Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

For about the third time during my 52 years, human life on Planet Earth is coming to an end. First it was nuclear war, then it was AIDS, now it is the Zika virus.

Perhaps a vaccine will be found one day, unless it turns out that this virus, like most others, is smarter than humans. Killing all of the world’s mosquitoes with a massive one-time dose of DDT would be great, except the mosquitoes also turned out to be smarter than humans (see this paper on genetic resistance to DDT).

Here’s a question for readers: Are there long-term effects from this virus? (New York Times says “no” but the paper has been known to be wrong…)

Given that the virus is spread by mosquitoes, where could a person go to escape the virus? Hawaii would have been ideal, except that Europeans began trashing the place in 1826 with this pest. (Pregnant women should watch out, though, because child support is quasi-capped at $72,000 per year.)

Can the virus survive if the mosquito population is dormant for most of the year? If not, that would make mostly tax-free Alaska a potential choice, except that one human visitor from the Lower 48 in May could reinfect the state? (Pregnant woman: watch out that you don’t end up like Bristol Palin as an actual target of a child support lawsuit under Alaska’s gender-neutral laws.)

How about a desert? There were no mosquitoes at Burning Man! Unfortunately, it seems that there are some in income tax-free Las Vegas (source). (Pregnant women: Nevada has the least lucrative child support system in the United States. Though more profitable than in Europe, the cash value of a child in Nevada might be 1/10th or even 1/100th of the potential revenue in Massachusetts or California.) Arizona and New Mexico have plenty of areas that seem too dry for mosquitoes, but pregnant women whose income is or might become higher than the fathers’ would need to be aware that they could become child support lawsuit targets in Arizona due to the 50/50 shared parenting default.

What about staying cold all year? Spend the winter in Alaska or in Jackson, Wyoming (neither state has an income tax). Spend the Northern Hemisphere summer in southern Chile or Argentina?

Go to a true desert? Take a job working on a telescope in the Atacama Desert? Or head to the South Pole?

Can we invest on this trend? Even if Las Vegas is not completely mosquito-free, could this be what finally gives a lift to Vegas real estate? Can we short Brazilian Olympics tickets?

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Footnote (2012) seems like an ideal movie for people involved with academia and/or parents whose children are in similar fields of endeavor. Who else loved it?

One thing that I enjoyed about the movie is that there are some loose ends. We never figure out the significance of the extra woman. We never learn what the bigshot professor knows about the father.

[Yes, it seems that I am at least four years behind the cool kids.]

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“Why Female Professors Get Lower Ratings” (NPR) contains a true gem regarding an experiment conducted in France:

Overall, there was no correlation between students rating their instructors more highly and those students actually learning more.

[Note that it doesn’t seem as though the researchers, university teachers themselves, considered the hypothesis that university teachers have no consistent effect on student learning outcomes, which would certainly explain the above result.]

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The New York Times has an article about Baltimore’s murder rate in 2015: 55 per 100,000. Looking at Worldbank data for 2013, if Baltimore were its own country, it would be the world’s second most dangerous.

[Separately, for math and statistics nerds, the article is interesting because it is missing the seemingly simplest explanation for why the murder rate in Baltimore has climbed: as the population falls, the people who have moved out are disproportionately the ones in careers that don’t require occasional murders while people who have moved in are disproportionately those engaged in illegal activities where business disputes cannot be resolved through the courts. The seed of this idea is in the article: “Unfortunately, many of our victims are involved in the illegal drug trade or involved in illegal activity.”]

Related:

• interview with Jill Carter, a state legislator representing Baltimore, in the Maryland chapter of Real World Divorce

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“U.S. Economy Grew Anemic 0.7% in Fourth Quarter” is a WSJ article on the latest GDP numbers for our country. The headline is inaccurate because the economy grew at a 0.7 percent annual rate during the fourth quarter. The actual “growth” was thus 0.175 percent.

Nowhere does the article mention the population size. If the population grew by more than 0.175 percent during the quarter, the per-capita GDP actually fell. If the popular shrank, on the other hand, then each of us is potentially significantly richer (though perhaps the evil Koch brothers can take all of the growth for themselves!).

“U.S. Economy Barely Grew Last Quarter, Stoking Concerns About Momentum in 2016” is the New York Times equivalent story and it has the same omission (though at least they don’t have the arithmetic wrong in the headline).

The CIA Factbook says that the growth rate is 0.78%. Thus, adjusted to a per-capita basis, the U.S. economy was shrinking slightly during the fourth quarter of last year. Considering the lack of cold and snow in the Northeast, which ordinarily would have given the economy a boost, the core shrinkage rate was probably higher.

Assuming that the CIA and Department of Commerce numbers are both correct, why would we be congratulating ourselves for a growing economy when in fact we have a shrinking economy from the perspective of the average resident?

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Here in Orlando I flipped the rental car radio on for a trip to Chick-fil-A. I found an NPR host interviewing Victoria Coates, a PhD art historian (LinkedIn profile) now working as an advisor to Ted Cruz. The host plainly wants to celebrate Barack Obama’s achievements in negotiating a deal with Iran. Start listening to the audio at about 6 minutes in for how Coates responds. It is interesting even if you don’t have a strong opinion on the subject.

Worth playing if your parents are questioning your decision to major in art history!

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I withdrew $400 from a Bank of America ATM here in Orlando. Instead of the stack of $20 bills I would have gotten in the Northeast, I received three $100 bills (“Manhattan food stamps”) and five twenties.

Was this a one-time fluke or has BoA figured out that Floridians want to have $100 bills in their wallets more so than people in other parts of the U.S.?

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The government in New York City is planning to cut its local helicopter tour industry’s revenue by roughly 50 percent (NY Post). All of the income from these tours was earned by people living and working in the New York metro area. Nearly all of the payments (about $50 million per year total says the article) was coming from visitors, including a lot of foreigners. #howtoshrinktheeconomy

On the other hand, it looks as though at least some money was made by lawyers and politicians off the regulatory fight:

Sources said that powerhouse lobbyist James Capalino, a longtime friend and fund-raiser of de Blasio, played a key role in the negotiations. Among the meetings he arranged was a rare face-to-face session with the mayor at City Hall last May – a day after Capalino’s firm gave de Blasio’s nonprofit fundraising arm, Campaign for One New York, a donation of $10,000, records show.

Capalino’s firm has received $120,000 in lobbying fees from the industry since de Blasio took office in 2014, including $85,000 from the Helicopter Tourism & Jobs Council.

Related:

• Political Use of Flight Restrictions (#OnelyOneAmericanCanWorkAtATime)
• Obama and New England aviation businesses start their vacation (#OnelyOneAmericanCanWorkAtATime)

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“Some Migrants in Germany Want to Go Home” is a Wall Street Journal article that includes some information on the practical economics of being a migrant in Germany.

It seems that asylum seekers get free housing, but it is not very high quality:

In October, Amer sold all his belongings in Syria and took his family to a safer life in Germany. Four months later, he wants to return to a country still at war.

Once in Germany, Amer discovered an unexpected reality: Instead of the small house he was hoping for and money to help him open a business, he was given a bare room in an old administrative building turned into an emergency shelter.

They also get a cash stipend:

Before leaving Syria, Amer said he had heard refugees in Germany got around €500 ($546) a month in benefits—a relatively accurate estimate. But he hadn’t realized everything in Germany costs far more than in Syria, he said, dressed in a black hoodie and sweatpants.

“I would probably need 10 years to reach the minimum standard of living of any normal German and the language seems impossible for me to learn,” said Amer, who worked in a snack shop in Syria and never attended university.

Having spent €15,000—everything he owned—to bring his wife, son and brother-in-law to Germany, Amer said he doesn’t yet know how he will pay for their return.

They can presumably get free health care in Germany’s health care system (not a simple single-payer one like in the UK or France).

Overall the package seems less generous than what U.S. welfare recipients collect. The total stipend is only about as much as a U.S. welfare family of three would receive in SNAP (food stamps). (Note that, perhaps coincidentally, the stipend is about the same as the maximum child support revenue obtainable in Germany, e.g., for someone who had sex with the richest person in Germany.) The housing sounds crummier than government-provided housing here.

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“Recognition” is a January 18, 2016 New Yorker story about a man convicted of rape in 1986 based on eyewitness testimony. Worth reading if you’re interested in how our criminal justice system operates.

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