Category: Uncategorized

Facebook is an all-purpose outrage platform. Here’s a friend’s posting:

The MA RMV [Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles] wants $25 to replace a lost registration. They suggest that you do it online and print it yourself. So I logged in to do that. They still want the $25!

He thought it should cost less to use the web site compared to going into a Registry office and waiting in line for two hours.

Given the cost of managing Internet security (see Swiss pour cold water on our Internet dreams from 2015, for example, in which they predict that the cost of securing the Internet will exceed its value to a typical business by 2019), could it be that his proportional share of the security cost is actually more than $25? So it should actually cost more to deal with the government online compared to the in-person fees? (The RMV presumably has somewhat higher security risks than a vanilla ecommerce site.)

[Separately, why did paper registration survive 20 years of mobile Internet and 60 years of computer-managed databases? Police officers are supposed to be connected to a network, at least by voice communication to a dispatcher. Why can’t they look up a car by VIN or license plate? Why rely on a paper document that can be forged and that is a hassle to distribute?]

 

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“Can My Children Be Friends With White People?” (nytimes) is by a law school professor who can’t get over the Rejection of Hillary:

My oldest son, wrestling with a 4-year-old’s happy struggles … Donald Trump’s election has made it clear that I will teach my boys the lesson generations old, one that I for the most part nearly escaped. I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust. Much sooner than I thought I would, I will have to discuss with my boys whether they can truly be friends with white people. … I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.

This is spectacular example of the nurture assumption (demonstrated to be false by research summarized in The Nurture Assumption).

[Separately, if this guy and the NYT editors who published him are correct and the nurture assumption is true, maybe they can teach us how to teach our 4-year-old about the virtues of sharing…]

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Our media has spent the last couple of months highlighting Hollywood’s sex-for-advancement system (formerly the “casting couch“). Our culture now considers this an illegitimate method of allocating scarce positions and the managers of this method are being punished with job loss, civil lawsuits, and criminal prosecution.

What about those who advanced under this system and those who were left behind? The media has highlighted some people who had sexual encounters with decision-makers in Hollywood as victims, but shouldn’t people who didn’t have sex also be considered victims? At least some of them failed to get a job that would otherwise have obtained.

[See “Harvey Weinstein accused of rape by actor Natassia Malthe” for example:

After the incident in Los Angeles, Malthe said she called Weinstein and told him being in his movies was “not worth what he wanted to exchange”. … Malthe said he barged into her room and named A-list actors whose careers he had made because they slept with him.

“Actresses should not have to demean themselves to be successful,” she said. Malthe explained that she had experienced harassment from many men in Hollywood, but the experiences with Weinstein were “the worst”.

]

Let’s consider the unwinding of the Madoff hedge fund fraud. It was determined that Madoff was operating an illegitimate system for allocating profits to investors. The managers of the allocation system were punished with fines and imprisonment. Those who profited from the system had their profits taken away (“clawed back”). Those who were losers under the system are being compensated to the extent possible (but Bloomberg notes that the administrators of the unwinding are doing better than the victims!).

Is it time for an unwinding like this in Hollywood? Once Harvey Weinstein and friends are securely in prison or hiding out in a country that won’t extradite them, we can get from them the names of film industry workers whom they advanced because of sexual favors exchanged. (This assumes that producers, directors, and top actors can actually remember the names of most of the folks with whom they had sex.) We can also see if they remember the names of qualified people who didn’t get jobs because they walked out of hotel rooms upon seeing His Majesty in a bathrobe. Then it is time for a job swap?

Related:

• If you are against inequality can you also be against Harvey Weinstein?
• May 1998 Vanity Fair article: “Clearly the Monica Lewinsky scandal is not a case of illegal sexual harassment. But if Clinton had the relationship with her that the available evidence suggests he had, it flew in the face of the law’s spirit and reasoning: among other things, by potentially penalizing all the interns with whom he did not have affairs.”

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Here’s a WIRED article on the latest Republican tax plan:

the devastating impact the GOP’s recently unveiled tax-reform plan could have on the university’s PhD candidates. Buried in that plan is a proposed repeal that would cause graduate students’ tuition waivers to be counted as income—making them subject to taxes.

The annual stipend for a PhD student in Carnegie Mellon’s school of computer science is about $32,400. The university covers the student’s $43,000 tuition, in exchange for the research she [your typical CS grad student is a woman, as it happens!] conducts and the courses she teaches. Under current law, the government taxes only a student’s stipend; the waived tuition is not taken into account. But under the GOP bill, her annual taxable income would rise from $32,400 to $76,234. Even factoring in new deductions also included in the proposal, the CMU document estimates her taxes would amount to $10,209 per year—nearly four times the amount under current law. That would slash her net annual stipend by 25 percent, from $29,566 to $22,191.

Many academics fear the tax burden would waylay efforts to increase social and intellectual diversity at their institutions. “You have to advocate for folks who are coming down the pipeline,” says UCLA neuroscientist Astra Bryant. She says that’s especially true of women and underrepresented minorities. “I mentor two underprivileged undergraduate women, and my concern for them is that an increased tax burden would make it financially impossible for them to afford to pursue a PhD.” [but if the typical STEM grad student is a woman, as suggested above, why worry specifically about women?]

The idea is that the IRS will assess tax based on the university’s absurd fiction that, absent a “stipend,” grad students would have coughed up the rack rate $43,000 per year. Schools could address this by cutting the official (fictitious) tuition price for graduate school (as distinct from professional school, such as med school or law school) to something close to the actual cost or perhaps to zero. If the IRS were to challenge the new number that’s where it gets potentially interesting. If we accept the principle that people should pay tax on value that they receive in exchange for employment then we must calculate the value received by spending six years as an English or Physics grad student. But a lot of university majors end up reducing the student’s lifetime income and therefore students would actually be entitled to a deduction as a result of their waived tuition? Imagine if Yale had to show just how much damage they were doing to a young person’s earning potential by keeping him or her in a theater program?

[See IRS Publication 15-B and the “General valuation rule” should be applicable: “The fair market value (FMV) of a fringe benefit is the amount an employee would have to pay a third party in an arm’s-length transaction to buy or lease the benefit. Determine this amount on the basis of all the facts and circumstances. Neither the amount the employee considers to be the value of the fringe benefit nor the cost you incur to provide the benefit determines its FMV.” Nobody can argue that a typical physics grad student would pay $250,000 in tuition to get a Ph.D. So the fair market value, and therefore the IRS fringe benefit value, will be some lower (potentially negative) number.]

Related:

• my article on how academic science tends to reduce a person’s income and therefore young people may go into other fields for economic reasons

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For leftover computer nerds from the 1990s and aquarium hobbyists… the Sun Microsystems UV sterilizer.

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“Women Cracked Wartime Codes. They Can Fix Tech Today, Too.” (nytimes)…

It wasn’t industrial might that enabled the Allies to win World War II, nor huge oceans that protected the U.S. from the consequences of years of incompetence:

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that inclusion — the willingness to welcome genius — is one reason the right side won the war. The country also benefited from the contributions of other marginalized groups, including Navajo code talkers, Tuskegee airmen and other black troops (including women) serving in a segregated military.

The Google heretic comes back to haunt us:

More than 70 years after that war ended, it is astonishing to see doubts re-emerge about women’s ability to do high-level intellectual work. Far from being put to rest, old prejudice has found new expression in naysayers like James Damore, the Google engineer, now fired, who suggested in an infamous memo that women are shut out of top jobs in Silicon Valley because they are not “biologically” suited to the brain work of tech.

(But doesn’t this mischaracterize what the heretic said? Damore’s point was that typical women preferred to do things other than stare at screens, right? Not that women were less capable of staring at screens?)

We could kick the North Koreans all the way to Mars if only we could dilute our military’s toxic concentration of white cisgender heterosexual males:

The same animus lies behind the Trump administration’s eagerness to exclude refugees, and behind the proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military. In gratuitously acting to exclude willing citizens from military service, the president has declined to avail himself of the array of ingenuity and courage this nation has to offer. … we’re losing a key military edge and could lose a technical one, if we give in to the notion that some groups are more gifted than others.

(Is the author right about this? On the one hand, no transgender person has ever been accused of steering a Navy ship into a collision with a freighter. On the other hand, aside from Chelsea Manning, for how many transgender soldiers do we have a public record of their contributions to our nation’s security?)

What’s the educational and career background of the author of this piece that advocates for more women to be included in the world of nerds (regardless of whether additional women actually want to be in that world)? Her biography says “Liza [Mundy] has an AB from Princeton University and an MA in English literature from the University of Virginia.” She seems to have worked primarily as a writer since completing her studies in English.

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The Saudi royal family has been in the news lately (example). The Turkish TV show The Magnificent Century (about the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century) has proved popular on Netflix and around the world (and, as a bonus, was produced without a lot of Hollywood folks having sex with each other and then litigating afterwards). A lot of the drama in the Ottoman Empire was driven by competition among members of the royal family and nobility. Saudi Arabia is one of the few modern governments that has a similar family dynamic.

Why not a TV series about the modern-day Saudi royal family and its intrigues?

Related:

• Teaching Company’s The Ottoman Empire lectures by Kenneth Harl

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I attended a lecture by Stephon Alexander (professor at Brown; author of The Jazz of Physics) at the Brandeis physics department. After about 20 minutes I noticed that the hard wooden fold-down seat and the limited legroom were nowhere near as comfortable as what AMC Theaters provides to its customers at a much lower price per hour.

Given that colleges refuse to give up on the lecture method of instruction and that they insist on raising tuition every year, why not try to reel in a wealthier and more mature population of students with recliner seating?

For students who like to be on Facebook or watch YouTube during lecture, the seats could have built-in mobile phone holders.

Readers: Given rising rates of obesity, falling rates of physical fitness, rising tuition, and rising expectations of college-as-Four-Seasons-resort-like-experience, what should the lecture hall be like?

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Chris Shewokis, one of our airport’s nicest people was buried yesterday, the victim of a non-aviation accident. He was 51 and had worked at Hanscom Field for his entire career.

Chris endured a horrific commute (minimum of one hour each way) so that his daughters could enjoy the great outdoors and good schools of southern New Hampshire. He was a big man and it can’t have been any fun stuck in two hours of traffic in a compact car. However, he never complained about this. Maybe commuting is the ultimate parental sacrifice in our modern times?

Chris was perhaps the most cheerful person at the airport. In over 15 years I never heard him raise his voice or utter an unkind word. Nor can I remember him without a smile on his face. In an era when complaints about inequality find a ready audience, a guy whose job included helping the richest people on the planet get in and out of their Gulfstreams never once expressed envy or bitterness regarding his relative financial position in life. At the same time he never provided a less warm welcome to pilots of single-engine piston airplanes ordering 10 gallons of 100LL.

Chris was most recently manager of the Rectrix FBO and provided an inspiring example of management style. If you didn’t know the management structure and didn’t reflect on the question of why someone in a jacket and tie was connecting a tow bar to a turboprop, you might never have guessed that he was the boss, seeing him out on the ramp working shoulder-to-shoulder with the newest guys. He never asked anyone to do something he wasn’t willing and able to do himself.

Current and former employees gathered at the funeral home and shared their memories. “On my last day,” said a guy who moved on/up to a maintenance shop in Manchester, New Hampshire, “he told me that if there was ever anything that I needed for my career or a personal favor I should call him.”

I hadn’t previously met Chris’s wife and daughters, but at the gathering it was plain that Chris and Suzanne had built a strong extended family network for their daughters. The girls talked about all of the outdoor activities that they’d done with their dad, including ice fishing(!), and how much that time had meant to them. One benefit of living in the digital age is that we were able to see hundreds of photos of family activities and maybe that will help the girls keep their memories refreshed. Still, a terrible loss for the children and difficult to comprehend or understand.

I will miss Chris.

Related:

• Obituary from the funeral home
• an education fund for the daughters

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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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