Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

How is everyone enjoying the school year so far? Here’s the first communication I received from the elementary school…

This letter is to inform you that a student in your child’s classroom has a severe allergy to peanuts and tree nuts. Strict avoidance of all peanut/tree nut products is the only way to prevent a life-threatening allergic reaction. … [bold in the original]

Our town’s school system also runs a preschool. Here’s the first email from the teacher.

Subject: IMPORTANT

Welcome to preschool! I am so excited to spend this school year with all of your children and I can tell we are going to build a strong, positive classroom community.

** I wanted to be sure that everyone is aware that we have a strict “no peanut/tree nut” policy at the preschool. This includes items that were manufactured or processed in a facility that also processes peanuts or tree nuts, so please be sure to check labels carefully. Tomorrow (or on your child’s first day) I will be sending home a notice from the nurse explaining the policy.

…

Related:

• web site regarding the debate in our town about whether to tear down the current school, move the children into trailers for three years, and spend $100 million on rebuilding the school in-place (maybe proponents could win this debate simply by saying “we found a nut in a classroom so now we are forced to demolish the old building”?)

Back in July I asked “Amy Coney Barrett nomination would stop working parents from demanding more help?”

Donald Trump decided to nominate Brett Kavanaugh (generic white guy) instead of the mom-of-7 and now the white male has been #MeTooed.

Earlier this year I wrote “Should Republicans run only black women for Congress and Senate?” The same question could be asked regarding appointees. In a country of roughly 330 million (Census), why do Republicans need white males for any job?

Let’s consider Nikki Haley, Trump’s U.N. Ambassador. She’s accorded victim status as a “brown woman” in this 2011 New York Times article:

Why on earth did your parents — wealthy Sikh immigrants from Punjab, one with a law degree, the other with a Ph.D. — settle in Bamberg, S.C. …

You don’t think it’s just a question of their preferring any white guy over a brown woman?

[Separately, a friend asked in a Facebook Messenger thread:

How come all of Clinton’s accusers can’t find work but Anita Hill and all Democrats who accuse someone end up with cushy university jobs?

]

Why can’t the Republicans learn from this and appoint only people whom the U.S. media will defer to as victims of racial, gender, or sexual orientation prejudice?

“Honey, I Swept the Floor! Why do so many husbands feel the need to boast about completing simple household chores? With mine, it’s all about branding.” (nytimes) has “so many husbands” in the headline.

How many did the author and the editor find? Two. The husband of the author plus

Another friend said: “After my husband cleans the garage or the pool, he makes each person in the family come for a separate ‘viewing’ so he can solicit praise and bask in his accomplishment.”

Would the Times publish an article in which two women were found who exhibited a negative characteristic and from this there was an extrapolation to “so many women”?

Related:

• Maine family law, should the authoress deliver on her stated commitment “Time to change the narrative.”

In 1996 California voters approved Proposition 209:

a California ballot proposition which, upon approval in November 1996, amended the state constitution to prohibit state governmental institutions from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, specifically in the areas of public employment, public contracting, and public education.

Now we have “Gifts to UC Santa Cruz fund new presidential chair for diversity in astronomy”, in which the last line is “The UC Office of the President provided matching funds of $500,000.”

In theory a white male who loudly espoused a commitment to diversity could apply for this position:

The endowed chair was created to advance the cause of diversity, equity, and inclusive excellence in astronomy. The holder of the chair will embody the spirit of diversity in one of a variety of ways, such as their proven ability to attract and train new astronomers from all walks of life.

For Sandra Faber, who worked with Rubin at the Carnegie Institution of Washington early in her career, the more experienced astronomer served as a model of a successful woman in a field dominated by men. “At a time when few women succeeded in science, especially astrophysics, Rubin began to pave the way for all members of underrepresented groups,” Faber said.

How successful was Vera Rubin in her paving project?

Women have composed half of UC Santa Cruz astronomy Ph.D. students for more than a decade, and 30 percent of current graduate students come from underrepresented backgrounds. The department’s six active women professors are the largest tenured cohort of female astronomers in the nation, led by eminent scientists such as Faber and Claire Max, director of UC Observatories.

Can this be consistent with the state constitution? The holder of the chair will embody the spirit of diversity. Doesn’t that suggest that the color and/or genetic sex of the applicant’s body will be considered, contrary to the constitution?

I went to Google Finance the other day to see how a hypothetical portfolio invested in 2012 would have done. This is something that I took the time to type in back in 2012. I discovered that keeping a database of a few symbols and numbers and doing a multiplication is too onerous for folks at Google (they’re busy stamping out heresy?). So they have thrown out my work. Here are a few articles on this attack on human productivity by Google:

• Google Finance portfolios are disappearing
• Google Finance Alternatives
• Everyone hates the new look of Google Finance

When we combine this with Google’s destruction of millions of person-years of (part-time) work in Picasa, is the only reasonable conclusion that Google has re-hired Marissa Mayer?

Readers: How would you track a hypothetical investment, including reinvestment of any dividends? Especially in a mutual fund ticker.

Related:

• What is the best photo organization and sharing tool currently? (replacement for Google Picasa)
• Picasa syncing to Google Photos seems to be broken; what to use instead of Picasa?

“Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not.” (nytimes) describes a 33-year-old American who has three children: “Taliya, 17, Shamal, 14, and Tatiyana, 12” (i.e., the first one was born when mom was 16). The worker lives in public housing and presuambly qualifies for free health care, free food (SNAP), and a free smartphone (Obamaphone). She does not earn too much:

After juggling the kids and managing her diabetes, Vanessa is able to work 20 to 30 hours a week [in home health care], which earns her around $1,200 a month. And that’s when things go well.

The explanation for her low earnings is not a bountiful supply of low-skill immigrants (see this analysis by George Borjas of Harvard) and therefore a low value of low-skill labor.

American workers are being shut out of the profits they are helping to generate. The decline of unions is a big reason.

Due to weak labor unions, it has become crazy profitable to hire low-skill workers in the U.S. Yet the individual profiled is working only part time. If she were generating crazy high profits for her employer, wouldn’t the employer be trying hard to get her to work full-time so that they could make more of these profits?

Why haven’t this writer and his colleagues at the NYT started a home health care business to scoop up some of these supranormal profits for itself? They are too virtuous to want to get rich on the backs of low-wage workers?

[The Times didn’t bother with a Google search to find out how profitable an average employer in this industry might be. As of 2015, however, it seems that the average profit margin for a publicly traded home health care provider was 2.4 percent (source). So if her employer gave the profiled worker all of its profits she would have earned $1,229 per week instead of $1,200.]

I made a new friend recently on Facebook. He had the same name and portrait as a friend whose profile says that he lives in Springboro, Ohio. Yet he was “Using Messenger without Facebook” and “Logged in using a phone number from Nigeria” and “Different from your Facebook friend Dale McCall” (most of this in grayed-out letters that a lot of folks would probably miss).

Some highlights:

• my new friend got one of the first Gulfstream G500s and, on top of that, was able to get it “delivered to my door step”
• he believed it to be a two-week, 200-mile trip (at less than 1 mph) from Springboro (Ohio) to “Ohio”
• when I offered to ship Dale my unneeded obsolete iPhone 6, he asked me to send it to Lynda Ham Stephenson, 22517 Wolfridge Rd, Killeen, Texas 76549. He then said that he would drive there from Springboro to pick it up

I can’t find a good way to export a single Facebook Messenger thread as HTML or plain text, so unfortunately you must view the exchange as a collection of screen shots.

Readers: Why did my new friend want my Verizon Wireless username/password? What use can be made of it in Nigeria?

A retired hedge fund manager sent me this 7-minute pitch (plus questions) for divorce insurance.

At 1:26:

• half of marriages fail, most within the first 8 years (one third of people will reach a 25th anniversary)
• Divorce reduces the average person’s wealth by 77% (why not only 50%? see “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for transaction costs and how people change their behavior in response to family law)
• Taxpayers end up on the hook for $112 billion (Parent A sues Parent B and prevails in winning custody, but due to choosing a non-wealthy sex partner, child support revenue does not increase total income enough to disqualify for subsidized housing, health care, food, smartphone, etc.)

At 3:08:

• Insurance policy will pay $10,000 to $2 million in the event of divorce (can rise with time)

I don’t see how this can work. “America, Home of the Transactional Marriage” (Atlantic) says that Americans tend to follow the money. Every U.S. state offers an inexpensive divorce procedure for parties who can agree on terms (in our survey of a Massachusetts courthouse, 17 percent of filings were “joint petitions”). What would stop two people from divorcing, splitting the insurance policy’s cash, and then getting back together? The Social Security system already provides a $128,000 cash bonus for people who divorce at 65 and remarry at 70 (see “Social Security and our world of no-fault divorce“). Why not spend $1,000 on an amicable divorce, pocket $128,000 from Social Security, pocket $2 million from this startup insurance company, and then remarry if it turns out that remarriage transaction is financially beneficial?

The Q&A session is interesting for what it reveals about America’s venture capitalists. None of them ask the above question, i.e., “If we live in a world of no-fault, no-social-consequence divorce, why wouldn’t a huge percentage of policyholders take the cash?” So the loss rate would go from the budgeted 50 percent to 90 percent, at which point the “insurance” ends up being simply a “savings account” with high fees and about 10 percent of customers who abandon their property.

Related:

• Wikipedia page on Moral Hazard