Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a stunning victory.
“An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling.
Until Monday’s decision, it was legal in more than half the states to fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender. The vastly consequential decision extended workplace protections to millions of people across the nation, continuing a series of Supreme Court victories for gay rights even after President Trump transformed the court with two appointments.

Personally, I think that any law like this actually reduces employment opportunities for the category of people whom such a law purports to help. The law highlights to employers the inferior nature of workers in this category and that, if the employer is unwise enough to hire someone from this category, a lawsuit is an ever-present possibility. Absent a substantial discount, therefore, a rational employer, even one who is completely without prejudice, should thus do everything possible to avoid hiring someone who might fit into the protected category.

In our neighborhood… (“Love is Love” in a larger font than “Black Lives Matter”; significant?)

Gary Drescher, an MIT computer science PhD who is also interested in cognition and philosophy, posted this analysis on Facebook:

Today’s 6-3 Supreme Court ruling on sex-discrimination is encouraging, and not only because the outcome is good (and not only because Trump’s appointee Gorsuch wrote the opinion rebuking the Trump administration’s position). It’s encouraging because the legal reasoning is correct and straightforward: discrimination against someone for being gay or transgender is an instance of sex discrimination, even if Congress did not understand it as such when they banned sex discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That is, it’s sex discrimination to fire someone for, say, wearing a dress or having a male spouse, if those same behaviors would not be penalized if the person’s own sex were different than it is.
By fanciful analogy, imagine if Congresspersons were all numerologists who in the 1960s passed a law saying that a person must pay an income-tax surcharge in any year for which the person’s taxable income was a prime number of dollars, due to some mystical property of primes. But imagine that at the time, 23,069 was widely believed to be a prime number, so Congress expected the surcharge to apply to that income. Nonetheless, upon discovery of the factorization of 23,069, a court today would have to hold that income exempt from the prime surcharge, even though the exemption contradicts Congress’s expectation when they passed the law. It’s not that Congress was using the term ‘prime’ differently back then–rather, they had a factually incorrect belief about a particular number’s primality. Even originalism regarding the meaning of a legal text does not necessarily bind us to false beliefs held by the text’s framers.

Gary has persuaded me! Readers: what about you? Is this the dawning of a great new era in American employment litigation?

(Separately, I wonder if the new interpretation of the law leads to a logical contradiction among some American religious beliefs. Transgenderism is as “real” as science, per the sign above. Belief 1: If Joe Linebacker decides to identify as a “woman” starting tomorrow, she immediately becomes a completely successful 6’3″ tall, 275 lb. woman, indistinguishable from a cisgender woman. Belief 2: Employers, being more interested in after-work sexual activities and gender IDs than in profit, will ferret out the transgendered and, as the NYT says, “fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender”. How can Beliefs 1 and 2 be consistent? According to Belief 1, absent a DNA kit, nobody can discern the difference between a transgender woman and a cisgender woman. If that is true, how does the prejudiced employer figure out whom to fire?)

Finally, what if the Equal Rights Amendment had been passed?

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

With this new interpretation of “sex”, what else would change had the ERA been ratified?

Finally, what is the practical effect of the righteous elites passing laws like these? Here’s a private text message from a small business owner, responding to the NYT article:

Except transgender is mental illness. Do you really think a company should be forced to hire a 6 foot tall man who thinks he is a woman?

From an immigrant physician, near the beginning of coronapanic:

We have a transgender psychiatrist health secretary. We r f**ked

(she is from a conservative culture)

Will these people (Deplorables?) be persuaded to abandon their prejudices via threat of litigation? Or will they just hide behind Silicon Valley-style “not a culture fit” (regarding an over-35 applicant) cover stories?

To sum up: I am persuaded by Gary and think the Supreme Court made the right legal decision, but I also think this decision will end making it harder for a transgender person to get a job in the U.S.

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Massachusetts contact tracing system blown over by the first breeze

June 15, 2020June 12, 2020 by philg

“Can Coronavirus Contact Tracing Survive Reopening?” (New Yorker, June 12) could be the poster child for “TL:DR”. Some high points:

Massachusetts created a pioneering program to track COVID-19 cases. Its challenges are multiplying as the state reopens
The marginal position of the Brazilian immigrants in Massachusetts represented a potential hole in the monitoring system that the C.T.C. was trying to build. Welch had come up with a characteristically P.I.H. solution, which was to fill that hole not with a protocol but with a person, Comin, whose life experience meant he might be trusted by the people he interviewed. Comin had arrived in the United States at the age of nineteen, a punk-rock enthusiast who came to Massachusetts because his aunt lived there; after his tourist visa expired, he was grateful for the older immigrants who had explained the rules of a new country to him—how, for example, when you stopped at a stop sign, you really had to stop, in order to avoid being arrested. To Comin, teaching people how to isolate at home during a pandemic, when they might not be here legally or have health insurance, was something like explaining the full and complete stop.
Throughout the spring, the Massachusetts contact-tracing program got faster. It took between three and four days for the C.T.C. to learn of a positive test, but after investigators had that information they were able to reach seventy per cent of cases, and contact tracers were then able to speak to seventy-four per cent of those cases’ contacts. This still meant that nearly half of potential contacts never spoke with anyone working for the tracing program.
But, until June, Massachusetts remained under lockdown—a temporary and highly artificial situation in which each case had, on average, about two contacts. That changed with the George Floyd protests, when crowds returned to the state’s public spaces. … Wroe, the C.T.C.’s director of implementation and design, had her eye on the protests but said that they were simply too difficult to trace. When contagious people told investigators that they had travelled on a bus, or visited a nursing home, the C.T.C.’s protocol was to alert the local Board of Health and move on. Wroe also believed that Massachusettsans did not want a program that would find ways to track their public movements. She said, “I don’t think there’s much epidemiological advantage in chasing people down in public places, versus the very real risk of losing trust.”

The core of the problem is that we don’t have enough welfare for low-skill immigrants:

The social safety net for immigrants in Boston can seem so porous that it might as well be all holes. Baez has been trying to make it airtight. “What people really want is to feel secure,” he told me when I called him one evening in May, just after his shift had ended. He began to talk through the cases he’d worked that day. All of the adults in a household had tested positive for the coronavirus, and they wanted to know how they could safely share one and a half bathrooms without infecting the children, or re-infecting one another. Another call came from a pregnant woman—who, Baez said, was “the most nervous person I spoke with today.” She and her husband, who both work at McDonald’s, had tested positive and had to stay home for two weeks. She was worried about eviction, and money for the baby, if they lost their jobs. A call came from a woman who worked as a nursing assistant at an assisted-living facility, who had just tested positive, along with many of her colleagues. “Everyone on my floor got it,” she told Baez. She was isolating at home and needed a nebulizer for her asthma, but didn’t have a hundred dollars to pay for it, so she had to figure out a way to purchase the device and then find a volunteer to pick it up at the pharmacy and drop it off on her doorstep. Baez said that this work reminded him of the challenges he has had trying to respond to emergencies overseas: “If there was equity, period, there wouldn’t be a need for us to fill these gaps.”

Fortunately, we still have a good supply of taxpayer-funded opioids:

A thousand tracers, in the middle of a pandemic, gets you somewhere, but maybe only partway. In the evenings, when Baez walks around his parents’ neighborhood, he often passes Boston Medical Center, which runs a large opioid-addiction program, and where he can see clusters of addicts on the street corners. They’ve still been getting their methadone, but their presence reminds Baez of all the vectors for transmission that might still be beyond his compass, and the gaps in care he can’t cover. Baez told me, “Obviously, we can’t promise the world.”

So… the official story back in March was that we would lock down to “flatten the curve” (same number of infections, spread out a bit). This morphed by April into a “shutdown until contact tracing is ready” plan (nytimes). By May this was no longer sufficient. We needed a long shutdown, to hire more contact tracers, and to turn the state into “Maskachusetts” (i.e., don masks at least a month after the infection had peaked).

Now it seems that, because (1) we don’t ladle out enough welfare to low-skill immigrants (who are, after all, our greatest source of economic prosperity and per-capita GDP growth!), and (2) we have the occasional mass gathering, the magic of Asian-style contact tracing will be forever out of reach.

From our neighborhood, the ponies of Maskachusetts:

“Boston Mayor Declares Racism A Public Health Crisis” (NPR): Yes, we shut down for 4 months and have more than 2X the Covid-19 death rate of never-shut Sweden, but the real public health crisis is not coronavirus…

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Harvard students take brave Black Lives Matter action

June 15, 2020June 8, 2020 by philg

From some young people brave enough to spend months cowering-in-place at Mom’s house… “What Comes Next: How Harvard Must Combat Systemic Racism” (The Harvard Crimson):

Our subsequent three editorials will address actionable responses the University can take. In the first, we will call on the University to address its own complicity in racist and anti-activist policing. Harvard must abolish its private police force. The Harvard University Police Department is no different than municipal and state forces across the nation. HUPD has been deployed in the armed policing of Boston-area protests and has helped arrest protesters at least once in recent memory. It has a history of racist policing and a current culture of racism, unjustifiable violence, and unaccountability. It has no place on our campus.
In the second, we — in a long-overdue shift — will join the call for Harvard to divest from private prisons and the prison industrial complex. Our previous precedent was not only insensitive, but missed the point. We can no longer fail the black community by failing to take into account the magnitude of oppression enacted by the prison industrial complex and its investors. Harvard can’t either.
In the third, we will dive into Harvard’s continued engagement with issues of race, both internally and externally. From explicitly — and with real financial teeth — supporting mutual aid funds, nonprofit organizations, and bail funds that combat state oppression of black people, to moving beyond facile diversity and inclusion rhetoric toward a more robust engagement with racism, discrimination, and ignorance on our campus, we will call attention to a number of ways — long advocated for by the activists already committed to this fight — that Harvard can consistently make its campus and community more just.

Racism in the U.S. (and “genocide” perpetrated by Israel) doesn’t stand a chance now that Harvard undergraduates are Zooming to the front lines.

my own prediction regarding investments in private prisons in light of the coronapanic

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Trump/Pence signs save communities from coronaplague

June 14, 2020 by philg

“Understanding Spatial Variation in COVID-19 across the United States” (National Bureau of Economic Research):

We also find that the severity of the disease is politically patterned: even when controlling for density, counties with a high proportion of Trump
voters in the 2016 general election have lower cases and deaths.

In other words, even the coronavirus cannot bear the sight of a Trump/Pence sign on a front lawn!

So… if you want to find a place in the U.S. where children are likely to be able to go back to school in September, a thinly populated state that voted for Trump in 2016 is the safest choice.

Combining the election results map with states ranked by Covid-19 deaths and states ranked by population density… it looks like the states in which children are most likely to be able to go to school, play on the playground, run around without a mask, etc. are the following:

Alaska (no income tax)
Wyoming (no income tax)
Montana
North Dakota
South Dakota (no income tax)
Utah
Idaho
Nevada (no income tax)

Among the above, my bet is on South Dakota as the least likely to be perturbed by the plague. Based on my source on the ground there, the state had a minimal shutdown, actually tried to reopen schools before the year ran out (unionized teachers thwarted these efforts, though), and has committed to reopening schools and universities in the fall (example).

Readers: What are your bets for which states will offer residents the closest experience to a normal life? (not a “new normal”, which is code for “bad”!)

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Time to watch Jar Jar Binks instead of Harry Potter?

June 14, 2020June 13, 2020 by philg

“Harry Potter Fans Reimagine Their World Without Its Creator” (NYT):

When J.K. Rowling was accused of transphobia about two years ago for “liking” a tweet that referred to transgender women as “men in dresses,” much of the Harry Potter fandom tried to give their beloved author the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it really was just an accident, a “clumsy and middle-aged moment,” as Ms. Rowling’s spokesperson said at the time.
[now] First, Ms. Rowling took aim at an article that referred to “people who menstruate,” suggesting that it was wrong to not use “women” in a misguided attempt to include trans people. When she received negative response to this, she then published a 3,700-word essay on gender, sex, abuse and fear: “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators.”

The Times itself seems to reject the idea of more than a handful of gender IDs:

Each fan must make her own choices for herself then.

Is it acceptable to start and end a list of pronouns for “fans” with “her”?

This is a “news”, not “opinion”, article in the Times. It is apparently a proven fact that TERFs are wrong:

Ms. Rowling’s essay, which was published on Wednesday, rails against the term T.E.R.F., or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, describing it as a slur used to silence women like herself on the internet. She repeated a number of pieces of misinformation that are common talking points for this loose association of people, and made the claim that the “movement” led by transgender activists is eroding the notion of womanhood and “offering cover to predators like few before it.” As a sort of explanation for that fear, Ms. Rowling recounted memories of a sexual assault in her 20s.

Here’s the real question for me: how hateful does a hate-filled author have to be in order to justify watching Jar Jar Binks?

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Chevy Volt and the Massachusetts RMV during Coronaplague

June 14, 2020June 7, 2020 by philg

A Facebook post from the Great State of Maskachusetts:

When the rules get stupid…
I acquired a Chevy Volt last year. For the ones who don’t know it, this is a plugin/hybrid that can drive ~55 miles on pure electric mode.
Afterward, when the battery is down, the gas engine kicks up. 55 miles is way enough to go to the office (in a prior life) and to the tennis courts. Great, I installed a 220v charger in the garage and I went twice to the gas pump during the year, typically for longer trips.
Last week was the time for the yearly Mass state inspection. And the car was rejected!! The reason: I have not used the gas engine enough so the computer cannot retrieve the actual emission of the engine (thanks VW!). Now they ask me to run on forced gas before I come back for another inspection.
Let’s recap: I used my car 95% on electric energy, which means almost zero direct emission, and the car was rejected as it might pollute. And now they ask me to pollute to validate it! How is that stupid??

“It’s a coronamergency, but let’s not relax any of our rules”

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Wicked Brazilians will take the place of the wicked Swedes in forecasts of doom?

June 13, 2020August 5, 2020 by philg

The Swedes who refused to lock down were the previous favorite targets of “scientists” and the media armed with forecasts of doom (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/24/did-doom-visit-the-swedes-yesterday-as-planned/ for example). Now that the Swedes are enjoying, unmasked, their summer and an abundance of UV light, the doomsayers need a new target. How about Brazil? They don’t have an effective lockdown and it is winter there. We all know the critical importance of national leadership whenever a virus is circulating and Brazil’s leader is an infidel with respect to the Church of Shutdown (“‘Death is everyone’s destiny’: Bolsonaro’s words of comfort”).

Here’s the June 10, 2020 IHME forecast:

On August 4, Brazilians will be dying at the rate of 5,248 per day and the rate of death will be accelerating. They will need 57,639 ICU beds and will have just 4,060 to go around.

Who wants to predict the actual numbers for Brazil? Keep in mind that the population is 210 million, so the number of deaths will be dramatic compared to what the typical European nation experiences.

I will go first. My perspective is a “scientific” one. In other words, I will look at one or two data points and then extrapolate wildly. From the chart below, it looks like the non-virtuous Brazilians have, by dint of doing nothing, already “flattened the curve” to a large extent. So my first scientific observation (i.e., guess) is that the death rate on August 4, 2020 will be roughly the same as it is today. On the other hand, the virus has already killed a lot of the easiest-to-kill Brazilians. Therefore, the number should be a little lower. On the third hand, General Winter is fighting alongside the coronavirus in parts of Brazil. If the latter two factors cancel out, the number of deaths tagged to Covid-19 in Brazil on August 4 should be 1,274 (the number from yesterday’s WHO report).

Readers: What’s the result of your own scientific analysis? Care to use the comments for a prediction regarding August 4, 2020?

Follow-up post: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/08/05/how-is-coronaplague-down-in-brazil-and-the-rest-of-the-ihme-predictions/

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How useful is a closed museum to the Black Lives Matter movement?

June 13, 2020June 13, 2020 by philg

From New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, closed since mid-March:

There is a link to a letter from two rich white guys:

We must come together as a Met community to grieve and to reflect on how we, as individuals, and as a museum, can do more to support social justice efforts in this country. We are thinking through various ways we can create opportunities for staff to have these conversations remotely, and we will share more details on what’s next in the coming days.

What’s the value of this offer to “come together” if the museum is closed? Those passionate about social justice can’t even go in to see all of the prominently featured art by dead white European males.

The comments on the site are interesting. Americans love empty words, it seems:

Thank you for Standing in Solidarity. What a fabulous idea.
Thank you for your commitment to build from these defining lessons born from our torn national fabric and lack of patriotic and empathetic leadership.
Thank you for this important public statement.
At a time when we have so little to be proud of, your statement makes me proud to be a patron and volunteer at the MET.
So important that the arts become a vocal part of our National crisis. Thank you for this statement.
As an world reknowned institution, it is unprecedented that you would reach out to the disenfranchized people of New York City as you have done
Thank you for your leadership in broadcasting this important message of acknowledgement of the absolute horror of our own uniformed police …
Thank you for making your views clear . It is wonderful for a cultural institution to be so explicit over it’s support for this matter.
Tony Mcdade, Nina Pop, Muhlasia Booker, and so many more. Black Trans Lives Matter.

In other words, even if you haven’t gone to work for more than three months, you can still be a hero if you tell your web contractors over in India to put a black image on your home page!

Uh oh, a couple of people want to see something beyond an update to the HTML on the index page:

While the museum is closed, would you consider hanging banners on the facade of the MET that are created by black artists, support the Black Lives Matter movement, and/or honor George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, or Breonna Taylor?
Will you be donating to The Black Lives Matter movement or offering donations of any kind to any programs?

A Deplorable comment:

Does your plan include the other oppressed groups, or will it be at their expense?
LGBT
Age discrimination
etc.

(He/she/ze/they forgot about half of the victims in “LGBTQIA+”!)

Separately, when do art museums reopen in the plague lands? A lot of Texas museums are reopened (e.g., Kimball), but there does not seem to be any plan for Boston and New York. Why can’t they add a $50 plague fee to each entrance, do security monitoring remotely with cameras, and call it good? The Met is 2 million square feet. If there are 500 people in the museum, are they really more likely to spread the virus to each other than if these same people were walking around on Manhattan sidewalks, going into grocery and liquor stores, meeting on Tinder, etc.?

New York does not have a monopoly on virtue. Here’s the home page of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, now in Month 4 of its closure:

The “Give Today” link is to a Black Lives Matter organization? It is certainly noble of the institution for rich white people to use their platform to raise money for Bostonians of Color! Oh wait… clicking “Give Today” leads to an appeal to give money to the Museum of Fine Arts, not to Black Lives Matter:

What does the rich white Canadian who runs the museum have to say about the experience of poor black Americans:

It is past time to recognize that the usual commitments to change are not enough, and that we have an obligation to make a difference. Only demonstrable actions will evidence a commitment. We acknowledge that the MFA, like many art and cultural organizations across America, has work to do to become the institution to which we aspire. This is the time for us to determine: “How will the MFA take the lead on bridging and healing the divides that exist among us?”

Past commitments didn’t work. What’s the solution? Additional commitments:

We commit to action, to listen, to do, to speak, to gather, to insist.

“The Met Welcomed More Than 7 Million Visitors in Fiscal Year 2019” (somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 on a typical day, then? if the museum is open for 500 people at a time in 3-hour blocks and stays open from 9-9, it could accommodate 2,000 per day)

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Coronapanic will usher in the Great Age of Convertibles?

June 12, 2020June 12, 2020 by philg

Fight the plague by driving with the top down?

Now that things are open in most states (not here in Massachusetts, though! We liked Months 1, 2, and 3 of Shutdown so much we’re going into Month 4.), people have a reason to get in the car and drive. I wonder if convertibles will become more popular as a way of reducing coronaplague. If you have to drive with a non-family member, just put the top down first.

Suppose that you’re stuck in traffic on America’s roads built for 150 million and now serving 330 million. If everyone is in a convertible with the top down then everyone is breathing on everyone else (not okay unless at a BLM protest, right?). Maybe that problem could be solved by rolling up all of the windows? Now it is like being a grocery store cashier: you’re protected by a clear barrier.

What about exploiting a height advantage? To avoid any virus exhaled by someone stopped next to you at a light, try to have a taller vehicle. If he/she/ze/they bring a Miata, you bring a Mini convertible. If he/she/ze/they bring a Mini convertible, you bring an SUV with the top cut off. If he/she/ze/they bring an SUV with the top cut off, you bring an SUV that has been jacked up before the top was cut off.

My Facebook feed is now packed with panic regarding coronavirus infections that are occurring post-reopening in various states. This is exactly what “science” told us would happen under our March 2020 dogma (example). And it is exactly what Angela Merkel told us to expect. But somehow people are treating it as new information.

One thing that is odd is that people are refusing to consider adapting. People who live in tiny San Francisco dwellings say that they are proud to wear masks all the time and make sure that their only connection to the rest of humanity is Internet. They express pride in not being “selfish” by going out and/or going unmasked. Example:

I feel very lucky in San Francisco and the bay area. SF protocols have been very strict and remain so and there has been only 44 deaths out of 800,000. We’re starting outdoor dining this weekend but not much more. And masks are required if you are within 30 feet of anyone outside (not just 6). Goal is to set culture of mask wearing before things open more. I have seen too many Americans online complaining about mask wearing as if it’s an imposition. I totally agree about too much entitlement as you note and very selfish. I hope we keep this mask requirement for quite a while!

Why does she stay, though? She could have a bigger house in Wyoming, the same Internet, zero income tax, and be as isolated as she wants to be (though does not have to be, since Wyoming is mostly reopened, including for school).

At least until the fearful are confident that coronavirus has burned its way through the U.S. population and/or there is an approved vaccine, why wouldn’t people without a job that requires physical presence seek to move to places where life (and driving) can be conducted outdoors?

Readers: What convertibles do we need? Personally, I want a five-seat convertible, but there is nothing on the market except for one Jeep. Given the height issue discussed above, it would also be awesome to have a topless SUV or at least minivan. At the risk of being tarred with the label of “Tesla fan-boy/girl/zirl/they”, I have to say that electric drive would be more valuable in a convertible than in a regular car. When going slowly downwind there is no exhaust to be blown back into the seating area. It should be easier to keep the cabin quiet if there are no explosions in cylinders.

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/05/21/plague-proof-florida-and-texas-with-shaded-outdoor-classrooms/

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