Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A (childless) friend works at Amazon. She’s been working extra hard because one of her colleagues has been on maternity leave with a fourth child. The company pilloried in the New York Times for slave-driving provides six months of maternity leave, one month prior to birth and five months after. “The month before birth is supposed to be only in case of medical need,” my friend explained, “but the company coaches people to get a doctor’s note saying that it would be better for the baby so almost everyone takes this.” The 6-month benefit extends to fathers and to parents who adopt children (perhaps the month prior to birth has to be finessed in that case?).

I wondered if it would be possible to obtain a 30-year stream of cash from Amazon without ever coming into the office. Suppose that an Amazon employee adopted a 17.5-year-old foster child. Six months of paid vacation! How about the next 29.5 years? It is reportedly tough to adopt healthy infants, but I don’t think that there is any waiting list for 17.5-year-old children in foster care. So the Amazon employee does another adoption and gets another 6 months off! Lather, rinse, repeat.

What about the fact that it could take a few hours per week to take care of a “child” and therefore the dream lifestyle of consuming OxyContin while playing Xbox might not be fully realized? Teenagers are famous for wanting to be left alone by adults.

How about expenses associated with the “child,” such as food (teenagers eat a lot) and clothing? Will these eat into a $150,000-200,000/year Amazon programmer’s income? They should be offset by payments from the state foster care agency. In most states, collecting cash from the government for a foster child is not nearly as lucrative as collecting child support cash from a private defendant (see table in Real World Divorce). However, it can still be cashflow-positive and the government checks continue to arrive by agreement after adoption in 92 percent of cases (HHS). The employee now has at least a cashflow-neutral child and six months of paid time off from Amazon.

What about having to pay $73,600 per year to send Adoptee #17 to Harvard? Children of an intact family in the U.S. have no right to sue parents for support, such as college tuition, after age 18 (the story is different, depending on the state, for children of divorced or never-married parents; in Massachusetts, for example, the 18-year-old former adopted “child” could become a tuition plaintiff and the lower-income adoptive parent could use the 18-year-old to get child support cash for himself or herself until the “child” turned 23).

How are things at IBM, the traditional cradle-to-grave corner of our industry? Friends recently welcomed a second child. The father works at IBM and took his full 6-week paternity leave to relax at home, hike, etc. “I’m upset because they just changed the policy to give fathers 12 weeks.”

Related:

• When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?
• The two-career couple at Netflix

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“The Tech Industry’s Gender-Discrimination Problem” (New Yorker):

AJ Vandermeyden drove to Tesla’s corporate headquarters, in Palo Alto, California, sat down on a bench outside the main entrance, and waited, in the hope of spotting someone who looked like a company employee. Vandermeyden, who was thirty years old, had been working as a pharmaceutical sales representative since shortly after college, but she wanted a different kind of job, in what seemed to her the center of the world—Silicon Valley. … A few weeks later, she was hired at Tesla as a product specialist in the inside-sales department.

… Vandermeyden, who worked closely with a group of eight other employees, soon learned that her salary was lower than that of everyone else in the group, including several new hires who had come to Tesla straight out of college. She was, as it happened, the only woman in the group. Her supervisors, and her supervisors’ supervisors, were male, all the way up the chain, it seemed, to Musk himself.

There was a sense that the male executives had little understanding of the challenges women faced at the company.

She noticed that sometimes, when female employees walked through certain areas of the plant, male workers whistled, catcalled, and made derogatory comments. Women called it the “predator zone.”

In July, 2015, about three months after Vandermeyden joined the team, several of her male colleagues were promoted. Although she was under the impression that she would shortly receive a promotion and a raise, she did not get either, according to court documents.

On September 20, 2016, Vandermeyden filed a lawsuit charging Tesla with sex discrimination, retaliation, and other workplace violations.

(The New Yorker writer and editors don’t address the question of whether it is  problematic to label a person with, apparently, no technical education or experience part of the “tech industry.”)

Some profound thoughts from a woman who, rather than waste her youth coding, was smart enough to marry a rich guy:

“Men who demean, degrade or disrespect women have been able to operate with such impunity—not just in Hollywood, but in tech, venture capital, and other spaces where their influence and investment can make or break a career,” Melinda Gates, the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told me. “The asymmetry of power is ripe for abuse.”

Will my friends who are passionate about social justice have to give up their Teslas? If so, what brand of car is ideal for signalling a commitment to gender equality?

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Facebook is an all-purpose outrage platform. Here’s a friend’s posting:

The MA RMV [Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles] wants $25 to replace a lost registration. They suggest that you do it online and print it yourself. So I logged in to do that. They still want the $25!

He thought it should cost less to use the web site compared to going into a Registry office and waiting in line for two hours.

Given the cost of managing Internet security (see Swiss pour cold water on our Internet dreams from 2015, for example, in which they predict that the cost of securing the Internet will exceed its value to a typical business by 2019), could it be that his proportional share of the security cost is actually more than $25? So it should actually cost more to deal with the government online compared to the in-person fees? (The RMV presumably has somewhat higher security risks than a vanilla ecommerce site.)

[Separately, why did paper registration survive 20 years of mobile Internet and 60 years of computer-managed databases? Police officers are supposed to be connected to a network, at least by voice communication to a dispatcher. Why can’t they look up a car by VIN or license plate? Why rely on a paper document that can be forged and that is a hassle to distribute?]

 

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“Can My Children Be Friends With White People?” (nytimes) is by a law school professor who can’t get over the Rejection of Hillary:

My oldest son, wrestling with a 4-year-old’s happy struggles … Donald Trump’s election has made it clear that I will teach my boys the lesson generations old, one that I for the most part nearly escaped. I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust. Much sooner than I thought I would, I will have to discuss with my boys whether they can truly be friends with white people. … I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.

This is spectacular example of the nurture assumption (demonstrated to be false by research summarized in The Nurture Assumption).

[Separately, if this guy and the NYT editors who published him are correct and the nurture assumption is true, maybe they can teach us how to teach our 4-year-old about the virtues of sharing…]

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Our media has spent the last couple of months highlighting Hollywood’s sex-for-advancement system (formerly the “casting couch“). Our culture now considers this an illegitimate method of allocating scarce positions and the managers of this method are being punished with job loss, civil lawsuits, and criminal prosecution.

What about those who advanced under this system and those who were left behind? The media has highlighted some people who had sexual encounters with decision-makers in Hollywood as victims, but shouldn’t people who didn’t have sex also be considered victims? At least some of them failed to get a job that would otherwise have obtained.

[See “Harvey Weinstein accused of rape by actor Natassia Malthe” for example:

After the incident in Los Angeles, Malthe said she called Weinstein and told him being in his movies was “not worth what he wanted to exchange”. … Malthe said he barged into her room and named A-list actors whose careers he had made because they slept with him.

“Actresses should not have to demean themselves to be successful,” she said. Malthe explained that she had experienced harassment from many men in Hollywood, but the experiences with Weinstein were “the worst”.

]

Let’s consider the unwinding of the Madoff hedge fund fraud. It was determined that Madoff was operating an illegitimate system for allocating profits to investors. The managers of the allocation system were punished with fines and imprisonment. Those who profited from the system had their profits taken away (“clawed back”). Those who were losers under the system are being compensated to the extent possible (but Bloomberg notes that the administrators of the unwinding are doing better than the victims!).

Is it time for an unwinding like this in Hollywood? Once Harvey Weinstein and friends are securely in prison or hiding out in a country that won’t extradite them, we can get from them the names of film industry workers whom they advanced because of sexual favors exchanged. (This assumes that producers, directors, and top actors can actually remember the names of most of the folks with whom they had sex.) We can also see if they remember the names of qualified people who didn’t get jobs because they walked out of hotel rooms upon seeing His Majesty in a bathrobe. Then it is time for a job swap?

Related:

• If you are against inequality can you also be against Harvey Weinstein?
• May 1998 Vanity Fair article: “Clearly the Monica Lewinsky scandal is not a case of illegal sexual harassment. But if Clinton had the relationship with her that the available evidence suggests he had, it flew in the face of the law’s spirit and reasoning: among other things, by potentially penalizing all the interns with whom he did not have affairs.”

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Here’s a WIRED article on the latest Republican tax plan:

the devastating impact the GOP’s recently unveiled tax-reform plan could have on the university’s PhD candidates. Buried in that plan is a proposed repeal that would cause graduate students’ tuition waivers to be counted as income—making them subject to taxes.

The annual stipend for a PhD student in Carnegie Mellon’s school of computer science is about $32,400. The university covers the student’s $43,000 tuition, in exchange for the research she [your typical CS grad student is a woman, as it happens!] conducts and the courses she teaches. Under current law, the government taxes only a student’s stipend; the waived tuition is not taken into account. But under the GOP bill, her annual taxable income would rise from $32,400 to $76,234. Even factoring in new deductions also included in the proposal, the CMU document estimates her taxes would amount to $10,209 per year—nearly four times the amount under current law. That would slash her net annual stipend by 25 percent, from $29,566 to $22,191.

Many academics fear the tax burden would waylay efforts to increase social and intellectual diversity at their institutions. “You have to advocate for folks who are coming down the pipeline,” says UCLA neuroscientist Astra Bryant. She says that’s especially true of women and underrepresented minorities. “I mentor two underprivileged undergraduate women, and my concern for them is that an increased tax burden would make it financially impossible for them to afford to pursue a PhD.” [but if the typical STEM grad student is a woman, as suggested above, why worry specifically about women?]

The idea is that the IRS will assess tax based on the university’s absurd fiction that, absent a “stipend,” grad students would have coughed up the rack rate $43,000 per year. Schools could address this by cutting the official (fictitious) tuition price for graduate school (as distinct from professional school, such as med school or law school) to something close to the actual cost or perhaps to zero. If the IRS were to challenge the new number that’s where it gets potentially interesting. If we accept the principle that people should pay tax on value that they receive in exchange for employment then we must calculate the value received by spending six years as an English or Physics grad student. But a lot of university majors end up reducing the student’s lifetime income and therefore students would actually be entitled to a deduction as a result of their waived tuition? Imagine if Yale had to show just how much damage they were doing to a young person’s earning potential by keeping him or her in a theater program?

[See IRS Publication 15-B and the “General valuation rule” should be applicable: “The fair market value (FMV) of a fringe benefit is the amount an employee would have to pay a third party in an arm’s-length transaction to buy or lease the benefit. Determine this amount on the basis of all the facts and circumstances. Neither the amount the employee considers to be the value of the fringe benefit nor the cost you incur to provide the benefit determines its FMV.” Nobody can argue that a typical physics grad student would pay $250,000 in tuition to get a Ph.D. So the fair market value, and therefore the IRS fringe benefit value, will be some lower (potentially negative) number.]

Related:

• my article on how academic science tends to reduce a person’s income and therefore young people may go into other fields for economic reasons

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For leftover computer nerds from the 1990s and aquarium hobbyists… the Sun Microsystems UV sterilizer.

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“Women Cracked Wartime Codes. They Can Fix Tech Today, Too.” (nytimes)…

It wasn’t industrial might that enabled the Allies to win World War II, nor huge oceans that protected the U.S. from the consequences of years of incompetence:

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that inclusion — the willingness to welcome genius — is one reason the right side won the war. The country also benefited from the contributions of other marginalized groups, including Navajo code talkers, Tuskegee airmen and other black troops (including women) serving in a segregated military.

The Google heretic comes back to haunt us:

More than 70 years after that war ended, it is astonishing to see doubts re-emerge about women’s ability to do high-level intellectual work. Far from being put to rest, old prejudice has found new expression in naysayers like James Damore, the Google engineer, now fired, who suggested in an infamous memo that women are shut out of top jobs in Silicon Valley because they are not “biologically” suited to the brain work of tech.

(But doesn’t this mischaracterize what the heretic said? Damore’s point was that typical women preferred to do things other than stare at screens, right? Not that women were less capable of staring at screens?)

We could kick the North Koreans all the way to Mars if only we could dilute our military’s toxic concentration of white cisgender heterosexual males:

The same animus lies behind the Trump administration’s eagerness to exclude refugees, and behind the proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military. In gratuitously acting to exclude willing citizens from military service, the president has declined to avail himself of the array of ingenuity and courage this nation has to offer. … we’re losing a key military edge and could lose a technical one, if we give in to the notion that some groups are more gifted than others.

(Is the author right about this? On the one hand, no transgender person has ever been accused of steering a Navy ship into a collision with a freighter. On the other hand, aside from Chelsea Manning, for how many transgender soldiers do we have a public record of their contributions to our nation’s security?)

What’s the educational and career background of the author of this piece that advocates for more women to be included in the world of nerds (regardless of whether additional women actually want to be in that world)? Her biography says “Liza [Mundy] has an AB from Princeton University and an MA in English literature from the University of Virginia.” She seems to have worked primarily as a writer since completing her studies in English.

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The Saudi royal family has been in the news lately (example). The Turkish TV show The Magnificent Century (about the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century) has proved popular on Netflix and around the world (and, as a bonus, was produced without a lot of Hollywood folks having sex with each other and then litigating afterwards). A lot of the drama in the Ottoman Empire was driven by competition among members of the royal family and nobility. Saudi Arabia is one of the few modern governments that has a similar family dynamic.

Why not a TV series about the modern-day Saudi royal family and its intrigues?

Related:

• Teaching Company’s The Ottoman Empire lectures by Kenneth Harl

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I attended a lecture by Stephon Alexander (professor at Brown; author of The Jazz of Physics) at the Brandeis physics department. After about 20 minutes I noticed that the hard wooden fold-down seat and the limited legroom were nowhere near as comfortable as what AMC Theaters provides to its customers at a much lower price per hour.

Given that colleges refuse to give up on the lecture method of instruction and that they insist on raising tuition every year, why not try to reel in a wealthier and more mature population of students with recliner seating?

For students who like to be on Facebook or watch YouTube during lecture, the seats could have built-in mobile phone holders.

Readers: Given rising rates of obesity, falling rates of physical fitness, rising tuition, and rising expectations of college-as-Four-Seasons-resort-like-experience, what should the lecture hall be like?

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