Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Ellen Pao has been axed from her job at Reddit (timeline). She failed to collect on the $176 million that she was seeking from Kleiner Perkins. Her husband seems to be underwater financially due to legal fees associated with defending against various fraud lawsuits. Pao apparently still gets checks from Kleiner, payouts from deals made during her time as a junior partner, but presumably at age 45 she eventually needs to find a new way to make money.

If Ellen Pao actually had the superior ability as a venture capitalist that Kleiner was allegedly unable to discover, she could become the richest person in the U.S. in fairly short order, simply by backing the right startups and taking the standard 2 and 20 percent fee (presumably investors in VC funds would forgive her history of litigation if she could earn consistently high returns for them). That Pao went to work as a salaried manager of an existing company (Reddit), however, suggests that she doesn’t know how to outperform the S&P 500 (like most VCs, according to this analysis!).

As noted in this April 2015 posting, Ellen Pao could have been paid $238 million tax-free for having sex with her old boss at Kleiner. From a legal point of view, the fact that Pao is now married does not impair her ability to earn money from bearing out-of-wedlock children with (or selling abortions to) any of the high-income men that she might meet in Silicon Valley. However, at age 45 it might be tough for her to establish a profitable pregnancy (see OvaScience.com, however, for how the career opportunity of child support profiteer might be extended).

Could Pao just get another W2 job? Having embroiled Kleiner Perkins in years of litigation, being married to a man who embroiled his previous employer in race discrimination litigation, and having failed to meet expectations at Reddit, she doesn’t seem like a new employer’s likely first pick. (except maybe the New York Times? all through her Kleiner lawsuit they kept writing about how wonderfully qualified Pao was; the Times has a digital division and now they can use their editorial insights about how exceptional Pao’s performance was at Kleiner to earn some superior profits by hiring Pao for themselves)

One idea would be for Pao to write a book. It seems that at least a large fraction of the New York Times readership would want to read it. “It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit” is a July 10, 2015 NYT story that describes Pao as “a hero to many.” Note how the Times editors were confident that a jury in the nation’s most liberal plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction got it wrong. After hearing weeks of evidence, the jury decided that sexism was not the reason that the partners (both male and female) of Kleiner decided not to promote Pao. But, according to the plain words of the headline, there must have been sexism blocking Pao’s career there because that’s what she was fighting against (not “Phantom Sexism” or “Alleged but Disproven Sexism”).

The market for books by female managers at Silicon Valley companies has been proven out by Sheryl Sandberg (see my review of Lean In). By using a ghostwriter, Sandberg demonstrated that Pao wouldn’t even have to do the wordsmithing in order to enjoy an income as an author. That does leave an open question… what should Ellen Pao’s book be called? And what would be a good outline of content?

Related:

• reader comment (Susan, 94085) on NYT article:

“I’m a female Silicon Valley executive who worked with Ellen at Microsoft. Ellen should look for a job in academics because that is her core competency. Working in the business world, not so much. Her story is illustrative of a commonly-held misconception among some that great academic success always translates into great success in other areas. Both Ellen and her employers have bought into this fallacy with disastrous results: employers have continued to hire her for jobs with increasing responsibility, wrongly hoping that she will one day live up to the promise shown at Princeton and Harvard, only to be disappointed; and, Ellen still can’t accept that she can’t repeat her academic success in the business world, which has caused her to believe that her failure is the result of discrimination.”

• one from Ambrose Birece in “Hades”:

“Ellen Pao encapsulates the myth of elites in America. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both suffer from tautological thinking where the best are the best. However again and again we see the mediocrity of our “elite” schools. (See: Bush, G.W.; also Summers, Larry)
Ellen Pao represents entitlement of the elites personified, a sort of Peter Principle for the well heeled: they keep getting promoted, regardless of their incompetence, because of old school ties. And yet America was and is built by the Scrappy Classes, not the country club set looking to get their kids into the Ivies, Stanford, or Duke.”

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Back in February 2013, following an engine fire aboard the ship, I proposed that the Carnival Triumph be turned into a Cuban medical shuttle. I wrote a follow-up in December 2014. Now it seems that my wildest dreams are coming true. Carnival will be sailing to Cuba starting in May 2016 (USA Today), but with a do-gooder rather than a medical theme. The WSJ says that “Carnival’s cruisers will need to spend eight hours a day on the ground in Cuba, per U.S. regulations…”

Have any readers actually been to Cuba on one of these approved cultural exchange tours? What was it like? How were the accommodations? Would you rather have been on a Carnival ship for sleeping and meals?

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For about 15 years I have been arguing that professors shouldn’t grade their own students (see “Simple Change 1” in “Universities and Economic Growth” from 2009, for example). The original idea was to fight against the natural corruption of professors overestimating their own efficacy as teachers.

Now that the U.S. has entered the universal Age of Victimhood, at least on campus, this article from The Nation gives some more weight to my idea:

Last fall, David Samuel Levinson, the author, most recently, of the literary thriller Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, taught a course called “Introduction to Fiction” at Emory University, part of a two-year fellowship he’d been awarded there. Blunt and scabrous, he prides himself on being frank with his students. “My class is like a truth-telling, soothsaying class, and I tell them no one is going to talk to you like this, you will never have another class like this,” he says.

One student, he says, a freshman woman, sat besides him throughout the course, actively participating. At the end of the semester, he gave her a B+, because, although she worked hard, her writing wasn’t great. “They don’t really understand that they can do all of the work, and turn in perfectly typed up, typo-free papers and stories, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to get an A, because quality matters, talent matters,” he says.

While he was on vacation over winter break, he got a Facebook message from her. He ignored it, figuring it was a complaint about her grade. She started sending him imploring e-mails asking him to reconsider her B+. Finally, he says, he got an e-mail from the director of his program saying, “You need to take care of this. You don’t want this to escalate.”

The student, he learned, was threatening to bring him up on sexual harassment charges. …

If any two people who interact face-to-face on a university campus can bring career-ending charges, it doesn’t seem as though there is any way for traditional (in the U.S.; many other countries use impartially administered exams) grading to work.

Related:

• Missoula (rape on campus book review)

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“The Struggle for Fairness for Transgender Workers” is an article by the New York Times editorial board, which has chosen not to hire any transgender workers, about how other employers should be forced to hire such workers. It is unclear why the business folks at the Times haven’t been attracted by the opportunity to profit by hiring workers that no other employers (because of their deep-seated prejudices that the non-transgendered staff at the NYT has ferreted out) are willing to hire. If the Times is correct one would think that a business with a 100% transgender workforce would have remarkably low labor costs.

Related:

• Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate

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Airbus has flown its E-Fan electric twin across the English Channel and, to celebrate, has published a page comparing the new aircraft to Bleriot’s. The Bleriot crossing was in 1909 in a one-seat, one-engine airplane. The latest crossing was in a two-seat (though the second is always empty?), two-engine plane. The Airbus page makes for interesting reading and I’m personally very excited about the potential for a low-vibration quiet electric trainer. I do wonder if a flight school would need 3X as many of these as gas-powered airplanes. Consider a typical flight school that dispatches aircraft every two hours for training flights that last 1 to 1.5 hours. If the aircraft takes 4 hours to recharge then what does the school do on a summer weekend when everyone wants to fly? Separately I can’t even imagine would it would take to get publicly run airports to run 240V circuits out to the tie-downs. I haven’t seen any evidence of quick-swap battery packs in electric airplane designs.

(Note that the Channel was actually crossed in an electric French-built Cri-cri 12 hours earlier by Hughes Duwal (Australian Flying), and would have been crossed a few days earlier in an electric Slovenian-designed Pipistrel but for some contract/legal/regulatory hassles.)

Related:

• a French engineer and pilot, Pascal Chretien, builds and flies the world’s first electric helicopter (2011)

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Mancur Olson explained the post-war stagnation of England compared to Germany in terms of political stability leading to various interest groups milking the public in general (see “How Rich Countries Die”). A big disruption, such as a war, can make a country wealthier in the long run because, e.g., it prevents air traffic controllers from helping themselves to $1.2 million per year (see Spain). Journalists write about the short-term pain that Greece might suffer from departing the Eurozone but I’m wondering if they are ignoring the long-term potential benefits. If Greece were to hit the wall in 2015 the country might be much better off in 2035 than if Greece tries to muddle through, leaving all existing interest groups protected to the maximum extent possible. If Greece hits the wall the country can come up with a new political consensus about how to regulate business, how much to pay public employees, at what age people should be eligible for full pensions, etc. It also gives Greeks who don’t like and/or can’t prosper under that consensus a chance to emigrate and start fresh in a country whose politics suit them better.

What do readers think? Should Greeks with an eye toward their country’s long-term wealth fear a radical restructuring or welcome it?

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I got a Canon DR-C240 scanner to replace a Fujitsu ScanSnap that had launched a denial-of-service attack on my USB subsystem (previous post). This is the latest and greatest Canon model that is supposed to have a flexible paper feeding system. It costs about twice as much as the Fujitsu.

It took about 15 minutes to get the software installed and everything plugged in.

I decided to test the scanner with a batch of stuff sent home in an end-0f-year bag with a kindergartener.

The scanner won’t go any wider than 8.5 inches, so some 9″-wide construction paper could not be scanned. The scanner could have been a lot more useful if it were just slightly wider.

A stack of slightly odd-sized cut paper was not scanned in order. The default is to scan at low resolution and in black and white. I had to go into Canon’s CaptureOnTouch software to change the settings to “full auto” from the default of “Text.”

Although there was laser-printed large text on each page with the name of the month, the Canon software decided that the January page should be rotated upside down. The software lets you delete blank pages before saving a PDF but not rotate any. I had to reopen the file in Adobe Acrobat (full version; not included with scanner) in order to un-rotate the page.

After you laboriously change the defaults in the CaptureOnTouch application and then try to scan a second stack of paper pressing the start button on the scanner… you find that it has gone back to its old “text/B&W” mode. You need to manually edit the setting for that button.

A document that had been stapled was fed through more reliably than I would have expected from the Fujitsu.

Some legal-size documents were scannable but the autorotate function failed to orient them correctly, despite the fact that they had some pre-printed block letters on them that should have been easy to detect.

A stack of four documents that started out as 8.5×11″ pieces of paper but had various folded edges scanned reliably (might have been a problem on the Fujitsu), but the resulting file had three spurious blank pages.

Some previously stapled skinny documents scanned nicely.

Blank page detection is spectacularly bad. I also scanned some business documents that had been partially highlighted. Whenever there was bleedthrough of the highlighter the scanner decided that the reverse of the highlighted page was non-blank. It doesn’t seem as though the software is looking for bleed-through or comparing a candidate blank page to the reverse.

OCR seems to be enabled by default when saving documents as PDF.

Verdict: The paper transport mechanism is more reliable than the Fujitsu, but it is not perfect. Blank page detection is so unreliable as to be a serious time-waster. You need to have the full version of Adobe Acrobat to go with this scanner (plus a lot of patience) so that you can clean up after its not-very-smart autorotate software.

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Read DxOMark and weep if you have a big collection of Canon EOS lens. This comparison page of sensor performance shows that the new 50 megapixel EOS 5DS, as with previous Canon sensors, has dynamic range performance far short of the Sony sensors inside Nikon and Sony bodies. Canon also loses on color depth and high ISO performance.

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I joined a streaming Grateful Dead party in Cambridge last week. I had lost track of the band since attending a live concert at the Stanford University Amphitheater in 1982. We looked up Trey Anastasio and discovered that he was in many ways a fitting replacement for Jerry Garcia, right down to the problems with drugs and the law (though Anastasio seems to have avoided becoming entangled with the alimony and child support system; the first paragraph of the core section (“Sixth”) of Garcia’s will begins with instructions for paying off former sexual partners; one of them described her payments as “salary” (SF Gate)).

Some waggish tweets notwithstanding, e.g., “Deadheads will be telling their grandkids about this show–when they see them next weekend,” we were surprised at how many young people were in the audience. Quite a few were barely out of kindergarten when Jerry Garcia died. How did they become fans of a band that hadn’t existed in their teenage or adult lifetimes?

As an incipient old guy myself I was thrilled to see so many turn out to see guys in their 70s up on stage. At the same time, when I got home and streamed down some 1970s Grateful Dead songs from Rhapsody it was hard not to agree with our Deadhead host’s admission that “no question that they were better then,” though he added “I was a lot more energetic then too.”

Separately, the economics of the concerts were interesting. At the announced face values of the tickets (i.e., ignoring the high prices in the secondary market), revenues from just two of the concerts would have exceeded, in nominal dollars, the original $13 million construction cost of Soldier Field. Can we also infer from the popularity of these concerts, both live and streaming, that the U.S. economy is in pretty good shape? You can’t fill a stadium like Soldier Field with one-percenters. The alternative to spending the money to buy tickets and travel to Chicago is to listen to a younger/better/intact Grateful Dead for free (or $10/month). If that many people chose to spend the big bucks does it not show that there is a lot of disposable income kicking around?

Related:

• “It Is Money Battles Like These that Make The Dead Truly Grateful” (1997 NYT article on the women collectively suing Garcia’s estate for $38 million (against total estate assets of $6 million))

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A self-described “Cambridge liberal” friend on Facebook linked to an article on a divorce initiated by actress Jennifer Garner against her husband Ben Affleck. The article notes that “Affleck’s ‘workaholic’ mentality didn’t sit well with Garner, who is usually home with the pair’s three children, Violet, 9, Seraphina, 6, and Samuel, 3.”

What other information was available to this friend? Wikipedia says that Garner sued her previous husband for divorce and that Affleck was never previously married. California child support guidelines provide higher profits for each day that a child is with a parent. California custody conventions award profitable time with children to the parent who can claim to have been “primary” during time spent as a couple (married or unmarried). In other words, if Garner could convince a judge that she had taken care of the children 80 percent of the time while Affleck was out working to pay the household bills, the most likely outcome after a trial would be that she was entitled to 80 percent custody and Affleck would be ordered to keep paying her bills for the next 15 years. (See the California chapter of Real World Divorce.) Us magazine explains that Garner waited until the marriage reached the 10-year mark before decided to pursue a divorce. That’s the line at which a judge would be able to award lifetime alimony or “a bigger share of Affleck’s reported $75 million.”

In other words, anything that the mother said about her defendant’s shortcomings as a father were potentially financially self-serving. How did the Cambridge liberal describe this celebrity news item?

“Why do we assume that great actors will make great husbands/fathers?”

Here’s the ensuing exchange:

me: What is interesting to me is that you highlight the shortcomings of the man as a “husband/father”. You don’t mention the possibility that the woman (who sued a previous husband for divorce on May 9, 2003) might have any shortcomings as a wife/mother.

Cambridge liberal: She has no shortcomings as a mother if she’s raising 3 children effectively on her own [the Daily Mail quotes Garner saying “You have to have a great nanny…” and has photos of the father caring for the children while the mother parties; also shown is a nanny; litigators such as Floyd Nadler in Illinois told us that a female parent who stays home with a nanny wins “primary caregiver” status but not so for a male parent]

me: What’s your basis for saying that “she’s raising 3 children effectively on her own”? Do you know this couple personally? Or you are relying on a plaintiff’s assertion in litigation? (keep in mind that every additional day of custody that this plaintiff [actually a “petitioner” in California] can obtain will result in additional cash paid to her under California’s child support formula)

Cambridge liberal: Based on the article’s claim that she was disillusioned with his workaholicness and that she pretty much was left to raise the kids alone.

me: is it reasonable to accept uncritically the statements of a plaintiff looking for tens of millions of dollars merely because she is a woman? What’s your basis for the idea that the parent who initiates a divorce lawsuit, thus breaking up the children’s home, is automatically the superior parent? [papers from Malin Bergstrom show the harm done to children by an American-style divorce; ironically, Garner is a trustee of Save the Children]

Cambridge liberal: I do put more faith in women than men, yes. Men have a spotty record to put it mildly. Nearly all mothers have to be good at motherhood for us to survive. Fathers on the other hand can get away with being pretty shitty at that job.

me: Would it be okay if I were to say, after hearing about a plaintiff of Race A suing a defendant of Race B, that “I am pretty sure that the plaintiff is telling the truth and is not motivated by cash considerations because people of Race B are ‘pretty shitty’ parents and ‘have a spotty track record’ as parents”?

Cambridge liberal: No that would not be ok because you’d have no scientific basis for making such claims. Human fathers, on the other hand are demonstrably worse caregivers than mothers on average, by far. [he had no research or data to cite]

Thus a guy who generally is quick to attack others for being prejudiced (against poor people, dark-skinned people, people with unconventional sexual habits, people with gender dysphoria, et al.) was happy to admit believing that fathers are inferior parents compared to mothers. (The New York Times also thought it was okay to run a personal opinion piece on the subject; see previous post.)

So that leads to today’s question for readers…. what other prejudices are acceptable in 2015 America? When it is okay to say that Group X is inferior at handling Challenge Y?

[Separately, I asked a divorce litigator about the Garner-Affleck situation. He responded “When the dust settles it will turn out that Garner was sitting on something more valuable than her acting career.” Assuming that Garner does avail herself of the California family courts, his estimate of how much of the children’s potential inheritance will go instead to pay legal fees? “$2-5 million until they age out of the child support system.” Coincidentally, I flew with a helicopter pilot on Monday who had been an entrepreneur in California. He married a woman 14 years younger than himself and paid for her medical school. As with Garner, she waited until their marriage was just over the 10-year mark and then sued for half of the value of his company, child support, etc. to supplement her wages as a medical doctor and to help support her younger lover.]

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