Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Americans like to gather statistics… as long as the numbers have dollar signs in front of them or are at least related to dollar figures (e.g., school test scores, which tend to predict employer demand for graduates).

Europeans, on the other hand, seem to be a lot more interested in how people feel. The Spanish, for example, have assembled a huge data set by surveying school children (roughly 10-18 years of age) and asking them, e.g., how satisfied they are with their lives. They also ask for a lot of demographic data and therefore it is possible to get some insight into what makes children happy.

On a slide featuring these Spanish data at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017, there was the same pattern that Malin Bergstrom and colleagues found in Swedish data on 172,000 children (see the Children, Mothers, and Fathers chapter for references): children who live with mom and dad in an intact family are happier than children who live in a 50/50 arrangement with a separated mom and dad who are in turn substantially happier than children who live primarily with one parent (i.e., parental separation makes children less happy, but children in 50/50 shared parenting aren’t all that different from their counterparts in nuclear families).

Much more interesting to me, however, was that the happiest children in Spain were not those who lived with their mother and father in a nuclear family. There was a yet happier group: those who lived with their two fathers. (This phenomenon cannot be explained by a preference for same-sex parenting; children who lived with their two mothers were extremely unhappy, one of the most dramatic differences in any two populations presented at the conference.)

Readers: Discuss! (I posted this on Facebook and there wasn’t a single comment. Either the above information is uninteresting or people are afraid to say anything about it! Of course I couldn’t resist noting that “for couples who really want the best for their kids it may be a good idea to look at transgender options”. Perhaps that was offensive? I don’t think it is that I have been defriended by all of the right-thinking folks on Facebook. An adjacent incredibly dull post about our 1.75-year-old’s first use of chopsticks got more than 30 “likes”)

[Separately, Spain is interesting for its regional variation in family law. Unlike France and Germany, but like the U.S., the law is different from region to region and outcomes are different from region to region even when the law is the same. For example, in some regions of Spain it is obvious that, post-separation, a child’s best interest is to be in a roughly 50/50 shared parenting situation and have ample access to both parents. Since 2010, this may be written into the law as a presumption. Across a state line, however, the statutory and/or judicial presumption will be that obviously a child’s best interest is to have a stable home base and be primarily with one parent, visiting the other parent occasionally. The regional prevalence of shared parenting tracks the legal environment and ranges from 8 percent to 40 percent (with an average of about 25 percent). Like Americans, Spaniards are comfortable with the idea that “justice” and “best interests of the child” may be completely different for two children living on opposite sides of a state or provincial border.]

Consistent with the first paragraph, I’m not aware of any way to compare Americans to their Spanish counterparts. The U.S. has more children not living with both parents than any other nation (both percentage and absolute), but nobody in the U.S. seems to care what is happening with these kids. Their living schedule and access to parents are governed by government court orders, but no state or federal agency bothers to track the contents of these orders. Therefore it would be impossible to say what percentage of children are living in shared parenting versus primary/secondary custody situations. We make K-12 students sit for standardized tests regularly, but I don’t think there are any questions about “How do you feel about your life?”

Full post, including comments

“There is nowhere in this country where someone working a full-time minimum wage job could afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment” (Washington Post).

Why not have the government buy or rent apartments for low-income Americans? It seems that we have pretty much run out of other peoples’s money:

The current level of public subsidies is already not enough to meet the needs of low-income families, with only one in four eligible households able to receive assistance, the report said.

If the U.S. economy isn’t vibrant enough to generate spacious housing for everyone at the wages that residents actually command, and we have run out of subsidy cash, how about going back to living in smaller houses and apartments? Back in 1973 we managed to live in half as many square feet per person (AEI). Maybe we don’t want to go back to 1973 living standards, though. Could we use superior engineering to make 1973-sized housing more comfortable?

Check out the video at Ori Systems (MIT Media Lab spinoff) for an example of one approach. For $10,000 you get a piece of furniture that expands to about twice the size of a bed (about 90 square feet?). How much could we cut our consumption of square footage, while remaining equally comfortable, if we had this? Perhaps by 50 square feet (the size of the bed that can be hidden away)? If construction costs $300 per square foot, that’s $15,000 of built space saved ($5,000 net savings, enough to keep a welfare family going for a month), but maybe long-term savings from HVAC, lighting, maintenance, etc. could be higher?

Is this substantially different from 19th or 20th century furniture that folded up against a wall (Murphy bed) or placed a child’s bed above a desk or whatever? Motorized is fun, but what does it enable that couldn’t have been done with wheels and human power?

Readers: What do you think? Given our growing population, gridlocked transportation system, inability to build public transit, and high costs of construction are we destined to live in higher-density housing? If so, is there a tech-based way to make that a lot more comfortable?

Related:

• 77 Bluxome; 237-square-foot apartments for rent in a new building in San Francisco for about $2,300 per month; some apartments have built-in Murphy beds
• “Inside Mars Simulator, IKEA Designers Learn How To Live In Close Quarters” (NPR): “Because there are a lot of people that are moving to big cities, and urbanization is bigger every year. And that mean also people – they live in a smaller space. And that is kind of the things and the learnings we are trying to solve in a better way in our development and in our designs when it comes to products.”

 

Full post, including comments

In the Divorce Corp. movie, a litigator driving by a wedding said “that’s inventory.” What if learning about family court litigation makes people shy about getting married? How can divorce litigators maintain their prosperity? In most jurisdictions around the world, lawyers can still get paid to handle custody and child support litigation between never-married parties. Scotland, however, has an innovative solution that I learned about at the International Conference on Shared Parenting 2017.

Unlike France and Germany, the United Kingdom has a family law that varies from region to region. A person who is able to file a lawsuit in Scotland, for example, might not have a claim in neighboring England.

In 2006, Scotland changed its laws so that a person who says that he or she lived with someone else can, within a year “after the day on which the cohabitants cease to cohabit.”, go down to the family court and sue for property division and alimony, just as if the two parties had been married. “Court ruling hits couples who cohabit” (2012 article on litigation following a 6-year relationship with no kids) quotes a lawyer: “People may also not know that there is no minimum period to qualify as cohabiting.”

What can lawyers be paid to argue, and bring witnesses to testify, about? Assuming that no children are involved, at a minimum, the following:

• whether the two litigants ever actually did cohabit
• the date on which they began to cohabit
• the date on which they ceased to cohabit
• what property each owns
• what property is jointly owned
• what income each has been earning
• what income each could have earned in the past
• what income each could earn in the future
• whether or not the plaintiff was disadvantaged by cohabiting with the defendant
• whether the defendant was advantaged financially by cohabiting with the plaintiff
• who supported whom during the cohabitation (because the judge might want to order that relationship to continue post-separation)

[If children are involved, and the defendant earns more than 3000 pounds per week pre-tax, there can be additional litigation on the profitability of the children. The UK government runs a calculator up to 3000 pounds a week of pre-tax income, which results in a tax-free payment of about 300 pounds per week to the parent who wins custody, i.e., roughly 20 percent of the defendant’s after-tax income. Median pre-tax weekly pay for a full-time worker in Scotland is 535 pounds. Therefore the plaintiff who has sex with two high-income partners and obtains custody of the resulting children is guaranteed to have more spending power than the Scot who marries and stays married to a median full-time worker.]

A quick Google search for how the law is being used in practice yielded a story about a defendant who was the part-owner of a plumbing business. He was characterized as a “tycoon” and reference was made to him flying “private aircraft.” It turned out that the “private aircraft” two attorneys were being paid to argue about was a two-seat “SkyRanger” homebuilt (airframe kit: roughly $20,000; I found an “always hangared” already-built example with 870 hours on it for $19,999 on barnstormers.com).

In litigation-oriented societies, I wonder if this Scottish idea will catch on. If the opportunity to litigate is a positive thing for people who were once married, why not for people who once lived together, however briefly?

Related:

• Property and Cohabitation: Understanding the Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006

Full post, including comments

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.”

Full post, including comments

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)

Full post, including comments

“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?

Full post, including comments

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

Full post, including comments

“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.”?]

Full post, including comments

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

Full post, including comments

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.

Full post, including comments