the Stalin era without being denounced by angry or jealous neighbors. That said, why take these risks at all when it is possible to move to a Civil law jurisdiction and live without fear?

Where can a young man seek to go? For long-term economic growth prospects it might be wise to look at the World Bank ease of doing business rankings and also the Tax Foundation’s International Tax Competitiveness Index. Countries that do well on both scales and that operate under Civil law: Estonia, Latvia, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Korea (mostly civil law?).

Readers: What do you think? We can all agree, I hope, that it would be wonderful if Americans never mistreated each other and therefore there was no need for a system of career-ending public denunciations, wealth-draining civil lawsuits, etc. However, humans mistreating other humans is an old story. So how should a young American adapt to the new environment in which decades of work and savings are more likely to be wiped out by an accusation?

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Bitcoin-mining space heater?

I never run out of brilliant ideas for this blog… because I steal them from smarter people. Here’s one from Andrea Matranga: If you’re going to deploy an electric space heater in a cold bedroom, bathroom, or office, instead use a bitcoin-mining box so that the electricity isn’t simply wasted. If the capital cost is objectionable, use a previous generation of hardware (essentially worthless). The result won’t be a profit, but it will be less of a loss than if a regular space heater had been employed.

Readers: thoughts?

 

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