We spent nearly 60,000 lives and more than $1 trillion on the Vietnam War to stop Communism…

by philg

… yet today it seems that a larger percentage of the U.S. economy is government-run than is “Communist” Vietnam’s.

Something to think about on this, the 44th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon?

From Heritage Foundation:

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam remains a Communist dictatorship characterized by repression of dissenting political views and the absence of civil liberties. … All land is collectively owned and managed by the state.

“Communist,” right? Since 1986, about a decade after the U.S. was defeated, the Vietnamese have been running what they call a “Socialist-oriented market economy”. What does it cost?


The top personal income tax rate is 35 percent, and the top corporate tax rate is 22 percent. Other taxes include value-added and property taxes. The overall tax burden equals 18.0 percent of total domestic income. Over the past three years, government spending has amounted to 29.4 percent of the country’s output (GDP)

How about the U.S.? From the same foundation:

The top individual income tax rate is now 37 percent, and the top corporate tax rate has been cut to 21 percent. The overall tax burden equals 26.0 percent of total domestic income. Over the past three years, government spending has amounted to 37.8 percent of the country’s output (GDP)

The above numbers are understated because they don’t include state income taxes, e.g., the top tax rate for someone living in California is over 50 percent (37 percent federal plus 13.3 percent state). But even before state taxes are considered, it seems that the U.S. has a larger percentage of its economy run by the government.

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Shareholders victimized by managers who hired men

by philg

“The Company That Sells Love to America Had a Dark Secret” (nytimes)

Dawn knew better. While she was acting manager, she had access to payroll forms and had seen some discrepancies: in particular, that a male sales associate who was recently recruited from a tile store was making $2 an hour more than Marie. The egregiousness of the manager’s lie bothered Dawn. That night, after the manager went home, she closed the door to the administrative office and took out all the payroll records and spread them out over the desks. One by one she saw it: There were seven women and five men who were counted as full-time sales associates. In only one case was a woman making more than a man, and it was only when you compared the highest-paid woman with the lowest-paid man. The women’s hourly wages averaged $10.39, and the men’s averaged $13.40 — so that on average, a woman working a 30-hour workweek for 52 weeks each year would make $16,208.40 before bonuses, while a man working the same amount would make $20,904. The men did not have more experience, nor were they quantifiably better salespeople.

There is a precise algorithm that lives in the heart of every woman, one that alerts her when the injustice she is experiencing outweighs the joy. Dawn saw those payroll records and knew she couldn’t stand for it anymore.

In other words, the company had to pay men more per hour to do the same job and decided to lower their profits, and shareholder returns, by hiring men rather than lower case equally qualified and productive women. They did this even though men, as a class, actually had lower value to the company:

Most of their customers were men; men are the ones who buy most jewelry, and so the female managers weren’t surprised when they were explicitly told whom to hire. “You hired women,” said Michelle, who became a district manager during her more than 20 years at the company and who, like many of the women I spoke with, preferred to be mentioned by only her first name. “Good-looking women, because men were the customers.”

If we believe that the managers of this company actively worked against shareholder interests by hiring men at premium wages, why not allow shareholders to tweak the corporate by-laws so that a public corporation can’t hire anyone who identifies as a man?

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New Yorkers figure out the best place to park millions of immigrants…

by philg

… and it turns out that the answer is not “New York.”

From the virtuous Editorial Board of the New York Times, “California Has a Housing Crisis. The Answer Is More Housing.”:

California finally is beginning to consider solutions to its housing crisis that are on the same scale as the problem.

The state is desperately in need of more housing. Home prices are the highest in the continental United States, and population growth continues to outstrip construction.

The city of Los Angeles calculates that 43 percent of its developable land would be opened to higher-density development. For wealthy cities like Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley community that abuts Stanford University, the legislation could increase permissible density virtually everywhere. Palo Alto has two commuter rail stations, but like much of suburban California, it has long resisted construction of anything but detached, single-family homes.

The state’s population continues to grow; the question confronting policymakers is where to put those people.

Did they forget about quality of life? That a resident of Los Angeles might spend five hours per day commuting through traffic jams? That California city-dwellers might have to travel for 30 minutes or more to find a green park? The existing Blade Runner-type crowding is acknowledged, but it turns out to be a good thing for Mother Earth:

The bill also is a necessary piece of the response to another crisis: climate change. Cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles — landscapes of tall buildings, concrete and traffic-clogged streets — are the most environmentally friendly places for human life on earth. The Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has calculated that the residents of California’s core cities use about one-fourth less carbon per year than the residents of the surrounding suburbs. Better yet, the residents of California’s cities use less carbon than the residents of any other large American cities because the temperate climate limits the use of air-conditioning and heating.

It is time to rewrite the rules: The solution to California’s housing crisis is more housing.

(Do we believe this? These “are the most environmentally friendly places for human life on earth”? A resident of Los Angeles generates less CO2 than someone who lives in Ethiopia or Madagascar? (Wikipedia per-capita CO2 emissions) Or maybe they are saving the planet by sending healing vibes?)

Readers: Does it show a lack of self-awareness to publish something like this? Saying that people on the other side of the country need to suck it up and wait a few more hours in traffic every week for the good of Planet Earth?

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We don’t want immigrant criminals until they’ve ripened a bit?

by philg

“Mass. Judge, Retired Court Officer Face Federal Charges For Allegedly Helping Defendant Evade ICE” (WBUR):

A Middlesex County judge and former court officer are facing federal charges for allegedly helping a defendant in a Newton courtroom avoid arrest by an immigration officer last year.

Judge Shelley Richmond Joseph and now-retired court officer Wesley MacGregor are accused of helping the defendant, an undocumented immigrant, slip out the back door of Newton District Court while an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent waited to arrest him on a federal detainer in April 2018.

Susan Church, a Cambridge immigration attorney, said the case would worsen fears about the court system for undocumented immigrants.

“We have witnesses who won’t come to court. We have defendants who don’t get tried. We have people who can’t get divorced — women who can’t seek restraining orders because they are terrified by ICE interference,” she said.

The defendant isn’t named in the indictment, but has been previously identified as Jose Medina-Perez, 38, from the Dominican Republic. In April 2018, he was facing drug charges and a fugitive warrant out of Pennsylvania for drunken driving. Immigration officials say the defendant’s real name is Oscar Manuel Peguero. According to Lelling’s office, Peguero has been deported from the U.S. twice — in 2003 and 2007 — and a federal order had been issued prohibiting him for re-entering until 2027.

It is the last bit that fascinates me. This guy, whatever his name might happen to be, seems to be a frequent flyer in our criminal court system. We say that want him out of the U.S. But we also say that want him back starting in 2027 after he has matured a bit. That’s because we need more Dominicans in the U.S. and don’t think that in 2027 we’ll be able to find any who lack a criminal record?

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Tesla 3 is cheaper than a Honda Accord …

by philg

… but Uber and their drivers are too stupid to realize this.

“Tesla Model 3 vs. Honda Accord — 7 Scenarios” (CleanTechnica) is kind of fascinating. The author figures out that it is cheaper to drive a Tesla 3 than a similar-size Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, or Nissan Altima. Yet he never questions why it is that people for whom driving is a business haven’t figured this out.

He finds some sky-high residual value estimates for Tesla 3s and never asks “If the resale value is so great, why isn’t it cheap to lease one of these?”

Is this additional evidence that, as a reader commented on an earlier post, Tesla is a religion, not a car company?

[Separately, my most recent Uber ride was in the back of a late-model Honda Accord. It was significantly louder on the highway compared to the middle seat of our 2018 Honda Odyssey EX-L. Maybe nobody can build a better car than an Odyssey!]

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Should Californians who bribe other Californians have to fly to Boston to be prosecuted?

by philg

One thing that I haven’t figured out in the college bribery case (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/13/admissions-fraud-layered-on-top-of-the-existing-american-college-fraud/ and https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/20/college-bribery-scandal-is-evidence-of-social-mobility/) is why the defendants are having to fly to Boston to be prosecuted by the Federal government.

Consider an actress who lives in Los Angeles, California and is alleged to have bribed a ringleader who lives in Newport Beach, California, to get a child into University of Southern California. I’ve just finished listening to a lecture series on the Founding Fathers and I don’t think any of them would have imagined the California resident having to travel out of state to be prosecuted.

Suppose that everyone can agree that the alleged actions are crimes. Why are they federal crimes?

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Cirrus SR22T Engine Management

by philg

Sharing a “Cirrus SR22T Transition and Engine Management” page in case it is useful to other flight instructors. I found that there wasn’t anything good out there, even from Cirrus, for pilots who already knew how to fly the SR22 and needed differences training for the SR22T.

People are actually buying these $1 million non-pressurized piston-powered machines. That’s the magic of (a) the parachute, and (b) Cirrus’s incremental annual improvements. General aviation would be a lot more popular, in my opinion, if the Piper Malibu had entered true mass production. Passengers want a quieter ride, to be above the weather and not wearing an oxygen mask, to walk up the airstair door, etc. But Cirrus has done amazing by focusing on the pilot. The G6 airplanes, for example, will automatically turn off the yaw damper below 400′ AGL. No more wondering how the rudder pedals got so crazy stiff on landing!

I would love to see Cirrus do a clean-sheet piston-powered airplane that concentrated on passenger comfort: pressurization plus dramatic reduction in interior noise for a start.

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Death of a Patent

by philg

An inter-partes review ( IPR2018-00044) at the U.S. Patent Office is not the most exciting part of my life as a software expert witness, but it more often leads to a clear resolution (timeline) than do the Federal District Court cases. The patent in question, 7,302,423, covers a way to browse the contents of a database. For curious readers: the decision.

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Maria Butina: Piper Warrior student pilot turns out not to be a master spy

by philg

Nearly a year ago, the New York Times carried the story of the master spy Maria Butina (post). One photo showed her as a student pilot in a Piper Warrior (market value: $30,000?). Later it turned out that she was planning to move to South Dakota in order to more effectively continuing her spying on the Federal government. Vladimir Putin claimed not to know her (CNBC), exactly as we’d expect if she were a critical Kremlin asset.

Now this from CNN… “How the case against Maria Butina began to crumble”:

Prosecutors, meanwhile, have acknowledged that Butina is no Russian spy. But they insist her crime was still nefarious and that she acted as an “access agent” to help spot people who could be recruited as intelligence assets down the road.

“Butina was not a spy in the traditional sense of trying to gain access to classified information to send back to her home country. She was not a trained intelligence officer,” prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing. But, her actions “had the potential to damage the national security of the United States.”

Maybe next time our counterintelligence agents can be trained to look for spies in turbine-powered aircraft?

[U.S. taxpayers, in addition to paying for the investigation and prosecution, now also get to pay for 18 months of incarceration, Butina’s sentence for failing to register as a foreign lobbyist.]

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Late middle age Democrats wanted to be led by the elderly, but now they want to be guided by children

by philg

My Facebook feed is a good indication of how Democrats aged 40-65 think.

In 2016, these folks yearned to be led by a senior citizen. They would have been happy with Bernie Sanders (77 years old) or Hillary Clinton (71), for example, tottering up the stairs to the White House.

In 2018, they were admiring Stormy Daniels (40) for her bravery and her attorney, Michael Avenatti (48), for his determination and possible Presidential candidacy.

These days, however, they post panegyrics to the wisdom of people young enough to be their children, e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (age 29; “in the media mostly because she’s good-looking,” says an independent friend) and Pete Buttigieg (37).

This seems fickle to me. Google and Facebook don’t change their minds every few years about what age person they want to see in various roles within their companies. Why would passionate Democrats swing wildly between thinking that a senior citizen has the requisite life experience to be their leader and deciding that actually the most sensible choice is to follow the guidance of a 29-year-old?

[More worrisome to me personally: Why the apparent dismissal of those of us in, um, later middle age?]

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