2019 should be a good year for alimony lawsuit plaintiffs

by philg

Alimony is now tax-free to the recipient (Forbes). (See “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for a reference to a U.S. Treasury analysis regarding the roughly 50 percent of alimony recipients who did not report the income and who therefore received it tax-free.)

Statutory and customary formulae haven’t changed. So where a plaintiff could previously get 30-50% of a defendant’s spending power, now there is an opportunity to capture 60-90%.

Massachusetts law, for example, provides alimony plaintiffs with the opportunity to collect 30-35 percent of the defendant’s pre-tax income via alimony (note that the plaintiff needs to spend in order to receive; the amount cannot “exceed the recipient’s need”). The tax law change means that the successful Massachusetts alimony plaintiff will now end up with more than 50 percent of the defendant’s after-tax earnings from just the alimony.

[Child support revenue will be in addition to alimony, depending on the defendant’s income and the judge. The Legislature wrote “When issuing an order for alimony, the court shall exclude from its income calculation … gross income which the court has already considered for setting a child support order.” Some judges, however, have interpreted this to mean that they can simply calculate alimony first and then subsequently calculate child support using the same total income (Judge Maureen Monks of Middlesex County is considered a pioneer in this interpretation). The result should be a transfer of roughly 80 percent of a defendant’s earnings to a plaintiff.]

So for anyone thinking of suing a higher-earning spouse… 2019 is probably the best year ever!

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Why are abortion laws that are anathema in Georgia okay in Europe?

by philg

Virtuous American corporations are boycotting Georgia due to some more restrictive abortion laws (list from The Wrap; article on an Amazon Studios production being pulled).

Yet the same companies that refuse to make movies in Georgia (a welcome respite for Georgia taxpayers? How much cash must they shovel out to the world’s wealthiest corporations?) happily operate in European countries that restrict abortion. For example, Netflix has a big office in Spain in which abortion is restricted beyond the first trimester (Wikipedia). Amazon has a big operation in Ireland, whose abortion laws are condemned by Amnesty International (see below; Amazon also operates in Northern Ireland where abortion is even more restricted).

If abortion is the litmus test for movie studios, why do they continue to operate in California? This chart shows that California bans abortion after “viability” (about 21 weeks with modern technology) whereas Massachusetts allows abortion up to 24 weeks. Why not pull up stakes and move to Massachusetts? (save a ton of money on personal income tax; similar winner-take-all divorce/custody/child support system) Or drive just a few hours east to Nevada, which also allows abortion to 24 weeks, and skip out entirely on state income tax? (family law plaintiffs should sue before leaving California, though; Nevada caps child support at $13,000 per year for a single child and starts from a presumption of 50/50 shared parenting)

All around the world there are countries with restrictive abortion laws (map). Why is it only U.S. state laws that get these virtuous corporations to speak up and vote with their checkbooks?

(Separately, if the idea is to help adult women in Georgia who are seeking abortions, how does it help to reduce their employment opportunities? Wouldn’t a woman in Georgia who wants an abortion at 23 weeks be better off with a movie production job with a paycheck that will enable her to hop a flight to New York or Massachusetts or fill up a car with gasoline for the drive to Florida? (see above chart))

Related:

  • “Amazon relocates operations to new Belfast Titanic Quarter site” (abortion is generally illegal in Northern Ireland (BBC), yet Amazon chooses to operate there despite the fact that it would be practical to do everything from the less restrictive Republic of Ireland and drive across the soft border as necessary)
  • Georgia family law: with child support revenue capped at less than $30,000 per year for one child, it is bad state in which to profit from a casual sexual encounter with a movie star
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Mothers acquiring cells from babies

by philg

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer:

In 1996, Lee Nelson proposed that microchimerism might make some mothers sick. With half their genetic material coming from their father, fetal cells might be a confusing mix of the foreign and the familiar. Nelson speculated that being exposed to fetal cells for years on end could lead a woman’s immune system to attack her own tissues. That confusion might be the reason that women are more vulnerable to autoimmune diseases such as arthritis and scleroderma. To test this possibility, Nelson and Bianchi collaborated on an experiment. They picked out thrity-three mothers of sons, sixteen of whom were healthy and seventeen of whom suffered from scleroderma. Nelson and Bianchi found that the women with scleroderma had far more fetal cells from their sons than did the healthy women.

But maybe this can be good?

It’s also possible that being a chimera can be good for your health. Bianchi’s first clue that chimerism might have an upside came in the late 1990s, when she was searching for fetal cells in various organs. She discovered a mother’s thyroid gland packed with fetal cells carrying Y chromosomes. Her gland was badly damaged by goiter, and yet it still managed to secrete normal levels of thyroid hormones. The evidence pointed to a startling conclusion: A fetal cell from her son had wended its way through her body to her diseased thyroid gland. It had sensed the damage there and responded by multiplying into new thyroid cells, regenerating the gland.

What about getting genes from a baby that is not genetically one’s own?

As chimerism rises out of the freak category, it also raises unexpected ethical questions. Somewhere around a thousand children a year are born to surrogate mothers in the United States alone. As Ruth Fischbach and John Loike, two bioethicists at Columbia University, have observed, the rules for surrogacy are based on an old-fashioned notion of pregnancy. They treat people as bundles of genes. As a society, we are comfortable with a woman nourishing another couple’s embryo and then parting ways with it, because she does not share the hereditary bond that a biological mother would. If the pregnancy goes smoothly, the surrogate mother is supposed to leave the experience no different than before the procedure. But Fischbach and Loike observed that a surrogate mother and a baby may end up connected in the most profound way possible. Cells from the fetus may embed themselves throughout her body, perhaps for life. And she may bequeath some of her cells to the child. This is not merely a thought experiment. In 2009, researchers at Harvard did a study on eleven surrogate mothers who carried boys but who never had sons of their own. After the women gave birth, the scientists found Y chromosomes in the bloodstreams of five of them.

More: Read She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

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Does it make sense for Boeing to rebrand Embraer?

by philg

“Boeing drops Embraer name from Brazil commercial jet division” (Reuters):

Boeing Co on Thursday said that after taking over Brazilian planemaker Embraer SA’s passenger jet unit, it will call the division Boeing Brasil – Commercial, dropping one of Brazil’s most iconic company names.

The name change comes after Boeing agreed to pay $4.2 billion to buy 80% of Embraer’s operation making passenger jets with fewer than 150 seats. Embraer will retain a 20% stake. That division is still Embraer’s most profitable and considered a gold standard of Brazilian engineering.

Boeing has not made a decision yet about whether to rebrand the small and mid-sized planes, which currently carry the Embraer name followed by a model code.

Given the recent 737 MAX debacle, a far worse failure of engineering design than anything Embraer has ever done, does this rebranding make sense?

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Human Chimeras

by philg

Some more interesting stuff from She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer… It turns out that Biology 101 contains a lot of simplifications (lies!).

Wikipedia: “A genetic chimerism or chimera … is a single organism composed of cells with distinct genotypes. In animals, this means an individual derived from two or more zygotes, …

How can this happen to a human and how does that interact with our “science is settled” attitude regarding DNA tests? Zimmer gives some examples:

In 2001, a thirty-year-old woman in Germany discovered she was a chimera while she was trying to get pregnant. For the previous five years, she and her husband had been trying to have a baby. They were fairly certain the problem didn’t lie with her biology, because she had gotten pregnant when she was seventeen and had had regular menstrual cycles ever since. A fertility test revealed that her husband had a low level of viable sperm, and so they made plans for IVF. As a routine check, the woman’s doctors took blood samples from her and her husband. They looked at the chromosomes in the couple’s cells, to make sure neither would-be parent had an abnormality that would torpedo the IVF procedure. The woman’s chromosomes looked normal—if she were a man. In every white blood cell they inspected, they found a Y chromosome. Given that she had given birth, this was a weird result. And a careful exam revealed that all her reproductive organs were normal. To get a broader picture of the woman’s cellular makeup, her doctors took samples of her muscle, ovaries, and skin. Unlike her immune cells, none of the cells from these other tissues had a Y chromosome in them. The researchers then carried out a DNA fingerprinting test on the different tissues, looking at the women’s microsatellites—the repeating sequences that can distinguish people from one another. They found that her immune cells belonged to a different person than her other tissues. It turned out that the woman had had a twin brother who died only four days after birth. Although he was unable to survive on his own, his cells took over his sister’s blood and lived on within her.

In 2003, a woman in Washington State named Lydia Fairchild had to get a DNA test. Fairchild, who was then twenty-seven, was pregnant with her fourth child, unemployed, and single. To get welfare benefits, state law required that she prove that her children were genetically related both to herself and to their father, Jamie. One day, Fairchild got a call from the Department of Social Services to come in immediately. A DNA test had confirmed that Jamie was the father of the three children. But Fairchild was not their mother.

When Fairchild was rushed to a hospital to deliver her fourth child, a court officer was there to witness the birth. The officer also oversaw a blood draw for a DNA test. The results came back two weeks later. Once again, Fairchild’s DNA didn’t match her child’s. Even though the court officer had witnessed the child’s birth, the court still refused to consider any evidence beyond DNA.

In Boston, a woman named Karen Keegan had developed kidney disease and needed a transplant. To see if her husband or three sons were a match, her doctors drew blood from the whole family in order to examine a set of immune-system genes called HLA. A nurse called Keegan with the results. Not only were her sons not suitable as organ donors, but the HLA genes from two of them didn’t match hers at all. It was impossible for them to be her children. The hospital went so far as to raise the possibility she had stolen her two sons as babies. Since Keegan’s children were now grown men, she didn’t have to face the terrifying prospect of losing her children as Fairchild did. But Keegan’s doctors were determined to figure out what was going on. Tests on her husband confirmed he was the father of the boys. Her doctors took blood samples from Keegan’s mother and brothers, and collected samples from Keegan’s other tissues, including hair and skin. Years earlier, Keegan had had a nodule removed from her thyroid gland, and it turned out that the hospital had saved it ever since. Her doctors also got hold of a bladder biopsy. Examining all these tissues, Keegan’s doctors found that she was made up of two distinct groups of cells. They could trace her body’s origins along a pair of pedigrees—not to a single ancestral cell but to a pair. They realized Keegan was a tetragametic chimera, the product of two female fraternal twins. The cells of one twin gave rise to all her blood. They also helped give rise to other tissues, as well as to some of her eggs. One of her sons developed from an egg that belonged to the same cell lineage as her blood. Her other two children developed from eggs belonging to the lineage that arose from the other twin. When Lydia Fairchild’s lawyer heard about the Keegan case, he immediately demanded that his client get the same test. At first, it looked as if things were going to go against Fairchild yet again. The DNA in her skin, hair, and saliva failed to match her children’s. But then researchers looked at a sample taken from a cervical smear she had gotten years before. It matched, proving she was a chimera after all.

More: Read She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

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Why do they allow shirt-pulling in soccer?

by philg

One of the joys of traveling in Europe is being forced to watch what they call “football” (i.e., soccer). Tonight is the UEFA Champions League final. From a high level, it looks to me like a group of adults acting out a scene more familiar from preschool: running around a field grabbing each other’s shirts.

Why is shirt-grabbing allowed in this game? Doesn’t it degrade the quality of the experience for all involved? The skills of a soccer player are supposed to be kicking, passing, seeing openings, etc., not grabbing someone else’s shirt, no?

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Navy pilots see UFOs that commercial airline pilots don’t

by philg

“‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects” (nyt):

The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the summer of 2014 to March 2015, high in the skies over the East Coast. Navy pilots reported to their superiors that the objects had no visible engine or infrared exhaust plumes, but that they could reach 30,000 feet and hypersonic speeds.

“These things would be out there all day,” said Lt. Ryan Graves, an F/A-18 Super Hornet pilot who has been with the Navy for 10 years, and who reported his sightings to the Pentagon and Congress. “Keeping an aircraft in the air requires a significant amount of energy. With the speeds we observed, 12 hours in the air is 11 hours longer than we’d expect.”

Commercial airliners operate in the same general areas and far more hours per year, yet their pilots don’t report similar stuff.

Could it be the curved canopy of the fighter jets?

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Don’t bite tumors off other folks’ faces

by philg

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer:

Tough as they might be, though, Tasmanian devils were in trouble. A singular epidemic was sweeping across the island, not quite like anything veterinarians had seen before. A devil would develop a fleshy growth in or around its mouth. In a matter of weeks, the growth would balloon, and within a few months, the animal would starve or suffocate. These growths were first observed in 1996 in the northeast corner of Tasmania, and over the next few years they spread over most of the island, killing off tens of thousands of devils. By the early 2000s, the species looked like it might become extinct in a matter of decades, killed by a disease scientists didn’t understand. It would take them years to realize that these devils were chimeras, and that their cancers descended from the cells of a long-dead animal.

The DNA fingerprint from tumor cells didn’t match the healthy cells from the same devil’s body. Instead, they matched cancer cells from devils who died dozens of miles away. It was as if all the sick devils had gotten a cancer transplant from a single tumor.

At some point in the early 1990s, [Elizabeth] Murchison’s research showed, a single Tasmanian devil in the northeast corner of the island got cancer. The mutations may have initially arisen in a Schwann cell. The descendants of that original cancer cell grew into a tumor. During a fight, another devil bit off the tumor. The cancer cells did not end up digested in the attacker’s stomach. Instead, they likely lingered in the devil’s mouth, where they were able to burrow into the cheek lining and work their way metastatically into the other tissues in the devil’s head. The cancer cells continued dividing and mutating, until they broke through the skin of the second devil’s face. At some point, that new victim also got bit, and its own attacker took in the cells from the original cancer. A single carrier could pass the cancer on to several other devils if it was especially aggressive, and thus help accelerate its spread. Passing through host after host, the tumor cells gained about twenty thousand new mutations.


Consider this fair warning!

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Why don’t rock stars have dogs?

by philg

An Irish friend who is unaccountably fond of English music and English cars (haven’t the English in Ireland mostly been unwanted immigrants and/or oppressors/exploiters?) took me to see Rocketman. The subject is portrayed as lovelorn and alone in bed, partly due to others’ disapproval of his heavy use of drugs and alcohol and having had sex with a prodigious number of partners. Who would forgive this behavior? Not Elton John’s parents or friends, we learn.

Similar scenes were included in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Why wouldn’t the managers/handlers for these rock stars have set them up with loyal dogs as soon as their popularity began to soar? A golden retriever wouldn’t complain about a pop star’s need to ingest drugs or indulge in Roman Emperor-style sexual exploits. Perhaps a Bernese Mountain Dog on tour would reduce a pop star’s need to rely on groupies for companionship (or at least reduce the groupie count slightly by taking up space in the bed).

Enya has essentially complete control over her life and has organized it around companion animals, though not dogs (The Sun).

How was the movie? Friend’s review: “It glorified cocaine use. His only worry was if he would still be just as good when he came off it. It also glorified therapy. One trip to rehab and he was cured. That’s bullshit. They were always breaking out in song, like a 1950s movie.” He preferred Bohemian Rhapsody. (Wikipedia suggests that the movie was essentially based on the subject’s own perspective: “Elton John and husband David Furnish had tried to produce a film based on his life for almost two decades.”)

I thought the “have ordinary folks break out in song” elements were creative and interesting. I noticed that the discredited practice of heterosexuality was written out of the lyrics. “I miss my wife” in the “Rocket Man” song turns into “I miss my life” in the movie version. (Doesn’t make sense unless sung by a dead astronaut?) Also, as in Gillette’s toxic masculinity video, wisdom in the film comes primarily from the non-white-males, e.g., some African-American musicians helping Elton John realize his true potential as a flamboyant gay singer and a black therapist who turns him sober through the miracle of talking about his childhood (just as victimhood is being celebrated worldwide, we learn that Elton John was a major victim of emotionally abusive parents, at least according to Elton John (the parents are dead so can’t defend themselves); Elton John now describes himself as a “survivor”).

[Elton John was born in 1947 to parents who were both 22 years old at the time (the father in the movie, though, is given an elderly appearance). The standard of parenting back in the 1950s was much less exacting. The movie shows the father completely indifferent to the son’s spectacular success (a fact check), which does not ring true. Mom is passionate about having sex with a neighbor, reminiscent of the Specsavers Golf Course ad]

The dialog is anachronistic. For example, Elton John admits to the group therapy session that he is a “sex addict.” A pop star drenched in naked groupies was not considered an “addict” back in the 1970s, I don’t think.

Readers: Who has seen Rocketman? What did you think? And should every young rising rock star have a companion dog to keep him or her steady?

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