Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Back in 2014 I asked Why aren’t there a lot more police shootings in the U.S.? (observing the ready-to-shoot posture of a police officer approaching a harmless-looking woman in a stalled vehicle) and then Should we have unarmed police? (at the beginning of the wave of American news media choosing to cover police shootings).

Now Mohamed Noor, an immigrant from Somalia, has shot Justine Damond, an immigrant from Australia. Had they both emigrated to Britain rather than the U.S., it seems safe to assume that Ms. Damond would still be alive in her pajamas. Mr. Noor, as a basic patrol officer, would not have been armed.

(From what I have read so far it is especially sad because Ms. Damond was calling the police for purely altruistic reasons, i.e., to report the possibility of an unknown stranger being a crime victim.)

Related:

• Murder of Kitty Genovese (a false New York Times story led to a debate about why so many people witnessed the crime but did not call the police); see also “Her shocking murder became the stuff of legend. But everyone got the story wrong.” (Washington Post)
• from “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track”: Professor Callie Marie Rennison, a criminology expert at the University of Colorado Denver, explained to us that crime of all kinds, including sexual violence and domestic violence, disproportionately affect lower income Americans and may be underreported: “I’ve done a 180 on this during my career,” she said. “Now I think ‘Why would anyone want to report a crime? What would they gain?'”

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“From hooves to helicopters” is worthwhile reading for instructors. What does it feel like to take a first lesson? Most of us can’t remember, of course!

Here’s one argument in favor of a flight school using Robinson R44s for primary training:

I was led out into the hangar by my first flight instructor. With two headsets in hand, she walked me over to what I was certain was a glorified go-kart. [The R22’s] airframe left little to the imagination and the exposure of its components was unsettling to my extremely untrained eye.

Not related, but I wish that we had space for it: bunkbed/home theater/desk for kids made from Bell 206 parts.

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“Would You Agree to Sex with a Total Stranger?” (Psychology Today, June 28, 2017) contains some surprising data:

Twenty years later, Hald and Høgh-Olesen (2010) largely replicated these findings in Denmark, with 59 percent of single men and 0 percent of single women agreeing to a stranger’s proposition, “Would you go to bed with me?” Interestingly, they also asked participants who were already in relationships, finding 18 percent of men and 4 percent of women currently in a relationship responded positively to the request.

Being married/partnered made a man much less likely to agree to have sex with a stranger, but made a woman more likely!

[Of course we have to consider the possibility that women who are more likely to agree to have sex with strangers are more likely to get married/partnered.]

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The yoga moms in our suburb have been chatting recurrently about the HBO show Big Little Lies so I decided to skim through it.

One big feature of the show is people driving their pavement-melting SUVs on winding undivided two-lane roads, often next to a cliff, and looking at back-seat passengers (children) or at a front-seat passengers. Where is the NTSB to protest against this?

Reese Witherspoon is the main character. She is married to what one of my Deplorable friends would call a “beta male”. When Hollywood needs a character whose career is believably low-paid, low-status, and irrelevant, what’s the go-to job? Work-from-home Web developer! Witherspoon’s character volunteers part-time in a community theater. How does she afford an oceanfront home in Monterey? (Zillow shows this at about $10 million) The answer seems to be that she was previously married to a high-income man and obtained custody of their joint daughter. So the oceanfront lifestyle is funded by child support under California law? If so, why isn’t there a fight over the cash-yielding 16-year-old when she wants to move in with Dad?

The 16-year-old daughter, for her part, hatches a plan to auction her virginity via the Internet and give the resulting cash to a worthy charity. Although a variety of the episodes show adults comfortable with cash-for-sex transactions within the context of family court, the parents are not happy about this. Nobody raises the question of whether or not this would be legal. The age of consent in California is 18 (Wikipedia; compare to 16 in some other states). Was the plan to drive up to Washington State and meet the high bidder there? Exchanging money for sex, outside of a family court, is presumably illegal under anti-prostitution laws. Would it become legal if a third party, such as a charity, were paid? No character in the show raises any of these objections to the 16-year-old’s scheme.

Domestic violence is a big theme for the show. We Believe the Children (see my first post on that book) says that Americans were desperate in the 1980s to convince themselves that poverty and domestic violence were unrelated (links to some stats). Maybe this is still true because the show’s abuser is crazy rich. The wife, who had been an attorney at a top law firm, can’t muster the courage to go down to the courthouse and take the house, kids, and cash. The couple’s therapist eventually coaches her on pre-litigation planning to win a custody lawsuit. How realistic is this? The book A Troubled Marriage that we referenced in our domestic violence chapter said that a common reason why an adult American doesn’t leave an abusive partner is that they don’t want to suffer a loss of household income (child support and/or alimony are typically less than 100 percent of a defendant’s income). But this abuser in the show had such a high income that the wife, even if she didn’t want to return to work as a lawyer, could have lived very comfortably on child support, alimony, property division, etc. Some suspension of disbelief may be required!

[Note that the character with the abusive husband is played by Nicole Kidman, who made roughly $200 million by divorcing Tom Cruise (see Daily Mail, which describes a failed legal argument: “Originally Cruise had been reluctant to agree a deal, arguing that with a £90million personal fortune, Miss Kidman could adequately support herself.”) Reese Witherspoon was herself a divorce and custody plaintiff, and alimony defendant in the California family court, according to Wikipedia.]

A big theme in the show is that one elementary school kid is being physically abused by another elementary school kid in a public school. This is one part that I had the most trouble believing. How could there be any mystery about what happens in an elementary school given the number of adults and other kids milling around? Nobody ever explains how two elementary school kids could be together unobserved.

Fans of The Son Also Rises and The Nurture Assumption will be excited to hear one character suggest that there could be a genetic basis for violent behavior and therefore, presumably, the rest of a child’s behavior. Most movies and TV shows stress the critical role of parenting, right?

The portrayal of the Monterey, California economy seems off. Some of the parents supposedly both live in Monterey full time and have top jobs at big enterprises. Is that credible? Wouldn’t it be a two-hour drive from Monterey to Silicon Valley on a typical weekday morning?

Readers: What is it about this show that has such a hold on suburban moms?

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Terrafugia, an MIT spin-off roadable-aircraft company (“flying car” sounds better) is being acquired by the Chinese owners of Volvo. I’m quoted in the Boston Globe story on the subject.

[Readers: Yes, I’m aware that this posting will be primarily of interest to my mom and dad! No need to point that out.]

The journalist did not quote what I thought were the most interesting things that I said. I pointed out that Terrafugia was founded before Uber. The existence of Uber makes an airport-bound airplane more useful and therefore a $50,000 used Cessna or Piper or $150,000 used Cirrus is almost certainly more practical as transportation (though of course plenty of people will buy a flying car just as a fun toy). I also pointed out that the main value of Terrafugia might be the team that understands something about certifying airplanes under the LSA standard. Geely might not want to make flying cars, but perhaps they want to make electric trainer airplanes?

Related:

• The MIT Flying Car Flies (2009)
• Second system syndrome without shipping the first system (2013)
• AeroMobil, the Slovenia flying car (i.e., Melania Trump’s first choice!)

 

 

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A good proportion of the American media and Facebook over the past few months seems to have been devoted to concerns about U.S. election integrity.

Lyndon Johnson was apparently elected to the Senate in 1948 through fraud (see “Were American politics better 50 years ago?“). Maybe it isn’t crazy to worry that today’s politicians are also getting elected either due to money-driven fraud or Russian meddling.

I’m wondering if readers who have thought about the latest blockchain technologies can help me out here…

What if every American citizen had an electronic ID card (see Estonia: Tough campaign stop for Bernie Sanders for a reference to one system)? Then could we trivially develop a blockchain-based voting system where anyone interested could verify the vote tallies? But it wouldn’t be anonymous, right? Or maybe it could be pseudonymous? People would somehow be able to verify that the issued personal ID codes were valid but not tie them to individual identities? But now it isn’t in fact verifiable because how do we know that a Russian isn’t generating IDs and then voting for Trump (one thing that I learned: Russians love Trump!)?

If there is no way to use blockchain and keep voting anonymous, maybe we give up anonymous voting? (see “Get rid of the secret ballot?“) Through the miracle of Facebook, political sentiment isn’t truly anonymous anymore.

Maybe we could use blockchain and Estonian-style electronic IDs to address concerns about voting by dead people, non-citizens, etc. Checking people into a polling station could be done using blockchain and then anyone interested could verify to see who had voted. After that, if the concern is Russian manipulation of voting machines… what about having three voting machines at every polling station? One machine could be Windows-based, another Android-based, and the third one iOS-based. Have each voter vote three times. The machines upload data to three separate server farms, again running a diversity of operating systems. Can Russian hackers compromise, without detection, three entirely separate systems?

Readers: Is there anything we can do to stop these endless rounds of hand-wringing?

 

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Here’s my dumb question for today…

We are smart enough to build self-driving cars, right? That’s a camera and computer vision software that needs to see everything happening on the road, including pedestrians.

It doesn’t take specialized training for a human to work as a crossing guard, right? The human sees a pedestrian approaching an intersection, walks out into the crosswalk holding a STOP sign, and stops the traffic.

Why would we wire up the light poles surrounding intersections with switches to activate WALK signs? Why not mount a camera up on the pole to watch for approaching pedestrians? Then, if no cars are coming, turn the light red for cars and activate the WALK sign before the pedestrian has to break stride.

How hard can this be? Maybe this could ease traffic congestion slightly by making it more pleasant to walk. At a minimum, we could save a lot of money installing and maintaining the under-pavement sensors for cars. The same camera can simply watch for a car approaching or stopping at an intersection. That should also save fuel (and the planet!) by changing the light before the car has to hit its brakes.

Camera plus microprocessor plus software should be cheaper than sensors, wires, and maintenance, no?

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Based on my Facebook friends, whom I believe to be a reasonably representative sample of American Democrats, I’d say that their explanations for the Deplorable Result of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election haven’t moved much. Here’s a recent musing from a wealthy Volvo driver:

I used to think more free speech was the answer to Mein Kampf but I’m not so sure. People choose to buy into the Fox TV narrative and are avoiding more information.

A response from his friend:

I believe that when Trump is gone we will need a New Reconstruction, or a de-nazification. Whatever you want to call it. The poison needs to be drawn out.

Some of my other distraught Hillary-loving friends can’t find enough anti-Trump articles in today’s news media so they are re-posting year-old items, such as this USA Today article about how Trump’s real estate entities didn’t pay some contractors (the article itself is an illustration of the recycling phenomenon: the vast majority of the disputes cited by USA Today in 2016 stem from the Taj Majal casino project that went bankrupt in in the general real estate collapse of 1991, 25 years earlier).

According to Atlantic, Hillary Clinton blames her loss on Russia and misogyny. (The $2 billion tax-free family slush fund (“Clinton Foundation”) did not come up.)

As a libertarian, I don’t have a dog in the Democrat v. Republican fight, but it is interesting to me to see that Democrats are still working the Trump as Hitler, Russia is Responsible, and Americans hate Women angles. I guess one possibility is that these angles are correct. Trump actually is Hitler, but somehow much less effective in getting laws changed. Vladimir Putin persuaded a majority of white women (but not black women or Latinas) to hate their sister Hillary and vote for the Trumpenfuhrer. (Or maybe Russians rigged the voting machines so that white women’s votes were not correctly recorded?) The Americans who handed over crazy amounts of cash to see Wonder Woman don’t want to see a powerful real-world woman.

If Democrats want to win the next two elections, and these angles are not resonating with voters (other than their fellow passionate Democrats, of course!), won’t they need to start coming up with some new talking points soon?

Related:

• “Democrats in Split-Screen: The Base Wants It All. The Party Wants to Win.” (nytimes)

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Happy Bastille Day!

One of the richest whitest towns in the United States, Concord, Massachusetts, is next to our local airport (Hanscom Field). Driving into Concord one passes a tall white church with a “Black Lives Matter” flag out front. (I have never seen a non-white person in the vicinity of this church.)

When the congregation put up the flag, I’m wondering if they had a plan for when the flag can be taken down.

Surely nobody is going to step forward and say “We don’t care about black lives anymore, so let’s have a ‘No human being is illegal’ or rainbow flag instead,” right?

If someone says “African-Americans are doing better than white Americans, so we can take the flag down,” that can always be refuted with at least one statistic on which white Americans are doing better (I don’t think this is true for Asian-Americans!). In any case, the typical member of the congregation would have virtually no contact with black Americans and therefore wouldn’t have any direct personal experience to offer.

Will we therefore find a descendant of that flag 100 years from now?

[Separately, last weekend I flew a helicopter tour for a couple of African-American local college students who’d bought a Groupon from East Coast Aero Club. As we flew over downtown Concord I pointed out the flag in as neutral tone as I could muster. The passengers broke into fits of laughter.]

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I wrote a longish post about the idea of the government privatizing air traffic control (at least some members of Congress are still pushing this). But the Institute for Liberty has done a better job:

what we do not support are the creation of entities that are some bizarre hybrid of governmental and private, since these generally contain the worst practices of both worlds (few, if any, of the incentives to innovate or compete, no oversight in how the public actually benefits or how the entity is governed, etc). One need only look at examples like Amtrak, the US Postal Service, or FannieMae and FreddieMac to see just how disastrous these hybrids can be over the long term.

(most easily viewed on SCRIBD)

[Separately, I think it is unfortunate that the analogy comes from an “Institute” that promises to deliver to Americans precisely the opposite of what they repeatedly vote for (i.e., a planned economy and Great Father in Washington taking care of most of their needs). But, nonetheless I think that their analogy might be persuasive to people on all parts of the political spectrum (well, at least those who have ridden an Amtrak).]

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