Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution

by philg

The comments on “Should Prostitution Be a Crime?” (New York Times) are interesting. Generally the Times readers, at least the ones whose opinions are featured, admire virtually everything about Europe. Single-payer and/or government-run health care? The French can do it, so obviously so can we. Tuition-free public universities? Denmark does it, so obviously so should we.

Prostitution is apparently legal in England and Germany and decriminalized in Denmark. Could the U.S. learn from these countries’ experiences, either positive or negative? Apparently not. Reader comments, at least the highly rated ones, don’t generally mention these rather significant examples. (The article itself does mention some foreign countries where the laws are different, but the readers don’t seem to be interested in these experimental results.)

I think it is interesting that Americans, or at least Times readers, imagine that it would be straightforward to choose the best and then import a complex bureaucratic system such as government-run health care, but that it would be impossible or uninteresting to choose then import the most successful system of regulation for what happens between two individuals. Americans are like Europeans when they’re running a hospital or a university, but are completely different after hours?

[Separately, I wonder if it is our fondness for legal process that keeps us from legalizing prostitution. We seem to like it when lawyers can get paid every time college students or co-workers have sex.  See “Lincoln Center President’s Abrupt Departure Was Prompted by a Relationship” for how $1200/hour lawyers were brought in after two co-workers at a non-profit org had sex:

To investigate, Lincoln Center enlisted outside counsel — Jeffrey S. Klein, chairman of the employment litigation practice group at Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

Although the inquiry determined that the relationship had ended by the time Mr. Bernstein was confronted and that it appeared to be consensual, the sources said, it violated Lincoln Center’s policies about senior management dating subordinates. The organization declined to provided a copy of the policy.

Lincoln Center officials confronted Mr. Bernstein, who agreed to resign and was paid a sum of money according to the terms of his contract, which are confidential.

Perhaps there should be a tax on sex. Given our socialized systems of criminal justice, medicine, etc., those who are abstinent are paying a high price to support the costs of cleaning up (legally and medically) after those who are not abstinent. Abstinent students pay higher tuition to support university-run kangaroo courts that decide whether or not to expel students who’ve had sex. Abstinent citizens pay Obamacare taxes to provide medical treatment for those who have contracted sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinent citizens pay taxes to support criminal prosecutions that follow sexual encounters (see Missoula for what it must have cost the taxpayers to investigate the activities of two college students behind a closed door). Abstinent employees and shareholders pay for corporate investigations such as the above (Mr. Bernstein and his ladyfriend had some fun; Mr. Klein billed enough to pay the property taxes on his house in the Hamptons; the rest of the workers at Lincoln Center got what?).]

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Don’t let your kids grow up to fly Boeing

by philg

AOPA has a comparison of the Boeing 737NG versus the Airbus A320 from a pilot’s perspective. Here are some excerpts:

As far as pilot comfort goes, the Airbus is a leap ahead of the Boeing. The 737’s forward fuselage is the same as that of the 707, which was designed in the mid-1950s. It begins tapering to the nose in the first-class cabin, and by the time you get to the cockpit it’s a pretty small tube. The Airbus keeps its beamy width all the way to the cockpit, providing a commodious workplace for the pilots.

Airbus took its time designing the cockpit, resulting in a clean, logical layout that is well marked and void of any lights during normal operations. Everything is covered in plastic, so pilots don’t see the construction details underneath. There are ample air vents to keep you cool in the summer and (optional) foot warmers to keep your toes warm in the winter. There’s plenty of room for all your baggage, two jumpseaters, and all the duty-free purchases you can bring on. There’s no massive yoke, either, so you can cross your legs if you want. There’s also a clever table that extends from the panel on which to lay your charts/iPad or crew meal. No eating off your lap like in the 737. Finally, the Airbus cockpit is noticeably quieter than the 737.

Speaking of landings, the Airbus is much easier to land smoothly and, for pilots, it goes a long way to stroke our already-inflated egos. If you can consistently grease a 737NG landing, you’re a better pilot than most. The problem with that airplane, especially the long-bodied models, is that it lands so fast. Because tail strikes are a big threat for the long, low-slung airplanes, approach speeds are in the 150- to 160-knot range, which is about 40 knots or more above stall speed. All that extra speed keeps the long-bodied 737s flat to avoid tail strikes, but it also causes them to skip right back in the air at initial touchdown—just a few inches. It’s just long enough for the ground-spoiler system to sense wheel spin, at which point the spoilers deploy—right now! And it’s that second plop to the ground that makes the NGs one of the more difficult airplanes to consistently land well.

This also brings up a safety issue. There have been more than a few runway overruns in long-bodied 737s. They are heavy, they land fast, and they have only four main-wheel brakes—unlike a 757, which has eight brakes. Pilots who like to use all of the runway’s touchdown zone trying to squeak out a good landing are playing with fire in this airplane, especially on wet or contaminated runways. Remember, style points don’t count if you run off the end of the runway.

Separately, I’m wondering if the passengers on Flydubai 981 would all still be alive had that airplane operated Airbus A320s with envelope protection. The cause of the crash is thought to be improper stick-and-rudder handling? An Airbus would therefore have protected itself and the passengers by preventing a stall. On the third hand, AirAsia 8501 was supposedly stalled by the pilots. Wikipedia says that with the autopilot disconnected they also lost any envelope protection.

Young pilots: Think JetBlue!

[Also in the same issue, we learn that there is only one thing worse than starving as a freelance aviation photographer: “I was a Java coder and I couldn’t take it anymore.”]

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Eisenhower biography suggests that we should avoid war

by philg

I’ve been gradually listening to Eisenhower in War and Peace as an audio book. The author, Jean Edward Smith, is a professor of political science.

It turns out that the Eisenhower family confirms the thesis regarding a genetic basis for family success put forward in The Son Also Rises. The Eisenhower boys were descended from successful German immigrants on both maternal and paternal sides. Their father, however, was unsuccessful as a provider and as a father, providing virtually no emotional or financial assistance. Yet, according to the book, all of the Eisenhower brothers achieved significant career success. (The Son Also Rises suggests that an unsuccessful family will have the occasional outlier who is successful and that a successful family will have the occasional outlier, e.g., Eisenhower’s father, who is unsuccessful, but that a next generation is likely to achieve more in line with the family mean.)

Are you dismayed that our current crop of politicians is dishonest if not always outright corrupt? The author, who is sympathetic to both his subject and to FDR, characterizes Roosevelt as a habitual “dissembler” and Eisenhower as, while ostentatiously taking “buck stops here” responsibility for small mistakes, pinning the blame for his biggest mistakes on others by rewriting (military) history with some lies built in. Upset at the lack of decorum during campaigns? Eisenhower’s opponents spread rumors that he was Jewish and chanted “Ike the Kike”. Adlai Stevenson, Ike’s opponent, had been sued by his wife in 1949, thus making him the first divorced presidential candidate. This opened the door to opponents insinuating that Stevenson was homosexual. (The ex-wife went on to sue her mother in 1958 in order to obtain possession of a lakefront mansion.) Harry S. Truman and Robert A. Taft are the only politicians who are portrayed as having complete integrity. One anti-partisan act by Truman described in this book is the destruction of a letter from George C. Marshall to Eisenhower that revealed the affair with Kay Summersby (see below).

The book describes nearly all of the senior American military officers stationed in Europe as having had local sweethearts and little attempt was made to disguise these sexual relationships. Eisenhower’s was Kay Summersby, a source of some gossip back in D.C. Divorce was a career-ender, however, so these women were generally abandoned when it was time to return home to the U.S. and the wife. This was prior to the era of statutory cash profits for out-of-wedlock children (quite limited even today in most of Europe) and the women behaved in apparent accordance with the economic incentives of the day, not producing any children despite the comparatively primitive nature of contraception at the time.

When these American officers were not having sex with their mistresses (sometimes in luxurious Mediterranean villas on 5-day vacations from the war) they turned their attention to matters military. The standard story here seems to be that we were incompetent in the early parts of the war, e.g., getting beaten by heavily outnumbered German forces in North Africa (and even French forces, who refrained from fighting the Germans, nearly beat us), but that we learned to fight. This book says that our senior generals, including Eisenhower, never learned anything about fighting other than “Let British officers plan the actual fighting.” According to the book, with the exception of those made by George Patton, in-the-field decisions by American generals were almost always disastrous. This was true during the Normandy invasion, for example, when the American-led assault on Omaha beach was nearly thrown back while the Canadian- and British-led attacks on other beaches went more smoothly. Patton summarized his friend Eisenhower’s qualities with “I hope he makes a better president than he was a general.”

According to this biographer, Eisenhower is responsible for the division of Germany. Under British command the ground war was basically won in the fall of 1944. The Germans expected that any day the Allies would concentrate their forces, punch through the German lines, and drive to Berlin. This didn’t happen because Eisenhower wanted to assume battlefield glory for himself. He took over command and applied the American doctrine of “attack on a wide front,” which was regarded as inappropriate in modern warfare by British, French, and German generals. Smith says that this extended the war by at least six months and cost the Allies 500,000 men killed, wounded, or missing. It also gave the Russians time to conquer eastern Germany and Berlin. It gave the Germans time to kill 100,000+ Jews in various death camps (see deaths-by-year chart in Wikipedia).

If this author is correct, the American military is essentially unable to learn from its mistakes and, even with a 10:1 advantage in soldiers and equipment, is at risk of losing any fight.

[Note that Jean Edward Smith describes Eisenhower as being exceptionally competent at high-level coordination and some big picture stuff. As a military officer he opposed the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan, which he considered to have been very nearly defeated via conventional means. As President he twice rejected advice from subordinates to use nuclear weapons (against China and Vietnam). Eisenhower correctly predicted that the U.S. could not maintain a monopoly on nuclear weapons technology and favored giving all nations equal access to such technology. (i.e., he failed to foresee that states such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, would lose central government control and thus that their military weapons would fall into the hands of non-state groups). As president of Columbia University, a position in which he exerted little effort, he was an advocate for open debate (proponents of speech limits then were trying to exclude Communist points of view). One big area where the jury may never come back is whether Eisenhower was correct to favor maintaining a U.S. military presence all around the world and fighting the anti-Communist fight. His principal Republican opponent, Robert A. Taft, advocated a military and foreign policy more like China’s today: trade with everyone, restrict military activities to one’s immediate neighborhood. Presumably there have been some benefits to us from the World Police role, but can they offset the costs of the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars?]

Readers: Has our military gotten a lot better at fighting and at learning since World War II? Or does our track record since then show that we still aren’t the military geniuses we imagine ourselves to be? (Or we do correctly perceive our incompetence and inefficiency and therefore spend way more than anyone else in order to avoid having Mexico and Canada take us over?)

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An interesting race discrimination lawsuit

by philg

We’re going to have fantastic economic growth… as long as litigation over bathroom usage and skin color generate as much as output as machine tools.

Here’s an interesting lawsuit covered by the Daily Mail: Young woman with a mixture of “German, Irish and Italian descent” is told that she doesn’t qualify for a “Multicultural Undergraduate Internship” at the Getty Foundation.

Up until now private institutions have been able to select students, for example, based on skin color. It was public universities that ran into trouble and litigation when they operated race-based admissions programs. I’ll be interested to find out what the legal theory is here. The Getty is entirely private. Why can’t they say “We don’t want to hire any white people”?

If a court says “No, you can’t choose by race” what about other non-profit programs that are limited by age? (Disclosure: I helped set up one myself that would potentially become illegal in a changed legal regime.)

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Eisenhower-era tax-avoidance strategies from… Eisenhower

by philg

I’ve been listening to Eisenhower in War and Peace. Supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton sometimes reference Eisenhower-era top marginal tax rates as evidence that the U.S. economy can thrive under a similar system. Eisenhower, himself, though, managed to avoid these rates. He was paid roughly $6 million in today’s dollars for writing Crusade in Europe (one thing that Eisenhower did not foresee was the rise of Islam as a military force!). Instead of the deal with the publisher being structured as advance-plus-royalties it was a lump sum for turning over the completed manuscript. Thus it qualified for a roughly 25 percent capital gains tax rate rather than a marginal ordinary income tax rate of 82 percent.

[Note that Eisenhower was generally in favor of trimming government spending, especially military spending (the biggest budget item of the time), so as not to “rob citizens of the fruits of their labors.” But he abhorred deficit spending/government borrowing, the U.S. was heavily indebted following World War II (though not as indebted in the 1950s as now), and therefore did not help Congress deliver on Republican campaign promises to cut tax rates.]

Another tax comparison from the book: A Federal gasoline tax of 4 cents/gallon was imposed in the mid-1950s to pay for building the Interstate Highway System. That works out to 36 cents/gallon in today’s mini-dollars. Current Federal gas tax is 18 cents/gallon, which turns out not to be enough to maintain the system (Heritage). (See “Cost to renovate Longfellow Bridge compared to its construction cost”)

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Haiku contest: Summarize your Facebook feed

by philg

Let’s have a haiku contest. Can you summarize your Facebook feed in a haiku (bonus points for restricting to 5-7-5).

Having been part of a university community for many years, here are some examples of what Facebook shows me:

I’ll go further – If you hate our country so much that you think this inexperienced ill-equipped racist asshole [Donald Trump] should be put in charge of our government, our military, our domestic policy and foreign relationships then you should think about moving out because you are anti everything this country stands for and you dont [sic] belong here. And we will not miss you.

I call on all Bernie supporters to rally behind Hillary Clinton. The danger that Trump and the republikans represent to us all are unthinkable. They will set our country back 50 years, undo all social progress and destroy our economy and global standing- or worse. We must unite to defeat them. Bernie is a true progressive – a mensch – and will be an important ally in the Senate. You know he will be supporting Hillary – and we all need to do the same.

Goodbye Rubio and good riddance. You were extreme and dangerous but in this crazy year not extreme or dangerous enough for the haters of your party.

Mitt Romney just told the truth about Trump…and then many lies about Hillary Clinton. Thanks for reminding us how much worse off we’d have been if we’d elected this pompous elitist empty suit – and the danger of ever electing the super-rich and over-entitled.

Heres [sic] our next “First Lady”, wielding a handgun. Imagine the outcry if Michelle Obama posed like this – but only silence from the right. Share this around. And stop it from happening. [over a photo of a lightly dressed young Melania Trump]

When I was young and learning about the Holocaust I wondered how someone like Hitler could come to power in a country that had smart talented resourceful people, and whether I would have had the courage to resist the rise of nazism and fascism. We are nearing that kind of challenge and that need to fight to protect our Nation and it’s values from thugs and haters – domestic terrorists – who seem bent on destroying it. We cannot let them succeed.

Speaks for itself. Donald Trump is a fascist. [over a link discussing Fred Trump’s purported screening prospective apartment building tenants by race (now our tax dollars fund race-based decisions by government public housing ministries under the “affirmative action” banner)]

Another example of the efforts by Republicans to limit the voting rights of minorities. Sad and infuriating. [over an article on voter requirements; the (white) author feels comfortable assuming and asserting that American minorities are inferior to white Americans in their ability to comply with annoying bureaucracy]

If Trump becomes President, Trudeau is giving me another reason to move to Canada. [not sure that the author of this one would qualify as he is around 65 and, like most countries with publicly funded medical care, Canada disfavors older immigrants with a point system: “Persons … lose two points for each year that they are under twenty-one or over forty-nine.”]

Throw the key away on [Dennis Hastert]. Harsh, but it makes me real angry. [i.e., the author has the courage to denounce someone who is both an admitted child molester and an admitted Republican]

I usually agree with Krugman, and today is no change from that stance.

A ticked off young woman speaking truth to power: [over an article in which a Starbucks customer called Florida Governor Rick Scott an asshole and noted “You cut Medicaid, so I couldn’t get Obamacare,” (but she still has enough money to patronize Starbucks?)]

These mouths remind me of a politician we all know and denigrate! [over an article titled “Monkeys With Smaller Testicles Scream Louder to Compensate, Study Finds”; what would happen if one of his friends compared Barack Obama to a monkey?]

The emerging Repulsive Republican ticket: Oink and Oink. [over an article about Donald Trump and Chris Christie]

Let me repeat: this man is a fascist. It he is President, he’ll create and endorse storm troopers outfitted with Trump ties.

Here’s my haiku summary of the above:

I hate Donald Trump
Liberals are my besties
Important to share

Readers: What’s your haiku summary of your Facebook feed?

[Separate question: Why is there so much political content on Facebook? The above folks suggest that they don’t want to live in the same country as anyone who identifies as a Republican. It should therefore be safe to assume that they have long since defriended anyone whom they suspect of supporting Trump, Cruz, et al. Thus their postings can’t reach beyond fellow Democrats and therefore they are spending a lot of time preaching to the converted, right? Why would they do this? Do they achieve higher social status among Hillary supporters for the vehemence and creativity of their denunciations of Donald Trump and traditional Republicans?]

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Group of women under 50 tells others to be more diverse

by philg

Ellen Pao is the gift that keeps on giving for this blog. She is part of the team at Project Include. These folks purport to tell companies how to build diversity. Some excerpts from Pao’s new site:

Research has quantified the financial benefits of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. Despite this, we have yet to see significant improvement in diversity numbers. [i.e., business owners don’t want to be richer]

We want to provide our perspectives, recommendations, materials, and tools to help CEOs and their teams build meaningful inclusion. We know how hard change is from our own experiences. [Yet Pao’s husband managed to change from homosexual to heterosexual. Are there changes that happen in cubicle farms that are more difficult?]

We are focusing our efforts on CEOs and management of early to mid-stage tech startups, where we believe change is possible and can have a broad impact on the industry and beyond.

We want the girls, people of color, and other underrepresented groups that we are encouraging to pursue STEM educations and future tech jobs to have real opportunities to succeed. [As noted in “Women in Science,” academic success in science may not constitute “success” using a financial or career flexibility yardstick.]

Making a few inferences from photos, names, and biographies on the site, it would seem that this is a group of people who (a) all identify as women, and (b) all but one identify as under age 50. This homogeneous group purports to be expert in achieving diversity. Yet if diversity is a guaranteed path to success, shouldn’t Project Include bring in (“include”) at least one more aged fossil (i.e., a Silicon Valley-dweller over 50)? Or some employees who identify as men? Or encourage some of their current team members to change gender ID to “male”?

[Separately, let’s look at the Project Include team to see if their biographies will inspire “girls, people of color, and other underrepresented groups” to go into STEM. The wealthiest member of the group it would seem is Freada Kapor Klein. Her Wikipedia page indicates no training in STEM and all of her wealth is a result of marrying Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus. This is about as inspiring as the Harvard undergrad who said “I used to think that I wanted to be an investment banker, but then I realized that I could just marry an investment banker.” (if she had been a little more educated about U.S. family law, she might not have included the marriage part in her plan) Y-Vonne Hutchinson has done some awesome stuff, e.g., “worked with foreign governments, the U.S. Department of State, and the UN” and is affiliated with Harvard Law School. She is trained as a lawyer, however, not in STEM. Ellen Pao herself, of course, also has a law background and did not work at a technical job. Erica Joy Baker is described as “a seasoned software engineer” yet is being paid to spend “20 percent of her time at Slack advocating for diversity and inclusion, both within and outside of the company.” If she were a great programmer, why would the company want her to write code only 80-percent time?]

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Time to bring back amphetamines for weight loss?

by philg

“After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight” (nytimes) reports on a doctor who followed reality TV contestants and concluded that a slowed metabolism accounted for their inability to maintain weight loss.

I wonder if it should make us reconsider our notions of progress in medicine. In the 1950s an overweight person would have been diagnosed for $10 with a slow metabolism and given a $2/month amphetamine prescription to speed up said metabolism. Today the same person could be a $50,000/year customer for weight loss clinics, supplements, surgeries, etc.

Obviously being on amphetamine for years is harmful (see “America’s First Amphetamine Epidemic 1929–1971”), but is it as harmful as weighing 300 lbs?

Readers: What do you think? Should medicine concentrate on speeding up metabolism, possibly with new drugs, or is that also doomed due to the fact that people can just have a second donut?

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