The 49-year-old father and the au pair

by philg

From an au pair host family group…

40-year-old mother of three: “Just wanted to give an update/get some advice on my ex-sleeping-with-the-now-former-au-pair saga. She left the US at the end of her travel month around Labor Day. It has come to my attention that the two of them are still in a relationship (he’s 49 and she is 20. Gross). Exhibit A below (try to ignore the fact it’s like it was written by an eighth grader), plus witnesses have put her back in our town as recently as 10 days ago.

Insert photo of handwritten (beautifully) letter: “… I love being with you … I never thought this year would turn out like this … I really hope & wish we have an amazing future ahead of us together. … I’m really going to miss your snuggles.”

[Inquiring minds want to know: how many American eighth graders can write legibly in a foreign language? And what exactly is “gross”? The 20-year-old woman’s body is “gross”? She looks okay in a linked-to Facebook profile (if you don’t mind the tall slender well-proportioned Northern European blonde look). Or the 49-year-old man’s body is “gross”? (If so, why was the 40-year-old mother sharing a bed with this “gross” body?)]

The other au pair host moms pile in with advice:

now going after him in the divorce with this as proof I would totally do. Send to your lawyer and start a file

Agree about divorce files

It’s got to be the saddest midlife crisis ever. Sleezy guys the world over fall for someone new… but look at how this girl writes. [maybe the non-native speaker would be able to spell “sleazy” correctly, though?] What kind of emotional connection could a middle aged man have with her? Can’t even have a mildly stimulating conversation over a glass of wine. She’s too stupid regardless of her age.

He’s a disgusting pig and she’s a horrible person. … I would inform future APs about his gross and inappropriate behavior.

[Nobody questions the inferiority of the 20-year-old’s emotions! But isn’t it more likely that older people are the ones with inferior emotions? Older people are more likely to be thinking about how to get the dishwasher or boiler fixed than about how to phrase a heartfelt poem.]

A (woke) male:

Taking as many of the ex-hubby’s assets along with being alone to think about how he ruined a great family situation for a fling is perhaps the start of just punishment.

[But the 49-year-old is apparently not alone, thus the dust-up.]

The females continue responding…

Take all of his money and don’t lose stamina!

… falling for the babysitter? It’s cliche and pathetic.

… No question. This is disgusting.

That’s double gross.

What a disgusting pig he is and what a poor excuse for a woman she is.

[But the 40-year-old previously tapped into this high-income guy, presumably using her youth to out-compete women who are now 49 and older. If the 20-year-old out-competing the 40-year-old is “disgusting” and “gross” why was it not gross for the 40-year-old to out-compete the 49-year-olds?]

A fellow mom thinking ahead:

She’ll get burned too bc this is all about him. Hopefully before she gets knocked up so [mama’s] kids don’t have to share their child support.

The above shows how little Americans understand about their own family law system. The mom concerned about child support revenue is correct that a European who has sex in the U.S. can cash checks over in Europe (see “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage”). But generally the first plaintiff to sue is invulnerable to attacks from successor plaintiffs, i.e., a court order in favor of a first plaintiff won’t be reduced because a second plaintiff comes along. New York has one of the simplest systems:

As with other states, children of the same parent will have different cash values depending on the sequence in which that parent has been sued for child support. The co-parent of the first child is entitled to 17 percent of the defendant’s income. The co-parent of the second child is entitled to only 17 percent of the remaining 83 percent. The co-parent of the third child is entitled to only 17 percent of the remaining 69 percent.

Linguistics:

Sorry you’re going through this, mama. A total nightmare for sure.

[The word “mama” becomes a title for one adult woman to address another by.]

Readers: Why the outrage over the au pair’s age? The folks in this discussion don’t seem to question the merits of a no-fault divorce system. The au pair was over the age of consent in every state. Either partner in a U.S. marriage is free to abandon the union if a preferred sex partner is identified and/or on payment of cash. Why does the situation become “gross” and “disgusting” and merit larger cash payments if a new partner happens to be 20 years old?

Related:

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Audi A8 long-term rental review

by philg

Regarding my equipped-with-active-suspension dream machine, from our reader/hero Scott Locklin:

I rented a 2018 Audi A8 for 10 days on the Autobahn [459 euro through kayak, 19 percent of which was VAT]. The electronics, as someone noted were pretty good. The HUD with speed limit and directions indicator was a cool feature, though it doesn’t work with polarized sunglasses. Wonder what HUD using pilots use for helmet shades these days; never thought of that before.

Oh yeah, one of your commenters identified that the 3D map view was mighty cool.

The ‘cruise control’ was, as you noted, awful and dangerous. I also disliked the collision avoidance system intensely, and couldn’t figure out how to turn most of it off. Basically it was a simple algorithm hunting for the lines on the road. Unfortunately there were a lot of dangerous ‘damped oscillator’ solutions to this, which boggled my mind, as there should be fairly simple ways to overcome this. The wheel jerking from this algorithm was alarming and possibly dangerous; there was an incident where there was a semi broken down in the traffic lane on the autobahn, and I needed to fight the steering wheel to avoid it. There was no time to signal a lane change which would have prevented the monkey vs machine steering wheel battle. I think the ‘collision’ software might have slammed on the brakes at the last minute had I continued, but that would have been a disaster also.

Another bizarre thing; the ‘collision radar’ in tight parking garages was incredibly loud and had me stopping 2 meters short of where I needed to be in this giant car in tiny euro sized parking spots. I couldn’t turn that off either.

The active suspension, meh, it was OK. Nothing special. It sucked you lower if you press the perf button, and was more billowy otherwise. No real complaints about the ride or steering in either configuration. I prefer the ride of a BMW for fancy car feels. The Audi was less precise. Probably more comfortable. My daily driver is a Subaru, so I’m not exactly cognoscenti tier here.

The here.com was hit and miss; they had me in a cow pasture at one point looking for a famous statue. Off road performance was pretty good though I didn’t realize until I returned it that it goes for $85k and has the “most advanced” autonomous vehicle features in it. Seemed like driving a larger, high performance German Ford LTD [Editor: Ouch! Looks like we’ll be sticking with the Honda Odyssey]

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Are there any razors as good as Gillette’s?

by philg

A Boston-based company is in the news: “Gillette #MeToo ad on ‘toxic masculinity’ gets praise – and abuse; Backlash includes call for boycott of P&G, complaining commercial ‘emasculates men’” (Guardian).

As someone too old and unhip to have a beard, I’ve been a loyal Gillette customer for decades. Now it seems that there is a virtue offset bonus. Gillette will take some of its spectacular gross margin on every blade and use it to educate un-woke men on how to behave.

What about for the guys who aren’t happy to support Gillette’s new crusade? Can they buy a blade system that is actually as good or better? If so, what is it and who makes it? Are there any multi-subject tests to show that one brand is actually better than another? I found this comparison that concluded the Korean-made Dorco Pace 7 is superior to Gillette’s best, but it is just one guy (the Koreans are better at making TVs, ships, and smartphones than we are, so why shouldn’t they also be better at making razors?).

Related:

  • Dorco Pace 7 at Amazon (searching for “Gillette” within the reviews reveals that some people prefer the Dorco and others went back to Gillette)
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Barron’s: 70 percent tax rate will be awesome

by philg

“What a Top Income-Tax Rate of 70% Would Mean for the Economy” (Barron’s) is a bit surprising, considering that the publication is targeted at the same rich investors that would get hit by any tax rate increases. The author points out that the no-extra-tax states aren’t able to gather up all of the rich bastards:

Top-earning Americans have shown surprisingly little appetite to move from high-tax jurisdictions, such as California (top state-tax rate: 13.3%) and New York City (top state and local rate: 12.7%), to states with no income tax. The people who tend to leave California and New York for Nevada and Texas are poor and middle-class workers in search of affordable housing, rather than rich people seeking lower taxes, according to Lyman Stone’s analysis of data from the U.S. Census and the Internal Revenue Service.

Ergo, a person who is getting hit with an 83.3 percent income tax (70% federal plus 13.3% California) will just pay it. As with https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/06/01/book-review-the-redistribution-recession/ the article points out that we already have some super high tax rates in the U.S. …. on the poor:

Making matters worse is that “means-tested” benefits are withdrawn as income rises. The net result is that the poor and middle class often face effective marginal tax rates equivalent to or higher than what Ocasio-Cortez has proposed for the rich. According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, a typical married couple with two children pays an effective marginal tax rate of 78% as wages rise from $30,000 to $60,000, while a single parent with one child pays an effective marginal tax rate of 69% as wages rise from $22,000 to $42,000. These implicit taxes are huge disincentives to work and affect many more people than tax proposals aimed at the top 10,000th of the distribution. 

(The rate actually reached over 100 percent during the Obama Administration when mortgage payment relief was factored in; see the above link to The Redistribution Recession book review.)

See also John Cochrane’s calculation that, due to property tax liabilities, the top marginal tax rate in the U.S. is already over 70 percent, and his analysis of optimum rates.

I still think that this is a pipe dream unless capital gains taxes are also raised to 70-83 percent. Otherwise people can just come up with ways to convert ordinary income into capital gains, as was conventional in the 1950s. (And can it really work to have 70-83 percent capital gains taxes in the U.S. when “socialist” Denmark maxes out at 42 percent (Deloitte) and when London is at 10 percent (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/01/02/move-to-the-uk-if-youre-an-entrepreneur-10-percent-capital-gains-tax/))?

Readers: What do you think it means when even Barron’s is saying that maybe a 70+ percent tax rate will be optimum? (Of course, as someone who earns less than the proposed income threshold for this new rate, I personally think that a rate of closer to 100 percent would be fair!)

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Investing in stoners inadvertently

by philg

The Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Small-Cap Index Fund shows that its fifth largest holding is Canopy Growth Corp. Some sort of real estate holding company? Wikipedia: “Canopy Growth Corporation, formerly Tweed Marijuana Inc., is a cannabis company based in Smiths Falls, Ontario, …”

I don’t like this purported “industry” (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/06/08/legal-marijuana-questions-1-why-does-it-cost-more-than-spinach/) because I can’t see any sustainable competitive advantage in growing marijuana (any more than spinach). As a mutual fund investor, though, am I doomed to be a shareholder?

[Separately, this fund has a 0.25% annual expense ratio. The equivalent ETF, also from Vanguard, charges 0.13%. Wouldn’t they actually prefer people to hold the fund rather than trade in and out of the ETF?]

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You didn’t build that, Jeff Bezos edition

by philg

“MACKENZIE BEZOS AND THE MYTH OF THE LONE GENIUS FOUNDER” (WIRED):

Admittedly, MacKenzie’s role in the history of Amazon may not be as crucial as the existence of the World Wide Web. Then again, it’s hard to say for sure.

See also, my review of The Everything Store.

(The book describes Mrs. Bezos as providing some assistance, such as bookkeeping or getting shipments out the door, during the first years of Amazon, but then exiting the workforce. She is mentioned on page 22 as having a degree in English and “targeting” Jeff Bezos for marriage, on page 27 as “supporting” Jeff Bezos in moving from NY to Seattle, on page 39 as driving boxes to UPS, on page 40 as depositing checks, and on page 60 as attending a 1997 post-IPO party. There is no mention of MacKenzie Bezos as having had any role in the management or operation of Amazon after 1997.)

Related:

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Irish tradition + no-fault divorce = unusual living situations

by philg

At one of our dinners-for-8 on Empress of the Seas, a lively fellow told us about his life in The Villages and how he could be more popular with women if he were a dancer. He said that he was just getting out of a marriage that began in 2015: “I’ve been single, married, widowed, single, half-single, married again, and now divorced.” (his three–year marriage isn’t long enough to trigger Florida’s permanent alimony provisions)

An Irish passenger explained that the Irish tradition is for adult sons to build houses on their parents’ land and thus settle down with their kids right next to the grandparents. As a significant chunk of land may be only 1 acre, the houses are quite close to each other. This system worked well for centuries, but with today’s no-fault divorce law a common outcome is that the daughter-in-law divorces the son and the Irish family court will award the house and children to the mother. “The son has to move out and the grandparents now find themselves across the garden from an unrelated female and her new boyfriend.”

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Working in San Francisco today

by philg

I am attending a meeting in the shining northern capital of California and had asked a business colleague who has experience with the location to recommend a hotel. His answer:

[the meeting is] inside of WeWork Civic Center on Mission between 7th and 8th wedged between a homeless encampment and emergency heroin detox center. I would recommend picking a hotel in another part of town. … Due to the layout and direction of the one way streets and traffic I’ve found cabs/Uber to work fairly poorly and often take longer than BART. I stopped using cars when junkies started trying to open my door at stop lights.

I think the level of understatement here is comparable to that in The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook:

Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word “cake.” I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert.

The good news is that a Hampton Inn at Mission between 5th and 6th is only $469/night.

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Jobs at the Kennedy Space Center

by philg

The government that says it is working to reduce inequality eliminates low-skill low-wage cashier jobs via touch-screen ordering kiosks… (Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex cafeteria):

I posted this on Facebook and it attracted the following comment from a New York City resident:

I don’t see a problem with eliminating jobs. Most jobs are going to be eliminated over the coming years including high paying white collar jobs. Eliminating jobs is simply accelerating a society with a guaranteed minimum income.

So it is okay if folks who want to work as cashiers can’t get jobs and/or must accept lower wages (due to lower demand) for a period of some years because it will usher in the glorious future of guaranteed minimum income. (See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/11/30/long-term-effects-of-short-term-free-cash-guaranteed-minimum-income-experiments/ for how we actually did have guaranteed minimum income in the U.S. for a few years)

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Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos talk about how much they value each other…

by philg

… but show that they don’t value marriage per se?

The jointly signed tweet from the soon-to-be-divorced Amazon founder and wife is full of mutual praise. These two people say that they’re friends, so presumably they like each other. Mr. Bezos earned more than $130 billion that the two friends could spend during their years together, for which they say they are both “grateful.”

The situation in which they found themselves, thus, was one where they had near-infinite spending power and were free of any forced disagreeable associations.

They’re not divorcing because they were miserable, in short, due to poverty or arguing. They’re divorcing because one or both believe that yet greater life enjoyment can be achieved without the encumbrance of marriage to the other.

Doesn’t that make their commitment to marriage contingent on “until I can find something at least slightly better”?

If someone says “I love my Honda Odyssey, but the new Sienna has an extra cupholder so I am trading in the Honda,” you wouldn’t consider that person an example of brand loyalty.

A woman in our home suburb said that she was divorcing her husband because he was abusive and addicted to alcohol and/or drugs (not so bad that he couldn’t go to work every day!). So she showed that she was committed to the idea of marriage, but had to escape this particular intolerable situation for the safety of her four children (who would, after she pulled the ripcord, be guaranteed to spend 4/14 nights completely unsupervised with the addict). [Once the cash was flowing, though, it turned out that when she was busy with Tinder dates the addict was the go-to babysitter for the brood of four.]

Readers: What do you think? Does the act of talking up the value of the to-be-ex have the effect of talking down the value of permanent marriage? (And what does “marriage” mean in a jurisdiction offering no-fault on-demand divorce?)

Related:

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