Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Abortion care perceptions and law in Norway

September 8, 2022September 4, 2022 by philg

Norwegians follow the American news at a high level. When I was there, for example, several mentioned the current administration’s raid of the former President’s home and asked me what I thought of the current U.S. leader seeking to imprison the former U.S. leader. They also had heard about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which a Mississippi law limiting on-demand abortion care to 15 weeks was found not to be in conflict with any Federal law or the U.S. Constitution.

What was interesting is how they perceived the ruling. All of the Norwegians who asked about this topic were under the impression that the Supreme Court had outlawed abortion care throughout the United States. I explained that the the law in Democrat-ruled states provided on-demand abortion at 24 weeks or beyond (e.g., Colorado).”You mean that there is all of this fuss when someone can just drive or fly to another state?” they asked, incredulously.

From reading CNN and other American media, they were under the impression that abortion care in the U.S. was less available than in Norway when, in fact, there are far more reproductive health care options for pregnant people in the U.S. than in Norway. Wikipedia:

Current Norwegian legislation and public health policy provides for abortion on request in the first 12 weeks of gestation, by application up to the 18th week, and thereafter only under special circumstances until the fetus is viable, which is usually presumed at 21 weeks and 6 days.
Abortions after the end of the 12th week up to 18 weeks of pregnancy may be granted, by application, under special circumstances, such as the mother’s health or her social situation; if the fetus is in great danger of severe medical complications; or if the woman has become pregnant while under-age, or after sexual abuse. After the 18th week, the reasons for terminating a pregnancy must be extremely weighty. An abortion will not be granted after viability. Minor girls under 16 years of age need parental consent, although in some circumstances, this may be overridden.

In other words, the Mississippi law (15 weeks) that was recently considered by the Supreme Court was actually less restrictive than Norwegian law (12 weeks), but those who had learned about the events from the media were under the impression that abortion care had been outlawed throughout the U.S.

Since we are informed that abortion care is health care, let’s look at the public health situation in Norway, a Science-following Land of Shutdown to some extent (they didn’t do the 1.5-year school closure that Science imposed on NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles). Here’s the hand-drying technology at the gleaming modern airport terminal in Oslo:

Should this machine be called “the Coronaspreader” or the “Monkeypoxer”?

How can Norway get away with this kind of public health hazard? If we consider “population-weighted density” (i.e., how dense is the average person’s neighborhood), the lived experience of Norwegians is almost the least crowded in Europe (source):

(And they want to keep it uncrowded. I didn’t find anyone who supported increased low-skill immigration. Norwegians said specifically that they valued open space and freedom to move around without bumping into hundreds of other humans. Even if someone could prove to them that they could get somewhat wealthier by growing the population they would reject the option.)

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Following the Science at Harvard

September 8, 2022September 8, 2022 by philg

“Harvard Grad Student Union Protests Comaroff’s Return to Teaching After Sexual Harassment Findings” (Crimson, September 7, 2022):

Returning from two years of administrative leave for allegations of sexual and professional misconduct, Harvard professor John L. Comaroff stood up to start teaching his first class back on campus Tuesday afternoon.
Then, five graduate students stood up and walked out of the classroom in protest.
Meanwhile, dozens of students congregated in the Science Center Plaza to decry Comaroff’s continued employment at Harvard on the first day of his course, African and African American Studies 190X: “The Anthropology of Law: classical, contemporary, comparative, and critical perspectives.” This week, Comaroff resumed teaching for the first time since University investigations found he violated sexual harassment and professional misconduct policies.

The African-American professor is, according to Wikipedia, now 77 years old (i.e., almost old enough to be President of the United States), a great example of the tenure system in action. The point of this post, however, is the tendency of Harvard students to Follow Science when outdoors. Portions of photos in the article:

That’s life on campus right now!

Report from our former town, a Laptop Class suburb of Boston: as many as 1/4 to 1/3 of the students in a middle school classroom will be wearing masks.

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What’s interesting about the iPhone 14 for photographers?

September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 by philg

Apple released some new products today. Who is excited about them and why?

Aside from being able to talk on the phone, check email, and receive text messages, my main interest in a mobile phone is the camera capability.

“Apple’s iPhone 14 and 14 Pro: Imaging tech examined” (DPReview):

The Pro models gain larger sensors for their main cameras, jumping from 12MP Type 1/1.7 (7.5×5.7mm) to 48MP Type 1/1.28 (9.8×7.3mm) quad-pixel chips. The aperture is reduced from F1.5 to F1.79 but this is brighter in equivalent terms than before: the sensor is nearly twice the size, which more than makes up for the ~0.3EV slower F-number.
The camera will primarily deliver 12MP images by combining quartets of pixels to give the 2.44μm pixels discussed in Apple’s presentation, but can also deliver 48MP ProRaw files, from the individual 1.22μm photosites.
There’s a larger sensor, too for the non-Pro iPhone 14 and 14 Plus. These receive main cameras with comparable specs to those in last year’s iPhone 13 Pro. Specifically this means 12MP Type 1/1.7 (7.6×5.7mm)

My dream is a chunky phone with a Four Thirds System sensor (17x13mm). The iPhone 14 Pro models are thus approximately one third of the way to my dream, as measured by sensor area.

When would this matter? Here’s an iPhone 13 Pro evening photo from one of the new waterfront neighborhoods of Oslo:

If you download this and zoom in you’ll see how fuzzy the faces are. That’s the limit of what clever hardware and software can do to try to patch up the deficiencies caused by using a tiny sensor in low light.

Compare to this image taken at 2 pm (daylight savings time):

Readers: Aside from this sensor size increase, which is simply catch-up to the better Android phones, what is new and interesting from Apple?

“Apple’s iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus Bring Enhanced Cameras” (PetaPixel): “The dual-camera system upgrades and features on the iPhone 14 include a new Main camera with a larger ƒ/1.5 aperture and 1.9 µm pixels, enabling photo and video improvements in all lighting scenarios for better detail and motion freezing, less noise, faster exposure times, and sensor-shift optical image stabilization. … There is a new Action mode for smooth-looking video that adjusts to significant shakes, motion, and vibrations, including when video is being captured in the middle of the action.”
speaking of Android, the co-creator Andy Rubin provides a good example of the risks of being married in California; from the Daily Mail: Former Google exec who ‘got $90M severance’ amid sexual coercion probe ‘ran sex ring which lent out women he paid to own for orgies and filmed them,’ claims estranged wife … Andy Rubin is being sued by his estranged wife Rie, who seeks to have the couple’s prenuptial agreement voided in a complaint unsealed on Tuesday … ‘This is a family law dispute involving a wife who regrets her decision to execute a prenuptial agreement,’ said Rubin’s lawyer, adding suit is full of ‘false claims’ … Rie, who is also seeking a divorce from Rubin in family court, is demanding a jury trial and asking that the prenuptial agreement she signed be voided, thus allowing her to collect on the $350 million her estranged husband earned during their marriage.

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Excited about the new variant-tailored COVID-19 booster shots?

September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 by philg

Who is excited about the new COVID-19 shots? (not to say “vaccines”) I’m not sure the guy in the photo below is going to camp out at midnight outside CVS. Stopped at a red light in Stuart, Florida, smoking a cigarette and not wearing a helmet:

Let’s check in with folks who say that they’re the world’s smartest. A recent “daily update” email from the City of Cambridge, Maskachusetts:

How many Followed the Science and got all four of the shots that Dr. Fauci told them to get? 1 out of 10. Not everyone is the right age for all four shots (“C.D.C. Urges Adults 50 and Older to Get Second Booster Shot” (NYT, May 2022)), but Science says that nearly everyone must have at least one booster, right? Only 1 in 2 Cambridge residents has made even this minimal commitment to public health.

From August, in which the smartest state refuses to follow CDC guidance: Maskachusetts rejects Science (90 percent refuse vaccines for children under 5)
“At Head Start, Masks Remain On, Despite C.D.C. Guidelines” (New York Times, today): the folks who refuse to follow CDC guidelines and get their 3rd and 4th COVID-19 shots also refuse to follow CDC guidelines and continue to force toddlers to wear masks even without “a high community transmission rate” (but toddlers in Florida, like K-12 kids in Florida, are mask-free: “A group of conservative states, including Texas and Florida, sued to prevent the rules from taking effect, and federal courts imposed an injunction on the guidelines in those states.”). Contrary to Science, the article says that forcing children to wear masks harms them: “Masks can make it more challenging for some children to develop early speech and reading skills, which are learned, in part, by observing mouths in movement, according to research.” (and, statistically, this will cause them to die younger because life expectancy and education are correlated; if we count someone who dies a few weeks early with a COVID-19 positive test as a “COVID-19 death” (ignoring life-years lost) then the 745,000 children currently enrolled in Head Start should be counted as “lockdown deaths”)

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Europeans cutting down their forests

September 7, 2022 by philg

Most of this is unrelated to the recent natural gas price increases…. “Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Energy” (New York Times, today):

Burning wood was never supposed to be the cornerstone of the European Union’s green energy strategy.
When the bloc began subsidizing wood burning over a decade ago, it was seen as a quick boost for renewable fuel and an incentive to move homes and power plants away from coal and gas. Chips and pellets were marketed as a way to turn sawdust waste into green power.
Those subsidies gave rise to a booming market, to the point that wood is now Europe’s largest renewable energy source, far ahead of wind and solar.

Some of this falls into the “what’s old is new” category, I think. When people from England invaded North America in the 17th and 18th centuries they expressed amazement at how much forest was available for the cutting. More or less everything in England that could be cut already had been cut.

Forests in Finland and Estonia, for example, once seen as key assets for reducing carbon from the air, are now the source of so much logging that government scientists consider them carbon emitters. In Hungary, the government waived conservation rules last month to allow increased logging in old-growth forests.
And while European nations can count wood power toward their clean-energy targets, the E.U. scientific research agency said last year that burning wood released more carbon dioxide than would have been emitted had that energy come from fossil fuels.

Let’s have a look at a forest that has already been cut quite a bit… Vigeland Park in Oslo.

The peace that comes from being a parent is depicted:

How about riding a horse through the forest?

Experience the joy of interacting with wildlife in the forest:

How about these gates for your back yard?

Need some ideas for your next Cirque du Soleil show?

There were a fair number of Norwegians in convivial groups of 2-10 enjoying the park at 4 pm on a Tuesday. Apparently, if a country has a small population of humans and a large population of oil and gas wells not everyone will have to work long hours in the dreary office.

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The Case-Shiller housing bubble isn’t so bubbly if we adjust for rising rents

September 6, 2022August 28, 2022 by philg

“Rising Home Prices Are Mostly from Rising Rents” (Kevin Erdmann) was sent to me by a retired bond fund manager. He starts by noting that the Case-Shiller real estate index, when adjusted for CPI (“real”), shows dramatic apparently irrational price swings. We go in and out of housing bubbles based on sentiment.

The problem with that theory is that rent inflation has definitely risen faster than general inflation for the past 40 years or so. So, instead of adjusting for inflation based on a reasonable theory that has stopped reflecting reality, why not adjust home prices with rent inflation instead of general inflation? When you do, it turns out that prices have become more volatile, but the deceptively compelling long-term flat pattern that suddenly jumps to a higher range isn’t so clear any more. Persistently high rent inflation is driving the rise in the “real” Case-Shiller index.

When the adjust-by-rent system is applied to individual cities, the purchase price of housing looks even flatter. Here the author generates smooth curves fit to data points from 50 metro areas. 2007 does look like irrational exuberance, but primarily in the higher-cost cities (even in 2007, in cities where rent was low, the buy/rent ratio was about the same as in 1991, 2012, 2015, and 2018).

Thanks to the miracle of population growth and the inability of Americans to come up with a cheaper way of building housing…

In Figure 8, we can see that prices are now rising in every city like they were in Los Angeles before. Low rates of building, with constrained lending, means that residents with low incomes are suffering from our policy choices now everywhere.

[Blaming “policy choices” is where I part company with this author, who talks about “systematic, persistent lack of housing production” as though that could be changed with the wave of a central planner’s wand. As I noted in City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion, even when land is free and there are no zoning restrictions, the basic cost of building an apartment now exceeds what a couple with two median incomes can afford (maybe the answer is that Americans need to live in throuples?). A simpler explanation is that we’re simply not wealthy enough, on average, to afford the things that we believe we deserve, including high quality housing for 333+ million people. We’re a medium-skill country, trending toward low-skill via our immigration system, demanding all of the stuff that properly belongs to a high-skill country.]

I’m not sure what we should take away from this as investors. The residential real estate market isn’t as irrational as previously portrayed. House prices, like apartment building prices, track rents. But how do we make money unless we have a crystal ball to forecast future rents? The friend who forwarded this to me said that historically real estate provides lower returns than investing in the stock market (but maybe this isn’t true if you consider leverage and the ability to stick lenders with the downside risk while keeping the upside benefit) and real estate ownership carries idiosyncratic risks, such as litigation risk (the owners of a hotel were hit for $26 million because a jury found that a clerk employed by the owners allowed a pervert to check in next to a sports journalist and film her naked (and that she suffered $55 million in damages from this, more than if she had been killed)).

As taxpayers one take-away is that we’re going to be paying the rent for a high percentage of our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters who either don’t want to work or whose skills don’t yield a sufficient income for housing that we consider suitable for a resident of the U.S.

Speaking of real estate investing, you can’t go wrong by doing the opposite of whatever I suggest. My theory was that Cambridge, Maskachusetts real estate would go up in value once the Followers of Science abandoned their fears, masks, school closures, lockdowns, and vaccine papers checks. When everyone was back at his/her/zir/their desk in the office towers of Kendall Square or the academic buildings of Harvard Square, real estate in Cambridge would catch up to real estate in South Florida. The brilliant minds of the AI software within Zillow disagree, forecasting a down round for Harvard Square:

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Counting “undetected” undocumented immigrants

September 6, 2022 by philg

“Biden Administration Has Admitted One Million Migrants to Await Hearings” (New York Times, today):

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine — At a modest hotel a few miles from the ocean here, most of the rooms have been occupied this summer by families from African countries seeking asylum — 192 adults and 119 children in all.
They are among the more than one million undocumented immigrants who have been allowed into the country temporarily after crossing the border during President Biden’s tenure, part of a record-breaking cascade of irregular migration around the world.
Distinct from the hundreds of thousands who have entered the country undetected during Mr. Biden’s term, many of the one million are hoping for asylum — a long shot — and will have to wait seven years on average before a decision on their case is reached because of the nation’s clogged immigration system.

It is the text that I have highlighted above that is the subject of this blog post. If the folks who have “entered the country undetected” were not detected, how can anyone purport to begin to estimate their number?

There are some less-interesting tidbits in the article:

The million who have been allowed in since Mr. Biden took office — a figure that comes from internal Homeland Security data and court filings — are from more than 150 countries around the globe. With few pathways to enter the United States legally, crossing the border without documentation is often the only option for those fleeing crime and economic despair.

The U.S. is bordered by only two countries, Canada and Mexico. How is the U.S. then the “only option” for people “from more than 150 countries”? If people have the right to claim asylum anywhere in the world, why is it a journalistic fact, not an opinion, that their only option to cross multiple borders before taking up residence in Portland, Maine?

“Since we can’t go back in time and convince Americans to have more babies, we’ll need immigrants to fill out the labor force,” said Amon Emeka, a sociology professor at Skidmore University. “It will be critical that immigrants be integrated in the U.S. labor market to make up labor shortfalls in the years to come.”

This is the opposite of the perspective that I heard in Oslo last week. Rather than additional migrants, Norwegians with whom I spoke said they would rather have open space and elbow room, even if it means counter-service restaurants (“Panera-style”) are destined to be the norm rather than table-service. It would not be an improvement, from their perspective, to grow Norway from 5 million population to 10 million, especially not with low-skill immigrants.

Who benefits when Metro Portland’s population is expanded and rents consequently go up? As predicted in this article by a Harvard professor, folks who own businesses and apartment buildings:

Ben Conniff, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Luke’s Lobster, said his business relies heavily on immigrants. About one-third of the employees at the company’s processing plant in Saco are asylum seekers, and he is desperate to hire more.

What’s the timeline?

Currently, it takes between five and seven years for asylum cases to be decided. If an application is denied, there are opportunities to appeal, adding more years to an immigrant’s time in the country.

If a child is born at the beginning of an asylum-seeker’s residence in the U.S., in other words, he/she/ze/they could be 18 years old before the end of the legal process and therefore able to get the rest of the family in via chain migration (the parents, e.g., will have an automatic right to a Green Card because the adult child is a U.S. citizen via birthright citizenship).

Maria Zombo, an Angolan asylum seeker and mother of six who lives outside of Portland, recently opened an African grocery store in the revitalized downtown of Biddeford. She came to the country on a tourist visa eight years ago, and has yet to receive an initial response to her application for asylum. She has started a business, purchased a home and had a child.
Her experience is not atypical, said Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, a nonprofit.
“People are having their entire life here happen before they get an answer,” Ms. Cruz said.

In U.S. family courts, having even one child is considered a disabling condition for a plaintiff identifying as a “mother” with respect to the world of employment yet this mother of six is hard at work running a money transfer shop (photo: Kirsten Luce):

Maybe the folks who say that low-skill migrants are an economic boon are right? (Or possibly, the NYT happened to feature this migrant rather than hundreds who were not working?)

Circling back to the main topic of this post… how do we know how many migrants are in the U.S. if many are “undetected”? “Yale Study Finds Twice as Many Undocumented Immigrants as Previous Estimates” (2018) describes an attempt: “After running 1,000,000 simulations of the model, the researchers’ 95% probability range is 16 million to 29 million, with 22.1 million as the mean.”

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Where does JetBlue get its programmers?

September 5, 2022 by philg

Here’s an interesting Labor Day example of laboring in the Web development mines. Trying to book four tickets on JetBlue.com:

After multiple retries, I called the 800-number and the automated system said to expect a 2-minute wait, but suggested going to jetblue.com/chat to resolve the issue and save $25 per person in telephone service fees. After about 20 minutes into the 2-minute wait, I decide to try it. Here’s what happens when you click to “start the conversation” in a Google Chrome browser on Windows:

(the chat window never populated with any text or UI)

Given the importance to an airline of being able to sell tickets, how can this happen? I tripped over at least three bugs in three different systems while attempting one transaction. Did Amazon hire away every programmer capable of building and maintaining a functional ecommerce site? And, if JetBlue can’t keep a competent programming staff together, what hope is there for smaller companies?

The number of people majoring in computer science is up, but is the number of people who can write a functionally correct program going up? How many of today’s fresh CS graduates will actually be working as programmers 5 years from now?

(I eventually got the tickets after a 46-minute phone call. The agent who finally picked up promised that the four of us would be together in one row, charging an extra $250 for the privilege, but booked 3A, 3B, 3C, and 4E. She insisted that 4E was an aisle seat and that it was directly across the aisle from 3ABC (contrary to SeatGuru and my lived experience on JetBlue). Even if we accept the row misalignment, that raised the obvious question “Where is seat 4D if 4E is the aisle?”, but, perhaps due to her not being a native English speaker (thick Spanish accent), I couldn’t get an explanation of her thought process. She dropped Senior Management’s known traveler number on the floor. Although I had given her my TrueBlue number, she left the required mailing address and phone number fields of the reservation blank. I spent about 15 minutes on the “Manage Flights” part of the JetBlue site correcting the known errors, leaving only the unknown errors. If we count the 15 minutes that I spent trying to get the site to work to buy a ticket, the whole process took about 75 minutes. Maybe it worked better in the good old days when U.S.-based prisoners handled the phones for airlines (NYT, 1997, whose headline is weak compared to “Booking the Penthouse From the Big House” (LA Times, 1998)).)

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Long COVID, Florida-style

September 5, 2022August 30, 2022 by philg

Happy Labor Day to all of those who failed to absorb “The Work versus Welfare Trade‐Off” (CATO, 2013). (Also, Happy Labor Day to those who are smart enough to refrain from labor!)

Part of an email from a teacher in the Palm Beach County Public schools:

… I have tested positive for Covid and was out of the classroom today [Monday]. I hope to be cleared for a return on Wednesday. Not my choice on how to start the school year but I’ll look on the bright side.

I checked in with her on Thursday:

Yes I am back and very happy to see my Fantastic First Graders again!!!

Compare to “1 in 5 Educators Say They’ve Experienced Long COVID” (EducationWeek).

So let’s celebrate those who continue to labor despite union contracts that would allow them to take a substantial amount of time off, at 100 percent pay, after a positive COVID-19 test.

As long as we’re talking COVID-19 and the Palm Beach County Schools… What’s the level of coronapanic as reflected in the Student & Family Handbook? The word “mask” does not appear. The word “COVID” appears only to provide historical context:

During the onset of COVID-19, in the Spring of 2020, the School Board supported the successful transition of instruction to Distance Learning. One of the supports for this transition was the implementation of a one-to-one student device initiative. Because of this, all School District of Palm Beach County students may be issued electronic devices. These devices are for instructional use to support curriculum goals and will be available for students to use at home or in school.

The corresponding document from our old suburb? The “top priority” is “Establish a culture that is built upon the intersectionality of social and emotional learning, Antiracism, Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity (AIDE), student and adult learning, and fostering strong connections”. However, the word “COVID” appears 20 times. The possibility of masks on buses and in the classrooms is explicitly discussed. Parents must swear a loyalty oath to Saint Fauci and Science:

Back to the topic of Labor Day… here’s a Florida native green anole taking a break from his/her/zir/their labors on our front door.

Let’s hope that this green anole wasn’t pushed out of his/her/zir/their tree. See “Densely packed invasive anoles outcompete natives”:

Invasive brown anoles might outcompete their native cousins in the southeastern U.S. merely by living more densely.
Brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) inadvertently came to Florida in the 1800s by tagging along on cargo shipments. Since then, the invasive species have moved steadily northward in the state, often taking over territories occupied by native green anoles (Anolis carolinensis). Researchers know that over time, the invasive Cuban anoles change the native species’ habits. After moving in, the newcomer species typically occupies the ground and lower parts of plants and trees, while the green anoles occupy an ecological niche higher up on trees and bushes. The native anoles also become less common once the brown anoles have established themselves in the new territory.
Instead, she speculated that brown anoles in the wild might be outcompeting green anoles based on sheer numbers. Brown anoles may lay eggs more often than green anoles. The Cuban newcomers also tolerate much denser living conditions, while green anoles don’t. This allows the invasive species to take over more territory.

In short, anole migrants have a higher birth rate and don’t mind living in squalid conditions that native anoles would consider intolerable…

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Book recommendation: Anatomy of a Murder

September 4, 2022September 4, 2022 by philg

Here’s a book that I recently enjoyed, loosely related to my slavery as an expert witness: Anatomy of a Murder. It was turned into a 1959 film with some added twists (Jimmy Stewart, a combat B-24 pilot in World War II, is the star). Although the subject of the trial in the book/movie is a murder, which is a little more dramatic than the typical patent infringement lawsuit, many of the ideas and concepts are similar.

Due to its age, the book contains no 2SLGBTQQIA+ angle. What if you need a book that is more up to date? The Barnes & Noble in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida is ready to meet your needs. Some photos from an August 13, 2022 visit that I think our loyal reader/commenter Mike will appreciate: