Search Results for: discrimination

Sex discrimination at the car wash

by philg

Finishing up the Labor Day roundup…

Last month I got the Honda Odyssey (review) cleaned out at the beyond-awesome Allston Car Wash. It was about 95 degrees outside. One hundred percent of the folks whom I saw actually doing the cleaning were men. They were toiling with vacuum cleaners at the entrance. They were cleaning interior glass at the exit like the Karate Kid. There were only two women whom I encountered at the operation that 95-degree day. They were sitting behind the counter in an air-conditioned shop collecting money from customers.

An interesting race discrimination lawsuit

by philg

We’re going to have fantastic economic growth… as long as litigation over bathroom usage and skin color generate as much as output as machine tools.

Here’s an interesting lawsuit covered by the Daily Mail: Young woman with a mixture of “German, Irish and Italian descent” is told that she doesn’t qualify for a “Multicultural Undergraduate Internship” at the Getty Foundation.

Up until now private institutions have been able to select students, for example, based on skin color. It was public universities that ran into trouble and litigation when they operated race-based admissions programs. I’ll be interested to find out what the legal theory is here. The Getty is entirely private. Why can’t they say “We don’t want to hire any white people”?

If a court says “No, you can’t choose by race” what about other non-profit programs that are limited by age? (Disclosure: I helped set up one myself that would potentially become illegal in a changed legal regime.)

Related:

Slam-dunk employment discrimination case against hospital maternity operations?

by philg

I recently spent two days at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. We got a healthy baby out of the deal so I am not complaining about their operation from a consumer perspective. However, I am thinking that there is an opportunity for litigators there.

Kleiner Perkins has a workforce that is 30-percent female (20 percent of partners are women) and that made them a target for legal buccaneer Ellen Pao and as well as guilty in the eyes of the New York Times, both before and after a five-week trial.  What would the jury have made of an operation where 100 percent of the employees (that we saw, over a 53-hour period) were of a single gender?

Health care jobs are the best in the U.S. The chart linked from “Software engineering = meaningless job?” shows that being in health care offers the best combination of pay and meaning. If these jobs don’t pay as well as collecting child support in Massachusetts (see Kosow v. Shuman in this chapter, for example), they certainly pay more than the median Massachusetts hourly wage of $21.48 (BLS May 2014). There is great protection from foreign competition and virtually unlimited demand for services, especially since the government made it illegal not to purchase health insurance.

How can it not be a lucrative field for litigators when the maternity and labor/delivery departments were both 100-percent staffed by women? Let the defense argue that men don’t want to experience the joy of working around newborns and helping women realize their dreams of motherhood. The plaintiffs will argue that these departments created a hostile environment for men.

Readers: If Ellen Pao had what the New York Times thought was a great lawsuit, why isn’t there a truly superb lawsuit here?

[Sidenote 1: The value of healthcare IT was on display throughout the delivery process. Mt. Auburn has achieved all of the Obama Administration’s “meaningful use” hurdles. This was our second baby to be monitored through pregnancy by the midwives at this hospital. This was our second baby where a test from this group had informed us that we would be having a boy. Yet we were asked three times by three different people, each typing at a computer, whether we knew the sex of the baby and, if so, what it was. (Separately, at what age can gender dysphoria begin? If very young, is it medically meaningful to ask “Are you having a boy or a girl?”) While sharp labor pains tortured the mother-to-be, we were asked about mailing addresses, health insurance data, etc. (the same information collected exactly two days earlier at a checkup) While suffering labor pains severe enough to merit an epidural, the mom was asked to sign a consent form for an epidural. (Why wasn’t it signed, scanned, and in the computer weeks before?) Having been given a due date by this group within this hospital, we were asked what the expected due date was.]

[Sidenote 2: At a “meet the midwives” event and some similar gatherings of expectant mothers, all were talking about their own to-be-born babies as fully human individuals, e.g., when looking at a 2-month ultrasound. They would refer to the fetus by name in some cases, talk about the child kicking, etc. Yet, given that the hospital is in Cambridge, it is same to assume that most are supporters of the Massachusetts law permitting on-demand abortion of babies at any time through 24 weeks of pregnancy (Wikipedia says a fetus may be viable outside the womb at 23 weeks).]

[Sidenote 3: New mothers are provided with a stack of pamphlets regarding welfare programs for which she would be either newly eligible or eligible at a higher level of benefits. In theory, Cambridge provides free housing for all non-working adults, but there is a waiting list and a parent with a young child gets higher priority. Anyone with a low income is eligible for food stamps, but “Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)” is available in addition for women and young children, according to the federal site. Obamacare requires insurance companies to pay for a breast milk pump with each baby, so the mother of four children will eventually end up with a stack of Medelas in the closet.]

Related:

 

How old would you have to be to win an age discrimination lawsuit in Silicon Valley?

by philg

As a member of the MIT Class of 1982 my friends are now getting to the age (or beyond) where employers might want to replace them with younger/childless/cheaper/etc. workers. This seems especially likely in Silicon Valley where the cool/valuable companies are seemingly the ones founded by 20-year-olds. Ellen Pao (wrap-up; divorce litigators’ perspective on) started at Kleiner Perkins in 2005. Pao was supposedly 43 in 2012 (Fortune) and thus would have been 36 at the time that Kleiner hired her. Even if she came in with videos of spry 75-year-old relatives doing demanding mental and physical work do we think she would have been hired for that job as a 56-year-old, regardless of race or sex? If not, plainly there is more age discrimination in Silicon Valley than gender discrimination.

The question then becomes what is the threshold age at which a person who had been fired could expect to win a lawsuit under the various federal and state laws that supposedly protect workers from age discrimination? (it is “supposedly” because my business-minded friends say that these laws actually hurt older workers because companies don’t want to hire them and incur the litigation risk)

Sheryl Sandberg sweeps away sex discrimination at Facebook

by philg

A friend on Facebook who also happens to work at Facebook posted the following:

‪#‎ellenpao‬ fired despite her results & despite them being credited to less competent men. ‪#‎whendoesitend‬ I am so happy to be at Facebook now where Sheryl Sandberg leads on culture. The stories I could tell about other places.

She linked to a story on Business Insider about the trial in Ellen Pao’s lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins.  Right next to the story that she referenced was a link to “A woman has hired Ellen Pao’s lawyers to sue her former employer Facebook for sex discrimination and harassment.”

Related:

Obama will preside over America’s greatest increase in employment discrimination?

by philg

When Americans elected someone who identifies himself as “black” as president, folks said that this might usher in a new era of open minds and tolerance. I’m wondering if, ironically, Obama will end up presiding over the greatest increase in employment discrimination that the country has ever seen.

I’ve started six companies and had the good fortune to operate most of them during the prosperous period 1985-2006. I hired whites and blacks. I hired women and men. I hired 18-year-olds and 55-year-olds. I hired Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and Christians. In addition to Americans, I hired people from Pakistan, India, China, Germany, England, Canada, Australia, Japan, Croatia, South America, and various parts of the former Soviet Union. Was I trying to make a statement about diversity? No. I was trying to stay in business. We had growing demand from customers and, thanks to the strong economy, there weren’t many qualified applicants for the jobs that I offered. I felt lucky whenever I could find someone whom I was enthusiastic about hiring.

This article (dated from some time in 2009 according to the text) says that, due to the 25 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed, there are typically 200 applicants for every job opening in the U.S. If we assume that 15 of those 200 are pretty well qualified, that leaves an ample opportunity for personal prejudice to operate. If an employer does not like workers of a particular race, he need not hire any and won’t face any financial consequence. More realistically, if any employer is prejudiced against older workers, who are rendered less attractive by government mandates to provide them with ruinously expensive health insurance, he or she can hire a workforce of twentysomethings.

In Obama’s speech he noted that “My administration has a Civil Rights Division that is once again prosecuting … employment discrimination”.  I think this makes sense. In a healthy classical free market economy, there would be almost no involuntary unemployment and a firm practicing discrimination would risk being overtaken by competitors. In a moribund planned economy, however, there is ample opportunity for cost-free employment discrimination and only a larger government can discourage it (though the Framers might ask why this isn’t a job for the 50 states; see The Dirty Dozen).

As government tends not to be perfectly efficient, my prediction is that Obama has a good chance of presiding over a massive expansion of employment discrimination in America. I expect this to fall hardest on older workers.

Lilly Ledbetter pay discrimination bill

by philg

While the U.S. is losing thousands of jobs every day, it might seem odd that Congress is making it tougher for companies to hire people in the U.S.  This New York Times story covers the fact that it will now be possible for someone to sue a company 20 or 30 years after they were hired, on the grounds that the person who hired them (who may be dead by the this time, and thus unavailable to testify) paid them less money than a person of another sex or a difference race.  If you’re an employer, how do you budget for this liability?  How do you account for it in your pension fund, given that once 20 years of pay are adjusted the pension fund will need to be beefed up to pay out a higher pension based on the revised salary.  It sounds at first as though we’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  In a nation where everyone is unemployed we’re going to argue about how much people should have been paid back in 1979 when they had jobs.  (Only from the perspective of 2009 does 1979 look like it might have been a good year for the economy!)

The effect on young people would appear to be especially pernicious.  The people who have the best chance of arguing that they were discriminated against are in their 50s and 60s (Lilly Ledbetter, the plaintiff for whom the bill is named, was hired by Goodyear in 1979 and retired in 1998).  As the U.S. economy shrinks, the pool of available money to pay wages shrinks.  If more of the money is given to oldsters and their attorneys, less money will be available to 22-year-olds starting their careers.

An economist would tell you that pay discrimination laws aren’t necessary in a free market.  A company that was underpaying women, for example, would find that its skilled women had quit to work for a competitor.  If women in all sectors of the economy were underpaid, a company could make tremendous profits with little risk simply by hiring an all-female workforce and entering markets where most firms had a mixed or all-male workforce.

Perhaps Congress is smarter than it would be appear at first glance.  Employers who aren’t subject to the market can do whatever they want and many of the most egregious cases of pay discrimination have been at monopolies such as the old telephone company and at government agencies.  Looking at where the jobs are right now and where we are going, the U.S. is no longer a market economy.  By the time we’re done with layoffs and stimulus, at least 40 percent of the economy will be government (federal, state, local).  16 percent of the economy is health care (overlaps with the preceding 40 percent), which does not behave according to the free market, and something like 7 percent is Wall Street, recently nationalized in all but name (and upside).  A school district can pay its workers whatever it wants to and however it wants to; parents have no choice but to continue to pay property taxes and send their children to the local school.  A hospital can pay doctors more or nurses less and still get its Medicare and Medicaid funds.  A Wall Street firm can hand out bonuses to the (mostly male?) managers who drove it into insolvency because there are always more TARP funds available.

A 22-year-old who is lucky enough to find a job in the land of his or her birth will most likely find it in the non-market portion of the U.S. economy.  If present trends continue, a child born today who remains in the U.S. is virtually certain to work for the government, in government-sponsored health care, or at a government-guaranteed financial firm.  Thus the new bill may not be as simple as the “old folks and plaintiff’s lawyers continue to grab everything that isn’t nailed down”.

MIT is too rich to pay taxes

by philg

Recent email from the president of the Queers for Palestine version of MIT:

The interesting part:

MIT now pays a 1.4% tax on that investment income. The current Senate version of the bill would hike this endowment tax rate to 8%. To give you a sense of scale, for MIT that proposed tax hike is equivalent to our entire annual undergraduate financial aid budget, which provides aid to about 60% of our undergraduates or about 2,600 students every year.

In other words, the university needs the massive endowment to fund “financial aid”. Also, only 8% of the income from the endowment is actually used for financial aid.

Note that what the elite schools call “financial aid” is referred to in Econ 101 as “price discrimination”, in which each consumer is charged the maximum that he/she/ze/they is willing to pay; if the school determines that a family has $X in free cashflow annually the entire $X will be extracted by MIT. From Wokipedia:

Price discrimination (differential pricing, equity pricing, preferential pricing, dual pricing, tiered pricing, and surveillance pricing) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of. Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy. Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.

How academic elites see the river of federal tax dollars that Harvard has been receiving

by philg

A Facebook friend and social acquaintance from my Cambridge days, Lisa Randall, penned an article for the Boston Globe about how working class federal taxpayers should be forced to keep feeding a rich university in a rich state:

the Trump administration has done what has seldom been done before: unified the faculty behind a common, unwavering defense of academic freedom and their unrelenting belief in the value of universities, particularly their own.

(Remember that part of “academic freedom” is the freedom to use the peasants’ tax dollars to run racially segregated theaters, e.g., from 2021:

Nobody has ever explained to me how this is consistent with the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause or the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Maskachusetts General Law, Section 98.)

She posted a link to the article on Facebook. One of her friends, apparently a Deplorable, said “Not one penny of my tax$ for a $50B endowment woke factory thanks”. I trotted out my standard line about how it was unclear why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems”, would want or accept any federal money. Shouldn’t Harvard want to fund itself via donations from the rich and from state taxes and see federal money spent at universities that are in poorer-than-average states, e.g., in Michigan, Ohio, and Mississippi (stats on median household income by state; DC at the very top, of course, and Maskachusetts and New Jersey right underneath due to Medicare/Medicaid buying pharma and the Department of Education subsidizing universities)? I cited this 2016 piece from the Harvard Gazette, which calls itself “the official news website for Harvard University”.

The responses from her friends opened an interesting window into how academic elites think:

  • I was called “the dullest knife in the block” for thinking that an article in the Harvard Gazette by a “Harvard Staff Writer” and containing a series intro likely written by an editor was in any way related to an official Harvard position. It was an mere “opinion” piece and represented only the opinion of that one writer. (Which would mean that Harvard officially thinks that inequality is good? Or Harvard doesn’t think inequality is bad?)
  • Research grants should be allocated by merit and not by geography or wealth. An unstated assumption seemed to be that a Harvard lab couldn’t move if Harvard failed to secure private/state funding to replace the federal funding. Although it is, in fact, common for entire labs to move when a professor moves for whatever reason, the Harvard folks couldn’t imagine anyone leaving Harvard to follow the money. Our neighborhood here in Florida actually is periodically a destination for a moved lab, e.g., this neuroscience lab that moved in 2023 from University of California. Florida State University beat MIT in a competition to host the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in 1990 and the New York Times said FSU was “expected to draw scientists in biology, physics and engineering from all over the world”. Another NYT article said “M.I.T. felt that it deserved the project”. Today, the Chief Scientist down at FSU’s lab is Laura H. Greene while the hidebound MIT magnet lab is run by a white male, Robert Griffin.
  • A giant-brained Ph.D. participant from California disputed that Michigan was any poorer than Maskachusetts (Wokipedia says that MA median household income is nearly 50 percent higher than in MI). For those who only fly over the Midwest, it’s apparently plausible that the Rust Belt state and its biggest city of Detroit are both in prime fiscal condition.
  • The idea that the peasants of Michigan would benefit if $2 billion/year in federal money were redirected to, for example, University of Michigan from Harvard was questioned. Nobody but me was able to see that Michigan would be better off it were able to collect state income tax, property tax, and sales tax from the people paid by the $2 billion/year in grants. Nor that when those researchers went out to local retailers that the state would once again be able to collect more tax revenue as the retailers staffed up. (They would probably argue that the move of Citadel from Chicago to Miami didn’t hurt Chicago and didn’t help Miami (the Miami HQ for Citadel is expected to cost “$1 billion-plus” (translation: $2 billion?); imagine the cost for the building permit on this 54-story tower!).)

Here’s the HTML title tag for the Harvard Gazette:

<title>Harvard Gazette &#8211; Official news from Harvard University covering innovation in teaching, learning, and research &#8212; Harvard Gazette</title>

and here’s how it is rendered by Google when one searches:

Maybe the courts will block Donald Trump’s attempt to redirect the working class’s tax dollars to universities other than Harvard and similar. But if Trump does succeed, I think the elite schools and their elite graduates will be completely blindsided. Even after being told by the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re violating the U.S. Constitution by discriminating on the basis of race (especially against Asians), these schools imagine themselves to have gotten rich by being more virtuous than anyone else. A few fun points from the Boston Globe article…

We wouldn’t understand DNA if the working class didn’t fund Harvard:

The nature of DNA was discovered by an X-ray crystallographer, Rosalind Franklin, who was doing pure research to understand its molecular structure. Under the current funding crisis, Franklin might well have been laid off before making her groundbreaking discovery that accounts for much of modern medical research.

It is unclear how Rosalind Franklin, a British Jew working in pre-Islamic Britain with funding from a private company (Wokipedia says Turner & Newall), would have been disadvantaged by a change in where U.S. taxpayer money is spent.

The subtitle of the article is an interesting window into how elites think: “What happens when research is fully privatized?” There hasn’t been any proposal from the Trump dictatorship, or indeed anyone in Washington, D.C., to “fully privatize” research funding. The current dictatorship merely wants to take away money from the Queers for Palestine League schools that fail to comply with the dictator’s reading of the U.S. Constitution. Presumably the money taken away from Harvard would then be spent at schools that don’t engage in race discrimination, don’t support Hamas, etc. See, for example, “University of Florida denies appeal of pro-Palestinian student protester’s suspension” and “Protesters handcuffed, arrested at FSU amid nationwide demonstrations against Israel-Hamas War”.

Who watched the Trump State of the Union speech?

by philg

Per my usual, I didn’t watch Trump’s speech last night, but have peeked at the transcript. CNN establishes their neutrality in the first sentence:

Americans are reeling from the early weeks of Trump 2.0

The Google, informed by Oxford, says the definition of reeling is “lose one’s balance and stagger or lurch violently.” CNN reports as fact, in other words, that Trump has assaulted all Americans.

CNN compares Trump unfavorably to Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

Trump will always say he’s accomplished more than anyone. He’s got a way to go to catch presidents like FDR.

Maybe if Trump puts Japanese-Americans into concentration camps CNN will give him some respect?

Trump compares himself to slaveholder George Washington:

In fact, it has been stated by many that the first month of our presidency — it’s our presidency — is the most successful in the history of our nation. And what makes it even more impressive is that, do you know No. 2 is? George Washington. How about that? I don’t know about that list. But we’ll take it.

(see George Washington, Mules, and Donald Trump (2015): “real estate speculator-to-president is not an entirely new path”)

They heard my words and they chose not to come — much easier that way. In comparison, under Joe Biden, the worst president in American history, there were hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings a month, and virtually all of them, including murderers, drug dealers, gang members and people from mental institutions and insane asylums, were released into our country. Who would want to do that?

yields a “facts first” check from CNN:

From CNN’s Daniel Dale and Haley Britzky: There is no evidence for the president’s claim, which Trump’s own presidential campaign was unable to corroborate. (The campaign was unable to provide any evidence even for his narrower claim that South American countries in particular were emptying their mental health facilities to somehow dump patients upon the US.)

I’m not sure what about Trump’s statement CNN thinks is untrue. The federal government’s own statistics said that hundreds of thousands of noble migrants crossed the border in various months during the Biden-Harris administration. In any population of roughly 10 million (the total number of migrants during Biden-Harris rule) there will be at least some “murderers, drug dealers, gang members and people from mental institutions and insane asylums”.

I do love this one!

I could find a cure to the most devastating disease, a disease that would wipe out entire nations, or announce the answers to the greatest economy in history, or the stoppage of crime to the lowest levels ever recorded. And these people sitting right here will not clap, will not stand and certainly will not cheer for these astronomical achievements. They won’t do it no matter what. Five times I’ve been up here. It’s very sad, and it just shouldn’t be this way.

So Democrats sitting before me, for just this one night, why not join us in celebrating so many incredible wins for America. For the good of our nation, let’s work together, and let’s truly make America great again.

This is kind of funny:

We ordered all federal workers to return to the office. They will either show up for work in person or be removed from their job.

CNN fact check: More than half of federal workers were already working from the office full- or part-time when Trump took office

This reminds me of going to a California law office in 2024 and asking the receptionist how many people were coming in to work. She characterized the office as “packed” with perhaps 50 percent of people coming in on a given day (I saw only a handful of them). The post-coronapanic norm for desk jobs seems to be that only about half of people will show up and most of them will show up only part time.

Everyone who disagrees with me is a racist:

And two days ago, I signed an order making English the official language of the United States of America.

CNN: The English as a national language and Gulf of America efforts can be tied together with a very clear racial overtone.

(the majority of English speakers don’t live in the U.S., of course)

Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified. $22 billion from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens. $45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma. $40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants. Nobody knows what that is. $8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of. $60 million for indigenous peoples and Afro Colombian empowerment in Central America — $60 million. $8 million for making mice transgender. This is real. $32 million for a left-wing propaganda operation in Moldova. $10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique. $20 million for the Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East. It’s a program — $20 million for a program. $1.9 billion to recently created decarbonization of homes committee headed up — and we know she’s involved — just at the last moment, the money was passed over — by a woman named Stacey Abrams. Have you ever heard of her?

CNN’s response is interesting. They aren’t able to say that Trump is wrong about any of the above except that they take issue with “$8 million for making mice transgender” (i.e., the $22 billion number at the beginning of the passage is apparently correct) [Update: Apparently there were some fact-checker-checkers and the government’s transgender mice project was real so CNN updated its criticism of Trump to say only that the $8 million number might not be right.]

Last year, a brilliant 22-year-old nursing student named Laken Riley — the best in her class, admired by everybody — went out for a jog on the campus of the University of Georgia. That morning, Laken was viciously attacked, assaulted, beaten, brutalized and horrifically murdered. Laken was stolen from us by a savage illegal alien gang member who was arrested while trespassing across Biden’s open southern border, and then sent loose into the United States under the heartless policies of that failed administration — it was indeed a failed administration. He had then been arrested and released in a Democrat run sanctuary city — a disaster — before ending the life of this beautiful young angel. With us this evening, are Laken’s beloved mother, Allyson, and her sister, Lauren.

CNN says that only Republicans are better off when violent criminals are detained:

Riley’s death was a major campaign issue for Republicans, and passing the Laken Riley Act, which requires certain migrants to be detained when accused of a crime, was a major victory for Trump and Republicans.

Democrats are better off, CNN reports as a fact (this is not an opinion section piece), when people like José Antonio Ibarra are not detained.

This seems kind of insane:

To boost our defense-industrial base, we are also going to resurrect the American shipbuilding industry, including commercial shipbuilding and military shipbuilding.

And for that purpose, I am announcing tonight that we will create a new office of shipbuilding in the White House and offer special tax incentives to bring this industry home to America, where it belongs. We used to make so many ships. We don’t make them anymore very much, but we’re going to make them very fast, very soon.

It costs 4-6X as much right now, I think, to make a ship in the U.S. compared to in Taiwan, Korea, or China (see Why you’re likely safer on a Panamanian- or Liberian-flagged ship than an American ship). The French, Germans, Finns, and Italians are all better/cheaper at making cruise ships than we are. Trump on shipbuilding sounds like someone who is 4’11” planning for a career in the NBA. Here’s one of the last memorable U.S.-built non-military ships (SS United States, built 75 years ago when the U.S. still had its WWII shipbuilding capacity):

This pains me:

And I also want to make interest payments on car loans tax-deductible, but only if the car is made in America. … Spoke to the majors today, all three, the top people, and they’re so excited.

The federal government has borrowed $36.5 trillion so far and will now encourage people to bury themselves in shiny car debt instead of paying taxes?

Trump describes the people who cowered in place for two years when instructed to do so by their governors:

From the patriots of Lexington and Concord to the heroes of Gettysburg and Normandy; from the warriors who crossed the Delaware to the trailblazers who climbed the Rockies; and from the legends who soared at Kitty Hawk to the astronauts who touched the moon, Americans have always been the people who defied all odds, transcended all dangers, made the most extraordinary sacrifices, and did whatever it took to defend our children, our country, and our freedom.

How did the world’s meekest people end up with this bold self-image?

Readers: What did you take away from the speech, if you watched?

The Democrat response (transcript) is from Elissa Slotkin, an archetypical member of her party (divorced childless menopause-age female passionate about expanding abortion care). She’s also an example of White men correctly perceive American Jews as their enemies? and Elite coastal Jews advocate discrimination against white and Asian males. For example, she promises to “Increase access to capital and other financial tools to support minority businesses” (but not to businesses owned by white men; source). Here’s an example of her rebuttal:

But securing the border without actually fixing our broken immigration system is dealing with the symptom not the disease. America is a nation of immigrants. We need a functional system, keyed to the needs of our economy, that allows vetted people to come and work here legally. So I look forward to the President’s plan on that.

(Doesn’t “America is a nation of immigrants” mean that Native Americans are irrelevant? Or maybe they’re not part of the “nation”?)

Is “an open border isn’t the real problem” persuasive? Isn’t this exactly what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris said?

But it’s also at risk when the President pits Americans against each other, when he demonizes those who are different, and tells certain people they shouldn’t be included.

She says that it is bad to “tell certain people they shouldn’t be included” but also has a web site telling white men they shouldn’t be included in a government hand-out program. Ms. Slotkin agrees with Donald Trump on one point:

We are a nation of strivers. Risk-takers.

She’s from a cower-in-place state (Michigan) where schools were still closed in 2022, roughly two years after SARS-CoV-2 began spreading in the U.S. and thinks that Americans are “risk-takers”?

It’s Congress’s job to set tax rates and determine spending, but Ms. Slotkin blames Donald Trump for deficit spending:

Meanwhile, for those keeping score, the national debt is going up, not down. And if he’s not careful, he could walk us right into a recession.

My conclusion from the two speeches: given our addiction to spending, the only thing that can save the U.S. from insolvency or hyperinflation is if LLMs and other forms of AI hugely expand the economy/tax base.

Loosely related, from the days when Congress accepted all of Ronald Reagan’s tax cut proposals and rejected all of his spending cut proposals: