The phone system has become useless, with seemingly 90 percent of calls and texts being from scammers (SMS: “Hi”). The USPS is losing money and trying to justify its existence as a sink for taxpayer dollars. What if the USPS launched a competing voice/text/email service in which every participant was authenticated? People could sign up by going to a Post Office and showing an ID or by receiving a PIN code at their regular physical mailing address. Instead of giving your phone number to a bank or doctor’s office, you’d give your USPS “RealNumber” and then the institution could contact you without getting lost in the tide of spam. Because the security would be guaranteed to be as good as physical letters carried by USPS, medical records could be exchanged via this service instead of by FAX(!). This would be a good way to receive bills because they wouldn’t get buried in the daily tide of spam.
Inevitably, of course, someone would start spamming within this system, but USPS could kick spammers out much more easily and durably than other services (the spammer couldn’t sign up again without getting an ID in a different name and getting a new residential or business address where mail was being received in that name). On the third hand, the USPS makes nearly all of its current revenue by delivering spam (unsolicited mail) so maybe they wouldn’t be able to resist selling the right to spam everyone in the system.
As others have noted, USPS could also start a bank as post offices in many other countries have done (taking advantage of their many physical locations). Then the authenticated bills received via the RealNumber could be paid directly.
Readers: Does this idea make sense?
A recent Facebook post of mine:
Why can’t pig butchers be more specific? Text today: “Hi, Monica. This is Linda. Do you have time to take care of my pet? I need to go on a business trip for a few days and I hope you can help me. I will treat you to a seafood dinner when I come back”. Who says “pet” in this context? And “seafood”? That’s a supermarket section, not a colloquial dinner plan. Is there some language in which the above umbrella terms would make sense in a text message or conversation? If so, which one?
The United States managed to destroy the utility of Antonio Meucci‘s invention, the electromagnetic telephone. We did this via a combination of (1) free calling, and (2) failure to authenticate callers. This has enabled half of India and their robots to work as phone scammers.
Why not simply turn off conventional phone calls completely? Health care, banking, and some other essential-for-most-people services still rely on this now-useless technology.
But why can’t the phone itself screen all calls and make phone scamming unprofitable? An AI resident on the phone could put through calls from recognized numbers and silently answer the rest of the calls to see if a legitimate human is on the other end. It should be able to quickly learn to recognize folks offering home renovation, solar panels, final expense insurance, Medicare benefits, etc., from some combination of long wait before caller speaks, Indian accent, saying “the reason of my call” instead of “the reason for my call”, and the use of previous scripted phrases. The AI could be programmed to lead on scambots and the human scammers behind them (“transfer to my senior supervisor”) so that 5-10 minutes of their time is wasted without any personal information being divulged. Answer
It seems as though there are some third party apps vaguely trying to do this, but since answering a phone call is a core function of an iPhone or Android phone, shouldn’t the capability be built directly into the operating system?
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds.
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
I was chatting this morning with a friend who is a retired professional investor, having been previously involved in the management of $billions (not as the ultimate fund manager, but in a pretty senior role). A staunch Democrat and an active trader of his own portfolio (using exotic techniques such as “selling premium”, shorting a leveraged ETF while being long the unleveraged index, etc.), he was predicting doom and gloom for the U.S. economy due to Republican incompetence and stupidity. The stock market would continue to go down and we would suffer a depression. He cited the example of George W. Bush ladling out $700 billion to Wall Street in 2008 because “it was the right thing for the American People” and contrasted to Donald Trump, who wasn’t even trying to do anything right for Americans. I disputed that “Americans” was a meaningful term because the owner of an apartment building has different interests than the renter of an apartment. More substantially, I took the position that someone, maybe us, would blink first and mostly everything would return to the previous status quo. Therefore, I argued there was no need to do anything other than perhaps invest any available cash into the S&P 500.
The call in which my friend implicitly advised me to sell everything began at 10:12 am. What happened later in the day? NBC:
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was pausing higher targeted tariffs for 90 days for most countries, a stunning reversal in his trade war that has sent markets reeling.
Trump wrote on social media just before 1:30 p.m. that he came to the decision because more than 75 trading partners didn’t retaliate and have reached out to the United States to “discuss” some of the issues he had raised.
Coral Gables, Florida is supposedly the nation’s second planned city, after Washington, D.C., and the model for most subsequent planned communities around the country, including the HOA idea. Bubble in the Sun book: even those with the best information can’t predict a crash gives some background on the early 1920s Florida real estate boom (followed by a spectacular 1926 bust) in which Coral Gables was created.
We took the faithful Honda Odyssey down there for a two-night stay during the Palm Beach County Public Schools spring break (perhaps the first time that the valets at the Loews hotel had seen a minivan; it’s not that I merit staying at any Loews, but the Hiltons and Marriotts nearby were up to nearly the same price).
the commercial roads in and around residential neighborhoods don’t have a landscape buffer between the strip mall parking lots and the road (driving around the main roads of Jupiter, by contrast, one mostly sees trees, grass, flowers, and shrubs because the strip malls are hidden behind 20′-wide green margins)
no consistent architectural style has been imposed on commercial buildings, many of which are generic modern structures
no consistent architectural style has been imposed on single-family homes, either; one might see a modern house, a Spanish Colonial Revival house, a Georgian style mini-White House, etc. There aren’t any hurricane-proof standing seam metal roofs, but neither is there a lot of consistency among the tile roofs that are apparently mandated. Some are Spanish-style barrel tile. Some are flat tile. Abacoa has a variety of house styles, but each style is pinned to one neighborhood within the larger development.
powerlines are often above ground, unlike in newer Florida developments
there aren’t alleys behind the houses to hide the garages so a lot of houses “meet the street” with a big ugly garage door. Even worse, the number of cars per household is far larger than architects of the 1920s-1960s expected and the result is the landscape becomes littered with cars (maybe this will be remedied when robotaxis are everywhere and people cut back on individual car ownership)
quite a few streets have sidewalks on only one side
All of the above said, Coral Gables is plainly a fabulous place to live. The downtown is jammed with lively high-quality restaurants. As I texted to a friend, “It’s like Manhattan, but without the homeless, trash, Tesla torchings, and pro-Hamas demonstrations.” What can a city do when it doesn’t have to deal with the foregoing? Offer a free Uber-style service to anyone interested. While New Yorkers push each other onto the train tracks, people in Coral Gables go door to door in Tesla Xs:
What does it look like downtown?
You can’t spit in the street without hitting a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or G-Wagen (“the new Corolla”):
There are quite a few high-end kitchen shops, which is confusing because there is no way that the restaurants could survive if anyone actually uses the $300,000 dream kitchens.
Eataly is opening soon in Aventura (north side of Miami) and West Palm Beach. A competitor is being put together in Coral Gables, which is mostly interesting because it illustrates planning fallacy (“coming soon 2024” displayed on March 29, 2025):
Here are some residential streets close to downtown. A modest house here is $1-2 million.
Saturday night:
Other than “people who can afford $1-20 million for a condo or house” what kind of people are out and about? Roughly half of the conversations that we overheard were in Spanish. We saw exactly one group of people wearing hijabs. Compared to a wealthy area in highly segregated Maskachusetts there were a lot more Black people.
The Coral Gables Museum is a worthwhile stop for some history of George Merrick’s achievement.
Here’s a 1925 map:
Merrick dreamt on a vast scale, almost unimaginable to an American today (except maybe Elon Musk?). To the extent that Coral Gables today doesn’t match his 100-year-old vision it is mostly because he was too successful. Miami, population 30,000 in 1920, grew so large and wealthy that it didn’t make economic sense to build low-rise buildings in central Coral Gables.
A former Haitian mayor living in Massachusetts who committed “unspeakable acts of violence in Haiti” has been convicted of visa fraud for lying about his violent past to secure a green card to live in the United States, the U.S. Attorney said.
Prosecutors said Viliena “ordered and carried out brutal extrajudicial and political killings against the Haitian people” in Haiti. He later lied to immigration officials in 2008 to obtain a permanent resident card in the United States.
In another civil case two years ago, another jury at the US District Court in Boston found Viliena liable and ordered him to pay $15.5 million in damages to the victims and families of political opponents he allegedly killed and tortured in Haiti, the Globe reported. He is currently appealing that decision.
Foley said on June 3, 2008, Viliena went to the U.S. Embassy Consular Office in Port au Prince, Haiti, where he submitted an Application for Immigrant Visa and Alien Registration, Form DS-230, Part II in order to gain entry to the United States.
The form specifically requires that each applicant state whether or not they are a member of any class of individuals that are excluded from admission into the United States, including those who have “ordered, carried out or materially assisted in extrajudicial and political killings and other acts of violence against the Haitian people.”
Viliena falsely responded that he was not. Viliena thereafter swore to, or affirmed, before a U.S. Consular Officer that the contents of the application were true and signed the application, Foley said.
Seventeen years and two federal court lawsuits later, justice has caught up with this enriching immigrant, a great result for attorneys who get paid to handle lawsuits, be judges, or be clerks for judges. What I find interesting is that U.S. immigration is based on the honor system. Mr. Viliena was asked “Are you guilty of extrajudicial and political killings?” and reasonably answered “No.” (It would be great to find out if in the entire history of the United States any prospective migrant has answered “Yes” to such a question!)
How did we expect this system to work and why is Mr. Viliena being prosecuted for lying? Wouldn’t it make more sense to prosecute for stupidity the Americans who set up the questionnaire?
Separately, let’s look at how Mr. Viliena enriched the United States:
Until his arrest two years ago, Viliena had been living in Malden and spent much of three years driving a school bus in the region, The Boston Globe reported.
He was one of the higher achievers in Haiti, mayor of a town of 23,000+, and here in the U.S. he was working at a job (driver) that will soon be automated at, no doubt, a salary that would have entitled him to taxpayer-subsidized housing, health care, etc. The majority of Americans seem to agree that we benefit from importing people who will be eligible for a lifetime of welfare.
I wouldn’t normally watch a basketball game, but the public school here texted out a message advising us that school uniforms wouldn’t be required today if students wanted to wear Gators or Cougars outfits instead (I would love to see the kid brave enough to wear a Houston shirt!).
Xfinity managed to stage a TV outage in our neighborhood (first time I’d tried to use cable since the Super Bowl), promising to have service restored by tomorrow evening, but I was able to see the end of the game via streaming.
Florida universities are searching for ways to pump more money into sports ahead of a proposed landmark NCAA settlement that would open the door for schools to directly pay athletes — and using state dollars could be on the table.
Florida has long held a bright line against putting tax dollars into college athletics. But that could change soon, as schools here and across the country grapple with revolutionary changes coming to the NCAA.
Athletic programs at Florida universities are by rule meant to be self-funded, paid for by student fees, ticket sales to events, NCAA distributions, sponsorships and donation dollars, among other sources.
High school seniors should have their acceptance/rejection notices by now. Thus, it is time to start thinking about how the younger kids will navigate the ever-more-brutal world of college admissions.
First, some group chat messages regarding the son of a friend who married a Taiwanese-American:
He got into Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale. Waitlisted at Brown
He should go to Harvard then. People will think he is smart because he looks Asian and they know that an Asian kid has to work 10X as hard to get into Harvard. Harvard is the gold standard of Asian hate.
Harvard has terrible teachers. Brown has terrible students.
Yale is for gay homosexuals. [A South Park reference.]
Speaking of Asians… a few months ago, a Chinese immigrant friend hired a Boston-based college admissions counselor for her 16-year-old high school sophomore: $18,000 is the initial fee and it covers 30 hours of work. What can a college application counselor do for someone whose first college application won’t be submitted for nearly two years? “The counselor will help him select and apply for internships.” I mentioned this to some friends in a chat group and got a response from a Maskachusetts-based participant:
Man, poor people don’t have a chance. Elizabeth “the system is rigged” Warren was correct.
For prices up to $1.5 million, parents can buy a five-year, full-service package of college admissions consulting from a company in New York City called Ivy Coach.
The service — all of it legal — begins as early as eighth grade, as students are steered toward picking the right classes and extracurriculars to help them stand out from the crowd. Then comes intensive preparation for the SAT or ACT, both “coachable exams,” explained Brian Taylor, the company’s managing director, followed by close editing of college essays.
“Is that unfair? That the privileged can pay?” Mr. Taylor asked. “Yes. But that’s how the world works.”
(If $1.5 million was the pre-Biden price, imagine what it costs in 2025!)
We’re informed by America’s expert class that Donald Trump’s tariffs, money paid to the government when an item from overseas is purchased for use here, are disastrous.
We’ve been informed for 30 years by America’s expert class that consumption taxes, such as sales taxes, airline ticket taxes, gasoline taxes, etc. are good. In fact, one way to make America better would be to have a European-style 20 percent value-added (consumption) tax, i.e., money paid to the government when an item from overseas is purchased for use domestically (and also when a domestically produced item is purchased). Trump’s 10 percent general tariff plus California’s 10 percent sales tax rate (varies a bit by city/county) comes pretty close to the European average of 22 percent consumption tax (VAT).
Our elites also say that what would really deliver us the paradise on Earth to which we are entitled is a carbon tax. We consume too much, especially of transportation, and the result is epic CO2 emission. A consumption tax, especially for things that have to be transported long distances, would go a long way to healing our beloved Spaceship Earth. A tariff, of course, isn’t a laser-targeted carbon tax, but it is most certainly better than no tax at all for plastic being made in China and then shipped across the wide Pacific Ocean.
Finally, we’ve been told by experts for at least 20 years that we are undertaxed (our structural annual budget deficits certainly lend some credence to this theory!). The government needs more revenue of all kinds so that it can do great things for us.
Trump’s tariffs may simply be a prod to negotiating lower tariffs and non-tariff barriers in other countries to U.S. exports. But even if they were to be applied long-term, based on everything that elites and progressives have previously said, shouldn’t they be a positive for both the U.S. and for the world? Why the hysteria from Democrats when higher tax rates, carbon taxes, and more government revenue are precisely the things that they’ve been asking for?
A neighbor’s house this morning, below. Why wouldn’t a progressive celebrate discouraging the importation of a gas guzzling Porsche 911 like the one in the photo (daily driver parked on the street because the homeowner’s garage is presumably full with the valuable cars). This homeowner could have used a nudge in the direction of a planet-healing domestically produced Chevrolet Bolt instead.
“Trade, Firms, and Wages: Theory and Evidence” (Amiti and Davis 2011), in which economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Queers for Palestine University (a.k.a. “Columbia”), and NBER, found that high tariffs boosted wages for workers “at import-competing firms”
“There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness” (New York Times! Guest essay by a young history professor): “They are the opening gambit in a more ambitious plan to smash the world’s economic and geopolitical order and replace it with something intended to better serve American interests. … it seeks to improve the United States’ global trading position by using tariffs and other strong-arm tactics to force the world to take a radical step: weakening the dollar via currency agreements. … some sort of reset of the economic order probably makes sense for the United States.” and then the more familiar NYT perspective… “But the slash-and-burn approach of the Mar-a-Lago Accord isn’t the answer. For one thing, it is hard to find an economist outside of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who thinks it is a good idea. But even if, despite all the chaos it will unleash, the United States eventually prospers as a result, we will have traded away the core economic and political values that make America truly great. … The most valuable asset of the United States is not the dollar but our trustworthiness — our integrity and our values. If the world envisioned by the Mar-a-Lago Accords comes to pass, it will be a sign that not only our currency but our nation has been devalue” (My rating for this last sentence: Completely FALSE! Our most valuable asset is the entire continent that we stole from the Native Americans! As a thought experiment, imagine if the roughly 350 million Americans lived on the territory of Sudan. How rich would we be?)
Happy International Asexuality Day to those who celebrate (i.e., 50 percent of of people in heterosexual marriages (measured at or after four years)).
Below are some highlighted books from Books & Books, an independent bookstore that started in Coral Gables, Florida in 1982 and now has five locations around Miami.
(There were no Black customers or workers in the store when I visited. On March 31, the book was ranked #4,783,207 in sales among all books by Amazon.)
The front door:
(All of these “banned” books could be purchased within the store or checked out for free at the nearby Coral Gables branch of the Miami-Dade Public Library.)
A book about slavery that ended in 1865 is featured in a part of the country that wasn’t settled until 1891 (Coral Gables was incorporated in 1925; Miami in 1896):
Books to teach children about the miracle of open borders:
Coral Gable residents favored closing U.S. borders in 2024 by voting in a narrow majority for Donald Trump.
A book deploring climate change and wealth inequality:
A house right at sea level on the water in Coral Gables will cost $10-20 million. How many of those folks would like to see everyone’s wealth equalized so that we all live in 2BR apartments? Some additional private poolside reading:
Here’s a 4400-square-foot $8.5 million apartment one block away from the bookstore in which a person can read about the horrors inflicted by the privileged and the propertied:
More about Blackness in a store free of Blacks:
If the Black-White conflict isn’t large enough…
Since transwomen are women I can’t know if there were any in the store when I visited. None of the people getting in and out of the passenger seats of Ferraris, Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, G-Wagens (“the new Corolla”), and similar cars were uttering feminist slogans or wearing T-shirts like this one from Target:
During my brief visit, nobody in the store either browsed or purchased any book like the above. A book featured in the window ranked #4,783,207 at Amazon and I don’t think that customers in Coral Gables are either more Black or more Queer than Amazon customers overall. The function of these displays, therefore, has to be something other than motivating people to buy the displayed books. What is the commercial function, then? Customers of independent bookstores like to think of themselves as part of the #Resistance during visits whose primary purpose is getting a sandwich and coffee or maybe a cookbook for their never-used dream kitchen?
It struck me as odd that Einstein, who died in 1955, would have written or said anything on the subject of “empathy”, a term that has only recently come into vogue as a personal bragging point (“I’m empathetic and you support genocide; #FreePalestine”). Being a horrible person without an AI assist, of course I couldn’t resist commenting with Einstein’s well-documented writing “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.” (from 1922-23 diaries), presenting this in a positive light as an inspiration to Harvard University’s admissions office. And I noted that even our AI overlords couldn’t find any source for Einstein having said “Empathy is patiently and sincerely seeing the world through the other person’s eyes”. David responded with a clickbait quote web page, which itself did not cite any source, as proof that Einstein had opined on empathy. (Of course, since those who advocate for diversity can’t tolerate viewpoint diversity, he subsequently defriended me.)
Now I’m curious… did Einstein ever write or say anything on the subject of a working definition of empathy, as in the meme? Most of Einstein’s writings are online, e.g., at https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/, so one would think that ChatGPT would have consumed them. In fact, however, ChatGPT can’t find any instance of Einstein using the term “sincerely” except in closing a letter with “Yours sincerely”. This makes sense to me because bragging about one’s superior fund of sincerity is also a relatively recent phenomenon.
David Levitt has a Ph.D. from MIT. This member of the credentialed elite accepted a combination of meme and clickbait quote web page as proof that a historical event (Einstein writing or saying something) actually occurred. In the bad old days, by contrast, middle school kids were taught that they couldn’t use an encyclopedia as a source. Teachers demanded that they find a primary reference so as to avoid accepting a misattribution. What is a reasonable definition of historical truth in an age where we have an arms race between people with computer assistance putting out falsehoods (possibly just for clicks/ad revenue) and people training LLMs? If Grok says that something didn’t happen can we be more confident in that than in Wikipedia, for example? Are LLMs sufficiently skeptical to cut through what’s produced by all of the cleverest Internet content developers? Or are we doomed to lose access to historical facts? In fifty years will the remnant humans left alive by Skynet believe memes in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. praises rule by AI?
Separately, never forgot that Albert Einstein is justly famous as a science writer for popularizing the work of physicist Mileva Marić (photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity, for example). Even if Einstein never wrote or talked about empathy, that doesn’t take away the credit he deserves for his work in assisting Ms. Marić with publishing her research.
The “Capt. Gilbert” quote might be genuine. How about the Hannah Arendt quote? She died in 1975, decades before the Empathy Boom among Democrats. ChatGPT:
No, Hannah Arendt did not say, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
This quote is often misattributed to her, but there’s no verified source—none of her writings, interviews, or lectures—where she says or writes this exact line.
Finally, let’s look at the Elon Musk quote, taken from a conversation with Joe Rogan (bold highlights are my own potential excerpts to capture the spirit of the Musk-Rogan conversation):
Musk: There’s a guy who posts on X who’s great, Gad Saad?
Rogan: Yeah, he’s a friend of mine. He’s been on the podcast a bunch of times.
Musk: Yeah, he’s awesome, and he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So, we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, I think, you know, empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
Rogan: Right, understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.
Musk: Yes, like, it’s weaponized empathy is the issue.
I, of course, will never see eye-to-eye with Elon Musk on the issue of whether every vehicle should have sliding doors… #LongLiveHondaOdyssey
