Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

If there is a “Black Lives Matter” movement then presumably there are Americans for whom black lives do not matter. The questions for today are “why not?” and “what should we do about it?”

First, I wonder if the U.S. is now simply too populated and government too centralized for us to be confident that Citizen A will care about Citizen B. As there are people suffering badly in other parts of the world and most of us don’t do much to help them it is clear that human sympathy cannot stretch to a population of 7+ billion. Thus why should we expect sympathy to stretch to 324 million (popclock)? (i.e., it is not simply that black lives don’t matter but that American lives per se may not matter to Americans, unless it is the life of a family member, friend, or immediate neighbor)

What about citizen involvement in local government, though? That doesn’t require concerning oneself with the full 324 million population of the U.S. Perhaps federal government involvement with law enforcement has demotivated citizens from becoming involved. Why invest a lot of emotional energy and caring in something over which you have no control? (See my review of the book Missoula for an example of how a local prosecution for a state crime was driven by bureaucrats from Washington, D.C.; it wouldn’t have made any sense for a Montana resident to weigh in on the question.)

From A Pattern Language:

. . . just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. . . . (J. B. S Haldane, “On Being the Right Size,” The World of Mathematics, Vol. II, J. R. Newman, ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956, pp. 962- 67).

It is not hard to see why the government of a region becomes less and less manageable with size. In a population of N persons, there are of the order of N 2 person-to-person links needed to keep channels of communication open. Naturally, when N goes beyond  a certain limit, the channels of communication needed for democracy and justice and information are simply too clogged, and too complex; bureaucracy overwhelms human processes.

And, of course, as N grows the number of levels in the hierarchy of government increases too. In small countries like Denmark there are so few levels, that any private citizen can have access to the Minister of Education. But this kind of direct access is quite impossible in larger countries like England or the United States.

We believe the limits are reached when the population of a region reaches some 2 to 10 million. Beyond this size, people become remote from the large-scale processes of government. Our estimate may seem extraordinary in the light of modern history: the nation-states have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of people. But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size.

They cannot claim to have struck the balance between the needs of towns and communities, and the needs of the world community as a whole. Indeed, their tendency has been to override local
needs and repress local culture, and at the same time aggrandize themselves to the point where they are out of reach, their power barely conceivable to the average citizen.

(emphasis added)

Are there any simple practical steps that we can take? As noted in “Should we have unarmed police?” (thoughts sparked by “Why aren’t there a lot more police shootings in the U.S.?”), I think it would be worth exploring the extent to which we could have a tier of law enforcement that didn’t automatically generate armed confrontations. I’m just back from Israel and there are plenty of security people there with guns but there are also people involved with security and law enforcement who don’t have guns.

If the folks behind A Pattern Language are right we should scale back federal and even state involvement with law enforcement. We accept a lot of variation from state to state in laws that have enormous effects on citizens’ lives (see Minnesota versus neighboring Wisconsin in family law, for example; or compare a state where marijuana is legal and taxed to one where possession and sale leads to a prison sentence; or look at penalties following a murder conviction). Now that some states are so heavily populated that the average voter has no voice, power, or access to those in power, why can’t we let the residents of a city substantially determine the way in which law enforcement is to be accomplished? (maybe there is a state-wide framework with some limits so that a local law can’t impose super-harsh penalties for crimes that most state residents consider minor)

At least some of the incidents that have led to recent protests began with traffic stops. How about we simply cut back on those? Use cameras and robots to mail car owners tickets for speeding, broken taillights, etc. The “due process” of being pulled over by a police officer, having a chance to explain oneself, and then to appear in court sounds good except that (a) nowadays someone might get killed, and (b) legal fees have skyrocketed in the 100 or so years since we established this convention.

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One big lesson from Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany is that the Germans went to war prematurely. They had a potentially devastating and insurmountable technological lead in ballistic missiles (e.g., the V-2 rocket) and the first practical jet fighter aircraft. If the Germans had spent another four years perfecting and stockpiling these weapons before attacking neighbors they could probably have won World War II. (The author notes that Germany actually did plan to wait until the mid-1940s before fighting a Total War but that a stronger-than-expected response to the invasion of Poland forced an accelerated schedule of world domination.)

The American and British bomber war against Germany is portrayed as ineffective until roughly mid-1944 and then highly effective for the last year of the war. American military leaders worked under a flawed doctrine of sending unescorted bombers over Germany and thus did not develop a long-range fighter aircraft to go with the B-17s until near the end of the war. Once the P-51 Mustang (originally designed for the British) entered the war, the bombers had a much higher survival rate. Due to intelligence failures and misguided analysis, the Americans spent years trying to damage the German war industry with little effect. Only towards the end of the war did they figure out that almost everything could be crippled by targeting the railroads and canals, so as to prevent the transportation of coal, and the synthetic fuel industry, so as to prevent the Germans from using tanks and aircraft. Civilian planners had told the generals to bomb electricity plants and grid, but the generals ignored them, thus ignoring another way that the synthetic fuel industry could have been shut down.

With the benefit of hindsight, in other words, either side could easily have won World War II. But perhaps one can say that about nearly any war.

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It has been a month since the Orlando nightclub attack, which I hope is enough time that we can think about something other than how tragic it was (though of course the tragedy remains just as bad, if not as immediate, and my sympathies are with those who were touched directly).

Until 1965 it would have been impossible for someone like Seddique Mir Mateen to have emigrated from Afghanistan to the United States. Thus it would have been impossible for his son, Omar Mateen, to have been born and educated here at taxpayer expense. With the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, considerations of cultural compatibility were eliminated.

Syed Farook, the former San Bernardino County Department of Public Health food inspector, is another person who was here in the U.S. as a result of this 1965 law. His parents emigrated from Pakistan. (Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his family provide another example, though the Tsarnaev brothers were not born in the U.S., only educated here in the Cambridge Public Schools.)

Plainly neither Mr. Farook nor Mr. Mateen developed any real fondness for the nation that adopted their parents. Both were likely guilty of what mainstream Americans would consider ThoughtCrime on a range of social subjects. This eventually led to a violent end for both men. Yet it seems possible that both could have fit in reasonably well back in their parents’ homelands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their beliefs would likely not have been out of step with neighbors’ beliefs in those countries. We didn’t do ourselves any favors by admitting their parents, but the full scale of the waste is apparent only when we reflect that we didn’t do Mr. Farook or Mr. Mateen any favors either.

I’m wondering if we are so biased in favor of our own culture that we can’t understand that there are people on the planet for whom prevailing U.S. culture would not be their first choice. If so, at least as long as we maintain our culture-blind immigration policy (plus a few generations beyond), we are doomed to be repeatedly shocked by events similar to those in Orlando and San Bernardino.

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Along with extended periods of paid time off it seems that American workers who are fortunate enough to also be parents are getting some additional benefits: lifetime paychecks not conditional on job performance. This New York Times article describes how male professors with kids gets extra time to publish before being evaluated for tenure and consequently are 19-percent more likely to get it.

[The Times complains that women with kids are less likely to get this lifetime cashflow stream, but neglects to consider that mothers may not work as hard to get it. If the female professor with children is married, for example, her husband may have a high income that relieves her of the fear of losing the university paycheck. Mightn’t she still strive hard for tenure due to the possibility of a divorce? Or if she is a single mother? Certainly she has fewer financial incentives to do so than a father. In Massachusetts, for example, a woman with a child has a 97-percent statistical chance of winning custody of that child and, with custody, a 23-year stream of profitable child support. Assuming that a female university professor had a high-income sex partner in producing one or more children, ownership of those children will provide her with financial security. Why would she work super hard to achieve a financial security that she had already achieved by producing a baby?]

Related:

• When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?
• Paid Maternity Leave: Employers or Taxpayers should Pay?

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Last month I attended a gathering of people who fly an airplane that was designed for short-haul small-airport airline service, but which, due to its slow approach speeds and single engine (less training involved and less experience required than for a twin-engine jet), has become popular with owner-pilots. Many of the folks at the convention had been successful enough to purchase at least a share of an airplane worth between $1.5 million and $5 million, depending on age. Furthermore, they had enough time available to maintain their pilot training, manage an aircraft, plan business and family flights, etc. What can we learn from these folks?

First, the group tends to confirm President Obama’s “You didn’t build that” philosophy. What kind of business generates a never-ending fountain of cash without requiring too many desk hours by owner-managers? A business that exists only because of government regulation! The government subsidizes certain kinds of purchases, such as health insurance, by allowing workers to make these purchases with pre-tax income. This gives rise to apparently enormously lucrative corporate benefits consulting opportunities. (If not for the baroque tax code presumably employers would pay all compensation in cash and let workers then go and buy whatever they wanted.) Workers compensation insurance and benefits administration is also an area where the government requires companies to perform various tasks and the companies don’t have the necessary internal expertise.

The traditional path of family and kids seemed to have worked out best for those whose wives were already close to 40 years old in 1990 when the child support guidelines mandated by the Family Support Act of 1988 began to take effect (prior to these guidelines, the potential revenue and profits from filing a divorce, custody, or child support lawsuit were impossible to determine with certainty; see “History of Divorce”). One of these older guys described Father’s Day as a time when he was “honored as a patriach.” He lives in Texas, where child support is capped at roughly $20,000 per year per child and alimony is not available, thus reducing incentives for lower-income spouses to sue.

For the male attendees who were younger, and who therefore had younger wives, some had intact marriages regarding which they expressed satisfaction, but roughly half of the ones I spoke to had been defendants in divorce, custody, and child support lawsuits. All of these lawsuits had been won by the respective plaintiffs and the result was deep dissatisfaction with at least that part of their lives, much more intense than the satisfaction from the marriages that had not resulted in a lawsuit. In the lawsuits described by convention attendees, plaintiffs had behaved in exact accordance with the financial incentives offered by their home states. In states with unlimited child support, high-income men had been sued after short marriages or brief relationships that they believed to have been romantic (though they turned out to be primarily financial). In states that favored 50/50 custody of children and/or that capped child support profits, women had filed lawsuits only after being married long enough to build up a strong alimony claim (see this video at 0:45 on this subject). A typical story came from a trim soft-spoken man with hair beginning to go gray who sat next to us at dinner. He worked for a vendor and earned an upper-middle-class salary. He had four children, the youngest of whom was just four years old, and took care of them week-on, week-off in a western state where shared custody is common and child support profits are generally much smaller than in, say, Massachusetts or New York. He said “I don’t understand how the institution of marriage can possibly work today because it is predicted on the idea that people won’t change.” How had his former wife changed? When they got married she was a non-practicing non-believing Catholic. She eventually developed three passions: (1) Evangelical Christianity, (2) drinking alcohol, and (3) having sex with a boyfriend from prior to the marriage. Now she confirms one divorce litigator’s theory that “Americans can’t resist the opportunity to have sex with new partner(s) while cashing checks from a former sex partner.”

The convention included some former divorce, custody, and child support plaintiffs. These were all women and all described the event that led to their children growing up in a single-parent household in passive terms. They had “gotten divorced” or “become divorced” or “gone through a divorce.” In every case it turned out that they had been the spouse to decide on a divorce and they had actually filed a lawsuit against a partner who had not wanted to get divorced, yet none described the event as something that had occurred due to their personal agency. All of the plaintiffs had scored a 100 percent victory in the courtroom, yet they remained unhappy with some aspects of their situation. With Father’s Day coming up, how did one woman describe the father of her child? “Useless.” It turned out that, consistent with the court orders she had obtained against him, the “useless” man had paid for the house that she lived in and had supplied profitable child support checks for her to spend on herself in addition to providing for at least some of the child’s expenses directly.

Consistent with academic studies (cites), the children who had yielded a comfortable material lifestyle for plaintiffs pursuing personal goals, had paid a high price. For every plaintiff who was better off from having sued her husband it seemed that there was a corresponding child who was worse off to at least the same extent. Conference attendees spoke of adult children who were not on speaking terms with one biological parent. The only children who were there enjoying the conference, learning from this high-performance crowd, and seemingly on track to take over a family business, were those from intact families. Attendees spoke of children as having been damaged and coarsened by being turned into cash sources for an adult: “My daughter learned at around age 8 that a woman’s body can be used to earn money and that a child can be used to earn money,” one attendee said. “She was robbed of about eight years of innocence. After what my ex-wife did I didn’t think that it was possible to be more jaded, but my daughter ended up with a transactional view of sex and sexuality that is shocking even to me.”

Personal flying is an aging/dying activity in our era of deregulated airlines, NetJets, risk-aversion, and expectation that big institutions will take care of everyone (example: Boston Globe coverage of passengers upset after an American Airlines crew executes a textbook recovery from an engine failure; the airline apparently failed to handle their emotional needs). A lot of the folks at the conference had learned to fly in the 1970s and early 1980s before the collapse of piston-powered general aviation. Consequently there were plenty of senior citizen pilots at the convention. Those who had managed to keep their weight under control and who exercised regularly seemed to be aging pretty well (but perhaps it is all genetic and the ones who weren’t aging well due to genetics didn’t feel well enough to exercise and consequently gained weight?).

Living in Europe seems to lead to a better-balanced life than living/striving in the U.S. The Europeans weren’t as wealthy as the Americans, at least at current exchange rates, but they seemed satisfied with their lives and were fit and cheerful. Due to their different system of law, none had spent a lot of time or money defending a divorce, custody, or child support lawsuit.

The conference was held in Quebec City during glorious summer weather. The Canadians were out partying every night in a city that truly sparkles. Either being a middle-class Canadian is much more pleasant than being a middle-class American or, like some European countries do, Canada just pours a larger share of wealth and effort into a few central cities, leaving the suburbs and small towns to decay. (Some evidence for the latter theory was supplied by a stop in Riviere-du-Loup, a town in which residents said that the only good jobs were government-related.)

What about “life as a pilot” lessons? I have to say that I disagree with one premise of the conference, which is that it is worth splitting hairs over safety-related issues in single-pilot operations. It is helpful to be trained for aerobatics so as to recover from an upset (we learned that a pilot has 6-10 seconds, may need full aileron deflection, and might need to pull 3G to avoid overspeeding, for example). It is helpful to be an expert on all of the systems in the rare event that something serious goes wrong. It is helpful to memorize emergency procedures. Yet if you’re going to fly an all-weather aircraft on business trips that are tough to reschedule, I think it is a lot easier to move the safety needle by bringing in additional crew members. A professional airline-style dispatcher who isn’t stuck in a meeting is going to do a better job planning the flight and identifying hazards before the plane leaves the ground. Even a moderately well-trained copilot in the cockpit will cut the workload by more than 50 percent. It is a lot easier to keep the airplane from going into a crazy attitude that requires heroic stick-and-rudder skills if one person doesn’t have to do anything other than watch the attitude indicator (“artificial horizon”). Unless it is an idiot-proof sunny day hop out to a big familiar airport, isn’t it safer to fly as a crew rather than try to be the world’s best pilot?

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“The ‘Kidbutz’ of Topanga Canyon” (nytimes) is a story about what happens to children of separated biological parents when unrelated adults try to combine themselves into an ad hoc extended family unit. The story contains a tidbit on how to get a child into a private school:

Ms. Evanguelidi and Ms. Welch recently registered as domestic partners on Eli’s kindergarten application to increase his chances at getting into Juno’s Waldorf-inspired school. “It’s not a lie!” Ms. Welch said. “We are domestic partners. We have been for the last four years.”

(The article makes clear that the two women do not have a sexual relationship.)

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A lot of Americans express unhappiness about their choices in the 2016 Presidential election.

Were things better in the good old days? I’m listening to Means of Ascent by Robert Caro. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer describes Johnson as having promised American voters not to involve this nation in a real war in Vietnam, e.g., saying “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves” prior to the 1964 election. Johnson also promised not to bomb North Vietnam. As soon as he was reelected, he sent in hundreds of thousands of “American boys” and also started the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign.

Today we complain about things that politicians might say to get votes. In 1948 Lyndon Johnson simply manipulated the vote count through fraud (1990 NY Times article summarizing this part of the book).

From the Means of Ascent:

“I have been unable to save much money in my life. I have been in politics, and in politics an honest man does not get rich.” —Sam Rayburn [one of the most powerful American politicians of the 20th century] (whose savings at his death totaled $ 15,000)

Some voters are upset that the Clintons have become one of the wealthiest families on the planet as a consequence of political “service” to the American people. Yet Johnson earned money for his family through exploiting his role as a Representative to get a valuable broadcast license and spectrum monopoly (Slate). After that, people who wanted to buy influence or favors from Johnson would simply buy advertising on the radio or TV stations that were technically owned by his wife. The dollar amounts were small compared to what the Clintons have obtained, but the connection between the money and the political position was similar.

Where today’s politicians have to ladle out hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits to a broad class of beneficiaries in order to get votes and campaign funds, Caro describes Johnson as corruptly steering government contracts to Brown and Root, whose executives in turn made sure that the company and its subcontractors funded the campaigns of Johnson and his cronies. This kind of straight-up corruption was actually a lot less damaging to the economy compared to our current system of paying for today’s votes with tomorrow’s trillions. From this one could argue that things worked better in the good old days, but not that the good old days featured less corruption.

Upset that politicians today are “lying”? While a Congressman in World War II, Johnson went into somewhere between 0 and 13 minutes of air combat as an observer in a U.S. B-26 bomber (see this story for how it might have been 0; Caro says 13). He did this for undisguised political advantage. He spun this into a tale of being in combat for at least three months on multiple missions. Think that politics drives U.S. military decisions? Johnson was awarded the Silver Star for being baggage on one flight; Caro says that the pilots and gunners on the flight were not awarded any medals.

The biographer loves his subject, but not enough to pretend that American politics in the middle of the 20th Century was clean, honest, or pretty.

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The world has been getting richer but Venezuela has been in the news lately for going in the opposite direction (Slate). It might be that the issue is as simple as a growing population and oil revenues that haven’t kept up (i.e., perhaps Hugo Chavez would be regarded as an economic genius if oil were worth $200 per barrel). Yet the things that Venezuelans voted for and implemented weren’t actually all that radical. They expanded their government’s role in allocating housing and food, for example, and subsidized various things that they thought everyone should be entitled to. This isn’t obviously different than what the U.S. government does, for example. I’m wondering if the rapid decline of Venezuela shows that a country’s economic prosperity is more fragile today than 50 years ago. Skilled workers can emigrate while using air travel and telecommunications to keep in touch with friends and family (see “Dumb towns getting dumber; smart towns getting smarter?” from 2006, regarding mobility within the U.S.). Capital is more mobile than in the past. If a country is only a slightly worse place to do business than competitors there can be a dramatic decline that wouldn’t have happened in the mid-20th century when most of these political ideas regarding the proper role of government were cemented.

Related:

• Hugo Chavez: Great politician; poor administrator
• Hugo Chavez’s legacy
• Piketty, Democracy, and Hugo Chavez
• A young woman who doesn’t support Bernie…
• Can a Hugo Chavez and Bernie Sanders supporter consistently advocate that a person marry for money?

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Friends have a 13-year-old and are afraid that if they let him build a gaming desktop computer that he will hide in his room until it is time for him to go off to college. They are hoping to hector him into agreeing with them that the real world and the social world of humans is more interesting than the virtual worlds created by the best minds of the game world. Their household currently is Mac-only, which the young man considers unsuitable for gaming. One of their ideas is that he can get a Windows laptop and then they can take it away from him if he overindulges. I’m wondering if there is a technological solution built into Windows 10.

This article contains screen shots of a non-admin user being limited to certain hours within a day and/or to a maximum number of hours per day. So does this one. The official Microsoft page also suggests that this can be done but apparently they didn’t have the energy to make screen shots. So it looks as though Microsoft has built in anti-addiction features.

That leads to the next question: Is it practical for a teenage gamer to be a non-admin user of a Windows 10 machine? He is going to build the machine with a friend whose parents are more liberal. Can he install everything that he needs and eventually turn over super-admin power to mom or dad? Will he have to bug them every hour for the next five years to come over and type the admin password? Will these devoted worshipers of everything that Steve Jobs might once have touched be able to execute their parental control role without thoroughly sullying themselves in the filth of Windows 10?

Related:

• TED talk about how kids who play video games do better on most cognitive tests (don’t forget also the Turkish Airlines video regarding TED talks)
• Recommendations for building a new PC

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I was chatting with an 18-year-old Canadian last month. He said that the drinking age in Quebec was 18, but 19 in most of the rest of Canada. He said “I couldn’t drink in the U.S., right? The age is 21?” I replied with “Yes, but you could have a machine gun.”

[I was skeptical of my own statement so I checked in with a gun-loving friend and it turned out to be true. In a typical state anyone can buy a machine gun as long as he or she is willing to pay an extra $200 for a “tax stamp.” However, my friend explained that there is a limited supply of fully automatic rifles available for private ownership. Consequently the young Quebecois would need to have about $20,000. The gun collector also explained that machine guns are not effective weapons: “most shots miss, and when you walk around with ammunition, you can only carry so much. The Army, for example, never uses their M4 rifles on full auto. They did in Vietnam and fired 50,000 shots per enemy soldier killed (true number).”]

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