A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
I was recently scheduled to be deposed as an expert witness in a software patent case. The Stuffy Big Firm (founded in the 19th century; more than 1000 lawyers today; breathtaking office space) partner representing the defendant said that the deposition would be videotaped. I said “Oh, so I’ll need to wear a suit.” He said “Don’t bother. Nobody will ever look at it.”
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Full post, including comments“The Voyeur’s Motel” is a New Yorker story mostly about sex. But the subject of this blog posting is a section buried in the middle:
[The voyeur, who ran a motel in Colorado,] also got bored with cataloguing his guests’ dishonesty. They sometimes tried to cheat him out of the room rent, and hardly a week passed without his witnessing instances of chicanery. One working-class couple asked him for a few days’ grace period to pay their bill. Foos spied on them the next day and heard the husband tell the wife, “The dumb guy in the office thinks I have a check coming in from Chicago, and we will fool him the same way we did the motel in Omaha.” Foos locked the people out of their room and kept their possessions until they paid him.
Diary excerpt: “Conclusion: Thousands of unhappy, discontented people are moving to Colorado in order to fulfill that deep yearning in their soul, hoping to improve their way of life, and arrive here without any money and discover only despair. . . . Society has taught us to lie, steal, and cheat, and deception is the paramount prerequisite in man’s makeup. . . . As my observation of people approaches the fifth year, I am beginning to become pessimistic as to the direction our society is heading, and feel myself becoming more depressed as I determine the futility of it all.”
These experiences prodded Foos to concoct an “honesty test.” He would leave a suitcase, secured with a cheap padlock, in the closet of a motel room. When a guest checked in, he would say to Donna, in the guest’s hearing, that someone had just called to report leaving behind a suitcase with a thousand dollars inside. Foos then watched from the attic as the new guest found the suitcase and deliberated over whether to break the lock and look inside or return the suitcase to the motel office.
Out of fifteen guests who were subjected to the honesty test, including a minister, a lawyer, and an Army lieutenant colonel, only two returned the suitcase to the office with the padlock intact. The others all opened the suitcase and then tried to dispose of it in different ways. The minister pushed the suitcase out the bathroom window into the bushes.
A lot of U.S. government programs are set up with the idea that Americans are fundamentally honest. Offering enhanced payments for disability is not going to change the number of people who seek to collect SSDI (see “Book Review: The Redistribution Recession“). Certainly we wouldn’t ever expect 97 percent of retired government workers to claim disability benefits. Hardly anyone would have sex with a drunken married dentist in order to harvest the $millions in tax-free child support that a Massachusetts or Wisconsin court would hand out. Nobody would work the FMLA to get full-time benefits out of a part-time job. People aren’t going to work in cash jobs in order to remain eligible for free public housing.
Readers: What do you think? Do we trust this motel owner’s data? If the data are right, is much of the current U.S. system set up improperly?
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Full post, including commentsThe New York Times didn’t wait to hear the evidence before lauding as meritorious Ellen Pao‘s employment discrimination claim against the one-percenters at Kleiner Perkins. Now they’ve got their own plaintiff, Marjorie Walker (“Here’s why I’m suing the New York Times for discrimination” (Guardian)), alleging that they discriminate against “older, minority and female employees” in favor of “young, high-end and primarily white” workers.
One common thread is that the Times doesn’t have any difficulty in making up its mind about these lawsuits. Just as they were quickly sure that Ellen Pao was right, they’re confident that Marjorie Walker is dead wrong:
A spokeswoman for The Times called the suit “entirely without merit” and said “we intend to fight it vigorously in court.’’ — “Suit Accuses New York Times Executives of Bias”
What do readers think? Ellen Pao’s argument was that the Kleiner Perkins partners wanted to make themselves poorer by bringing in a less qualified person as a partner (my initial posting on the lawsuit where I wondered what their motivation could be). Marjorie Walker and her co-plaintiff Ernestine Grant argue that mid-level managers at the Times are favoring workers under 40 rather than workers over 60.
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An evergreen subject for our media seems to be “female” athletes earning less than athletes who identify as “male”. “Roger Federer, $731,000; Serena Williams, $495,000: The Pay Gap in Tennis” is a recent example from the New York Times.
I’m wondering if games would be more interesting if there were no restrictions on gender identification. Certainly right now the singles game is typically pretty predictable and often the winner is simply the taller player. Could an amazing player 5’8″ tall reasonably hope to beat Novak Djokovic at 6’2″?
Why not deal squarely with the issue that huge strong players, regardless of gender ID, can overpower physically smaller players? We can group sub-tournaments by weight and/or serve speed rather than by gender ID. If we are concerned about pay equity then just have the prize money be the same in each group.
[Separately, what is there to stop a 6’4″-tall “male” player right now from putting on a skirt, saying “I identify as a woman”, and entering a woman’s tournament? Gael Monfils, for example, probably wouldn’t have too much trouble overpowering even a top player currently identifying as “Female”.]
Full post, including comments“MIT built its own Ellen Pao before the Ivy League did: Gretchen Kalonji” covers a UC chancellor who arranged a sinecure for her lover and ran up $600,000 in renovation bills before it all ended in suicide and litigation.
Today’s nytimes has “University of California, Davis, Chancellor Is Removed From Post” about Linda Katehi and “questions about the campus’s employment and compensation of some of the chancellor’s immediate family members.”
Do they really need to have someone in this position if it is so prone to nepotism?
Full post, including commentsPeople seem to be excited about government regulations around self-driving cars. I’m wondering why this couldn’t be reduced to “Your self-driving car needs a $20 million liability insurance policy from an A-rated company.” The insurers aren’t going to underwrite high risks, presumably.
On a boat tour of Ft. Lauderdale’s rich waterfront houses, the captain/guide told us of his experience working on big private yachts. I asked him “If I am a rich douchebag can I buy a crazy long yacht tomorrow and, knowing nothing about boats, start driving it around?” He explained that Coast Guard regulations are essentially irrelevant because long before a regulation would require training or certification the boat’s insurer would insist on a licensed captain and perhaps additional crew members.
This is also true in aviation. A woman who got her pilot certificate yesterday can get into a $5 million Pilatus PC-12 and push the start button from an FAA point of view. But no insurance company would allow that.
Why not assume that underwriters are prudent and can evaluate the risks of self-driving vehicles at least as well as government workers and politicians?
[Maybe tweak this with a requirement also for comprehensive data and video logging in any self-driving car so that it is easier to determine if the self-driving vehicle caused an accident. But that would still be only a couple of paragraphs of regulation.]
Full post, including commentsI watched a high-school senior, presumably an expert rider, teaching a 6-year-old to ride a horse. I asked her if she wanted some feedback on her teaching and she said yes, so I’m writing this for her and sharing it in case it is useful to anyone else.
Horse riding for beginners is a bit like flying in that people tend to develop tunnel vision and don’t have a lot of spare mental capacity to listen and process. The instructor thus must limit comments and corrections to only the bare essentials. The inputs to a helicopter are power (collective pitch) and attitude (pitch and bank). It is seldom helpful to say anything except suggestions regarding how to adjust these inputs. I’m not sure what the inputs to a horse in English riding, but it is probably worth figuring out what the most important ones are and limiting one’s corrections/suggestions to those inputs. “Sit up straighter” and “shorter reins,” for example, could be helpful.
While the beginner 6-year-old was on the horse, presumably just barely holding everything together, the teacher started a discussion about what had gone wrong in a previous maneuver (letting the horse turn himself right instead of forcing him to turn left). This probably could have been summarized as “Don’t let the animal win; you’re the boss!” but the real issue was dwelling on the unsuccessful past. Perhaps there is a place for a post-ride debrief but it doesn’t work to try to debrief while still at the controls in a moving aircraft so I don’t think it would work while sitting on a live animal. A deeper issue is positive reinforcement in training, which is equally important for humans and animals. From my “Teaching Flying” article:
I stood in a lift line at the Sante Fe ski resort once. A father and daughter were in front of us. The father said to the child “The reason why you failed…” and was interrupted by a veteran instructor next to me. He said “Don’t tell her why she failed; tell her why she succeeded.”
Perhaps more experience riders can comment with what they consider to be the most important tips for a novice riding instructor.
Full post, including comments“U.S. Economy Grew 0.5% in First Quarter, Slowest Pace in 2 Years” (nytimes) has a “glass is half full” ring to it. Our economy is growing, but less rapidly than in the past. The journalist and editors, as is typical for the American news industry, fail to to put this into context with the population growth rate of about 0.7 percent (Google it!). In other words, Americans on average were getting poorer in 2016, but it is impossible to learn that from reading the journalists’ interpretation of the data.
Readers: How can we explain this?
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Full post, including commentsSome advice: Run down to the Renwick Gallery, next to the White House, to see their grand re-opening show: Wonder.
Must-see work that is being taken out after May 8: a room decorated beautifully with 5000 dead bugs by Jennifer Angus, a Chesapeake Bay in glass marbles by Maya Lin, and a cast-then-recreated-in-wood tree by John Grade. Not closing immediately, but still awesome, are a paper sculpture by Tara Donovan, a series of birds’ nests by Patrick Doherty (kids love this one), and a gossamer rainbow by Gabriel Dawe. A Janet Echelman overhead fiber sculpture is hypnotic and will remain indefinitely as part of the building.
It is kind of inspiring to see how great contemporary American art can be.
I was there with a smartphone (unfortunately not the briefly beloved Samsung S7) and took some snapshots.
Full post, including commentsRobot cars will be safe but we’ll lose a lot of stories.
After a heroic-yet-unsuccessful struggle with a Samsung Galaxy S7 we ordered an UberXL from a friend’s iPhone. The driver showed up to our rented house in Ft. Lauderdale in a beautiful Infiniti SUV. He was a compact guy who looked to be in his mid-50s (but was probably more like 60) who had moved from Los Angeles to be closer to his wife’s relatives. “It was a huge pay raise because I got transferred to another office of my company [life insurance] at the same salary and don’t have to pay 10 percent income tax plus the cost of living is so much lower here.”
Why would he drive for Uber if he has a real job? “I get up early in the morning and found that I was watching way too much television. So instead I drive from 3:30 am to 10 am. You’d be amazed at the kind of people you meet during those hours.”
What were his best stories? “One college girl I picked up immediately passed out in the back seat. She hadn’t given me an address and I didn’t want to leave her on the street or call the police on her. So I spent about 10 minutes trying to wake her up and finally got an address. When we got there she was passed out again so I carried her and her purse into her rental, dropped her on the couch, and left.” His other late-night story started with an apparent no-show. “I waited and waited outside an apartment complex and the woman said that she’d be right down. Then a man about 38 years old gets into the car. He was confused and ashamed, but explained that he’d met the woman earlier that evening, gone to bed with her, and he’d been asleep only for about two minutes when she was tapping him awake and saying ‘There’s an Uber waiting for you, on me.’ He said ‘Now I know how women feel.'”
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