Should judges who approve racial discrimination have to explain the system to children?

by philg

“Harvard Admissions Process Does Not Discriminate Against Asian-Americans, Judge Rules” (nytimes) describes how an Obama-appointed judge approved of Harvard’s system of admitting students based on race. (The NYT headline is interesting; it would be more accurate to say that the judge ruled that she didn’t care whether Harvard discriminated against Asians or that the judge ruled that Harvard did discriminate against Asians, but that they did so with her blessing.)

Here’s my comment:

A Whirlpool factory service guy showed up today to fix the refrigerator (failed in early September after three weeks; soonest service appointment was today, Oct 1). He turned out to be an immigrant from South Korea whose job now is cleaning up after all of the appliance failures experienced by American McMansion-dwellers.

I would love to see the judge explain to his children why they will need to work harder and score higher than children of other races in order to get into a college that is at least partially funded with taxes paid by their appliance repairman dad.

Assuming that other factors are equal, the child of an investment banker with the correct skin color will be admitted by Harvard ahead of the Korean-American child of an appliance technician.

Readers: What do you think? Would judges be less likely to approve of racial discrimination if they had to explain to the young targets of the discrimination how it was going to work?

[Separately, why is it okay for the judge to imply that a group of Asians is lacking in diversity? “In her decision, Judge Burroughs defended the benefits of diversity … ‘The rich diversity at Harvard and other colleges and universities and the benefits that flow from that diversity,’ she added, ‘will foster the tolerance, acceptance and understanding that will ultimately make race conscious admissions obsolete.'” Isn’t the implication that if we assemble white and black Americans we have “rich diversity,” but if we assemble a group of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Burmese, and Indian students we have a boring monoculture?]

Related:

  • https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/09/18/why-is-it-difficult-to-make-a-reliable-refrigerator/ (background on the refrigerator saga; the $2,600 Kitchenaid failed after three weeks; the tech today said that it was an example of “Monday morning or Friday afternoon assembly,” with a thermometer that is supposed to control the coil defrost cycle in the wrong place and some blue tape left improperly in the fridge evaporator section. He thought that it would have been easy to see at the factory that the unit had been assembled improperly, so there was at least a deficiency in inspection)
  • “Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard,” a paper by economists at Duke, University of Georgia, and University of Oklahoma; Harvard is not seeking out “students of color” because they grew up poor: “disadvantaged African Americans receive virtually no tip for being disadvantaged” (the (Harvard grad) friend who sent me this article concluded “being black confers the same advantage as giving the school over $1 million”)
  • Grutter v. Bollinger, in which the Supreme Court held that University of Michigan could discriminate on the basis of race (against a white woman), but Sandra Day O’Connor wrote “race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time … [the] Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
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True cost of Medicaid is 2X headline cost?

by philg

I recently attended a talk by the CEO of a hospital with $2.6 billion in annual revenue. She noted that patients on Medicaid are 40 percent of the census and that Medicaid pays only 50 percent of the cost of treatment. In order to at least break even at this not-for-profit, therefore, she has to charge privately insured patients enough extra to make the books balance.

(A doc who was formerly Physician-in-Chief of this hospital and then president of another hospital said “you can’t make money doing research” and, financially at least, “teaching is hopeless”.)

This might explain why apparently healthy people are paying such big premiums. “Employer Health Insurance Is Increasingly Unaffordable, Study Finds” (nytimes):

A relentless rise in premiums and deductibles is putting insurance out of reach for many workers, especially those with low incomes.

Instead, she quit her job last summer so her income would be low enough to enroll in Medicaid, which will cover all her medical expenses. “I’m trying to do some side jobs,” she said.

The average premium paid by the employer and the employee for a family plan now tops $20,000 a year, with the worker contributing about $6,000, according to the survey. More than a quarter of all covered workers and nearly half of those working for small businesses face an annual deductible of $2,000 or more.

Annual Medicaid spending is supposedly roughly $600 billion per year, about 3 percent of GDP. But if hospital-related charges are the majority of Medicaid costs and, in fact, the hospitals are recovering half of their expenses from unrelated privately insured patients, the true cost of Medicaid to Americans is closer to $1 trillion per year (about 5 percent of GDP, meaning that people who work 40 hours/week have to stay at work on Friday from 3-5 pm to pay for Medicaid).

Note that this off-books funding for Medicaid is done in a regressive manner since the money is extracted silently from all Americans with employer-affiliated or other private health insurance. I.e., the cost of a health insurance policy also contains a hidden tax to pay for about half of Medicaid (and also to pay for the uninsured who throw out the hospitals’ $100,000+ bills?).

[Anecdotally, we know plenty of folks in Massachusetts who are careful to refrain from earning more W-2 wages than the thresholds for public housing and MassHealth (Medicaid) eligibility.]

Related:

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Taxi driver’s perspective on Uber coming to Vancouver

by philg

Uber had been, until recently, effectively outlawed in Vancouver (history). I took a taxi(!) to the airport there on September 12 and asked the driver how he felt about the impending Uberstorm.

He was an unskilled, though English-speaking, immigrant who rented the taxi from the medallion owner at a fixed price and then his earnings were dependent on the vicissitudes of the market. How much was a medallion worth? “It used to be $500,000,” he replied, “but now they’re down to $50,000.” (Vancouver Sun says that the peak was C$1 million).

Due to the fact that prices for taxi rides were high enough to pay the rent on a C$1 million asset (the medallion), consumers used taxis only as a last resort and drivers ended up netting more or less the market-clearing wage for unskilled immigrant labor. With lower prices, the driver expected to be working more and keeping everything but the car costs.

Related:

  • California AB 5, a new law that is intended to force Uber to treat drivers as W-2 workers (ironically leaving drivers of traditional taxis, who have to rent from medallion owners, as supposedly modern “gig” workers)
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Vanity Fair on Amazon Prime

by philg

In preparation for three weeks away from decent Internet, I downloaded a five-hour adaptation of Vanity Fair, the mid-19th century novel, from Amazon Prime.

To appreciate the achievement of Gwyneth Hughes, the screenwriter, download the Project Gutenberg text of the novel. It is heavy sledding compared to modern works and contains minimal dialog. Hughes had to create characters’ speech patterns from whole cloth. A woman refers to Becky Sharp as a “treasure-hunting jade”, but I couldn’t find this phrase searching the text of the book. I’m not sure to what extent she leaned on previous TV miniseries, but very little seems anachronistic.

Readers: If you’ve seen this, what do you think? Can anyone compare it to previous adaptations?

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Free coding class from Microsoft for 8th graders

by philg

From the email inbox of a reader-parent….

Meany Middle School was invited to an amazing opportunity at Microsoft on Thursday, October 3rd from 9 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. This event is in partnership with Paramount Picture. The students will have an opportunity to experience a coding class with a surprise special guest.

There is space for 45 – 8th grade students who identify as female. The students must be 13 yrs. old to attend this field trip. Lunch will be provided. It has been described as a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Only the first 45 students who return the permission slips and photo release form will be allowed to attend. Permission slips were sent home with students yesterday.

If Microsoft chooses to expose these young folks to C++, it would be interesting to know how many decide that coding is the best career choice.

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Northwest Passage and Donald Trump

by philg

I’m in Washington, D.C. today. What does the former malarial swamp have to do with the mostly-frozen (still) Northwest Passage? It turns out that timbers from a British Royal Navy ship sent out to search for Franklin, HMS Resolute, were used to make the Resolute desk, a gift from Queen Victoria to Rutherford B. Hayes.

Who is using the desk now? Donald Trump! (at least until he is convicted following the impeachment process that the New York Times assures us is right around the corner)

Where else in the U.S. do folks love polar exploration? One of the experts on our cruise had studied the Arctic at Ohio State, home of the Institute for Polar Studies (renamed “Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center” because #ClimateMatters).

Here are some photos from Nome, Alaska, commemorating the Amundsen-Ellsworth airship trip over the North Pole, very likely the first time that humans reached that point:

Readers: What do we make of the fact that most American presidents do much of their work at a desk that is associated with a famous British failure?

Related:

  • In the #MeToo age, let’s just be grateful that no furniture associated with the polar hero Fridtjof Nansen is in the White House; it turns out that he was sending nude selfies (made with a view camera?) to a woman 30 years his junior (Vice)
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Some hope for electric airplanes from Nova Scotia’s latest battery tweaks?

by philg

Electric airplanes currently cost more to operate per hour than gas-powered ones. A major factor is the limited life of the battery. Throwing out a $20,000 battery after 700 to 1,000 flights is more expensive than overhauling a piston engine after 2,200 hours.

Nova Scotians funded by Tesla to the rescue? This WIRED article talks about a battery that can handle 4,000 cycles.

Related:

  • May 2018 post with some discussion in the comments about battery cycle life (also a discussion about Californians using taxpayer funds to run Slovenian electric airplanes: “The students flying these world’s-most-advanced training aircraft are currently “unemployed.” In other words, they are young Americans who can’t get organized, in one of the tightest labor markets in U.S. history, to walk down to McDonald’s at 3 pm and start an evening shift. The California officials, however, have decided to train them for a job that requires getting up at 4:30 am.” The flight school’s blog suggests that the project is on hold pending FAA regulatory approval.)
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Computational Health Informatics Program, 25th anniversary

by philg

It is sobering to think that I sat down and began writing a web interface to an electronic medical record system (the Oracle database at Boston Children’s Hospital) more than 25 years ago (see “Building national electronic medical record systems via the World Wide Web,” a paper from 1996).

Today is a celebration (agenda) of the 25th anniversary of the Boston Children’s Hospital Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP). I’ll try to take some notes and write a blog post later about what I learned.

For at least 25 years we’ve had all of the tech building blocks that we’ve needed to implement almost any kind of IT support for health care. Yet in the US we have ended up with a unified database of every ad that we’ve ever clicked on and are discussing the possibility of a unified medical record.

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Drama on Martha’s Vineyard

by philg

Preparing a short talk for an upcoming aviation gathering…

My friend David landed his Bonanza at Martha’s Vineyard and the police were waiting for him. “Do you live in Katama in the gray house with the ‘I’m with Her’ lawn sign and the Black Lives Matter and Rainbow flags on the pole out front?” David affirmed that he did.

“We have some bad news for you, sir,” said the officer. “Your house burned down and your children are at the hospital being treated for smoke inhalation. They might have to bring in Boston MedFlight to take them to Children’s Hospital.”

“That’s terrible!” said David. “Do you know how the fire started?”

The police officers shuffled a bit and looked at each other. Finally, one spoke up. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, this, sir, but I think you know that Barack Obama recently bought a waterfront house in the neighborhood. It seems that he was having an affair with your wife. They were smoking in bed, the marijuana cigarette got tangled up in the covers and ultimately set the whole house on fire.”

David looks stunned and takes a deep breath. He puts his right hand on his heart and bows slightly.

“Barack Obama? Came to my house?”

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What is the point of 5G in a country that has coverage problems?

by philg

People are complaining that the latest iPhones can’t support 5G, a high-speed cellular data standard that uses high frequencies and therefore will presumably require new antenna and radio circuits.

I am not sure what the point of 5G is in the US, though. The range and ability to transmit through walls, rain, etc. is inferior with 5G. The problem with the US is not that the 30-50 Mbit speeds in areas with good LTE (4G, sort of) coverage are not fast enough. It is that the speed in a lot of places is 0 Mbps (i.e., there is no coverage).

Readers: What will be the practical advantage of 5G over LTE?

Separately, if 5G does prove useful, will 5G make our traffic-choked suburbs even less attractive compared to cities? If carriers didn’t want to invest in good LTE coverage for American suburbs why would they build 5G towers every 1,500’ in medium-density environments?

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