Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

… today is the day that Chipotle announces the extent to which its bacterial problems have affected earnings. I just want to say “thank you” to the chain for teaching me to how spell “food poisoning” in Chinese:

(photo: from Chinatown location in Washington, D.C.)

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On a recent trip to Cincinnati our Uber driver was an immigrant to the U.S. from the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. After roughly 10 years in the U.S., he was plainly savvy about the relative value that Americans put on bureaucracy versus hands-on work. He was studying for a PhD in Academic Administration.

I asked him what he and his Mauritanian friends and family thought about Mohammed Slahi, the author of Guantanamo Diary (my review). “There is a lot of disagreement [among Mauritanians, including in Mauritania] about whether he is guilty,” said our driver. “My personal belief is that he is guilty. He was too close to everything that was going on.”

Despite believing Slahi to be guilty, the driver did not believe that he should be in Guantanamo or that the U.S. should operate the Guantanamo Bay detection camp. Our driver believed Gitmo to be a place where Muslims were tortured, Korans were desecrated, etc. on a daily basis and that, at least in the minds of most Muslims worldwide, the U.S. operation of Gitmo justified jihad against the U.S. (He was silent on the subject of whether or not he personally believed that jihad against the U.S. was required and/or justified.)

Slahi’s actual book describes primarily incompetence and wasting of taxpayer funds rather than torture. If we are going to continue to run Gitmo (Obama is closing it any day now?), I’m wondering if we should open it up to pretty much anyone who wants to visit. If in fact we are not torturing people all day every day there, why let the rumors spread that we are? If anyone can visit at more or less any time and see anything for which there is no real reason for secrecy, wouldn’t that dispell negative rumors about Gitmo?

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“Corruption in Afghanistan All but Cripples Women’s Team Sports” (nytimes) chronicles the failure of American do-gooders plus American tax dollars to make a difference (but perhaps they “raised awareness”?) in Afghanistan. Blame is pinned squarely on old male Afghanis who are corrupt and/or enjoy having sex with young women, with a slight hint of blame at the end attached to female Afghanis: “The national team has lost more members to marriage than anything else, she said, because Afghan women are considered too old to wed after their early 20s, and their husbands typically refuse to allow them to play.”

It makes us feel good to point at foreigners and say “Look how bad they are” or “Look how bad they are at accomplishing X” but I wonder if we’ve been running a similar program here at home: STEM promotion. A lot of money and do-gooder time is invested to get young Americans interested in STEM when they would rather be studying or working in other areas. Has there been any tracking of the effects of these programs? The desperation of tech employers to bring in H1-B visa holders would suggest that the needle has not been moved.

[Disclosure: I am tutoring some local high school students in AP Statistics, Calculus, and Physics. However, they signed up for these classes without any input from me.]

Some interesting reader comments on the nytimes site:

• Syed Abbas, Dearborn, MI: The question everyone on this discussion Board is asking – why did we go there and why are we still there? Simple answer – someone here is making a bundle of money in all this mess, laughing all the way to the bank at our expense. And that will keep us there no matter how much we howl.
• Southern Boy, Spring Hill, TN: Most of the comments reflect a western bias against traditional Afghan life and culture. The west calls for cultural diversity and inclusion, an appreciation of other cultures, as way to understand and appreciate the variety that characterizes the globe. However, the goal of appreciation stops when the cultures fall short of meeting the West’s expectations of equality, especially when the cultures fails to promote gender equality. In that sense all the talk about diversity and inclusion is a crock. Thank you.
• Emile, New York: … There’s no way to reconcile our declared respect for other deeply entrenched cultures with our own deeply held Enlightenment values that see women as equal to men. If we decide part of our values is to proselytize the rights of women, and push for them in other cultures, the best idea is the pragmatic one–to slowly nudge them toward more respect for women by empowering women through the most tried and true route of all: literacy.
• tbrucia, Houston, TX: Interesting that the word ‘sports’ is immediately followed by the words ‘money’ and ‘dollars’. You don’t need very much money to buy a soccer ball or a cricket bat or even a bicycle. Throwing money around and forming teams and organizations just attracts buzzards and flies. Sports themselves just require will, determination, a few friends together, and really basic equipment. The West’s obsession with commercialization misses the point of sports: competition and fun.
• Brown, Detroit: Under the Soviet regime, women wore mini skirts to coed classes at university. Our progressive policies put an end to that! [see “Why can’t governments apologize?” (2004) for my suggestion “Could we offer a sincere apology today to the Russians and offer Afghanistan back to them?”]

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If you were comforting yourself on April 15 that your forced commitment to corporate welfare was limited to U.S.-based companies, “Airbus Gains New Financing Ally in U.S.” (WSJ) will rain on your parade. By setting up a final assembly plant in Alabama, Airbus planes will now be eligible for taxpayer-subsidized financing.

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Now that Samsung Pay is here I could theoretically leave the house with nothing more than a Galaxy S7 phone (okay, and maybe a 50 amp-hour 12V car battery for reserve power). Anywhere that a credit card can be swiped I can pay using one of the cards stored in my phone (the merchant doesn’t need the special Apple Pay hardware).

I could unlock and drive my Tesla using the phone as well (just need a spare $100,000 to replace the Honda Odyssey with a Tesla…).

But what about the drivers license that we are all required to carry? In Iowa apparently a phone app can substitute, but presumably not in most states nor with the TSA at airports.

Given the limitations of government with respect to IT (e.g., spending $1.4 million on the simplest iPad app conceivable), and with an eye toward having any substitute system be at least as secure and authentic as the current one, what would be the right way to implement this?

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I know a bunch of Americans who aren’t enjoying what they consider to be a comfortable material lifestyle in retirement.

The problem seems to have started with excessive consumption during their own or their spouse’s working years. (This inability to control spending is typically characterized in our media as an “inability to save for retirement,” as though people are being coerced into spending 100 percent of their paychecks.) Essentially they spent beyond their means unless they had some assurance of drawing a paycheck until death. Just as American politicians cannot be trusted to avoid bankrupting the public with pension promises, Americans themselves apparently cannot be trusted to refrain from spending whatever isn’t nailed down.

In some cases this was compounded by American-style divorce. Being sued cost the future retiree roughly 50 percent of total assets/savings in legal fees and then the divorce judgment itself would typically award the plaintiff roughly 50 percent of the remainder. If alimony was at stake, each party had an incentive to ramp up spending prior to the trial so as to demonstrate more “need” (plaintiff) or less “ability to pay” (defendant). See “Divorce judge awards woman who gave up career 90% of family assets” (Guardian) for an English case that could just as easily happened on this side of the Atlantic (but not on the other side of the English channel under Civil family law). “Extravagant spending,” presumably positioning for favorable alimony treatment, reduced “multi-million-pound family assets to just £560,000” (paying for lawyers on both sides through a trial and an appeal also could have taken care of a million pounds in assets, but, like in most media treatments of divorce, litigation is portrayed in the article as essentially cost-free and also as having been started by mutual agreement (“they split” is how the beginning of a lawsuit by one person against another is characterized)).

Whatever the reason, these folks are not going to be hired by anyone unless they can somehow contrive to appear less than 50 during a job interview. They don’t have significant assets. They’re trying to live on Social Security. The latter seems to be challenging principally due to the high cost of real estate in the U.S. As the country gets ever more packed (the population has doubled during my lifetime), the cost of shelter seems to grow accordingly.

Yet for many Americans the cost of shelter is $0 or near-zero. These are folks who have been blessed by a government ministry and provided with “public housing.” In the Boston area, the value of a government-provided house can exceed $60,000 per year (after-tax or tax-free dollars). One can’t qualify for a free house or apartment, however, if one has a W-2 job. I’m wondering if it would make sense strategically for older Americans to leave the workforce (at least the non-cash workforce) starting around age 62. They’ll perhaps have a slightly smaller Social Security entitlement due to paying in less, but if they can use the years between 62 and 67, for example, to qualify for free housing then they’ll be entitled to stay in that free housing once they do start drawing Social Security.

What do folks think? Now that Obamacare is an entitlement and food stamps are readily available, an American with a modest income would seemingly have little to lose and much to gain by spending a few of the pre-golden years without a W-2 job. If the waiting list for a free house is too long, a tweak to this strategy would be to take over temporary responsibility for a grandchild (or at least write that down on a form applying for housing). A no-income adult who has gotten hold of a child generally has priority over a no-income adult without a child. Another useful tweak might be to go onto SSDI because disability is a requirement to get into some public housing, at least in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Someone experienced in this area said “Disabled single parent is great, but disabled pregnant single parent is better.”

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Barack Obama has written an op-ed urging Britons to vote to stay in the European Union. Let’s assume that he is correct about how great EU membership is for a nation. Shouldn’t the U.S. then also seek to join the EU? The UK is physically closer to the rest of Europe than is the U.S., but in our modern age of telecommunications and low-cost air travel, why is distance an obstacle to membership?

Some advantages of joining the EU:

• We could stop fighting about interest rates, printing money, etc.
• We wouldn’t have to worry so much about who is on the Supreme Court since the ultimate decision-makers on a lot of issues would be in Holland or Belgium.
• No immigration lines on either side of the Atlantic.
• No cheese import quotas and hence the prices of high-quality cheese would fall by at least 50 percent. Wine prices should also collapse down to European levels.

What do readers think? Should Britons take advance from Barack Obama? If so, why should we also take the same advice?

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I was talking to a supporter of Hugo Chavez (she has lived in Latin America, but not in Venezuela) and Bernie Sanders the other day. She expressed disappointment and surprise that her middle-aged sister had married a middle-aged artist with no track record of financial success. “He’s as poor as a church mouse,” she noted. She was generally approving of the man’s personality and character.

She buys into the idea that some citizens should work harder than others and, through a Chavez- or Sanders-conceived redistribution scheme, support those who don’t work as hard. But she doesn’t want her sister to work harder than her new brother-in-law.

Readers: Is there any inconsistency between her political and personal views?

[Separately, note that while the marriage might not last, the sister’s obligation to support the arts could very well continue. Under Massachusetts family law, for example, given a gender-blind judge, he will be the “dependent spouse” and his entitlement to alimony could begin after a day of marriage and, given a favorably disposed judge, extend until her death (the Legislature has suggested limits to judges based on what attorneys call “time served” but judges have felt free to ignore those limits). Under Florida law, if the artist sues her after seven years of marriage he is on track for “permanent alimony.” Under California law, he needs to wait for ten years to be presumptively entitled to a permanent meal ticket (see 0:45 of this video (credit: GermanL) for a reference to this rule).]

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Obamacare was pitched as a moral imperative. Humans are entitled to health insurance as a basic right. We are responsible to provide health insurance, not simply health or emergency care, to anyone residing within the borders of the U.S. Yet Obamacare was designed with the expectation that tens of millions of Americans (plus millions of undocumented immigrants) would remain without coverage (statistics).

Are we doing the same thing with the $15/hour minimum wage? People advocating to make it illegal for Americans to work for less than $15/hour say that it is a moral imperative. But then the moral imperative phases in through 2020 or 2022? We’re going to behave immorally for the next six years but then become moral actors in 2022? Businesses can exploit workers in 2018 by paying less than a fair wage but beginning in 2022 the exploitation must stop?

Example from BernieSanders.com: “Millions of Americans are working for totally inadequate wages. We must ensure that no full-time worker lives in poverty. The current federal minimum wage is starvation pay and must become a living wage. We must increase it to $15 an hour over the next several years.” (i.e., poverty and starvation amidst plenty are okay in 2016 and 2017 but they will become unacceptable at some future date)

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“We don’t have enough strip malls, strip clubs, and traffic in Boston” is how I explained to interlocutors in Florida my rationale for spending two weeks in Ft. Lauderdale, right around the corner from Pure Platinum. I happened to be riding a shuttle bus back from the Miami Open with a strip club owner while looking at a news article about the $15 minimum wage being proposed around the U.S. How would that affect his business? “Anything that makes it tougher for an 18-year-old to get a regular job is great for us,” he said (apparently minimum age for a stripper in South Florida is 18), “because dancing is seldom a first career choice.” Wouldn’t he have to give dancers a pay raise to compete? “They’re independent contractors,” he noted, “but even they weren’t the decent ones are all getting more than $15/hour right now.” [Note that, as with everything else regarding employment in the U.S., this is the subject of litigation: example1; example2]

Wouldn’t his dancers earn a larger income by using their bodies to produce a child? “The 21-year-olds are not planning 18 years ahead,” he replied. “The blowjob pregnancy [followed by child support] is a great retirement plan for a dancer, but they don’t usually start down that road until they’re closer to 30.”

[He did have some non-dancer employees currently working for less than $15/hour, but their compensation was not a big percentage of total costs and he thought that he’d be able to eliminate some jobs by keeping only the most productive of the lowest-wage workers (the Costco approach).]

Here’s the waterfront Ft. Lauderdale home that our tour guide identified as belonging to the owner of the Pure Platinum club:

Related:

• Florida family law, which does provide for potentially unlimited child support profits, but only if a high-income defendant can be identified (the cash yield from obtaining custody of the child of a moderate-income defendant is only about half as large as in Massachusetts or New York)

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