How did our coronapanic investing ideas work out?

Five years ago… Investing in the time of plague?

Thought experiment: What stocks will go up in response to the coronavirus plague?

One idea: Comcast and similar cable TV stocks. If people are stuck at home they won’t mind paying for premium channels and will be less likely to cut the cord.

Second idea: airlines and hotel stocks. “Buy on bad news” is the theory here.

Some ideas from readers in the comments:

  • Oil ETFs and/or Exxon/Mobil (XOM)
  • Valero (VLO) for diesel fuel
  • telephone stocks (Verizon?)
  • an index fund of Japanese pharma companies
  • carnival cruise stock
  • short Boeing and Airbus (BA, EADSY)

Let’s see if my ideas are reliably terrible. Comcast is about flat today (dramatically lower, if adjusted for Bidenflation) than it was five years ago while the S&P 500 has roughly doubled:

How about Hilton (HLT) as a proxy for the hotel industry? It has outperformed the S&P 500.

For airlines, JETS seems to be the ETF that holds U.S. airline stocks. It hasn’t done great.

Reader ideas? XOM and CCL (Carnival cruises) would balance each other out:

Conclusion: it is difficult to beat the index.

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Justifying our total war against Japan

It’s the 80th anniversary of a bombing raid on Tokyo in which the American military killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night (Wokipedia). Did the Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii justify our attacks on their civilians?

University of Alaska in Fairbanks runs a beautiful museum and it answers the above question to some extent.

Right now, about one fifth of the core exhibit space at the Museum of the North is devoted to the victimization of 220 Japanese-Alaskans whom President Franklin Roosevelt ordered interned (with Supreme Court approval) and also the evacuation of 800 Native Alaskans from islands thought vulnerable to Japanese attack.

The PhD scholars explain on a sign leading into the exhibit that the Japanese were on track to conquer interior Alaska, western Canada, and Seattle:

If we hadn’t waged total war on this enemy, including killing 100,000 civilians in one night (pre-atomic bombs), folks in Seattle would to this day be forced to live a Japanese lifestyle. Certainly, it wouldn’t have made sense to engage in the settlement negotiations that the Japanese expected after Pearl Harbor.

What else goes on in the museum? First, visitors are reminded of the irrationality of W-2/1099 work in the American Welfare State (admission is $20 for chumps; free for EBT cardholders):

The PhDs in charge of the museum use native languages whenever possible (Troth Yeddha’ is apparently not, as I’d thought, a location of one of Jabba the Hutt’s branch offices) and also note that the noble indigenous themselves don’t want to use these languages anymore (consistent with John McWhorter’s explanation of how humans converge toward a single language in a media- and telecommunications-rich world)

Compare your level of patience and attention to detail to Cynthia Gibson’s, who sewed salmon vertebrae into a dress:

The Into the Wild bus will be on display here soon:

Looking for decorating ideas?

Even without indoor plumbing you can have a beautiful home:

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Progressive town in Maskachusetts admits being 60 years late to the feminist party

Happy International Women’s Day to those who celebrate.

A January 7, 2025 post from the suburb of Boston where we used to live:

History was made today in Lincoln. Town Clerk Valerie Fox swore in Sergeant Jennifer McNaught as the newest member of the department. Sgt. McNaught becomes the first woman supervisor in the department’s history.

More than 60 years after second wave feminism made it through the United States, the righteous progressive town finally appoints a female to a position of responsibility. Why admit being this late to the feminism party? (Also, if the town has been working for years on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Anti-Racism (“IDEA”, not the discredited “DEI”) why are both of the employees in the photo white? They wanted to hire some non-white people, but couldn’t find anyone qualified?)

Massachusetts progressives love to talk about how stupid, racist, and sexist folks in Alabama are, for example, yet Birmingham, Alabama appointed Annetta Nunn captain in 1995 (CBS) and police chief for the whole city in 2003. If we assume the “captain” job in Alabama is comparable to the “supervisor” job in Maskachusetts, it took the progressives of Lincoln, MA 30 years to catch up to the people whom they enjoy characterizing as primitive and prejudiced.

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Robinson goes to war

Incredibly, the U.S. military decided that it didn’t need to waste every possible dollar every day. The Army will now do some primary training of helicopter pilots in the Robinson R66 (rebranded the “TH-66 Sage”) at a civilian flight school in Marianna, Florida, a one-hour drive from Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee. An R44 would probably make better economic sense, but the idea of a piston-powered aircraft is apparently too terrifying for America’s bravest heroes.

See “Crew Training International and Helicopter Institute awarded U.S.Army FAA Part 141 Helicopter Flight School Pilot Program” (March 6, 2025)

Related:

the airspace (Marianna at the top center; note the magenta color for the airport, which indicates that there is no control tower):

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Poor as a Professor, Dumb as a PhD (UCLA edition)

A friend who taught computer nerdism in Hong Kong before joining our lab at MIT used to try to intensify the pain and suffering of graduate students by remind us that the Chinese had an expression “Poor as a Professor, Dumb as a PhD”.

In an age where an average OpenAI employee earns $1 million/year and a receptionist at an NVIDIA branch office likely gets considerably more, UCLA is hiring mathematics professors for “$78,200 – $101,400 annually.” In case the original URL gets memory-holed, here are some screen shots:

Google’s AI says “The average home price near UCLA in Westwood, Los Angeles is around $1.3–1.6 million, depending on the source. The median sale price per square foot is around $857–$859.” The same AI says that a 30-year mortgage on a small house near UCLA will cost about $90,000 per year (i.e., roughly 100 percent of what UCLA is offering to pay the proud Ph.D. in mathematics.

Let’s dive into some of the specifics to figure out what a successful applicant looks like. In theory, California government employers aren’t supposed to sort applicants by skin color (the hated-by-progressives Proposition 209 from 1996). Let’s look at some of the language:

We strongly encourage applications from individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and other individuals who are underrepresented in the field, across color, creed, race, ethnic and national origin, physical ability, gender and sexual identity, or any other legally protected basis.

If they don’t discriminate by skin color in hiring then where’s the “strong encouragement” for those who have a favored skin color?

Donald Trump is trying to eradicate DEI from federally-funded universities such as UCLA. Instead, UCLA will have “EDI”:

Statement of contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion that includes previous and planned efforts that advance EDI through formal and/or informal mentoring, especially of Latina students

Are they trying to put together a “Hot Latinas” calendar for their nerd departments?

This search is part of a cluster hire with faculty positions in the departments of Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy who will support UCLA’s goals to achieve federal designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution as early as 2025. … Faculty hired through this search are expected to maintain an active affiliation with the Chicano Studies Research Center and to have a track record or demonstrated commitment to mentoring and encouraging the success of U.S.-based Latinx and first-generation scholars. Since the Latina population is particularly under-represented in physical sciences nationwide, the Department of Mathematics and the Division of Physical Sciences are especially interested in candidates with potential to serve as outstanding mentors to Latina students.

Maybe I could be considered, despite my lack of a math Ph.D., because I consistently use the term “Latinx”:

the Office of the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost have sponsored this search in order to recruit exceptional scholars whose teaching, scholarship and/or mentoring has strong ties to Latinx experiences in the United States.

Let’s have a look at Proposition 209:

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

Circling back to the economics… as prestigious as some of these institutions are, how is a math professor earning $78,200/year in his/her/zir/their 30s ever going to be able to afford a family unless he/she/ze/they chooses a job at a school in a part of the country with a lower cost of living? It’s tough to have two children in a studio apartment shared with another adult.

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Ayn Rand’s Antique Car Museum in Fairbanks

Last month, I spent 1.5 hours at Alaska ComiCon in Fairbanks, which isn’t quite the jam-packed experience of the San Diego Comic-Con, but included the world’s largest balloon costume (Godzilla, of course!):

My friends picked me up for the short drive to the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, which seems to be indirectly named for Ayn Rand, ironically famous for not having learned to drive despite living for a time in Los Angeles. (The connection seems to be that Tim Cerny, a real estate developer, liked Rand’s novel The Fountainhead and named his company after her and then the museum is named for the company.)

Despite the founder’s apparent free market orientation, the museum has an Elizabeth Warren section:

My favorite car was the Owen Magnetic, spiritual heir to the Chevrolet Volt, in which the internal combustion engine is a generator. It even had regen braking:

Here’s a 1932 Cadillac…

After 90 years of evolution, the ugly duckling 1932 Cadillac was transformed into the beautiful Escalade:

Americans 110 years ago hadn’t discovered the joys of helicopter parenting and, therefore, brothers aged 10 and 6 were able to ride on horses from Oklahoma to the East Coast, buy a car and learn to drive in NYC, and then drive back to Oklahoma (the horses went home by train). They met two presidents and both Wright brothers:

State-sponsored PBS did a show about them (I recently learned about this from a Facebook friend; it aired in April 2020, just as coronapanic was in full swing, but it is tough to imagine a lockdown strict enough that I would have the patience to watch PBS).

The museum covers the challenge of building a practical snowmobile, which didn’t happen until airplanes were into their second generation (most of the invention seems to have occurred first in Russia; Wokipedia).

I knew that Carl Fisher, the creator of Miami Beach and the Indy 500, had developed a gas-based “Prest-O-Lite” headlight, but didn’t realize that it involved a tank of acetylene right next to the driver!

For fans of the old Bell 47 and Hiller helicopters… the Franklin company that made their engines was produced cars with air-cooled engines back in 1905:

After the museum, we went downtown to Soba for Moldovan food.

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Testing ChatGPT 4.5

On this glorious day of Turing Award presentation to two reinforcement learning nerds, I went back to some of ChatGPT’s failures, feeding the same prompts to the 4.5 version of our future robot overlord.

December 21, 2024: ChatGPT tries to figure out time zones; Today: correct answer!

December 14, 2024: LLM failure on a simple question (“What are examples of museums named after two people with different last names?”) Today: failure once again.

August 2024: ChatGPT 4o tackles the challenge of AC ducts sweating in an attic; Today: complete failure. It concludes that if you put 50-degree air inside an R-30-insulated duct in a warm attic, the outside of the duct will be at 50.8 degrees F and, therefore, the duct will sweat.

The latest version of ChatGPT thinks that pit bulls are, in general, more dangerous than golden retrievers. But it adds an “important nuance”:

Individual temperament, training, socialization, and responsible ownership significantly impact dog behavior.

I followed up with

You’re saying, then, that your chances of being killed by your pet golden retriever are low, but never zero?

and ChatGPT agreed, highlighting “but never zero”. Asked for an example, ChatGPT claimed “A notable fatal incident involving a Golden Retriever occurred in 2012, when an 8-month-old infant in South Carolina was tragically killed by a Golden Retriever.” I found the story:

… found dead in his family’s mobile home …. The baby was in a swing when Lucky, a golden retriever-Labrador mix, bit the child several times and tore off his legs, authorities said. The child’s father, Quintin, was in the home at the time, police said. He was in another room asleep with the family’s 3-year-old and their other dog. The baby was discovered when his mother, Chantel, came home after taking their seven-year-old to a doctor’s appointment, The Post and Courier reported.

Here’s a photo of what a Goldador is supposed to look like:

Based on this photo, I’m not convinced that the mostly peaceful animal is a golden-lab, though a lot of puppies do love to bit arms, hands, legs, and feet!

Let’s try some image generation… “generate a picture of failed flying machine design circa 1900 based on the principle of wing flapping”

This can be considered a fail due to the apparent rigidity of the structure.

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Iditarod Update

The mushers and their beasts (14-16 per sled at this point) have all made it to the mighty Yukon River at or past Tanana.

This is an all-gender race, just as I think all sports should be, and a woman is in the lead: Maggie Hamilton. She’s got a “T” bib for “Teacher on the Trail” and, I think, is traveling by air taxi. Three out of the five dog-pulled leaders are women:

The musher currently in 2nd place is Mille Porsild, listed as from Denmark but the bio later says “Mille lives in Alaska with her sled dogs” so I guess the dogs didn’t have to endure air freight before their big race. She’s dealing with a broken sled, according to Facebook, and meeting up soon with a new one that has been airlifted in. Bad news for our trade war: Michelle Phillips, the leader, is from Canada and lives halfway between Skagway and Whitehorse. Hope for the U.S. comes from Alabama in the form of Jessie Holmes, currently in third place.

Following the Iditarod via the site/video isn’t as much fun as I had hoped. It’s tough to get power and connectivity so the only video comes from checkpoints and we don’t get to experience a musher’s-eye view from the trail. It’s too bad that there aren’t any drones with Starlink and 100-mile range.

In this image from Dave Poyzer, the terrain isn’t the snow-blanketed landscape that you might expect (everything in Fairbanks was covered in snow last week!).

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Who watched the Trump State of the Union speech?

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:

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Child care in the Netherlands

A friend in the Netherlands is a little crazy and is now head of a household (the term is still vaguely sensible there) with four pre-K children. Here’s his report:

Things are going surprisingly well. It’s actually possible to have a ton of kids running around just like our forebears did. The neighbor’s kid shows up everyday to help out.

Me: “Just for a few hours? What do you pay for that, out of curiosity? Here I don’t think you can get anyone decent for less than $25/hr and probably $30/hr if you wanted to lure a high school kid away from obsessive college prep. How old is your helper?”

we pay E10 per hour. She’s still in high school. We don’t need more than a few hours. In the morning, they all go to the child care which is a few minutes walk from here and they come back at 6pm. She’s very young, though. I think 15 or something.

Me: 15 isn’t young. Stalin’s girlfriend when he was 35 and in Siberian exile was 14. Maybe she was 13.

I directed his attention to “Stalin and his lover aged 13” (The Standard, 2010):

In March 1914 Josef Stalin – a Georgian cobbler’s son known to friends as Soso and comrades as Koba – was sentenced for his revolutionary activities by the Tsar to exile close to the Arctic Circle in a tiny hamlet named Kureika.

The place was a freezing hellhole, an isolated twilight world cut off from humanity in winter by the daylong darkness.

In Kureika, only the reindeer, snowfoxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone wore reindeer fur.

The hamlet contained 67 villagers – 38 men and 29 women – all packed into just eight ramshackle izbas or wooden peasant shacks.

Among them were seven orphans from the same family – the Pereprygins – of whom the youngest was 13-year-old Lidia.

She immediately noticed Stalin, not just because of his good looks but also because he was hopelessly underdressed with only a light coat.

Before long, he was sporting the full local outfit – from boots to hat – of reindeer fur, all of it provided by Lidia Pereprygina.

Stalin in those days was slim, attractive, charming, an accomplished poet and educated in the priesthood, but also a pitiless Marxist terrorist and brutal gangster boss – a Red Godfather who had funded Lenin’s Bolsheviks with a series of audaciously bloody acts of bank robbery, piracy and racketeering.

Some time in the early summer of 1914, the 35-year-old Stalin embarked on an affair with Lidia.

While not admitting to anything explicit in her memoirs, we catch a glimpse in them of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking bout to drinking bout, because she writes of their drunken dancing and singsongs: “In his spare time, Stalin like to go to evening dances – he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance.”

Separately, today is the anniversary of Josef Stalin’s death in 1953. Imagine the disappointment of people who were alive 72 years ago and thought that they’d seen the last of Stalin-style dictatorship reading today’s New York Times and learning that an even worse dictator has seized control of the U.S.

Circling back to the Netherlands and my friend, I think that all of the doom stories coming out of Europe still leave room for us to admit that most European countries provide a lot more support for the traditional nuclear family. Marrying the government in Europe leads to a much crummier lifestyle than here (admittedly, working at the median wage in Europe does too!). All of the family court profiteering that works so well here (e.g., having sex with an already-married high-income person, divorcing a medium-income spouse, etc.) leads to just a subsistence income there. The U.S. provides economic incentives for parents of young children to split up (or never get together to begin with) while Europe mostly provides economic incentives for parents of young children to stay together and, as a consequence, the traditional two-biological-parent household is more common in Europe (some stats). At this point, most of Europe is a terrible place to make money, obviously, (the whole continent will be worth less than NVIDIA if present trends continue?) but for someone who already has money and wants to spend a summer over there with a 10 Euro/hour helper maybe it makes sense?

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