Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

As a true child of the 1970s (cue fringed leather vest and tie-dye), I had scheduled a wine and cheese party in Cambridge for last night. This turned out to be about 12 hours after an angry Democrat (“passionate progressive”) shot Republicans on a baseball field in Virginia (Wikipedia).

About 90 percent of the guests were staunch Hillary supporters, a few having transferred their allegiance from Bernie. (How did we end up with 10 percent Deplorables/Libertarians? For example, a commercial pilot was invited and she lives on a steady Fox News diet while waiting with her jet at various FBOs.)

One theme of the party a “slide show” (another 1970s staple) from my recent trip to Russia. Before the show, the Hillary supporters expressed confidence that Russia is a completely dysfunctional society, except when it comes to nefarious plans to destabilize the U.S., at which time the same Russians develop superhuman capabilities. What about the fact that we have a member of one political party shooting at politicians from an opposing party? That’s one aberrant individual and doesn’t say anything about U.S. culture. (By contrast, if an individual does something bad in Russia or China, that is generally proof of a systemic problem.) [Did the pictures and narration change anyone’s mind? I don’t think so, but a few expressed interest in visiting Moscow and seeing for themselves.]

What about the shooting per se? One Democrat had posted “So much for ‘there’s no crying in baseball’.” on Facebook shortly after the shooting. This had earned some “likes” and “smiley/laugh” emojis. Previously, many of the party attendees had agreed with an outlook in which Republicans were responsible for (1) destroying Planet Earth, and (2) between now and when the surface of Planet Earth bursts into flames, making the U.S. unlivable for women, people of color, and the LGBTQIA. Republicans were killing Americans on a daily basis by trying to slow the growth in health care spending (we’re at 18 percent of GDP, compared to 4.5 percent in Singapore, so obviously they haven’t been very effective!). Trump was Hilter reincarnated , except actually worse than Hitler because Trump had admitted to sexually assaulting helpless women, and, when done grabbing pussies, he would soon grab dictatorial powers. Most had posted on Facebook or “liked” expressions of variations of the above sentiments.

Quite a few of the Hillary supporters had actively “resisted” Trump and the Republicans by joining the Women’s March. So they heard Angela Davis call for “Resistance to the attacks on Muslims and on immigrants. … Resistance to state violence… Resistance on the ground” and Gloria Steinem mention that “collectively violence against females in the world has produced a world in which for the first time there are fewer females than males” (is this mostly because of sex-selective abortions? If so, why is Steinem also pro-abortion?). They heard Madonna talk about the “new age of tyranny,” that “The revolution starts here,” and that “I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House…”.

Did any of the party-attendees draw a connection between talking about the need for a “revolution” and talking about the Republicans as running a “tyranny,” attacking citizens, attacking helpless immigrants, perpetrating violence against women, etc. and one of their fellow Democrats deciding to use a rifle rather than Facebook? Recall that Mao pointed out that “A revolution is not a dinner party, … A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” If you alert 325 million people to the need to start a revolution against a tyranny, is it surprising that one would take action?

The answer turned out to be simple, for these Democrats. The only cause of the “passionate progressive” taking out a gun and shooting was the lack of appropriate laws against gun ownership by civilians.

Readers: What have you heard from Democrats? Has anyone said “Maybe comparing the Republicans to Nazis or demanding a ‘revolution’ wasn’t such a great idea after all?”

[Separately, I’m concerned about the long-term effects of this shooting. We’ve been developing a society in which senior government officials occupy a separate plane of existence from citizens (And often, literally, a separate “plane”, e.g., James Comey, after being fired as FBI director, was traveling on a Gulfstream G550 (about twice the weight of the regional jet that I used to fly… carrying 50 taxpayers)). So laws, regulations, and economic decisions made by Congress and top Administration members may not affect those people in the same way that the affect an average citizen. If members of Congress need to be kept in a security bubble they will be even more out of touch with the problems of the typical American.]

Related:

• Antonio Garcia Martinez: “Schrodinger’s shooter: simultaneously representative of all gun owners, but not representative at all of rabid anti-Trumpers.”

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Tim Cook gave a commencement speech this year at MIT. Let’s look at the transcript:

in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I might even have experimented with a Windows PC, and obviously that didn’t work.

I would have laughed about this six months ago. Now that I own a $2,400 Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, I am crying.

I had never met a leader with such passion

The person who gets paid to lead says that it is all about the great leader and the passion. And that probably you should find a passionate leader and follow him or her. It worked for the Germans in the 1930s (well, until roughly 1943 anyway). Why not for MIT grads?

Aligned with a leader who believed that technology which didn’t exist yet could reinvent tomorrow’s world.

He’ll just have to agree to disagree with Bill Burr.

So the question I hope you will carry forward from here is how will you serve humanity?

Should we burden 22-year-olds with this standard? Shouldn’t this be reserved for the Albert Schweitzers? (Or are we interpreting “serve humanity” as in this Turkish Airlines commercial?)

Technology today is integral to almost all aspects of our lives and most of the time it’s a force for good.

Because video games enable Americans to enjoy their SSDI and Oxy? Wouldn’t most people actually be better off if they didn’t have an iPhone that encouraged them to waste time with Farmville, Facebook, and celebrity news?

I’m not worried about artificial intelligence giving computers the ability to think like humans. I’m more concerned about people thinking like computers without values or compassion, without concern for consequences.

Like Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers, telling women “You know how they say we only use 10 percent of our brains? I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.”?

Whatever you do in your life, and whatever we do at Apple, we must infuse it with the humanity that each of us is born with.

What if “humanity” for some Apple customers means waging Jihad? Why is humanity-infused automatically better than plain technology?

Don’t listen to trolls

Where “troll” = “anyone who didn’t vote for Hillary”? Or “troll” = “anyone who disagrees with you”?

At a shareholders meeting a few years back, someone questioned Apple’s investment and focus on the environment. … So I told him, “If you can’t accept our position [of wasting shareholder money on unprofitable green initiatives], you shouldn’t own Apple stock.”

Tim Cook is not afraid to speak truth to power!

[Separately, in what sense is Apple “green”? They are headquartered in a place that is accessible only by car, right? So wouldn’t they be automatically less green than a typical Manhattan-based Fortune 500? They compound this problem by being headquartered in a place where real estate is crazy expensive, which causes at least some workers to settle 30-90 miles away. They further compound this problem by being headquartered in a place with some of the worst traffic jams on the planet, which causes commute times and gasoline consumption to be yet more extreme.]

When you are convinced that your cause is right, have the courage to take a stand.

What kind of courage is required when you’re at the head of a trillion-dollar company?

if you choose to live your lives at that intersection between technology and the people it serves, … then today all of humanity has good cause for hope.

Uh oh, bad news for humanity every time someone decides to major in science rather than engineering. In fairness to Cook, though, when was the last time that you used a Higgs boson to get to the next level in an iPhone game?

Readers: did you find anything non-generic in the transcript? To me the speech seems like something almost anyone could have given. Why not share with MITers some secrets of effective management? Tim Cook must know something that makes him worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Apple shareholders (or at least they pay him that much!). Why not try to share that?

Related:

• What do liberal arts college graduates want to hear? (Jessye Norman at Oberlin)

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“The Mysterious Printer Code That Could Have Led the FBI to Reality Winner” (Atlantic) says that laser printers include an ID code whenever one prints in color (but not in black and white). Has anyone tried reading these hidden ID codes at home or work? With which printers and what did you find?

Related:

• The National Security Agency hired someone named Reality?

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Linda Nielsen, one of the professors who presented research at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017, talked about critical analysis of shared parenting studies. Outcomes for children of separated or divorced parents in shared parenting (the Nordic researchers define this as 50/50 time, but most American researchers call any split of 35/65 to 50/50 “shared”) are better than for children who spend more than 65 percent of their time with just one parent. But perhaps this is because, at least in the U.S. where shared parenting has typically required agreement by the parents, the parents who do agree tend to have a higher income.

Nielsen looked at 27 studies where the income of the parents was available and determined that higher income for children in shared parenting does not explain the superior outcomes. Why is this believable? Nielsen said that if you look at the same metrics for children in intact families, excluding those in poverty, there are “not strong links between family income and children’s emotional, behavioral, and psychological well-being. In fact, richer kids may do worse.” Nielsen noted that the parent-child relationship, in particular, may be worse with children in wealthier families.

When we were kids in the 1970s (black and white TV, no Facebook, glaciers still covering most of North America, etc.), it was folk-wisdom that rich kids tended to be neglected by their parents, who were busy with cocktail parties at the country club, kid-free ski trips to Colorado, etc. They had their own rooms, sometimes with their own TVs (color!), and typically a car on their 16th birthdays (this was so long ago that teenagers actually got off their butts and learned to drive!). We envied them for their material prosperity, but would have conjectured that they were, on average, worse off.

With rage over inequality being, well, the current rage, the assumption seems to be that rich kids are actually better off. Thurston Howell V is getting his Mandarin lessons, the elite private school, and entry into a fancy college (see Elizabeth Holmes, of Theranos fame, as a real-world example).

Readers: Whom should we believe? The New York Times and the Zeitgeist? Or the research psychology professor and her data?

Related:

• Antonio Garcia Martinez linked on Facebook to “Stop Pretending You’re Not Rich” (nytimes). I pointed out that “The article assumes that rich parents somehow buy success for their children. However, http://www.nber.org/papers/w10894 looks at Korean kids adopted by Americans and finds that there is almost no correlation between parental income and the income of the children.” and also “If this guy is right, are a lot of American parents needlessly worried about their brats? English lords didn’t worry about their children not becoming English aristocrats, right? If all that one needs to do in the U.S. to have successful children is, as the NYT suggests, earn $200k/year, why do people who earn $200k+/year lose sleep at night over how their kids are doing? Just use some of that $200k+ to pay for a private high school and the kid is guaranteed to do pretty well. So the parents can catch up on Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix.”
• The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications
• The Son Also Rises: Policy Implications
• The Son Also Rises: Tips for Optimizing Your Life

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“Uber’s Travis Kalanick and Silicon Valley learn that work isn’t a fraternity” (Sacramento Bee) makes it sound as though Uber’s founder was a waste of space and shareholder cash:

Uber long has been the poster child for the downside of Silicon Valley. The dismal treatment of women. The corner-cutting business practices. The unbelievably childish and even dangerous bro culture.

On Tuesday, Kalanick announced he would take a leave of absence, …

Certainly Uber is not the first startup to outgrow a hard-charging founder. But the culture Kalanick fostered has been among the most blatantly obnoxious and fraught with misogyny.

More than 215 of the company’s 12,000-plus employees [i.e., 1.8 percent; compare to the 44 percent of female federal employees who said that were harassed within the preceding two years (1994 survey)] were accused of unprofessional conduct that ranged from sexual harassment to discrimination to bullying to retaliation to physical threats.

The company will be transformed?

It reportedly bans sexual relationships between employees at different levels, requires senior managers to undergo leadership training, details a new process for handling employee complaints and requires Uber to implement new benefits, such as equal time for family leave.

Media reports of Uber’s evilness have been tough to square with my limited personal experience, e.g., meeting an Uber executive from the Los Angeles office temporarily assigned to Moscow. She seemed to identify as “female” and yet didn’t have any complaints regarding the company. It also seems implausible that apparently the majority of evil American workers were gathered into this one enterprise, the only sensible inference from the non-stop media coverage of how evil Uber is, ignoring the nearly 30 million other American businesses.

I’ve always wondered why Uber exists at all. If Google (“not evil” by definition/motto!) and Apple know where everyone is and those companies both have comprehensive mapping software, why aren’t they the companies connecting drivers and passengers and taking a fee for doing so? Could it be that the business isn’t actually profitable?

Readers: What do you think? With the hated Kalanick sacrificed, will Uber enter a new and more glorious phase of corporate development? The world’s top female sysadmins will flock to the company to replace Susan Fowler? Or was Kalanick somehow important? And why doesn’t a $1 trillion gorilla such as Apple or Google take away this business?

[Separately, how is the new policy “bans sexual relationships between employees at different levels” different from what Kalanick himself promulgated in 2013: “Do not have sex with another employee UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic ‘YES! I will have sex with you’ AND b) the two (or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command.”?]

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Six months after Canadian certification was achieved, Bell Helicopter finally deluged the FAA with enough paperwork to get U.S. certification for the “new Jet Ranger” (press release). Rumor has it that the sticking point was a big filter designed to keep particles out of the engine. These filters have supposedly been operating for decades all around the world as after-market retrofits to helicopters, but the FAA was worried that the filter could become clogged.

Related:

• my review of the Bell 505

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My host’s BMW passed by a couple of slender women in their early 20s dressed up for a Friday night. He turned to me and said “the hunters are out.” Why would attractive young women be faced with the challenge of “hunting” for male companionship? “Remember that Russia lost 10 million men during World War II [see Wikipedia],” he replied, “and society still hasn’t gotten back to normal after three generations. Also remember that life expectancy for Russian men is 64 and for women it is 76 [CIA Factbook numbers are close]. Women dominate [are the majority] in every social group.”

What are they hunting for? “Sometimes they want money, but a lot of women have good jobs and just want to spend time with a man.” How about marriage? It sure seemed as though there were a lot of young mothers around the city [nationwide stats show median age of first marriage for a Russian woman of 25, compared to 27 in the U.S.]. “A man who earns at least $18,000 per year is considered a reasonable catch here,” he responded. “That’s enough to afford an apartment and support a family.”

Could the World War II demographic shock in fact still be felt? I met college students dating 35-year-old men (maybe because their college student peers still live with mom and dad?). I learned about a 70-year-old former Soviet administrator (i.e., not rich) with a 46-year-old girlfriend who had a middle class job and wouldn’t have needed a man for financial reasons. “Women over age 30 can forget it,” one local said. “There are fresh 18-year-old girls arriving in Moscow from all over the former Soviet regions.”

Departures from strict monogamy are not unheard of. A married man referred to the delicate etiquette of when the girlfriend meets the wife. For those with kids, the young girlfriend downtown is the “second family.” Does the girlfriend have an incentive to get pregnant and create a full-fledged “second family”? Unlike in the U.S., where child support following out-of-wedlock sex can yield $millions, the practical limit in Russia seems to be about $300 per month. If a girlfriend is getting more than that in the form of, e.g., free rent, she has no financial incentive to have a baby.

[It is possible to tap into a fellow citizen’s wealth through marriage, but Russia seems to have a California-style community property system in which assets acquired prior to the marriage are unreachable by a divorce plaintiff. Alimony profits may not be large due to the expectation that women in Russia are capable of working.]

Russian women are not shy about shedding a useless mate. “At least a third of the Uber drivers that I ride with ask me if I’m married,” said one local. “When I say that I’m not, they say ‘Good. Don’t get married.’ Then they tell me how they lost their job, were quickly divorced by their wives, and are now driving for Uber.” (If there are no children involved, a Russian divorce can be obtained through a quick and inexpensive administrative procedure. Even a judicial divorce in Russia is nothing like the festival of litigation that would be typical in many U.S. states. Ordinary citizens are able to retain lawyers to handle divorce cases without draining the family savings.)

As in other no-fault (“unilateral divorce”) countries, it is children who pay for the sexual freedom of their parents. An adult woman told me of her childhood visitations with the father that her mother had discarded. Presumably due to the shortage of men, he had been picked up by a different woman and had started a family with Wife #2. The daughter of the first marriage would go over to Dad’s apartment, complete with stepmom and new half-sibs, for a few hours every two weeks. They didn’t have enough room to keep her overnight and she never became a true member of her father’s family. This was not especially enjoyable for anyone.

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I have an idea for a news story that would be popular for my Facebook friends to share and talk about.

Headline: “Donald Trump proposes shutting down Federal wildlife refuges”

Picture: Bucolic lake with some mountains in the background.

Story:

President Trump today said that the nation had too many refugees and therefore he was shutting down Federal wildlife refuges.

Readers: What do you think? Would it work? Do you have a better idea?

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“D.C. and Maryland to sue President Trump, alleging breach of constitutional oath” (Washington Post) concerns a state and a quasi-state that apparently don’t like the Trumpenfuhrer or his family’s hotel.

My model of the U.S. President is that he or she doesn’t have that much power due to Congress controlling the purse strings. However, I’m wondering if a President could retaliate against a hate-filled state by moving federal employment out. Let’s take Maryland, for example. The Census Bureau has a massive office in Suitland, Maryland. This is apparently not the best neighborhood because one of my MIT alumni friends recently said “they put a big fence around the parking lot to cut down on carjackings.” He lives in Arlington, Virginia and would presumably be happier if the Census Bureau moved to Virginia, for example. The D.C. area is expensive and notorious for incompetent programmers. Why not move Census to a place where it is easier to hire good software developers, where the cost of living is lower so that the civil service salaries are more attractive, and perhaps where there is no state income tax so that employees will enjoy a boost in take-home pay?

Readers: Would it take an act of Congress for Trump to move a bunch of agencies? Or is this something that as the manager of the executive branch he can do as easily as negotiating a new lease on office space within the same state or city? Who has actually been to the Trump hotel in D.C.? What is it like?

Related:

• see Real World Divorce for how a move would affect the likely outcome of divorce, custody, and child support lawsuits for a federal employee (moving from Maryland to Nevada would be devastating to a typical plaintiff, for example, though statistically beneficial for the children)
• the book Code Warriors covers a proposed move by the National Security Agency out of Maryland and into Kentucky (Fort Knox, actually); at least in the mid-1950s this would have been done without Congressional approval (the military eventually decided against the move)

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I was part of the local coffee shop gathering the other morning. We were talking about fighter jet procurement and how the Swiss actually voted on the question of F-35 versus Saab Gripen versus sticking-with-the-old (story). I pointed out that “Angela Merkel says that Germany can’t rely on the U.S. in the age of the Trumpenfuhrer, so the Europeans will have to buy a lot more military hardware.” The response was “The Europeans are like teenagers. They want to rebel, but they also don’t want to be responsible for anything. The U.S. is the parent who remains in the background to clean up any messes.” Conclusion: Europeans are the new teenagers.

The conversation shifted to a friend’s Facebook post:

Another Happy Mother’s Day tribute to my mom, an original feminine trail blazer! Cheers to all the strong and courageous moms out there who forged their own path, … in 1970 became a private pilot. Happy Mother’s Day!#mothersday #strongwomen #womenpilot

He’s not completely wrong. A woman earning a Private certificate was a “trail-blazing” achievement… for Raymonde de Laroche in 1910. By the 1940s the Women Airforce Service Pilots were flying the P-51 Mustang, a 1,620-horsepower taildragger, and B-17 four-engine bomber. Their Soviet counterparts were flying 24,000+ combat missions. Jerrie Mock made it around the world in 1964 in a 1953 Cessna whose navigational gear today would barely suffice for a 50-mile sunny day hamburger run.

How is it that, in the aviation world, adult women are now being celebrated for stuff that used to be considered basic, e.g., taking a docile trainer around the pattern at an airport designed for transport jets? “That’s only been true for the past five years,” said one local Deplorable (he doesn’t have a rainbow flag on his house or Black Lives Matter sign on his lawn in our all-white/Asian nearly-all-hetero-couples town). “Before that, people were able to remember that women used to be as capable as men.”

We then discussed how this seems also to be true in the engineering and programming world. An adult woman who gets a straightforward program to work or who passes an undergraduate course gets extravagantly praised (see “Most computer science majors in the U.S. are men. Not so at Harvey Mudd” (LA Times), for example, celebrating women on track to get a bachelor’s in CS at age 22). A well-meaning, correct-thinking, Hillary-voting computer nerd friend in Boston described Jean Sammet, part of a six-programmer team on a committee designing COBOL, with “In the field of computer science she was a giant.” Twenty years ago, the same guy would have used “COBOL” as a synonym for computer-assisted mediocrity and incompetence. Certainly COBOL was promulgated years later than Fortran (which has given us hundreds of predictions of future Earth temperature?), ALGOL (which grew into today’s C, Java, et al.), and Lisp (which became a religion). COBOL was also years later than the business data processing languages from which it borrowed features, e.g., COMTRAN. A 1975 view from Dijkstra: “The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” (Of course, there are women who are generally agreed to have been “giants” in computer science and you can see their names among the rest of the Turing Award winners (though don’t forget the “super-giants” Emil Post, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann))

The question was posed: What other group in society is regularly praised for achieving fairly straightforward stuff? “Children” was the immediate answer agreed upon. Thus the group concluded that, at least as far as their portrayal in the media and in descriptions by activists purporting to assist them, Women are the new children.

Readers: if the goal of 1960s “equality feminism” was to put women on equal footing with men, has the result of present-day feminism been to put women on equal footing with children? (And, separately, could this be why a lot of high-achieving women refuse to identify as “feminists”? Examples: Angela Merkel, the PhD in physical chemistry who runs Germany; Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, hasn’t been seen wearing a pussy hat; Patty Wagstaff talks about the men who helped her (including an ex-husband in Alaska), not about obstacles that were placed in her path due to her sex.) Do the well-meaning journalists celebrating minor achievements by women inadvertently make readers think that women are less capable than men?

[Personal anecdotal history: When I started programming in the 1970s, every software development organization seemed to have at least some women. I learned to program from a woman who had a terminal (110 baud, printing!) in her home. I can’t remember anyone suggesting that it was more or less difficult for woman to write software than it would have been for a man. At the software development company that I co-founded in the mid-1990s, two of the earliest employees were women, one a Caltech graduate and one an MIT graduate, and they quickly rose to management positions due to their superior abilities. No customer ever expressed surprise that the manager responsible for their project was a woman. Nobody within the company ever expressed surprise regarding a programmer or a manager being a woman. Base salaries were the same for men and women (this was before the transgender age, so those were our only two categories) and bonuses were decided upon by a committee of project leaders. Women were awarded equally large bonuses by their peers.

In classes that I have taught at MIT, ranging from probability theory to circuit design to database programming, women have usually been over-represented among the best students.

I’ve been part of the same airport community since 2001. There has always been a mixture of men and women at every level of flying experience and nobody has ever said “I am surprised to see that Woman X is flying a jet now” or “I don’t feel comfortable with Woman Y as my instructor.” One of my primary instructors was a woman. My first flight in the cockpit of an airliner during training at Comair (Delta regional jet subsidiary) happened to be with a female captain and young male first officer. When I came back from the flight, nobody in the training class expressed surprise that the captain had been female or asked a question regarding her competence.

Among the pilots that I have worked with as an instructor, the ones who identified as female didn’t stand out as having any difficulties learning, nor did any ever complain that she was struggling to overcome a sex-linked barrier.

So… if I didn’t have the New York Times and a cluster of social justice warrior friends on Facebook, I would be aware that women were a minority in flying and computer nerdism, but I would not be aware that women faced special obstacles in these worlds.]

Related:

• Sho Yano, celebrated for earning a bachelor’s in science at age 12 (Yano went on to earn his PhD at 18 and MD at 21, useful to remember next time someone brags about an academic achievement!)).

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