Category: Uncategorized

The idea that affirmative action leads to a perception that the favored group is inferior is an old and obvious one. If the standards for admitting members of Group X are lower then other students within a college will notice that people who belong to Group X are less qualified. If hiring standards are lowered for Group Y then coworkers will come to see Group Y workers as less capable.

Is it possible that running affirmative action at Company A could cause people at Company B, which hires people without discrimination, to believe that a favored-by-Company-A group is inferior?

One of the folks with whom I talked at NBAA was a charter company CEO. Based on the people he evaluates as pilot candidates for his firm (roughly 100 pilots), he believes that women are inferior as pilots to men.

It is possible that he is a straight-up sexist, but certainly there have been plenty of accomplished women pilots. How could he ignore Hanna Reitsch, for example, a leading test pilot throughout Nazi Germany’s rapid period of innovation?

[Wikipedia notes that Reitsch was not necessarily a proponent of gender equality:

she presented the idea of Operation Suicide to Hitler at Berchtesgaden, which “would require men who were ready to sacrifice themselves in the conviction that only by this means could their country be saved.”

Despite noting her support for Hitler until the end of the war, e.g., “It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side,” her accomplishments as an aviator were sufficient that “In 1961, United States President John F. Kennedy invited her to the White House.”]

Is there a way for his belief to be a rational conclusion from facts? How about affirmative action by airlines? Airlines are much more interested in hiring women than they are in hiring men. Consequently they are willing to hire women with the bare minimum qualifications. Occasionally these inexperienced female pilots will flunk out of simulator training or the initial operating experience in the real airplanes that is required by the FAA. However, as most pilots would prefer a job at an airline (better pay, union protection, stronger financials), this would tend to leave only the dregs of the female pilot workforce available to be hired by charter companies.

I’m wondering if this phenomenon is likely to be true elsewhere in the American workforce. The best employers, such as Google and Facebook, are desperate to increase the percentage of women so as to burnish their reputations. This leaves a skewed population for other employers to interview.

 

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“Mr. Trump’s Attack on Birth Control” (nytimes) is interesting on a few levels.

The context:

the Trump administration is making it harder for women to get access to birth control. On Friday, it rolled back an Obama-era rule requiring most employers to provide their employees with birth control coverage without co-payments.

So the debate concerns only women with jobs who get health insurance as part of their compensation. An employer that doesn’t mind being picketed by an angry Facebook mob can now tweak its health insurance plan so that birth control pills are either not covered or require a co-payment.

The first interesting idea is that insurance is an appropriate vehicle for funding expenses that can be predicted in advance. I.e., an Obamacare policy should provide “health assurance” in addition to what would traditionally have been regarded as “health insurance” (paying for unexpected costs):

These regulatory rollbacks will almost surely reverse years of progress. The percentage of reproductive-age women who faced out-of-pocket costs for oral contraceptives, for example, fell to less than 4 percent by 2014 from more than 20 percent just two years earlier, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. One study estimates that women are saving about $1.4 billion on the pill.

The second interesting thing is the assumption that if an insurance company is buying something it costs less (maybe it costs nothing because it has become “free”). The assertion highlighted above is that women will be saving money compared to going to Walmart and paying $9 per month (nine different options for pills at that price), perhaps out of a health savings account or flexible spending account to neutralize the pre-tax/post-tax issues (again, remember that this entire debate concerns only those women with jobs). This can be true only if insurance companies have special money trees. If they don’t have money trees then payments come from premiums paid by other members.

Who pays premiums to fund “free” birth control pills plus whatever administrative costs are associated with arranging reimbursements by an insurance company in $9 chunks? To a large extent… other women!

In the hierarchy of American victimhood, lesbian and transgender women are more victimized than cisgender heterosexual women, right? Why would it make sense, then, to transfer money earned by lesbian and transgender women, whose demand for birth control pills is presumably low, to subsidize cisgender heterosexual women? Also, why does it make sense to transfer wealth from older infertile women to younger fertile women? In addition to suffering from any complications of menopause, these older women now have to subsidize the younger women who are often taking their places in society?

[You might argue that some of this wealth transfer does flow in the correct direction with respect to comparative victimhood because premium dollars paid by men are used to fund birth control pills consumed by women. But a lot of women share household expenses with men so taking money from a man within their households reduces their spending power just as much as if the money had been taken from them.]

What does the credentialed American public think? Let’s look at the highest-rated reader comments:

S: I went to medical school for multiple reasons, one of which to make sure abortion services would always be safely available. I was hoping to use that skill as little as possible, but if Trump, Ryan, McConnell, and the Heritage Foundation (holding the marionette strings over all of them) have their way, it looks as though this country is going back to the dark ages.

*** about 10 more top-rated comments that assume that working women will quit using contraception if they have to pay $9 per month. Then they will end up pregnant and will have abortions. But does this make rational economic sense? Can they get an abortion every six months for less than $54? If not, why wouldn’t they choose to pay $54 every six months out of pocket for pills? ***

Laura Haight: Consider a single mom who was finally able to go back to work after her child went to pre school. She can’t afford to take care of another child, so she gets birth control through her company. The cost would be prohibitive otherwise as they are just getting by now. No, she can’t work another job because she needs to be home raising her child. Without birth control, she gets pregnant. She can’t get an abortion. She has the baby. Must quit her job. Cannot work now because she has an infant to care for. She turns to the so-called safety net but it’s not there. And so on. And another well-intentioned, willing to work, American woman begins down a cycle of failure for herself and her kids and their kids. [No explanation for why the “single mom” didn’t learn enough about the U.S. family court system to turn a profit on the second child. Or for why she can’t get an abortion in a country where women are free to sell abortions at a discount to the net present value of the potential child support revenue.]

J.M. Kenney: Not all women are unmarried and poor! Access to effective birth control is crucial to married women and the families who rely on them to earn wages through work. We are now a society where the majority of households rely on two adult wage-earners to survive. Not to afford vacations or other luxuries, but just to keep food on the table and a roof over everyone’s head. [i.e., in a heterosexual couple, with both the man and the woman are paying health insurance premiums, somehow it saves money to pay a higher premium and let the insurance company pay the $9/month… ergo they are being subsidized by people who don’t have sex? Or people who are infertile?]

njglea: Go ahead, Con Don. Try to take away women’s right to choose what they do with their own bodies.

LAllen: This is an attack on many fronts. It’s an attack on women’s health, women’s autonomy, and women’s rights. [Women can be autonomous only when someone else is paying for their pills? But, as noted above, if the payors are lesbian and transgender sisters, isn’t there a zero-sum autonomy game going on?]

A lot of the comments discuss the fact that Viagra is covered by all health insurance plans, while plans from Catholic employers may no longer cover birth control pills. This is evidence for U.S. society being rigged in favor of men. However, it looks as though the most popular insurance plan for older American men, i.e., those most in need of Viagra (except for some prime-age guys at Burning Man), does not cover Viagra: “Does Medicare Cover Viagra.” And it is unclear that there is any Obamacare mandate requiring insurers to cover Viagra for men under 65. Maybe a social psychologist can do a master’s on how Americans managed to convince themselves of something that can be easily fact-checked with Google.

Readers: What do you think? How is it possible that while other countries keep pulling ahead of us in terms of GDP per capita (list) we have a national debate on the subject of who pays $9/month? And, if we are going to have such a debate, why are newspapers that champion the rights of the lesbian and transgender supporting this subsidization of cisgender heterosexuals?

[Update: Today the Times published “The Economy Can’t Grow Without Birth Control”, which uses a figure of $600 per year for birth control, without explaining the apparent contradiction with the Walmart web site. The article is another great example of the idea that insurance companies have money trees and their spending isn’t taken away from money that we could have spent on something else: “Consumer spending makes up about 70 percent of all economic growth, and women are responsible for an outsize portion of that spending. Billions of dollars less a year in their pockets means billions of dollars less that they could spend on goods other than birth control, dampening their ability to support businesses and the economy.”]

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“Roxbury’s Dudley Dough, a fair-wage pizza shop, to close its doors” (Boston Globe):

they’re losing a community resource in the heart of Dudley Square and a singular business based on a premise of economic justice and healthy food.

Launched in 2015, the popular fair-wage pizza shop will close at the end of the year, according to Bing Broderick, executive director for the nonprofit Haley House, which oversees the shop. While popular, the shop is not breaking even financially, which has put stress on the wider nonprofit organization.

Pitched as “pizza with purpose,” the restaurant offered above-average pay as well as culinary and leadership training.

Last year, Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, donated $100,000 to Haley House, specifically for Dudley Dough.

If this failure demonstrates that “economic justice” is not profitable (or break-even), can we infer that “economic injustice” is profitable?

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Folks here in Boston have been speculating about whether Amazon will choose to locate its second headquarters amidst our already-clogged roads, bringing 50,000 jobs and maybe 200,000 more cars (employee cars; family member cars; cars belonging to people in service businesses that will expand as a result of Amazon’s presence, etc.).

The most common response to this idea is wondering “how could it possibly work?” We are already short on housing. The streets are jammed from 7:00 am to 8:00 pm. The MBTA’s subway system is packed and the service is falling apart as the enterprise is buried in pension and health care expenses. Unless they build a 50-story campus that includes dormitories for all workers and their families, nobody can figure out where an Amazon headquarters could go that wouldn’t result in Mexico City-style traffic jams.

The Amazon HQ2 response from Boston is 218 pages. The proposal stresses that Amazon won’t be plagued with a lot of stupid native-born white people: “55% of Bostonians are Hispanic or non-White” and “29% of Boston’s population is foreign born”. I think this is basically a lie because they’re drawing an artificial line around the city itself rather than considering the metro area. On the other hand, when the authors wanted to find some nerds they draw the line regionally, e.g., “With 130,660 workers in computer and mathematical occupations, the Boston MSA has the 7th highest number … amongst 34 comparable metropolitan areas.” What do these computer nerds and math geniuses read? Here’s what the merchandisers at a Cambridge Whole Foods thought would sell:

The proposal makes clear that there is nowhere near enough housing, talking about “53,000 new units of housing by 2030.” In other words, the Amazon workers would take up 100 percent of the new housing that has been contemplated! Another lie is that “1 in 5 households in Boston are affordable, making Boston a national leader.” I think this is only true because the city gives away free housing to people who don’t work. None of the Amazon workers, by definition, would be eligible for these units. Market rents in Boston are brutal.

It promises “A perfect, shovel-ready site with a single owner.” Where will this be? Not really in Boston, as it turns out. It will be the old Suffolk Downs horse racing site, which is technically in East Boston, but is mostly attached to Revere, Massachusetts, a separate city. The proposal is reasonably honest about this, saying that “the Site is adjacent to and accessible to established neighborhoods of East Boston and Revere.” The proposal talks about MIT and Harvard graduates running around, but, unless you count trips to Logan Airport, most of these eggheads have never been to East Boston or Revere. Google says that this is a 50-minute trip from Harvard Square by T.

The Blue Line train is disclosed as having 71,000 passengers per day right now. How would it not collapse with tens of thousands of additional riders?

One group of folks that should be supporting this move are divorce litigators here in Massachusetts. The probability of a divorce lawsuit goes up dramatically as the potential profits from the lawsuit are increased. Washington State family law provides for much more limited profits than Massachusetts. A plaintiff cannot collect child support revenue in Washington after children turn 18; the cash continues to flow in Massachusetts until children turn 23. It is tough to get more than about $22,128 per year for a single child in Washington State; the plaintiff who can get custody of the same child in Massachusetts might win $100,000 per year (tax-free) in child support. A Massachusetts plaintiff is more likely to win “primary parent” status than in Washington State. Alimony lawsuits in Washington are also less lucrative, in general than in Massachusetts. In short, any Amazon employee who moves from Washington to Massachusetts and is the higher-earning spouse will face a higher statistical chance of being sued by his or her spouse. The Amazonian could try to protect himself or herself by settling in less-plaintiff-friendly New Hampshire, but the commute to Revere/East Boston would be brutal.

This would probably be the greatest thing that ever happened to JetBlue, which operates a major hub out of Logan, more or less adjacent to the proposed site. If you are confident that Boston will win this, buy stock in JetBlue!

Note that the proposal contains some even crazier ideas, e.g., that Amazon should try to spread itself among a whole bunch of different buildings in South Boston and downtown. Or maybe spread out across a couple dozen buildings in the South End, Back Bay (off the charts expensive), Roxbury, and some other unrelated areas.

My idea: Since Amazon can locate anywhere…. pick a happy place. Colorado always comes up in the top 5 happy states and always has cities in the top 5 or 10 (example). Boulder, Colorado would be awesome, obviously, but I don’t see how 50,000 new families could show up to the party. The area next to the big Denver airport is uncongested, on the other hand, and it will be convenient for Amazon employees to get anywhere on the planet from KDEN. Colorado family law doesn’t provide anywhere near the incentives to plaintiffs that Massachusetts does, so more of the Amazon workers will be able to keep their families intact. As a percentage of residents’ income, Colorado has a lower state and local tax burden than either Washington or Massachusetts. Denver has less traffic congestion overall than Boston (e.g., see TomTom data).

My backup idea: Vancouver! Amazon can gradually transform itself into a Canadian company and pay corporate taxes at Canadian rates (much lower). Vancouver is insanely packed, of course, but how about right next to the Boundary Bay Airport, a 35-minute drive to downtown Vancouver. The runway can handle an Airbus A320 or Boeing 737 to shuttle employees as necessary back and forth to Seattle (maybe less time than they currently spend commuting on Seattle’s own clogged freeway system).

Readers: What do you think? Does it make sense for Amazon to build a headquarters in a place whose transportation systems have already melted down? On the one hand, the meltdown of the transportation systems (car, bus, train, etc.) reflects the fact that people want to live in that place. On the other hand, since Amazon is one of the country’s best employers it would be able to draw people to wherever it settles.

[Question 2 for readers: How come progressive-minded government officials are bringing out the barrels of taxpayer cash to attract Amazon? Didn’t they read the New York Times expose about the abuse suffered by Amazon’s employees? If one believes the New York Times, why seek to bring that kind of abuse to one’s hometown?]

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A friend’s Facebook post:

So proud of friend and high school buddy, Paul Feig…he’s always stood up against injustice. (link to “Bridesmaids director Paul Feig condemns Harvey Weinstein: ‘Men need to speak up'” (Guardian))

The article is dated October 10, 2017, i.e., two days after the New York Times reported that Mr. Weinstein had been fired and no longer held any job within Hollywood. Thus my comment on the friend’s post:

He took a big risk by speaking up about Weinstein after the man had been fired. He Spoke Truth to Has-Been!

This Feig guy plus other men in Hollywood coming out with similar denunciations of Harvey has led me to a momentous decision: I am considering my own bold denunciation of Harvey Weinstein.

Despite the risk to my career as a helicopter instructor, only slightly reduced by the fact that Mr. Weinstein likely exceeds the 300 lb. per-seat limitation of a Robinson R44, I am now thinking about going on record to express my disapproval of this unemployed guy.

Readers: When do you think it will be safe for me to finally release a public condemnation of Mr. Weinstein’s reprehensible behavior? I am almost ready to stand up against injustice.

Related:

• Bill Burr talking about the different levels of temptation presented to men with differing levels of career success (about halfway through the video)

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“Two Women, and Their Dogs, Rescued After Nearly 5 Months Lost at Sea” (nytimes):

Jennifer Appel and Tasha Fuiaba were rescued by the Navy vessel the Ashland 900 miles south of Japan, according to a statement released by the Navy on Thursday. After setting out in early May, a storm claimed their 50-foot boat’s engine on May 30. They spent the next five months adrift at sea and unable to make contact with others.

Ms. Appel and Ms. Fuiaba at first believed they could get to their destination using only the boat’s sails. But two months into a journey that ordinarily takes half that long, they began to issue daily distress calls using a high-frequency radio.

An EPIRB manufacturer should try to hire these two (and their dogs?) immediately!

Related:

• I will be carrying an EPIRB when I walk into Harvard Square from now on

 

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I am in love with the idea of the active suspension in the new Audi A8, but maybe the autopilot is the more significant innovation?

“Audi Beats Tesla (And GM) To Level 3 Autonomy” (Seeking Alpha):

Audi’s forthcoming version of the A8 sedan is the first production automobile to arguably achieve Level 3 autonomy. … The key point in moving from Level 2 to Level 3 autonomy is that Level 3 expects that the user only has to intervene whenever the car is not able to handle a situation and asks for the user to take over. The vehicle for its part must be able to perform all activities related to driving the vehicle at other times.

Now to be clear, Audi’s solution has certain limitations. For one it is only meant to be activated in relatively slow moving traffic (up to 60 km/hr) and only on divided roads where a physical barrier separates vehicles driving in the opposite direction.

The new Audi A8 will be the first production vehicle to use LIDAR along with cameras, radar and ultrasonic sensors.

Audi’s solution is the first of its kind to require absolutely no monitoring of the vehicle as long as the driver is available to take over when the vehicle asks him/her to. While the vehicle is driving itself, the customer is free to do anything else, for example even watch a movie on the on-board TV screen.

Tesla’s Autopilot also requires the user to keep their hands on the steering wheel and asks the user to monitor the actions of the car. This makes it a SAE Level 2 solution at best.

I’m wondering if an autopilot that works from 0-35 mph is useful. On a recent trip to Dallas/Ft. Worth we experienced highways clogged at all hours on both Friday and Saturday. After returning to Boston we found the central highway network jammed up and sat for an extra 30 minutes in stop-and-go traffic on the Mass Turnpike (I-90). However, traffic did occasionally speed up to faster than 35 mph in both cities and therefore we would have been turning the Audi autopilot on and off every 5-10 minutes.

Readers: What do you think? Is this Audi feature likely to be useful in practice?

[Separately, maybe Audi should be donating money to pro-immigration American politicians. If via immigration and the children of immigrants the population grows to 450 million, Americans will spend nearly all of their highway driving time below 35 mph. (Of course we have a lot of open space in the U.S., but immigrants, like native-born Americans, tend to cluster in cities.) See also How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?]

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Here’s the Dallas Morning News from October 21, 2017:

Note that the center of the front page is devoted to the “firearms” category and the locals interviewed are against a ban on bump stocks. Wandering around the Fort Worth Stockyards I noticed a young lady wearing a “Keep Calm and Reload” T-shirt, complete with silhouette of a rifle. I decided to talk to ask some locals how they felt about this issue. Did they agree with a New England gun enthusiast’s statement “Bump stocks are ultra gay. I don’t know anyone who has one or wants one”?

A moderate by Texas standards (he owns fewer than 10 guns) indicated some support for a ban on bump stocks: “You can’t hit the side of a barn with one of those things.” Why didn’t he have dozens of guns? “You need to go to the range and practice. You need to clean them.” Why didn’t he have zero guns? “Well, when you need a gun you need one.”

[Note that bump stocks will be illegal in my home state, going forward: “Massachusetts House approves ban on bump stocks” (boston.com) The vote was 151-3 and, sadly, the journalists didn’t interview the three who voted against the ban. I would love to hear their attempt to explain their vote to an urban journalist!]

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Back in 2003 I asked why cars didn’t integrate data from existing sensors and warn owners about kids left in the back seat (see Lack of wireless Internet killing children). Today’s New York Times carries “Forgetting a Child in a Back Seat Can Kill. Cars May Soon Warn You”:

At least 41 children have died of heatstroke this year after being left in the back seat of a parked vehicle. Since 1990, when the annual number of vehicular heatstroke victims was first recorded, more than 800 children have died in hot parked cars.

But congressional lawmakers are now weighing whether to require new cars to include a device for detecting children in the back seat and warning the driver of their presence after the car has been turned off. The requirements were attached to a House bill, passed last month, that is meant to speed the development of self-driving vehicles. The Senate version of the bill, which cleared a committee vote this month, includes an amendment with the warning requirement.

It looks as though my 2003 post overlooked a super simple way to do this:

General Motors and Nissan have introduced technologies that remind the driver that a child is in the back seat by analyzing door sequencing. If the rear door is opened before the car is started but not after it is turned off, a warning sounds.

This will be annoying for dog owners, though, in moderate temperatures. The dog enjoys riding around in the back seat, but isn’t welcome in the Kwik-E-Mart. So there will be a lot of spurious warnings.

My 2003 post also overlooked the utility of an additional sensor:

Some companies that sell equipment to the auto industry have developed warning devices. One such system, the VitaSense, uses low-power radio to sense movement and breathing. The technology, developed in Luxembourg by IEE, a manufacturer of automotive sensors, can reportedly detect even a sleeping infant in a rear-facing child seat. If a child is detected after the vehicle has been turned off, it alerts the driver by several means, including flashing lights, beeps, and messages sent to cellphones and computers.

(maybe this is why Luxembourg is so much richer, per capita, than the U.S.?)

For proponents of markets, it is kind of sad that this has taken so long. Why wouldn’t Toyota have added this (at least the trivial door sequence monitor) to the Camry in order to distinguish its product from the Honda Accord? Unless consumers are indifferent to whether their children survive, how to explain this apparent failure of the market?

Readers: how come hundreds of children had to die between my 2003 post and today? There is sort of a competitive market in automobiles (enough competition that GM needed almost $100 billion in tax dollars to survive!).

Related:

• Maybe Tesla is our only hope

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Bernie Sanders supporters are apparently the most hostile Internet users. This map of average hostility level of an Internet comment (WIRED) shows that comments from Vermonters are, on average, the most hostile (rage travels by Prius?), while comments from the adjacent Live Free or Die citizens of New Hampshire are the least hostile.

Maybe New Hampshire needs to build a border wall to keep out angry Vermonters?

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