Reasonable to sentence a wanna-be terrorist to 20 years in prison?

by philg

“Alexander Ciccolo to get 20 years for terror plot, assault” (Berkshire Eagle) is about a young Massachusetts man who converted to Islam and aspired to wage, but did not actually wage, jihad.

He couldn’t finish high school, but supposedly he was going to accomplish his terrorist goals: “he dropped out of school in the 11th grade and worked fast-food and roofing jobs after that, had once been a peace advocate, having taken part in a peace walk around Lake Ontario, organized by the Grafton Peace Pagoda, located off Route 2 in Petersburgh, N.Y., in July and August 2012.”

He only got close to his goals because the U.S. govenrment helped him: “On July 4, 2015, he accepted a small cache of weapons from an informant cooperating with the FBI and who had been in contact with Ciccolo beginning in June 2015”

He did not grow up in a two-parent home: “He came to the attention of authorities after his estranged father, a Boston Police captain, alerted them to his son’s stated interest in supporting the work of the terror group. … Ciccolo’s mother and stepfather attended the hearing…” (The child was the subject of significant litigation in Massachusetts family court. From ABC News:

Ciccolo had missed so many days of school the Wareham School Department filed what is known in Massachusetts as a CHINS – or Child In Need of Services – complaint to the Department of Social Services which opened an investigation into his mother, who had full custody.

The entire time his father, who was rising in the ranks of the Boston Police Department, desperately petitioned the court to let Alexander live with him, his new wife, and his stepchildren in Needham, an upscale Boston suburb, rather than with his ex-wife, Shelley Reardon, who refused, he claimed in court records, to have Alexander evaluated by mental health professionals.

“He [Robert] seeks this change because the child’s mother…who presently has primary physical custody of the child has in the past verbally agreed to allow the child to be evaluated but without exception has subsequently refused to allow such evaluations to proceed,” Ciccolo’s lawyer wrote in an emergency motion that petitioned a court to give him full custody of Alexander. “At present mother… has threatened legal action against father if initiates” psychological treatment.

The contentious divorce between Robert Ciccolo and Reardon, who split after 10 years of marriage when Alexander was five, are a glimpse into their only son’s long history of behavioral problems and mental illness that culminated with him coming “under the sway of ISIS,” as a young adult, prosecutors said at his first court appearance on July 14. He changed his name to Abu Ali al Amriki 18 months ago and opened a Facebook account where he posted a picture of a dead American soldier along with “Thank you Islamic State! Now we don’t have to deal with these kafir [non believer] back in America.”

).

He doesn’t seem like great neighbor, but does it make sense to put him away for 20 years given that he didn’t do much besides dream? What else could we have done with this troubled young person that would have kept us safe in case he did ever become capable enough to realize his dreams (without government assistance)?

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Audi A4 review

by philg

This is a review of a 2018 Audi A4 after a week of driving around Colorado. The vehicle was rented from Silvercar, an Audi subsidiary. Usually I am a Hertz Gold member, but prices at DEN for a simple Hyundai were so high that I decided to try going off-airport and pay about the same fee for a fancier vehicle. The Silvercar experience is pretty good, though it starts with catching a shuttle to an off-airport parking lot. In Denver this isn’t an issue because you are 99 percent likely to want to head in that direction. The Silvercar staffer, Angela, showed me how to use the shifter (apparently this has not been obvious to previous customers) and suggested Apple CarPlay instead of the Audi navi system. She recommended Denver Biscuit Company for breakfast (truly awesome!). I couldn’t find an owner’s manual in the glove box, so I had to resort to a 400-page online PDF (not from Audi itself; the company does not seem to make any attempt to provides these on its web site).

The car is more nimble than our 2018 Honda Odyssey minivan. However, it isn’t as quiet nor does it soak up bumps as well. So it represents a different point on an engineering continuum, not some sort of huge advance over what Honda is capable of doing. The 9-year-old passenger said that she preferred the Honda.

The “roll a cursor around the screen” instead of a touch screen interface requires a lot more head-down time than a well-implemented touch screen. The steering wheel controls do not seem as intuitive as on the Honda, nor is it as easy to adjust radio volume. Fortunately, Audi puts a volume knob down near the driver’s right hand (to the right of the shifter). Changing the radio station can be done more or less by feel, flicking a dedicated button to change the main screen to radio tuning. There is no button, however, to go back to Apple CarPlay and the navigation map (if you are willing to accept that Apple Maps is legitimately “navigation”!). It takes a huge amount of head-down time to switch back to CarPlay. The “Back” button does not work for this.

I could not configure the central instrument cluster to put the fuel gauge anywhere that was visible. Its far-right location is obscured by the steering wheel and its stalks, at least from my (6′ tall) point of view. Ameliorating this issue is a continuous display of the range remaining and the car’s long overall range (more than 400 miles) and 30 mpg achieved in mountain highway driving.

The cruise control is not adaptive or at least does not default to being adaptive (since there was no owner’s manual in the vehicle I never figured out whether it was not included on this particular car or if it needed to be set somehow). If set to 75 mph, therefore, the car will try to ram itself into the car in front. As someone who has grown accustomed to Honda’s adaptive cruise control, this is disconcerting! I wonder if there will be a lot of “automation confusion” accidents as cars transition into assisted driving and drivers move from Car A where Task X is handled automatically into Car B where Task X must be done manually.

Audi engineers can’t make up their minds whether to have synthesized voice warnings or tone warnings. Thus there is a mixture. Start up the car and don’t have your seatbelt on? Confusing beeping. Shut down the car and open the door before unplugging your phone from CarPlay? Synthesized (loud!) voice warning about the phone still being connected. The overall impression was that the car was unhappy and beeping or warning far more often than the Honda Odyssey.

Warning for the drive-through crowd: The Audi A4 has no rear cupholders when operated as a five-seater.

Conclusion: It is a nice car, but I would be just as happy with a Honda Accord. What about the boring folks at Consumer Reports? They give the A4 a score of 85 and say that it costs $36,000 to $44,500. The Accord scores 84 with a price range of $23,570 to $35,800.

Readers: Who loves Audi? What do you love about the A4? (More importantly, who has experienced the new A8 and its active suspension?)

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How long would it take a Nike worker to earn as much as an American welfare family?

by philg

Nike has hired Colin Kaepernick for an ad campaign, presumably to show that the company virtuously opposes the “wrongdoings against African Americans and minorities in the United States” (Sports Illustrated, 2016): “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,”

If we assume that the most oppressed Americans are those on welfare, let’s look at the economics of this. The typical welfare household in 2011 consumed roughly $60,000 in tax dollars (“America Spent Enough On Federal Welfare Last Year To Send $60,000 To Each Household In Poverty”, from budget.senate.gov). That’s roughly $68,000 today.

Also in 2011, it was reported that the folks in Indonesia making Nike shoes were being paid 50 cents per hour (Mercury News).

Assuming that inflation in Indonesia has been comparable to the U.S. rate, a Nike worker would have to work 120,000 hours per year to enjoy the same spending power as the American welfare family whose oppression Nike is now concerned about. (We wouldn’t want to question whether the $68,000 per year of tax money translates into $68,000 of spending power; if it did not, it would mean that our central planners were inefficient somehow.)

Using a standard 2,000 hour/year working rate, a Nike worker is getting only 1/60th as much as an oppressed American welfare family.

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70 Years of Affirmative Action in India

by philg

From Incarnations: A History of India in Fifty Lives by Sunil Khilnani, a chapter on Bhimrao Ambedkar:

In his youth, Ambedkar had burned a copy of the Laws of Manu, a legal text by the legendary Brahminic lawgiver whose ancient decree was said to have created the caste order. Now he wasn’t about to waste the chance to subvert that order by pressing into the Constitution the most sweeping system of affirmative action anywhere in the world.

To Ambedkar, the caste system was generated by the exclusionary social and kinship rules of the Brahmins, and it spread because other groups, especially those lowest down the order, aped the Brahmins’ precepts. They did so believing that spiritual, social, or economic benefits might come to them, too. This analysis would lead to a crucial insight: that the caste hierarchy was able to enforce itself with minimal physical coercion. It operated largely by voluntary submission, based on what Ambedkar described brilliantly as “an ascending scale of reverence and a descending scale of contempt.”

A right to equality of opportunity in public employment has also been affirmed. Ambedkar did more than anyone to embed these principles in the Constitution. But out of them grew a politics of reservations, or affirmative action, that was paradoxical in its effects. Initially, the principles were supposed to sanction, for a finite period, the reservation of places (quotas), in government employment and educational institutions, for Dalits, tribal groups, and others defined as “economically backward.” (A ten-year jump start was the initial hope.) Yet the power to determine eligibility for reservations was given to India’s state legislatures, and a constitutional principle thereby became an electoral expedient. Politicians can promise, in the name of equality, to expand the number of reserved places, and to extend them to include newly defined “backward classes.” Caste groups, even successful ones, compete and sometimes campaign violently to be deemed backward in order to benefit from reservations, which today apply to just under half of all positions in India’s national government institutions. In one state, the figure approaches 70 percent. So, in terms of social mobility, down is the new up. It’s one of the profound ironies of India’s democracy: reservations, designed to erode caste identities and fortify individual citizens, have invigorated caste categories now defined by the state.

So everyone is equal in India under the Constitution, except that some people are entitled to jobs based on personal characteristics. And the sorting of job applications by personal characteristics was supposed to last from 1948 through 1958, but instead has endured through 2018 (more than 60 years past the expected expiration date).

Readers: Does this show that an affirmation action program inevitably ends up being permanent?

Related:

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Trump was “paranoid” about a deep-state conspiracy…

by philg

New York Times on Donald Trump’s mental health:

  • March 4, 2017: he is frustrated by his rocky debut and increasingly paranoid about what he sees as the Vast Deep-State Conspiracy.
  • March 18, 2017: Consumed by his paranoia about the deep state, Donald Trump has disappeared into the fog of his own conspiracy theories.
  • June 17, 2017: His paranoia about the Deep State…
  • August 20, 2018: (headline: “The G.O.P.’s Climate of Paranoia“) the assertion of Trump and company that all of the tweeter in chief’s woes are the product of a vast deep-state conspiracy

Definition of paranoia:

a mental condition characterized by delusions of persecution, unwarranted jealousy, or exaggerated self-importance, typically elaborated into an organized system. It may be an aspect of chronic personality disorder, of drug abuse, or of a serious condition such as schizophrenia in which the person loses touch with reality.

What is the reality? Today the same paper that called Donald Trump “paranoid” for thinking that some of the people ostensibly working for him were actually working against him published “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” subtitled “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.” The article is from “a[n anonymous] senior official in the Trump administration.”

Is it now fair to say that Donald Trump’s shortcomings do not meet the clinical definition of paranoia? Or is it instead an example of “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”? (Catch-22)

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Meet to learn physics in Manhattan on Thursday, September 13 at 6:15?

by philg

Folks: Weather permitting, I’m heading down to New York on Thursday, September 13 to hear Brian Keating present a lecture on cosmology and his interesting book for laypeople, Losing the Nobel Prize. The lecture is free and at the National Museum of Mathematics (5th Avenue and 26th; registration link). Refreshments (and conversation amongst ourselves) at 6:15 pm. Lecture at 7. I would love to get together with readers. If that doesn’t work, maybe coffee on Friday morning? Happy also to meet at Teterboro on Thursday morning or Friday around noon.

Related:

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Patent Office IPR proceeding is resolved

by philg

Back in 2017 I did some analysis for an inter-partes review ( IPR2017-00886) at the U.S. Patent Office. The patent in question, 7,480,694, covers a way to make a slide show of web pages. The decision was recently issued and I thought that readers might be interested to see it. (All of the documents in any IPR are public, incidentally, and available for free download via the Web.)

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Voters heed Democrat call to push an older white guy out of Washington…

by philg

… but it turns out that the first step to tearing down the white patriarchy is voting out a Massachusetts Democrat, perhaps not the intended result!

Michael Capuano spent 20 years in Congress, most recently comfortably and apparently securely ensconced in the bizarrely shaped Massachusetts 7th district. He virtuously denounced Donald Trump, including with threats of impeachment (“it’s more important to follow your heart than do the practical or political calculation”).

Capuano expressed outrage at the Trump Administration’s separation of people claiming to be under 18 from accused illegal border crossers claiming to be their parents. While focusing his attention on separated children 2,000 miles away, he was defeated by Ayanna S. Pressley, a woman roughly 5 miles away who had previously been separated from her father by a divorce lawsuit (boston.com). (also, Wikipedia says she lives with a stepdaughter, i.e., a child who is separated from at least one parent much of the time.  So Capuano overloooked two local children separated from parents!) Pressley’s Boston City Council web page:

career has been marked by history-making campaigns and a relentless determination to advance a political agenda focused on women and girls and breaking cycles of poverty and violence. … diversify economic and wealth building opportunities for women and people of color, and strengthen support services for families of homicide victims and sexual assault survivors. In 2013, she formed the Elevate Boston coalition to ensure issues uniquely impacting women and girls and the LGBTQ community were part of the 2013 Boston mayoral race debate.

I wrote “Should Republicans run only black women for Congress and Senate?” back in June, but now it seems that Democrats will beat the Republicans to this goal line.

[Capuano used to be Mayor of Somerville. The current mayor has been in the news lately for boycotting our local Sam Adams beer in favor of foreign-owned beer after the Sam Adams founder said some kind words about the Trump tax cuts, e.g., “I mean, Americans — I’m the largest American-owned brewery at 2 percent market share. We were paying 38-percent taxes. And competing against people [the 85 percent of the industry that is foreign-owned] who were paying 20. And now we have a level playing field, and we’re going to kick their ass,”]

In other Massachusetts primary news, the one state official who has gone on record as being in favor of 50/50 shared parenting (the default under the law in Alaska, Arizona, and Nevada; the default in practice or via guidelines in Delaware, Pennsylvania, etc.; see Real World Divorce for the details) was attacked for her Governor’s Council position. Marilyn Devaney, for example, opposed the nomination of a divorce litigator (Maureen Monks) to a family court judgeship after it emerged that she had represented only one male client in a courtroom during her multi-decade career (source). (There is no indication that Devaney is hostile to female judges; she was enthusiastic three years later about a female Supreme Judicial Court nominee: “Lenk to be first openly gay SJC justice”)  Some folks who had been successful plaintiffs in winner-take-all custody and child support lawsuits here in Massachusetts turned out with signs in at our local polling station to oppose Ms. Devaney. Their choice was Nick Carter, a white male whose web site indicated that he was primarily running against the hated occupant of the White House: “I want to ensure that whatever Donald Trump and his Department of Justice attempt to force on the states, the judiciary here in the Commonwealth is deeply committed to upholding the rights of all our citizens.” Mr. Carter won our suburb, but Ms. Devaney prevailed in the complete district 56/44.

Another candidate who ran against Donald Trump actually won. Jay Gonzalez will be the Democrat opposing the incumbent Republican(!) governor. The “On the Issues” section of his site:

AIMING HIGH ON THE OPIOID CRISIS [not Trump-related, but I love this turn of phrase]

President Trump has disparaged and discriminated against people of different ethnicities, backgrounds, religious beliefs and genders, and he has stoked fear in their communities. President Trump’s unconstitutional Muslim travel bans and increased raids to detain and deport immigrants have been particularly harsh, disruptive and fear-provoking for immigrant communities across the country and across Massachusetts.

Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet and to our future. President Trump is taking us in the wrong direction on climate change. As President Trump and the Republicans continue to take the country backward, it’s more important than ever that we have leadership here in Massachusetts that moves us forward. [Is it obvious that Massachusetts would be harmed by a warming climate? If someone decides to vacation here because Florida has been washed away or is too hot, that’s a positive for Massachusetts, right?]

The (popular) incumbent governor, Charlie Baker, is not mentioned. Perhaps this is due to our booming state economy (thank you, President Trump, for continuing to dump a river of tax dollars into the pharma and health care industries!). Mr. Gonzalez is passionate about women being leaders…

Women must be full and equal participants in our economy. For Massachusetts to reach its full potential, women must have equal career opportunities, equal pay, and workplaces free from discrimination and harassment. Women who work hard every day and contribute to our collective well-being should earn enough and have the additional support they need to provide for themselves and for their families. Women should be represented in leadership positions in business throughout our economy to ensure their full and fair participation at every level.

So he wants a quota system for women in business management, but is happy that two white guys will compete for the top state government management job (governor)?

He is opposed to the river of federal tax dollars that has made Massachusetts rich:

Today, our health care system is broken. It is too expensive, too complicated to navigate and inadequately addresses the health care needs of our residents.

Our local hospitals and pharma companies complained to him that our health care system is “too expensive” and they want to accept lower prices from the central planners in Washington, D.C.?

Large swaths of the ballot was reserved for sinecures such as Register of Deeds (example guy who was getting paid $110,000 per year back in 2015 and working four hours per day; I think the pay has now been bumped to $142,000/year). The general election ballot should be even tamer, with most victors of the Democrat primary running unopposed.

Readers: What’s going on in your states? Are the white male Democrats who’ve been decrying white patriarchy losing their jobs? Are local and state candidates whose jobs have nothing to do with the Federales campaigning against Donald Trump?

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People happier if pressured to marry at a young age?

by philg

I recently attended a wedding of two best friends from high school. They met on their first day of high school… in 1975. In a society with strong social pressure to marry it seems likely that they’d have gotten married shortly after completing high school or college, presumably to the most compatible person they’d identified at that time. As members of the Me Generation, however, they were entitled to pursue a search for self-actualization with no time limit, including a search for the ideal partner. As it happened in this case, the 40-year delay didn’t result in finding anyone more compatible than they’d already identified in high school.

Would they have been happier if they could have spent their core adult years together? Married at an age when it was still biologically possible to have children?

Musicologists say that Mozart did better work because he operated within constraints established by Haydn. Is it possible that Americans would do better with a few more constraints?

[Scorecard on the two most recent weddings that I’ve attended, both within the last couple of years… One wedding was in Paris. The couple remains together. One was in Massachusetts. The wife sued the husband a year later.]

Separately, this wedding was held at a Colorado ski resort, with events at 10,200′ and 9,400′ above sea level. At least one third of the guests who had flown in from sea level were suffering from altitude sickness (not me, though; I spent three nights in Denver before heading up to nosebleed territory).

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Stale, Pale, and Male

by philg

At Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) we talked to a 55-year-old MIT graduate who’d been fired from his engineering job (he mentioned this in the context of a multi-week cross-country trip with kids in a light airplane; he said that he was glad that he didn’t cancel the trip after he’d been fired). His camp site was organized as well as a typical Hilton hotel.

Another member of our merry band works at one of the world’s largest HR consulting firms. Asked “How could someone so qualified and so obviously competent be fired?” the HR expert responded “stale, pale, and male.”

Happy Labor Day to all of the young replacements!

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