Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The cultural highlight of our spring here was the Boston Opera Collaborative La Bohème. Part of what made it so great was the comparatively small venue, a craft brewery in Jamaica Plain. Instead of thousands of elderly people falling asleep there were about 60 audience members, at least 20 years younger than the median age for the big opera houses.

The orchestra was small, but didn’t sound thin. (conductor: Beatrice Jona Affron) We have supertitles on flat-screen TVs. The acoustics were remarkably good. Maybe if the hall is small the engineering constraints can be relaxed?

Being so much closer to the singers it was possible to appreciate their acting and also understand more about the technique. The audience was visibly far more engaged than at a big opera venue.

As the audience was younger than at the Met, so too were the singers, all of whom seemed to be in their mid-20s. Fausto Miro and Junhan Choi were wonderful as Rodolfo and Marcello. Abigail Krawczynska was appropriately bewitching as Musetta. Sarah Cooper sang Mimi beautifully.

La Bohème contains a scene that ties right into today’s news. The young attractive Musetta hangs around the elderly rich Alcindoro and extracts cash from him. This role, along with that of Benoit, the confused landlord, was acted and sung well by Matthew Stansfield, but he was not convincingly elderly when viewed up close. That’s one limitation of “opera in the small”: the performers need to match the roles more closely than when the average audience member is 200′ away.

One suburban couple: “We would go to opera every night if it were like this.”

Readers: What do you think? In an age where everything can be captured and streamed, as with the excellent Metropolitan Opera performances in movie theaters, would it make sense to say that live opera should be done in small halls? This might be the only way to keep the art form vibrant for the next generation.

Related:

• La Broheme (updated libretto)
• Seattle Opera Beatrice and Benedict Review (traditional)
• Metropolitan Opera La Traviata at the movie theater (modern tech)

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The Los Angeles Times is committed to the righteous path of social justice. From “Hillary Clinton would make a sober, smart and pragmatic president. Donald Trump would be a catastrophe.” (by the full Editorial Board):

The election of Hillary Clinton as the first female president of the United States would surely be as exhilarating as it is long overdue, a watershed moment in American history after centuries of discrimination against women.

From April 14, 2018, “A welcome assault on the gender wage gap” (by the full Editorial Board):

Year after year, study after study has come to the same depressing conclusion: Women are paid less than men in most every occupation, from accounting to teaching to sales to nursing. In the 55 years since the federal Equal Pay Act was passed, the gap has shrunk a bit, but it’s still far too wide. … it is unfair and dispiriting … prehistoric attitudes about the value of women’s work persist and are reflected in their collective pay.

These gender equity warriors are now leaving the newsroom for the courtroom, but not on the side that you might expect… “LA Times Union Preparing Class-Action Lawsuit Over ‘Illegal Pay Disparities’: Last week, an analysis of the newsroom’s pay structure revealed wide discrepancies along racial and gender lines.” (Huffington Post)

Readers: Explain this apparent paradox!

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If you enjoyed the movie Sully, you might want to see what a real NTSB hearing looks like.

There should be one tomorrow, April 24, from 8:30 am until 3 pm (webcast link) on the subject of loss of control. Presenters will include Patty Wagstaff, aerobatic superstar, and Tyson Weihs, founder of ForeFlight.

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Almost exactly 20 years ago I was part of a team that launched scorecard.org, a web site that enables consumers to check out pollution in their neighborhoods. (See also this chapter of a tutorial book on Web development that describes it.)

The site is still running, remarkably, a tribute to the persistence of Bill Pease, the Big Idea person behind it. (I take credit for “Why don’t we just have people type in their ZIP code as the primary interface?”)

So Happy Earth Day to everyone and, if celebrating, try not to drink too much Toluene.

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“Why buying a house today is so much harder than in 1950” (Curbed) has some interesting numbers:

To understand just how unaffordable owning a home can be in American cities today, look at the case of a teacher in San Francisco seeking his or her first house.

Educators in the City by the Bay earn a median salary of $72,340. But, according to a new Trulia report, they can afford less than one percent of the homes currently on the market.

Despite making roughly $18,000 more than their peers in other states, many California teachers—like legions of other public servants, middle-class workers, and medical staff—need to resign themselves to finding roommates or enduring lengthy commutes. Some school districts, facing a brain drain due to rising real estate prices, are even developing affordable teacher housing so they can retain talent.

This housing math is brutal. With the average cost of a home in San Francisco hovering at $1.61 million, a typical 30-year mortgage—with a 20 percent down payment at today’s 4.55 percent interest rate—would require a monthly payment of $7,900 (more than double the $3,333 median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment last year).

Over the course of a year, that’s $94,800 in mortgage payments alone, clearly impossible on the aforementioned single teacher’s salary, even if you somehow put away enough for a down payment (that would be $322,000, if you’re aiming for 20 percent).

The figures become more frustrating when you compare them with the housing situation a previous generation faced in the late ’50s. The path an average Bay Area teacher might have taken to buy a home in the middle of the 20th century was, per data points and rough approximations, much smoother.

According to a rough calculation using federal data, the average teacher’s salary in 1959 in the Pacific region was more than $5,200 annually (just shy of the national average of $5,306). At that time, the average home in California cost $12,788. At the then-standard 5.7 percent interest rate, the mortgage would cost $59 a month, with a $2,557 down payment. If your monthly pay was $433 before taxes, $59 a month wasn’t just doable, it was also within the widely accepted definition of sustainable, defined as paying a third of your monthly income for housing. Adjusted for today’s dollars, that’s a $109,419 home paid for with a salary of $44,493.

I’m not sure that the author’s explanation of why houses are expensive today is right, but I think at least he is good at explaining that houses are expensive. (My personal view is that the U.S. is crazy bad at urban planning so there are only a few nice places to live and, with the population having quadrupled since the most recent batch of “nice places” were built (circa 1900), that puts a lot of pressure on prices.)

Readers: What do you think of this author’s arithmetic and, more importantly, his grand explanation?

Related:

• Americans can’t afford to live in America

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“DNA test reveals fertility doctor’s dark secret, lawsuit alleges” (CNN) is about some folks who are upset 37 years after the fact.

According to the lawsuit, Ashby and her husband at the time, Howard Fowler, sought the doctor’s help when they had trouble conceiving a child. Ashby thought the doctor used anonymous donor sperm from a college student for the procedure that led to the birth of her first child, Kelli Rowlette, in the spring of 1981.

… That’s when Rowlette took an Ancestry.com DNA test and noticed that her results predicted a parent-child relationship with Mortimer. At the time, Mortimer was a complete stranger to her, according to the lawsuit.

Believing that the results were a mistake, Rowlette gave her mother access to her Ancestry.com account, according to the lawsuit.

“When Ms. Ashby was alone, she accessed the account to investigate further. When Ms. Ashby saw Dr. Mortimer’s name, she was devastated. Ms. Ashby contacted Mr. Fowler, her now ex-husband, and relayed the information she obtained from Ancestry.com. Mr. Fowler was also devastated,” the lawsuit says.

In order to be matched with someone on Ancestry.com, the website explains that both people have to be in the AncestryDNA database.

“Based on what we know from what’s been reported, and the knowledge of how our system works, it’s possible that both biological mother and father both took the test, and that the child did as well, however without further details we cannot speculate on individual cases,” Melissa Garrett, a spokeswoman for Ancestry.com, wrote in an email.

Ancestry.com said in a statement that DNA testing helps people make powerful discoveries about their family history and identity and that the company is committed to delivering accurate results.

“However with this, people may learn of unexpected connections. With Ancestry, customers maintain ownership and control over their DNA data. Anyone who takes a test can change their DNA matching settings at any time, meaning that if they opt-out, their profile and relationship will not be visible to other customers,” the statement said.

In the lawsuit against Mortimer, Rowlette and her parents are requesting an amount in excess of $75,000 plus costs, disbursements, reasonable attorney fees and interest.

I wonder if this proves the superior wisdom of the French, where DNA testing that could reveal paternity is banned (Ancestry’s DNA matching service is not available there). See this Irish Times article from 2009:

the intent of lawmakers was to preserve “the peace of families”

Meanwhile, how does our legal system process the case of this 36-year-old? Would she have been better off if she’d been the genetic offspring of someone other than the doctor? If so, she could get paid for not being taller, for example?

Maybe she can hit the doctor for 18 years of child support? Idaho family law offers unlimited child support revenue given a sufficiently high-income defendant, but the percentage of income harvested is lower than in many other unlimited states, only about 5 percent of income above $250,000 per year (the same child would be more than twice as profitable in Massachusetts, for example).

What about the college student whose sperm was not used? He has been denied a genetic legacy. Should he get monetary damages?

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Self-criticism was important in the Soviet Union, in Mao’s China, and for the Khmer Rouge (see Wikipedia). Here’s what it looks like in Boston today: “ICA Boston closes show of work by Nicholas Nixon, who has been accused of sexual harassment, at his request” (The Art Newspaper):

the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston (ICA Boston) prematurely closed a solo exhibition of works by Nicholas Nixon, who has been accused of sexual harassment by former students at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt), at the artist’s own request, …

Nixon retired abruptly from MassArt on 2 March, after allegations of sexual harassment prompted the school to launch a Title IX investigation, which the school’s president David Nelson addressed in a letter to the MassArt community on 22 March. Following the subsequent Boston Globe report, the ICA added signage in the gallery space of Nixon’s show stating that the institution was “dismayed and disturbed” by the allegations, and discussing questions raised by the situation such as “Can we separate creative output from personal conduct?”

The museum took down the “open forum” (now a “closed forum,” literally?) where people could express their thoughts about the accused and his now-discredited art, but the article preserves some samples:

“I love these pictures because they are about how these women live their lives,” Respini wrote. “There is immense power in their sisterhood and unflinching gazes. And now it seems the maker of these pictures is a yet another man who has abused his position of power. I condemn this kind of behavior and am angered by it. Can I still love the pictures?”

The majority of the posts that followed were written by anonymous ICA staff members and heavily criticised what they perceived as an inadequate response. “As a woman who works at the ICA, I am sickened by this… Dialogue is not substantial enough of an action,” one staff member wrote. Another staff member wrote that “when presented with an opportunity to make a controversial but morally guided decision, the ICA chose to protect the problematic artist and its own pockets. By keeping this exhibition on view and by twisting this decision to be about public discourse, the ICA as an institution is silencing the voices of those who have come forward to name Nicholas Nixon as an abuser.”

In December 2017, the 70-year-old Nixon was celebrated in New Yorker magazine:

Today, we are bombarded by images of women every day—in entertainment, in advertising, in art, on social media—but depictions of women who are visibly aging remain too rare. Stranger still, women whom we know to have aged are often made to appear as if they have not, suspended in a state of quixotic youthfulness, verging on the bionic. But Nixon … is interested in these women as subjects, not just as images, and he’s committed to documenting the passage of time, not defying it.

What did the exhibit look like before it went into the memory hole? Here are some iPhone snaps from February 23, 2018:

Separately, the museum still has an “Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today” exhibit, which starts with Nam June Paik’s 1994 Internet Dream. The sign says that he hoped for “a communication network as a participatory mass medium, one that might foster genuine connectivity and understanding between diverse groups of people.” (How has that worked out?)

 

Cindy Sherman’s 2007 print seems to predict the Facebook/Instagram culture pretty well. (The sign: “… they’re older women and if they are successful, maybe they’re not really happy. Maybe they’ve been divorced, or they’re in an unhappy marriage, but because of the money, they’re not going to get out.”)

Here’s a fun Sarah Sze kinetic work for engineers that is not part of the Internet exhibition:

Finally, one gift shop item on February 23, 2018 loosely related to what would happen in March with the Nicholas Nixon show…

My friend, on seeing Chelsea Clinton’s She Persisted, asked “Is that about divorce plaintiffs?”

Circling back to Nicholas Nixon… an 8×10 view camera photographer worked fast enough to get #MeTooed? And if he had been having sex with students, does it make sense to remove the images of the wife and her sisters from museums worldwide? Why do these women have to go into the memory hole also?

 

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A new employee from our septic tank pumping company showed up recently. He was unable to find the tanks or covers, even with a map, and eventually abandoned the project. Why isn’t there an inexpensive electronic device that can find the metal covers underneath a foot or two of dirt/grass? Then the job could be done by people at a lower level of skill.

It looks as though this can be done with ground-penetrating radar (example). It seems that the necessary equipment is more than $10,000, though. Everything else with sensors and electronics has gotten cheaper. Cars are sprouting radars everywhere. Why can’t this technology be cut down to $250 the way that everything else has been?

[Separately, the new employee was a white guy in his 20s. All of the people that I’ve seen in Massachusetts pumping septic tanks are white males, from which it is reasonable to infer that they are using their white male privilege to exclude women and minorities from this job?]

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“School Is Expensive. Is It Worth It?” (WSJ) is a response to The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan, an economics professor.

Thus Mr. Caplan’s case against education begins by acknowledging the case in favor of getting one. “It is individually very fruitful, and individually lucrative,” he says. Full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree, on average, “are making 73% more than high-school graduates.” Workers who finished high school but not college earn 30% more than high-school dropouts. Part of the difference is mere correlation: Mr. Caplan says if you adjust for pre-existing advantages like intelligence and family background, one-fifth to two-fifths of the education premium goes away. Even so, it really does pay to finish school.

Mr. Caplan believes these signals [of having been smart, diligent, and conformist enough to finish a college degree] are reliable, that college graduates generally do make better employees than nongraduates. Thus it is rational for employers to favor them, and for young people to go through school. Yet the system as a whole is dysfunctional, he argues, because the signaling game is zero-sum. He illustrates the point with another analogy: If everyone at a concert is sitting, and you want to see better, you can stand up. “But if everyone stands up, everyone does not see better.”

The advantage of having a credential, that is, comes at the expense of those who lack it, pushing them to pursue it simply to keep up. The result is “credential inflation.” Today a college degree is a prerequisite for jobs that didn’t previously require one—secretary, rental-car clerk, high-end waiter. And to return to the concert analogy, if you’re unable to stand, you’re objectively worse off than before. “People who are in the bottom 25% of math scores—their odds of finishing college, if they start, are usually like 5% or 10%,” Mr. Caplan says. They end up saddled with debt and shut out of jobs they may be perfectly capable of performing.

The irrational actor in this whole drama, Mr. Caplan says, is the voter, who almost without exception wants to keep the tax money flowing. “Only about 5% of Americans say that we should spend less on education,” he says. Even among self-identified “strong Republicans,” the figure is a mere 12%.

The professor is down on Internet education:

“Online education is only a viable competitor if you think that the main thing going on in schools is teaching useful skills,” Mr. Caplan says. He doubts that any internet certificate can supplant the signaling function, especially when it comes to conformity: “If your new, weird signal of conformity attracts a bunch of nonconformists, it fails as a signal of conformity.”

But he is up on getting a job as a teacher:

“I’m not one of these professors that resents teaching or dislikes teaching. I love it,” he says. “Maybe most of the students aren’t that interested,” but if “there’s one person in the room that cares, that person to me is the center of the universe.”

If you look at “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football)” and similar chronicles of how American college students actually spend their days, it is tough to believe that anyone ever thought that using tax dollars to subsidize majors other than science and engineering was going to make society wealthier. Other scholars have pointed out that Americans don’t come out of a typical college program with measurably better critical thinking or writing skills than when they went in (see my reviews of Academically Adrift and Higher Education?) But maybe The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money is the first to point out the zero-sum nature of college credentials? That, even if the problems identified by other scholars were fixed and college were somehow made intellectually rigorous, college for everyone still wouldn’t provide a huge boost to GDP.

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