Category: Uncategorized

“Affirmative Action Battle Has a New Focus: Asian-Americans” (nytimes) is kind of interesting.

The young student, Austin Jia, who was rejected from Harvard is anti-Affirmative Action. The young student, Emily Choi, who was accepted to Harvard says “I firmly believe in affirmative action.

Here’s an interesting turn of phrase:

A Princeton study found that students who identify as Asian need to score 140 points higher on the SAT than whites to have the same chance of admission to private colleges

More proof that Rachel Dolezal will be remembered as the most important American of the 21st century.

The same paper carries “Racial Justice Demands Affirmative Action”, from an executive at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Here the Asians who are suing Harvard to end Affirmative Action are characterized as unable to compete with their white overlords:

countless African-American, Native American, Asian and Latino students are still excluded from quality education at all levels. Undoing affirmative action now would reverse the gains we have made and dim the prospects for greater progress.

A commenting schoolteacher disagrees:

The author’s inclusion of Asian students in affirmative action is misplaced here and diminishes her overall thesis. After many years in public education at a diverse, elite public high school, I saw firsthand the struggle of (often economically disadvantaged) Asian students who faced longer odds for admission than their Latino and African American peers. Their SAT scores and GPAs needed to be significantly higher than students of color in order to have a chance at getting into elite schools. How can we claim the arc is moving toward racial justice when one group is treated so differently under admission policies?

Related:

• my review of Academically Adrift, which gives data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment test indicating that Americans in a whole host of majors learn almost nothing during four years in college

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I listened to Never Call Me a Hero: A Legendary American Dive-Bomber Pilot Remembers the Battle of Midway (Jack “Dusty” Kleiss) on Audible.

Kleiss graduates from the Naval Academy in 1938 and, at a salary of about $24,000 per year in today’s dollars, serves on destroyers doing “neutral” patrols in the Atlantic after World War II had started, but before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Sailings are delayed for months by union workers trying to get paid more (going so far as to run off with critical components of the ship that have to be retrieved by armed Marines) and incompetence in ship handling leading to damaged turbines and running aground. Once out in the water, the test-firing of a destroyer’s 4-inch guns goes awry when it is discovered that nobody remembered to clean out the cosmoline. Peacetime duty had some hazards, e.g., commercial boat captains in the New York area would seek to smash into Navy vessels in such a way that a lawsuit could claim that it was the Navy ship’s fault. A year of litigation would ensue with at least some damages ultimately paid.

Kleiss served on the carrier Enterprise and flew the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber. A bomb run required opening a window to help with air pressure equalization, taking a dose of ephedrine via the nose (same purpose), and then nosing over to 240 knots for the dive at more than 10,000 feet-per-minute. Pulling out of the dive imposed 6-8Gs on the pilot and rear-seat gunner.

Kleiss’s most serious injuries occur prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His squadron is helping to make a Hollywood film. The senior officer, to simulate being hit by the enemy, is supposed to roll and dive out of the formation and then release hydrofluoric acid to create the appearance of flames and smoke coming out of the plane. Instead the pilot of the lead plane released the acid first, right into Kleiss’s plane and face, and rolls/dives second. Kleiss barely managed to get the plane back on the ground and then spent nine days in the hospital for burn treatment.

Kleiss chronicles a tremendous number of takeoff and landing accidents, consistent with the Air Force statistics cited in Unbroken: “In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.”

Kleiss is humble about his own role in the Battle of Midway. He says that, as one of the lead dive bombers, he was able to target a Japanese carrier before it was engulfed in smoke and flames from previous bomb hits. Also, as one of the lead planes he used less fuel keeping up in the formation and therefore was able to make it back to the carrier with a few gallons of gasoline in the tanks (1 percent of the total fuel available!), unlike squadron-mates who had to ditch.

Kleiss attributes much of the U.S. success in the Battle of Midway to code-breaking. We knew roughly where and when to expect the Japanese fleet. He attributes most of the losses to incompetence. Kleiss says that everyone in the Navy knew that the Mark 13 torpedo was useless, unable to hit even static ships in a harbor. His best friend dies as part of the “40 out of 44 torpedo bombers were lost at the Battle of Midway without scoring a single hit” (Wikipedia) and he has never gotten over this squandering of human life. Most of the dive bombers and crews that were lost were similarly due to incompetence/disorganization. The Enterprise planes were ordered to circle after takeoff to form up with dive bombers from another carrier. This wasted 40 minutes of fuel to achieve something that Kleiss said had no practical value (it was easier to attack in smaller groups). In any case, nothing was achieved because the other planes never showed up. Thus did the dive bombers head out to the extreme edge of their range minus 40 minutes of fuel and a lot of them ditched within about 30 minutes of the carrier.

As with Stefan Cavallo, World War II test pilot, who said “By our mid-20s nearly all of us were in what would turn out to be lifelong marriages and we already had kids,” (see What does the Greatest Generation think of us?) Kleiss married his first sweetheart, had five kids with her (two of whom were born during World War II), and the marriage ended with her death from cancer.

Kleiss served for roughly six months in combat and then worked stateside training Navy pilots before enrolling in a Navy-run engineering school. He says that the Navy tended to promote pilots based on bureaucratic accomplishments, such as hours flown, rather than actual proficiency. This was one of the things that led him to abandon flight operations in favor of engineering. Kleiss was enthusiastic about some of the top admirals, however, particular Bill Halsey, whom he describes as being able to remember personal details about all 2,000+ crewmembers of a carrier. Kleiss describes Halsey confronting officers who appeared in their dress white uniforms and saying “Go back to your cabin and change into khakis. This is a working ship.”

The book is interesting because it reminds us of how rapidly military technology becomes obsolete. We couldn’t put any autonomous guidance into the bombs so we risked smart humans to drop dumb bombs accurately. Wikipedia says that the great age of dive bombing lasted only a few years, mostly replaced by rockets. The bombs that were sufficient to sink the Japanese carriers were mostly 500 lb. and 100 lb., easily delivered today by a drone (see the Tomahawk, for example, which can carry 1,000 lbs.). Given that it takes 20+ years to develop a new military aircraft it is tough to imagine that a human-piloted airplane developed today could ever have military value.

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A young friend wants to spend the rest of his summer vacation making a computer game (could be Windows or iOS/Android). The theme will be maximizing welfare benefits, e.g., SSDI, Medicaid, OxyContin prescriptions, public housing, Obamaphone, TANF, SNAP, etc. The author had the idea of a player “trying to grab welfare checks like Pokemon,” which I think implies a 3D virtual world. The author has only a minimal programming background so this can’t be done by coding feverishly in C or Java.

One idea is RPG Maker, which seems to be able to target all popular platforms other than Xbox, PlayStation, and similar. Is that an appropriate tool for this? Or are there better tools?

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“Crew Forgets To Raise Gear” (Avweb) describes an Airbus A320 flight where a robot could have helped:

An Air India flight was diverted last week because the crew didn’t raise the landing gear. There were apparently lots of clues that something was terribly wrong but the A320 crew pressed on, climbing to 24,000 feet instead of the normal 35,000 to 37,000 feet and reaching only 230 knots as the plane gobbled huge amounts of fuel to beat the drag of the wheels. About 90 minutes into the flight from Kolkata to Mumbai, the fuel state demanded a diversion to Nagpur. They reportedly didn’t realize their error until they went to drop the gear for landing.

Imagine a camera up in the dome light watching the same instruments and indicators as the pilots. The robot could use the camera image to ask “The altimeter shows us at FL240; the FMS shows that we’re still 400 nm from the destination; are you sure that you need the landing gear down?”

Obviously this would be more useful for single pilots and non-professional crews, but even the best pilots can make mistakes after a few days of airline flying.

Related:

• post from 2010 wondering why the fancy computers on Colgan 3407 didn’t ask “why don’t you push the power levers forward?” (50 people died for want of a few IF statements)

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A Hillary-supporting retired insurance agent here in Massachusetts linked on Facebook to a panegyric about Barack Obama’s years of accomplishment. One of Obama’s accomplishments was the following:

Welfare spending is down: for every 100 poor families, just 24 receive cash assistance, compared with 64 in 1996.

I asked if he believed that, as a society, were spending “less on welfare (cash handouts, housing, food, health care, phones, etc.) compared to 1996.” The answer was “yes,” and he believed the welfare spending had been trending down to 2 percent of GDP.

I think this is interesting partly because the guy failed to notice the millions of Americans on SSDI/SSI+Medicaid+Oxycontin and guestimate that these folks alone should consume in the neighborhood of 2 percent of GDP (gobbling up 95 percent of the world’s prescription opiates has to cost something, right?). Also because Medicaid is one of the largest welfare programs and he’s been exposed to 20 years of news about how health care costs in the U.S. are skyrocketing. (Medicaid alone is about 3.6 percent of GDP and then you have to add in $43 billion of Obamacare subsidies and the portion of Medicare that is attributable to young Americans on SSDI (beneficiaries shift from Medicaid to Medicare after a couple of years, I think), so health care welfare consumes at least 4 percent of GDP.

He was also implicitly ignoring the shrinkage of the economy due to people being discouraged from working because it is more lucrative to collect welfare. (See this analysis of family law in the U.S. economy for some literature references and also Book Review: The Redistribution Recession.) If enabling Americans to collect alimony and profitable child support shrinks the U.S. economy 3 percent, the Welfare State has to be responsible for at least another 3 percent, no?

On the same day, a Cambridge government worker posted a chart from the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. It shows that white Bostonians have a “total wealth” of $256,500 while nonwhite households have essentially no wealth, e.g., $700 in total wealth for a black household (one iPhone? But they apparently don’t own that phone outright because “net worth” is $8). In other words, according to the Federal Reserve Bank experts, a typical black Bostonian is poorer than 226 million Africans who have an unencumbered-by-debt smartphone). I pointed out that even the lowest income Bostonian couldn’t have a net wealth of $8 because he or she would be entitled to (a) a lifetime of free public housing, (b) a lifetime of food stamps (SNAP), (c) a lifetime of Medicaid/Obamacare, (d) (typically) Social Security payments from the mid-60s until death. These were all forms of “wealth”. He deleted the comment, of course!

I wonder if we could quantify the wealth of someone entitled to welfare. An officially poor Bostonian, if living in Cambridge or Boston public housing, has a centrally located apartment that is worth far more than $256,500 (in some cases $1-2 million) and is generally entitled to live there until death and, oftentimes, to hand the apartment down to a family member. So he or she has all of the benefits of ownership without having to pay property tax, condo fees, maintenance, etc.

Of course, not everyone in the Boston area who is on welfare gets an apartment in a nice area. CATO’s Work versus Welfare Tradeoff 2013 looks at the aggregate. Four years ago, collecting welfare in Massachusetts was worth $50,820 per year on a pre-tax basis. The current yield of a 30-year Treasury bond is 2.9 percent. So you’d need roughly $1.75 million in Treasury bonds to earn $50,820 per year. Unless there is a significant risk of losing all of these welfare benefits, which doesn’t make sense anecdotally (the families that we know personally have been collecting welfare in Cambridge for generations), the “wealth” of a welfare household is actually at least $1.75 million.

[If you consider that the value of welfare benefits should rise with inflation, it is probably more accurate to use the “Treasury Real Yield Curve” for TIPS. That’s only 1 percent on the 30-years. So actually each welfare household has a wealth of closer to $5 million and, if you assume that there is no free lunch, this is also likely the minimum cost to taxpaying members of American society.]

This is only a couple of intelligent people, and their circle of friends clicking “like,” commenting approvingly, and condemning the Trumpenfuhrer for his purported hardhearted attempts to scale back government handouts. But I wonder if much of the anger of Hillary supporters can be attribute to their acceptance of ideas such as “welfare is only 2 percent of GDP and declining” and “Boston-area black households have a wealth, net of debt, of $8” (i.e., a Boston-based black family could become wealthier by emigrating to Burundi (GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power: $800/year)).

Related:

• Canvassing for Elizabeth Warren (a Massachusetts citizen who considers himself highly politically educated yet who was unaware of Medicaid)

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Now that we have some distance from Father’s Day and the requisite Hallmark sentiments around it, here’s a report on a Father’s Day weekend presentation in our woodsy (Lyme-disease-y) suburb by The Fatherhood Project, based at the Massachusetts General Hospital and affiliated with Harvard Medical School.

I spoke to one of the staffers who helps run a “Divorcing Fathers” program. It turned out that she had not carefully studied Massachusetts family law. She did not understand that a divorce was a civil lawsuit. She believed that it was usually a mutual decision and, when it wasn’t, it was usually the father who initiated a divorce (the stats show only about 17 percent of the time is there a “joint petition” and that, when there is a conventional lawsuit, mothers are 3.14X more likely to sue fathers than vice versa). She was aware that mothers nearly always turned out to be the “primary parent,” but believed that a father simply had to ask a judge for an equal parenting role and it would likely be unopposed by the mother and granted by the judge. She had no idea that, when both parents had similar-paying jobs, the mother would be cutting her after-tax spending power by 30-50 percent (depending on tax bracket and number of kids) by agreeing to a move from 67/33 to 50/50 parenting. She denied the relevance of economic incentives or the family law environment to the topic of “divorcing dads”.

[Coincidentally, as this local expert was explaining the irrelevance of family law, a friend of a friend was venting via text message from Pennsylvania. She is, well, rather spirited, and had threatened her husband repeatedly with divorce (though in fact she did not want one). He eventually consulted a litigator, learned that Pennsylvania is a 50/50 shared parenting state, and sued her. The result by formula is minimal child support revenue (both parents are high earners) and she has to compromise on the child’s schedule with a person whom she hates and whose equal importance to the child she disputes (she gave birth to the child, breastfed the child, fussed over the child, etc.). None of this bad stuff would have happened to her under Massachusetts law. Aware that Massachusetts was a winner-take-all state and that the often-enraged wife would end up with the house, the kid, and most of the money, the father probably would have signed her up for anger management classes instead of suing her. If for whatever reason they did end up divorced, her “pattern of historical [hysterical?] caregiving” would have enabled her to easily obtain primary/winner parent status. She would be getting a healthy slice of the father’s income until the child turned 23 and the father would be an every-other-weekend babysitter. All that she would have had to do to preserve her marriage was learn about family law and move across the border to Maryland (also a mom-friendly winner-take-all state) or New Jersey or up to New York or Massachusetts.]

The keynote speaker was Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog, who experienced a terrible childhood (described in Townie) and nonetheless turned out to a great writer just like his dad (demonstrates the power of genetics?). Dubus opened by saying that he had never texted, Facebooked, or used “Twatter.” He said “I’m bringing all of me here for the next 45 minutes and ask that if you need to text, otherwise use your phone, or urinate, that you go outside and do it.”

Dubus talked about the divorce lawsuit between his parents in a passive manner, as though it had simply happened to them or perhaps had been a mutual decision. He did mention that, prior to the divorce and “single parent” culture that developed in the 1960s, they probably would have just stayed together and maybe ended up being reasonably happy. In any case, after this divorce that somehow descended on the two parents for obscure reasons, his father was reduced to living in a small apartment and the mother and four kids were reduced to living in crummy rental houses. They went from “educated struggling academic family” to just-above-welfare status and Dubus went to a Haverhill, MA high school with “the 7th worst drug problems in America.” His elder sister turn into a promiscuous drug dealer by age 16. His younger sister padlocked herself into her room. He and his younger brother drank and got into fights. The four sibs’ only contact with the father was two hours every Sunday morning when he took them to a Catholic church (the father’s apartment was never large enough to permit an overnight stay). The single moms in the neighborhood abused drugs and alcohol and neglected their children. His mom was no exception. Dubus is a great storyteller and he was effective at communicating the suffering of the children and the permanent wreckage of some of his siblings, but it wasn’t clear what their parents could have done differently other than stayed together (not a likely scenario in our no-fault divorce age).

The professionals of MGH/Harvard talked to the assembled crowd as well.

The take-away perspective was pro-divorce, especially “expressive divorce” (see the History of Divorce chapter), in which one adult individual within a couple gets what he or she wants, as long as psychiatrists and psychologists (like themselves!) were brought in (on a paid basis) to help clean up the wreckage, run training programs, etc. The mantra used by cash-seeking plaintiffs, “I’m doing it for the kids,” was affirmed. Maybe Dubus’s childhood had been ruined by parental separation, but in general divorce could be great for kids because they would be spared exposure to fights between their parents (research psychologists have found the opposite, but that doesn’t stop anyone profiting from the divorce industry from asserting the widespread benefits of divorce for children as fact).

“The evening felt surreal to me,” said a guy who lost a divorce lawsuit 15 years ago and had lost nearly all of the subsequent rounds of custody and child support modification litigation. “These MGH people are out of touch with reality. We’re in what might be the most hostile-to-fatherhood state in the U.S. and these guys are going on about how important fathers are. It doesn’t even make sense for fathers in Massachusetts to invest in kids because they’re not really his from a legal point of view. They’re just on loan from the mother until she decides to take them away.” Certainly a move to a shared parenting state such as Pennsylvania, Delaware, Nevada, Arizona, or Alaska would be a lot more helpful for a man interested in fatherhood than any amount of advice from MGH psychiatrists and psychologists, however brilliant.

One thing that neighbors could agree on was that the successful divorce plaintiffs in our midst were the more relaxed mothers in town. Instead of being “on call” 24/7 they had every other weekend completely free of responsibilities (their children being with the loser parent) and, apparently, were using that time to recharge. There was no social stigma attached to being a “single mother” in our town, partly because the mothers were able to sell their divorce lawsuit as a means of protecting children from an unfit caregiver (result: Instead of the kids being in a house with the mother, a nanny, and the unfit father 24/7, the kids were under the exclusive and unsupervised care of the unfit father for about 33 percent of the time (the max free babysitting before the mother’s child support profits could be reduced).)

I thought the evening was a good illustration of the contradictory attitude Americans take toward marriage, divorce, and fatherhood. On the other hand we lead the world in maudlin expressions of sentiment. On the other, we lead the world in the portion of the economy and the cash rewards allocated to citizens who work to separate children from their fathers. In a two-hour period, nobody mentioned that, under Massachusetts law at least, including fathers would require a lot of mothers to act against their own economic interest (unlikely because, as a research psychologist at a recent shared parenting conference noted, “If mothers valued fathers none of us would need to be here.“).

[What else do the Millionaires for Obama discuss on a rainy Friday night? Over wine and cheese at the end, a neighbor talked about going back into the working world after being a stay-at-home mother. She has chosen to work for a non-profit organization helping refugees settle into American life. I said “I’ve offered to all of my Facebook friends to pay for the airfare from Kabul, Amman, or Beirut for any refugees that they want to shelter in their spacious suburban homes.” She said “Oh, that’s not nearly enough. They’re going to need help for 20 years or more.”]

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Measured by support for the Democrats, Boston certainly qualifies as a Sanctimony City. How are we doing on the issues on which we consider ourselves superior to the benighted Fox News viewers in the Deplorable Red States?

“50 years later, Metco’s dream is still unanswered” (Boston Globe) says that sorting children by skin color and then busing some of the “non-white” ones out to the mostly-white suburbs hasn’t worked as well as hoped:

Fifty years after Massachusetts launched an ambitious voluntary school desegregation initiative, the yawning social disparities and tensions the plan aimed to ease remain — and painful incidents persist.

But when some 3,300 Metco students walk into those suburban schools, they encounter student peers who are predominantly white, and teachers and administrators who are overwhelmingly so, state data show. There are no requirements for the 37 suburban districts to diversify their teaching or administrative ranks. And the state’s Metco rules, which mostly cover reimbursement for the suburban districts, have long been silent about recommending or requiring training that would help teachers better understand cultural differences and help make Metco students feel more welcome.

The good news is that learning a third as much as a student in Finland can qualify an American as a “superachiever”:

Despite these hurdles, Metco students, who often spend hours each day bused to and from school, tend to be superachievers. State data show they score higher on state MCAS exams than their counterparts in Boston and are significantly more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. “The educational resources are great,” said Sammi Chen, who graduated last month from Lincoln-Sudbury and expects to major in biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

[Chen? How does someone with a Chinese last name qualify for a program that starts with skin color sorting? It turns out that Asians are considered to “non-white,” though in a lot of the suburbs that participate in Metco there are now a lot of local Asians.]

Being surrounded by well-meaning Hillary-supporters can be annoying:

Day, who lives in Lincoln, said he didn’t feel like an outsider until he hit high school, where he said some teachers and students assumed he was a Metco student bused from Boston because he is black. … Day said teachers at the high school would sometimes ask if he needed financial assistance to go on a field trip because they assumed his family couldn’t afford it. … he asked that the caption under his yearbook picture reflect that. “I do not feel safe at this school,” it reads.

The Millionaires for Obama in my neighborhood were discussing this article on a listserv (that’s how old we are here!):

The elementary school still has a problem even if it is “substantially more integrated”. All one has to do is walk down the hall any given morning before school starts and you can see & hear the kids of color being reprimanded more harshly than the other kids for speaking too loudly or to sit down on the benches.

Last year I met a young woman of color who attended LS… Her experience was of a school that oozed with entitlement and white privilege.

I refrained from trying to cheer them up with the following response:

At least the inner-city kids who come out here are learning about transportation engineering. Now they know that transporting a 110 lb. person and a pair of yoga pants a distance of 3 miles over smooth pavement requires a 6,000 lb. vehicle.

What about when these kids graduate from their bureaucratically integrated schools and go to work? The good news is that they can become infinitely rich by starting a company and employing only female workers. “Boston Has Eliminated Sexism in the Workplace. Right?” (Boston Magazine) says “women here [in the Boston area] are actually being paid 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man,” which is, according to the article, a larger disparity than in the U.S. as a whole. This opportunity will be shut down if people listen to the geniuses behind Enron: “perhaps the most convincing argument comes from a McKinsey & Company study, which showed Massachusetts would receive a jaw-dropping 12 percent bump in GDP if it achieved gender parity in the workplace.”

It isn’t on their web site, but the August 2017 issue carries an interview with 85-year-old Harvey Mansfield, the only “conservative” left at Harvard. You can see why universities want to get rid of old people. His explanation for why Harvard has so much grade inflation: “the early 70s. When black students arrived, they benefited from great good will, which is the passion behind affirmative action. … a professor wasn’t going to give a black student a C, so … he couldn’t give them to white students either.” Are parents getting good value for paying Harvard prices? “the curriculum is a mess. If you look at a typical Harvard transcript, you see courses all over the place. Often on small subjects or policy questions, instead of meat and potatoes: history, economics, philosophy. … there are a whole lot of [gut] courses and it’s easy to waste your money…”

At least the students can party, Missoula-style, right? Professor Mansfield says “the sexual scene [at Harvard] is a mess. … ‘sexual adventure,’ if I can put it that way, is expected, even though it doesn’t always materialize. And when it does materialize, it can often be misadventure. … There’s no backing from the faculty, from the mores, from the churches, from reality, to a woman’s ability to say no. It much more depends on her courage and her good sense than used to be the case.” (Note that “saying no” may not make good economic sense; collecting child support in Massachusetts can be worth more than 3X the median after-tax income of an Ivy League graduate.)

What’s the predictive power of being a professor of Government at Harvard? No better than mine! In response to “Did you expect Trump to win?” Mansfield replies “I didn’t see him coming. I kept thinking he would lose.”

How is Harvard doing going forward? Answering a question about Harvard’s president, Mansfield says “she hasn’t done anything … to make [Harvard] offer a more demanding education, and she has participated in this slow decline from veritas to change. Our motto is truth, but we now interpret that as adjusting to the changes of society. That is an essentially passive goal, which is conformist.” Mansfield still likes the school, though: “The students are great, the faculty is okay, and the administration is about average.”

So… here we are feeling superior to the rest of the U.S. with no data to support our beliefs!

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A round-up of divorce attitudes from the neighborhood (rich Boston suburb)…

“She had a fresh pedicure and manicure and looked fantastic,” said one mom about a recent divorce plaintiff, encountered at the supermarket. “She didn’t have any of her kids with her.” (The plaintiff sued her husband due to an expressed desire to “protect the children” from what the defendant’s “addiction issues” (apparently not severe enough to prevent him from bringing home a physician’s paycheck every two weeks). Now the kids are fully protected by being parked unsupervised with the addict every other weekend. [Also, apparently nothing is better for an adult’s mood than to be completely-off-the-child-care-hook roughly 30 percent of the time (while still being paid to provide child care). See also Newsweek for a report on a recent Harvard Business School study that found that leisure time was the key to happiness.]

“He would have had a good reason to divorce her,” said a 60-year-old married-with-kids friend regarding a former colleague, a Manhattan-based retired financial services industry executive (he didn’t know whether the wife or the husband was the plaintiff, only that his friend was no longer married). “She was bipolar.” In other words, the “in sickness and health” part of the marriage vows didn’t apply, in his view, given the wife’s mental illness. Now the man is enjoying the NY dating scene, mostly with divorcees in their 40s, though he says “all the women are lying about their age” so it is tough to establish a precise age.

An Arab immigrant renting a neighbor’s mother-in-law apartment explained that he and his wife, also an Arab immigrant, had started a business and purchased a house together. The wife sued him and obtained the business, the house, and the kids down at the Middlesex Family Court (our statistical study of what happens there). Asserting “I am afraid of him,” she got a restraining order against her defendant. Among other things, this keeps him from saying anything regarding their mother to the children, who are over 18 (they can yield child support profits through age 23 in Massachusetts and are therefore still a fit subject for family court litigation). He endures a lot of hassle whenever he returns through U.S. immigration due to the fact that the border agents find a red flag in his record from the restraining order.

From a woman who apparently followed her heart rather than optimizing her life and reproduction to align with Massachusetts family law: “Recently divorced mom, 14 yo son, and a 10 yo daughter in need affordable rental, 2-3 BR ASAP. Would be willing to help with some of the maintenance.” (Safe to assume 5 years of happiness, 10 years of annoyance/irritation, and, going forward, decades of financial struggle?)

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Foxconn is going to build a new factory in the U.S. Because we don’t have a crony capitalist system it is presumably coincidence that the factory will be within the Congressional district of Paul Ryan, House Speaker (i.e., the factory will be between Milwaukee and Chicago).

“Wisconsin’s Lavish Lure for Foxconn: $3 Billion in Tax Subsidies” (nytimes):

According to a presentation by the state, the incentive package consists of $1.5 billion in state income tax credits for job creation, $1.35 billion in state income tax breaks for capital investment, and up to $150 million for a sales tax exemption.

Over all, the subsidies for the Foxconn plant, which would produce flat-panel display screens for televisions and other consumer electronics, equal $15,000 to $19,000 per job annually. … The new Foxconn jobs are expected to have an annual salary of at least $53,000 plus benefits…

I’m not sure why Foxconn would have paid any Wisconsin (or U.S.) corporate income tax. Wouldn’t they set things up Apple-style so that the Wisconsin factory paid a huge annual license fee to an offshore corporate shell in either a tax-free or low-tax (Taiwan is at 17 percent) country? If that wouldn’t have worked, it seems that Foxconn could have gone to North Carolina and paid state income tax at half the rate of Wisconsin’s or to South Dakota or Wyoming and paid nothing (Tax Foundation).

Readers: Does this mean that big companies, except those based in SD or WY, should be expected to move every 10 years or so when their state corporate income tax exemption runs out? So that they can get new exemptions from a new state? Would it make sense to design factories in advance for modular shipping via rail?

Related:

• Wisconsin family law (unlimited child support makes it straightforward to collect $53,000 per year without working at Foxconn…)

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Back in 2008, I wrote up an “Economic Recovery Plan” for the U.S. that suggested, as part of a plan to achieve vibrant GDP growth, “corporate governance that relieves investors from worry that profits will be siphoned off by management”:

Right now the shareholders of a public company are at the mercy of management. Without an expensive proxy fight, the shareholders cannot nominate or vote for their own representatives on the Board of Directors. The CEO nominates a slate of golfing buddies to serve on the Board, while he or she will in turn serve on their boards. Lately it seems that the typical CEO’s golfing buddies have decided on very generous compensation for the CEO, often amounting to a substantial share of the company’s profits. The golfing buddies have also decided that the public shareholders should be diluted by stock options granted to executives and that the price on those options should be reset every time the company’s stock takes a dive.

If current trends continue, the CEO and the rest of the executive team will eventually have salaries that consume 100 percent of a public company’s profits and they will collect half ownership of the company via stock options every few years. Who would want to invest in that?

“State Street: corporate governance has grown up” (Financial Times), an interview with Rakhi Kumar, points out that things have gone in the opposite direction since 2008:

Top of the 43-year-old’s list of concerns is the move by many of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Snap, Facebook and Alphabet, to adopt controversial voting structures that limit the power of their shareholders. The issue came to the fore in February when Snap became the first US company to issue shares at its initial public offering that gave investors no voting powers.

With $2.6 trillion in assets under management, State Street has been able to achieve some of its goals:

State Street has also taken a tougher approach to companies that have failed to appoint women to their boards, vowing earlier this year to vote against company directors that do not commit to improving the gender balance in their boardrooms. … “[Our push against all-male boards] has been a great success,” she says. “Some companies have proactively called us and asked us not to take action against them. We will keep voting against those that don’t [improve], and we hope other investors will join us.”

A quota system for women on corporate boards will apparently make State Street happy, but what will it do for ordinary investors? If the CEO and pals on the Board are stealing from shareholders via fat salaries, stock options, etc., does an ordinary shareholder care about the gender IDs of the thieves?

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