Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Deepest sympathies, of course, to anyone living in Paris or otherwise directly affected by the recent attacks. Not much more can be productively said, I don’t think, from 5,500 kilometers away.

This posting is really a question for European readers. Please comment on how you understand these events. Are they part of a trend or grand plan? If so, how does life in France or Europe change?

Americans: How does the Web format of today’s newspapers strike you when an event like this occurs? In the old print world, coverage of a tragedy like this would occupy the entire front page and the reader wouldn’t be asked to contemplate the diurnal or trivial as well as the tragic. The nytimes.com site, however, has the news from Paris sharing with summaries of and links to articles such as “In Ireland, Milk Chocolate Reigns,” “Build Your Thanksgiving Feast,” a piece on fantasy sports, “Meet the Instamom, a Social Media Stage Mom,” etc.

Related:

• some photos that I took in Paris in happier times
• A drawing by one of our resident young artists, starting from the preceding photos:

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The debate this evening among Democrats could, if translated into Spanish, easily be mistaken for one occurring in Latin America. One candidate is the spouse of a former president. All candidates promise an expansion of government and an increase in handouts to the popular masses (to be paid for by taxes on those who have unjustly become rich).

“America’s Fragile Constitution” is an enlightening Atlantic magazine article on the parallel political systems operating in the Americas. While the rest of the world mostly operates with a parliamentary system, in which one party takes responsibility for running the government, the U.S. has a presidential system that closely resembles a monarchy. Who else has done this?

Since the american Revolution, many new democracies have taken inspiration from the U.S. Constitution. Around much of the world, parliamentary systems became prevalent, but some countries, particularly in Latin America, adopted the presidential model, splitting power between an executive and a legislative branch.

When, in 1985, a Yale political scientist named Juan Linz compared the records of presidential and parliamentary democracies, the results were decisive. Not every parliamentary system endured, but hardly any presidential ones proved stable. “The only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States,” Linz wrote in 1990. This is quite an uncomfortable form of American exceptionalism.

So lay out the pupusas, humita, and empanadas for your guests tonight…

[Separately, when listening to Bernie Sanders, these words may be helpful:

“Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.” — Theodore Roosevelt, 1902.

“I cried because I had no Gulfstream G650 until I met a man who had to fly a turboprop” — attributed to Al Gore, boarding one of his chartered Gulfstream G550s.

]

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On the same day, one friend posted video captured by his personal drone over downtown Boston, 3.2 statute miles from the center of Logan Airport, while another posted a video captured by his personal drone (from Costco!) over his backyard, about 2 miles from the center of Hanscom Field. The downtown Boston pilot said that he relied on his DJI software to warn him about restricted airspace. The DJI map shows that the protected zones around KBOS and KBED are essentially the airport perimeter fence. I.e., they don’t incorporate any knowledge about charted FAA airspace (see skyvector.com for a full selection of VFR charts). A towered (Class D) airport typically owns a ring of about 5 statute miles around the airport, from the surface up to 2500′ above the ground. A Class B airport such as Boston Logan owns a ring of about 9 miles down to the surface.

[One area that DJI does seem to have blocked out very conservatively is the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, essentially all of which is now a no-fly zone.]

Plainly one can toss a soccer ball up into the air from one’s backyard, even if it falls within the surface area of a Class D or Class B airport. And perhaps one could fly a radio-controlled toy helicopter 20′ above the ground? When is approval from an FAA control tower required? My efforts to figure this out were unsuccessful. My contacts at our local FAA FSDO weren’t immediately sure of the answer. A friend who is a NASA expert on UAVs in controlled airspace gave an answer that was so long-winded and complex as to be unactionable. The clearest FAA web site on the subject seems to be http://www.faa.gov/uas/model_aircraft/ and it says “strongly encouraged.”

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The New Yorker has a good story about the emergency response system in Iceland: “Life is Rescues.” Highly recommend for fans of things Polar.

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A Pew Research study on domestic time allocation has some interesting data on two-career American families.

While politicians are saying that being a parent is “incredibly challenging” (previous post) and therefore higher-income parents need to be showered with government handouts funded by taxes on the lower-income childless, the majority of survey respondents said that it was either “easier” or “no different” to seek career advancement while parenting.

A New York Times article on this study also references “The Production of Inequality: The Gender Division of Labor Across the Transition to Parenthood”, a 2015 paper from the Journal of Marriage and Family (funded with your tax dollars by the National Science Foundation, but of course you don’t have the right to download or read it). In two-career house households,  compared to women the men did more hours per week of “paid work” and fewer hours per week of “child care.” (The authors seem to be fully up on modern gender theory so I am kind of surprised that they have only these two gender categories and also that they didn’t find out who in the survey sample had changed gender one or more times during the study.)

The three academics who wrote the study pretty much ensured that men would come up short on the childcare front by picking a sample of couples expecting their first child and surveying them just before the birth and then at a point when the child was 9 months old. Where the paper says “child care” what was actually surveyed is “infant care.” Consider also our society’s obsession with breastfeeding for a full year, especially for the first child, and I am not sure why we had to bleed tax dollars to learn that it was the mom who spent more time with the infant.

If we consider that the median fertility of an American woman is 2 (Census.gov) and that a child is a pre-verbal infant for at most two years, the study mostly sheds light on gender roles during 4 years out of 80 years of a woman’s expected life (i.e., covers 5 percent of an American woman’s life; 2.5 percent if you want to restrict to the breastfeeding phase).

Just how onerous is it to have a 9-month-old in diapers around the house? “Physical child care” occupied the two adults for a total of 25 hours per week. Add in “child engagement” (“look at that amazing explosion on TV, Junior!”) for another 11 hours per week.

Readers would be disappointed if there weren’t an analysis of the economics here. Suppose that the typical 9-month-old of the survey were the result of a one-night encounter in a Massachusetts bar with a dentist earning $250,000 per year. The after-tax revenue yield from obtaining custody of that child would be $40,000 per year (based on our interviews with litigators, the loser parent is typically ordered to pay the child’s actual expenses on top of this child support guideline amount). That’s based on the winner parent taking care of the child 2/3rds of the time, which would correspond to 16.65 hours per week of physical child care. That’s an after-tax wage of $46 per hour. The cash economy wage for taking care of someone else’s child is $15 per hour and thus it is straightforward to earn 3X as much for taking care of one’s own biological child. Another point of comparison is that the median hourly pre-tax wage in Massachusetts is $21.50/hour (BLS) and thus it is also possible to earn roughly 3X as much for taking care of one’s own child as it is for going out into the W2 workforce.

[The above analysis  is probably incorrect because it is based on child care inputs by a married couple. Previous studies have shown that working single mothers invest less time in their children than working married mothers (I’m not aware of any study looking at time investment by single fathers). So the wage would be higher than the above calculation suggests. And if an older child required less care than a 9-month-old, the wage would also rise over time. This 2014 Pew study, which aggregates care of children of all ages under 18, found that single working mothers spend only 10 hours per week on child care. Their wage, assuming that they had sex in Massachusetts with a partner earning $250,000/year and that they had sex with a different partner for each child, would be roughly $77 per hour (tax-free) per child, i.e., $154 per hour if two children can be cared for simultaneously.]

The authors conclude, from looking at a snapshot of family life when the child is 9 months old, “the stalled gender revolution suggests that women’s gains in the marketplace have slowed and that women continue to lag behind men economically, in part because they are unable to pursue their careers in the same manner as men because of uneven unpaid work responsibilities” and “that parenthood remains an important barrier to a complete gender revolution.” Given the (1) high percentage of American children who are born out of wedlock, (2) the tendency of children to grow out of the 9-month-old breastfeeding-and-diapers stage, and (3) the number of marriages with children that are terminated by the mother suing the father for divorce, I wonder if this conclusion is justified. If the authors are right in their implication that women are getting a raw deal out of marriage, aren’t we forced to conclude that a lot of American women are behaving irrationally, at least from an economic perspective?

Birth control, abortion, and sterilization are widely available; why would American women give birth if the result is exploitation by a man? Why are women agreeing to get married? Given that nearly all live in a legal environment in which no-fault divorce is available, profitable child support is available, and women win more than 90 percent of custody lawsuits, why wouldn’t women terminate their marriages once they wised up to what a raw deal it was? What enables American men to lure women into this trap and then keep them there? If men in some more enlightened country are better partners, why wouldn’t American women seek to emigrate to that country and marry a man there? And, finally, in our world in which gender reassignment surgery may be paid for by an employer or health insurer and where people are encouraged to talk about their unconventional sexual preferences… why would a heterosexual woman choose to continue to identify as such? Why continue voluntarily as a member of an exploited class?

[On the other hand, even if we accept the study’s conclusions, perhaps American women are not behaving entirely irrationally economically when you factor in divorce litigation statistics. A lot of women sue their husbands when the youngest child is 2 years old and thus easier to place into commercial care. The result of a quickie marriage+divorce is often less child support profit than could have been obtained from one-night encounters with higher-income men, but (a) some hands-on assistance during the early years of child-rearing, (b) ownership of a fully setup house, (c) greater likelihood that the father will take care of the child(ren) at least every other weekend, thus freeing up a lot of leisure time for the mother. On the third hand, having escaped economic exploitation by Husband #1, a lot of divorce plaintiffs end up marrying Husband #2, thus suggesting that there is something beneficial to women in the condition of marriage+children (if not marriage to the father of those children).]

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“Mass. among the worst in US for public records access; An ‘F’ for state on open records” from the November 9, 2015 Boston Globe:

The state earned a grade of F and ranked 40th, below states such as Mississippi and Arkansas, in the category of public records access, according to the Center for Public Integrity…

The center described public access to state documents in Massachusetts as “terrible,” citing in part the fact that the Legislature, judiciary, and governor’s office are exempt from the open records law, which was passed in 1973. The Globe has reported that Massachusetts is the only state in the country with such a wide exemption.

Related:

• “Middlesex County, Massachusetts May 2011 Divorce Lawsuits Analysis” (tedious because a maximum of 10 cases per day can be studied, though in theory all are public records)

 

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Facebook postings in chronological order:

• Watching San Andreas movie on JetBlue. Opening scene has them trying to rescue a woman whose car is teetering on the side of a cliff. They park the Huey in an out of ground effect hover right over the car and yet the rotor wash does not simply push the car down into the gulch. I am beginning to think this is a purely fictional work.
• Now the rich douchebag real estate developer has his private jet land at KOAK instead of KSFO when going to downtown SF. Further difficulty suspending disbelief.
• Their buildings are falling down but they still have great Internet connectivity.
• There is nobody standing in line to pay $5 for a cup of drip coffee. Definitely not filmed on location.
• I am not even sure that the Rock is sitting in the correct seat. He is supposed to be the senior pilot. I thought aircraft commander typically sits left seat in a Huey. Of course half the time he seems to be simply abandoning the pilot seats in order to run the hoist or whatever.
• Others seem to have the same questions: https://www.quora.com/Do-rescue-helicopters-have-a-hover-button-as-seen-on-San-Andreas-2015-movie
• Girl whose mom abandoned her dad for the rich douchebag is now expressing surprise that the rich douchebag abandoned her.
• Huey seems to be proceeding to SF from LA with no fuel stop. Maybe there will be an autorotation.
• The ragged out military surplus Huey seems to be as quiet as a library for conversation.
• Gearbox failed. Major failure to maintain attitude during the auto. Worse than beginner R22 student chasing needles. (Saved perhaps by the massive amount of rotor inertia in a Huey, though in some of the shots it looked as though the collective was still up next to the seat during the purported auto.)
• They are supposedly getting fuel for their airplane but they are still in a hangar (no ISO 9001 for this airport) and there is no fuel truck or line guy.
• Why is there a tsunami if the earthquake was along an inland fault?
• http://www.bustle.com/articles/85496-can-a-san-andreas-earthquake-cause-a-tsunami-the-movie-definitely-stretches-the-facts
• http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-12/why-arent-we-afraid-tsunami-hitting-san-francisco is more comprehensive

Why do they show this movie on flights to SFO? (And thanks, JetBlue, for the free WiFi!)

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Plenty of folks are writing about the sacrifices of life and limb made by U.S. military veterans. I’m grateful but don’t have anything original to add so I thought I would write a note of appreciation for the contributions made by military design engineers (as distinct from “military engineers” who may have built impressive roads, etc.).

Gerry Sussman, one of my advisors at MIT, liked to point out how the N connector and BNC connector were compatible in an emergency, something that he attributed to engineers designing for military use.

World War II was also a great time for military-driven innovation in aircraft and avionics, still paying peacetime dividends, but it is tough to pinpoint specific design engineers who were actually in the military and separate their accomplishments from those working for contractors. For example, I’m pretty sure that someone in the U.S. Air Force was responsible for our country’s early lead in integrated circuits, but I can’t figure out who it was (see this history of Texas Instruments for “while the U.S. Air Force showed some interest in TI’s integrated circuit, industry reacted skeptically.”; see also Wikipedia).

That’s my Veteran’s Day message: Thanks to the engineers inside the U.S. military who pushed for technology that all of us can now use on a daily basis.

Readers: Can you think of specific active duty U.S. military service members who contributed to technology?

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A friend’s posting on Facebook:

I’m a little concerned about my daughter’s ideas on beauty. A few weeks ago, she told me that I’m the only person she loves who isn’t pretty. When questioned further, she acknowledge there are some other people she loves who aren’t pretty. … Last night, she said she loved Daddy more than me because he is more pretty.

[My friend has many virtues, including having worked hard enough to earn a PhD in Computer Science and having been creative enough to write a thesis that was worth reading, but, as with most of the rest of us in the software world, she is not besieged by phone calls from modeling agencies.]

My response:

The ancient Greeks thought that beauty was as much a virtue as intelligence or anything else. So she is not totally off the human reservation in her thinking. Adults say that beauty is irrelevant but kids watch what we do, not what we say. So after hearing about how it doesn’t matter what you look like, the child then hears a pediatrician (female as it happened) compliment a little girl on “looking cute”. So plainly adults do think this is a virtue and an achievement. And presumably they also see adults paying more attention to attractive people. I’m not sure what the right answer is. Maybe to admit that being pretty is great but it is just one possible virtue. And that a more sophisticated approach is to look at the balance of virtues that each person has before deciding that A is more lovable than B based on any single virtue. In other words, don’t assert that “pretty” is less important in our current society than “hard-working” or “honest” or whatever. Children would be able to see for themselves that this is a lie. But point out that being pretty is not more important than a basket of other virtues.

A response from a mutual friend (also a mom with a PhD in CS):

Most young kids are instinctively attracted to people who are physically attractive (which is unfortunate, but it’s overwhelmingly true.) That doesn’t mean they’ll grow up to be shallow people. I think you can be “relieved” that she has already learned to notice and articulate the dimension of physical beauty, because that’s a prerequisite for learning to separate physical attractiveness from other features that make a person desirable.

If you look at children’s literature and movies, almost everything targeted at the youngest audience has an attractive protagonist and an ugly villain. With a slightly older audience, you start to see pretty villains, but it’s treated as a challenging topic, or it may be treated as a shocking plot twist. Then in adolescent literature, it’s cliche for beautiful people to be cruel.

Separately, what would happen if a group of software and hardware engineers founded a fitness company? Here are a couple of photos of bacon doughnuts from the Fitbit Boston open house:

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I promised myself not to look at anything that any Republican candidate said or did due to the fact that I don’t think any could win (previous posting). But friends keep asking me what I think about these folks so here are my comments on the transcript from last night.

Trump: I hate to say it, but we have to leave [minimum wage] the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard…”

Telling Americans that they have to work harder to earn a higher wage = political suicide.

Carson: Every time we raise the minimum wage, the number of jobless people increases….

Mostly consistent with The Redistribution Recession but “there is no free lunch” is not a message most voters want to hear. I would write off Trump and Carson based simply on the above.

Rubio: If you raise the minimum wage, you’re going to make people more expensive than a machine. And that means all this automation that’s replacing jobs and people right now is only going to be accelerated.

Not a message that Americans want to hear. We are special. We are creative. People in Asia are not creative. Machines are like Asians (reliable, consistent, good at math, not creative) and therefore can never replace Americans.

Kasich: An economic theory is fine, but you know what? People need help.

… and the Great Father in Washington is going to help them. This guy may have some promise. Now that the government is close to 50 percent of the economy (previous posting) it does make sense that Americans seek help from the government. What other entity is big and rich enough?

Cruz: It’s great to be here in Milwaukee.

It is hard to think of a situation in which a person could say this and not be lying.

Cruz: I have rolled out a bold and simple flat tax: 10 percent for every American that would produce booming growth and 4.9 million new jobs within a decade.

How can it possibly work to have a 10-percent federal tax rate in a country where the federal government is more than 20 percent of the GDP (with state and local governments bringing us up closer to 40 or 50 percent, depending on how you look at Obamacare)?

Bush: A corporate rate of 20 percent, which puts us 5 percent above — below that of China, and allows us full expensing of investing. It would create an explosion of investment back into this country, creating higher-wage jobs, and so that’s part of it.

This would be a disaster for accountants and tax lawyers. The “full expensing of investing” is not something that the average voter can understand (presumably he means toss out our perverse depreciation system, as I suggested in my November 2008 Economic Recovery Plan). This seems like a losing message with voters who are passionate about soaking rich companies and would be much more receptive to a proposal for Third World-style capital controls to stop the corporate exodus.

Fiorina: Well, first of all, I must say as I think about that question, I think about a woman I met the other day. I would guess she was 40 years old. She had several children. And she said to me, you know, Carly, I go to bed every night afraid for my children’s future. And that really struck me. This is America. A mother is going to bed afraid for her children’s future.

It seems safe to assume that Fiorina did not tell the woman “If you wanted financial security, you should have read Real World Divorce and had sex with a married dermatologist for the first kid, then had sex with a drunken Medicaid pediatric dentist for the second, etc. Having established a tax-free, location-independent source of income, you could have moved yourself and your children to a low-debt, high-income, high-growth country anywhere in the world.”

Fiorina: We need to pass the REINS Act so Congress is in charge of regulation, not nameless, faceless bureaucrats accountable to no one.

This led me to Google and I found a relevant article. This seems naive because oftentimes the bureaucrats who make a living enforcing regulations present the most influential testimony on Capitol Hill. See this Washington Post article, for example. Some politicians are considering cutting off taxpayer funds used to try to get child support cash from imprisoned fathers. Who is enthusiastic about chasing after incarcerated African-American guys? Frances Pardus-Abbadessa, head of child support enforcement for New York City. (See this YouTube video at 6 minutes in for how Ms. Pardus-Abbadessa is getting her share of $6 billion.)

Kasich on immigration:  in 1986 Ronald Reagan basically said the people who were here, if they were law-abiding, could stay. But, what didn’t happen is we didn’t build the walls effectively and we didn’t control the border. We need to.

Translation: despite spectacular budget increases, the U.S. government has demonstrated continuous incompetence in this area for the past 30 years but somehow it will become competent. I wonder if this guy just checked the wrong box a long time ago and nobody has noticed that he is in fact a Democrat with unlimited faith in Big Government.

Cruz regarding entitlements: for seniors we should make no changes whatsoever, for younger workers we should gradually raise the retirement age, we should have benefits grow more slowly, and we should allow them to keep a portion of their taxes in a personal account that they control, and can pass on to their kids…

Translation: I have no clue what to do and the actuarial disaster won’t be fully apparent until I’m out of the White House.

Cruz on immigration:  the politics of it will be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande. Or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press. Then, we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation.

Beautifully phrased! (albeit irrelevant)

Fiorina: Obamacare has to be repealed because it’s failing… …it’s failing the very people it was intended to help, but, also, it is croney-capitalism at its worst. Who helped write this bill? Drug companies, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, every single one of those kinds of companies are bulking up to deal with big government.

Self-contradictory? If Obamacare is crony capitalism then the “people it was intended to help” were executives and shareholders in the health care industry. In that case, Obamacare is not failing but rather it is working beautifully.

Carson: …there are a lot of people who say, if you get rid of the deductions, you ruin the American dream because, you know, home mortgage deduction. But the fact of the matter is, people had homes before 1913 when we introduced the federal income tax, and later after that started deductions.

How is this persuasive? Nobody can remember what things were like before the Great Father in Washington guided everything. Most Americans seem to think that before Social Security and Medicare older Americans would wander off into the snow to die at age 60-65 and that, before publicly funded schools, Americans couldn’t read.

Paul: I’m also in favor of a plan called the penny plan where we’d just cut 1 percent across the board and the budget actually balances in less than five years.

This seems false. Growth in government spending on health care and pensions (including Social Security) will be more than 1 percent annually, won’t it?

Cruz: There are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible…

The real question is whether the IRS code or the Bible has a larger effect on American lives!

Cruz: if you’re a single mom, if you’re making $40,000 a year, what [his tax cut] means is an extra about $5,000 in your pocket

Assuming that the “single mom” has median fertility (rounds to two kids), why didn’t she have sex with two different men, each with a reasonably high income? In that case, assuming an appropriately chosen state in which to have sex (e.g., Massachusetts or New York), she would be getting a lot more than $40,000 per year, entirely tax free, without having to work. Her child support revenue would be, in most states, a function of the gross income of her defendants. Thus her profits from child-ownership would not be affected by Cruz’s proposed change in tax rates.

Bush: simplify the tax code, to spur economic activity in this country

The companies bailing out of the U.S. are not put off by the complexity of the tax code. They just don’t like the rates!

Rubio:  the most important job anyone in this room will ever have, is the job of being a parent. … And so when we set out to do tax reform, we endeavor to have a pro-family tax code, and we endeavor to do it because we know how difficult it is for families in the 21st century to afford the cost of living. … It is expensive to raise children in the 21st century, and families that are raising children are raising the future taxpayers of the United States, and everything costs more.

Let’s make low-income childless Americans work harder to give money to higher-income Americans with children (previous posting).

Rubio: And so, yes, I have a child tax credit increase, and I’m proud of it. I am proud that I have a pro-family tax code, because the pro- family tax plan I have will strengthen the most important institution in the — in the country, the family.

A person will be able to get hold of these credits by getting Clomid online, going to a bar, meeting a drunken married radiologist, etc. Thus the “family” can be a child support profiteer and one or more cashflow-positive children. That will be “the most important institution” that other taxpayers are tapped to subsidize.

 Rubio: I do want to rebuild the American military.

Why does the world’s most expensive military need “rebuilding”? Does that not call into question our competence to manage military spending?

Fiorina: how is it possible that the federal government gets more money each and every year, which the federal government has been doing, receiving more money every year for 50 years under republicans and democrats alike, and yet, never has enough money to do the important things?

Occam’s Razor gives us an uncomfortable answer: Americans are not competent to run a big government. No voter wants to hear that he or she is part of an incompetent nation.

Trump: [the latest trade agreement is] 5,600 pages long, so complex that nobody’s read it.

This is kind of impressive! What is in there?

Paul: You can be strong without being involved in every civil war around the [world]…

A well-turned phrase.

Rubio: I’ve never met Vladimir Putin, but I know enough about him to know he is a gangster. He is basically an organized crime figure that runs a country, controls a $2 trillion economy.

Translation: I am envious of this Russian guy.

Rubio: Do you know why these banks are so big? The government made them big. The government made them big by adding thousands and thousands of pages of regulations. So the big banks, they have an army of lawyers, they have an army of compliance officers. They can deal with all these things. The small banks, like Governor Bush was saying, they can’t deal with all these regulations. They can’t deal with all — they cannot hire the fanciest law firm in Washington or the best lobbying firm to deal with all these regulations. And so the result is, the big banks get bigger, the small banks struggle to lend or even exist, and the result is what you have today.

Since these Republicans don’t have any chance of winning, should we buy stock in the biggest banks

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