Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The media are excited about Rachel Dolezal, who identifies as black despite apparently having at least some Caucasian heritage. This reminded me of a 1988 situation here in Boston. Here are some excerpts from a New York Times story:

Philip and Paul Malone are fair-haired, fair-complexioned identical twins who worked for the Boston Fire Department for 10 years. Last month both were dismissed when a state agency ruled that they had lied on their job applications: They had contended they were black.

In 1975, the Malone twins, now 33 years old, took the Civil Service test for firefighters and failed. But in 1976, according to their lawyer, Nicholas Foundas, their mother found a sepia-tinted photograph of their great-grandmother, who, she told them, was black. In 1977, they reapplied to take the test, contending they were black.

Philip Malone scored 69 percent and Paul Malone 57 percent, below the 82 percent standard minimum for white applicants, … The twins won appointments in 1978.

[Note that the litigation surrounding this dismissal seems to have lasted at least through 1995 (seven years), according to this appeals court decision. It would truly be an all-American story if the litigation had lasted for the same 10 years as their employment!]

I think the Rachel Dolezal situation raises the same issues as gay marriage. As I noted in this May 2015 posting, how can America be a land of equal economic opportunity if someone is denied the opportunity to profit from a divorce lawsuit merely because of sex? Much of the income that Rachel Dolezal earned was from jobs restricted to Americans who identify as “black.” Can we say that we have equal economic opportunity if not everyone who wants to be black can be black?

What do readers think? Is it unfair for Rachel Dolezal to call herself “black”? If so, is there “percentage of ancestry” test that would be an agreed-upon threshold for an American’s right to claim “black” status? How could such a law be written so as to exclude people descended from, for example, white South Africans?

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At a charity dinner on Saturday night I saw with a couple who had recently come to a rich suburb of Boston from Shanghai. The father had been home-schooled in upstate New York. He explained that he did whatever he wanted all year, including a lot of reading, and then spent two weeks each year cramming for an exam based on California standards that would show he’d learned everything necessary for his grade level (via these two weeks of work he was able to keep pace with students who physically attended public school in California for nine months). In Shanghai the children, age 5 and 11, had attended an international school that was so demanding the parents had to stay up tutoring until 11 pm some nights. Public school in the Boston suburbs, by contrast, is so easy that the children don’t need any after-school help. However, the mother now has to spend nearly all of her time managing household affairs. “We had three people to help us in Shanghai,” said the father, “but here just weekly cleaners.”

[How is it possible for an adult American to need to spend full-time maintaining a 20-year-old house? I got some insight into this the other day. The contractor’s favorite HVAC subcontractors installed a new A/C-heat pump system in our house last fall. Last week was the first hot/humid weather for Boston this year. Immediately there was a flood of water coming through the ceiling. I brought in my old HVAC contractor who explained that there are four drains on an air handler. One task for the installer is determining which drain is at the lowest point and hooking up the drain line to that one. Our unit had its highest drain hole connected to the line. There is a safety pan underneath the air handler that is supposed to catch any water that drips and, via a float switch, shut down the air handler. In some installations, however, there is a second drain line connected to a hole in the safety pan. If you intend to rely on the float switch you plug up this hole so that the water will actually trigger the float switch instead of spilling out into the attic. This hole was not plugged. Finally it is important to have a float switch compatible with the air handler. Flipping the float switch upside down did not actually shut down the system. So the original contractors did not do any of the three steps related to drainage correctly, nor did they test their own work.]

[Update: Here’s a photo from a fairly new luxury hotel in Cambridge (Le Meridien) showing the quality of local labor:

]

 

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Greece is in the news due to its imminent insolvency (can something be “imminent” and yet drag on for many years?). There is talk of money that Greece is supposed to pay creditors but also talk about bailout funds that the IMF and other countries are supposed to be giving to the Greek government. But what is the cashflow in this heavily indebted country? Is the Greek government still spending more than they collect in tax revenue, in which case presumably there must be a net inflow of cash? (let’s assume that Greeks themselves are smart enough not to lend money to their own government) Or is the Greek government no longer engaging in deficit spending and therefore they are paying down their sovereign debt, but just not as fast as creditors were promised?

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Check out Boston.com for an article about trying to take a Tesla on a day trip to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire (340 miles round-trip). They spent most of the trip worry about range and more than three hours of the trip shut down for charging. What about doing all of the recharging with renewable energy? WSJ has an article about a $2.2 billion solar-thermal electricity generating plant whose input of cash ($1.6 billion from taxpayers) was presumably at least as much as budgeting but whose output of electricity is only 40 percent of the expectation.

Good reminder for engineers that sometimes the TED talk works better than the final system…

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Aviation readers: Our two full-time helicopter instructors reached 1000 hours and were able to get jobs flying jet-powered helicopters. We filled one opening with one of our own graduates but need to hire a second full-time instructor (about 600 hours per year in the Robinson R44 per CFI) at East Coast Aero Club. Please email resume if interested.

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Today’s Investor’s Business Daily has an interesting chart in an article on U.S. economic freedom compared to what prevails in other nations worldwide. If you’re not diversified into foreign stocks, this chart should provide some motivation…

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Michael Sandel is a Harvard professor famous for teaching thousands of undergraduates, mostly from rich families, about “justice.” Semyon Dukach, one of our Boston-based software entrepreneurs, was recently tapped to be opposite Sandel on a public radio talk show (link; the amazing novelist Marilynne Robinson is also on the show (I recommend Gilead)). Sandel decries the use of market ideas in U.S. society, an extension of the course where he encourages Harvard undergraduates to aspire to make millions of dollars by working at the Clinton Foundation instead of tens of millions of dollars by working for J.P. Morgan.

Of what value is this philosophy to someone who doesn’t have a Harvard degree or come from at least an upper-middle-class family? Most people who work in a local Walmart, McDonald’s, or Department of Motor Vehicles rather than at J.P. Morgan did not make that choice affirmatively. What can people who live and work in a town without a global non-profit organization do after learning that the righteous path is to work for a global non-profit organization? Or consider Angelika Graswald, the Latvian immigrant who had to decide whether to sabotage her fiance’s kayak and collect $250,000 in tax-free life insurance immediately or instead to get pregnant and collect $872,796 in tax-free child support over a 21-year period from the guy. How are Sandel’s philosophical musings relevant to her?

Is it fair to say that Sandel is a philosopher only for the rich? And, if so, can a philosopher for the rich be considered an important philosopher?

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Seventy-two-year-old Tim Hunt, the English Nobel Prize-winner, was forced to resign a professorship after some public comments. This has gotten a lot of press due to the number of people who enjoy thinking of themselves as smarter than a Nobel laureate. Let’s benchmark Hunt’s career-ending statement against Kleiner Perkins’s experience employing Ellen Pao:

Tim Hunt	Ellen Pao at KP
Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab
You fall in love with them	Married partner wants to have sex with her
they fall in love with you	She wants to have sex with married partner, assuming that he will leave current wife and children.
when you criticise them, they cry	When you criticize her, she goes to court for “$16M. Shake that pu$$y!” (reader comment on February 2015 post, though it was later reported that Ellen Pao was seeking an additional $160 million in punitive damages)

Would it be fair to say that Kleiner Perkins incurred roughly $10 million in legal fees and a lot of aggravation to confirm Hunt’s hypothesis, at least with respect to this particular “girl in the lab.”?

[Update on the Ellen Pao case: the unsuccessful plaintiff now seeks $2.7 million to cover some of her legal fees and costs (cnet) in exchange for waiving her appeal rights against Kleiner, which presumably already incurred at least $10 million in legal fees and expenses. Coincidentally this is the amount that Pao’s husband owes in legal fees for one of his lawsuits and also the amount that the IRS is trying to get out of him (link from post about the total litigation generated by the Pao-Fletcher team). Will she get her fees paid? “You get your fees paid if you’re a female family court plaintiff,” said one litigator, “but having a vagina doesn’t get you a free lawsuit in other venues.” (see previous post about how Ellen Pao would have fared in family court)]

More productively, the Hunt case provides some guidance for universities struggling with how to get rid of old tenured faculty. The original concept of tenure was paired with a mandatory retirement age, e.g., of 65. Such age-based mandatory retirement is now prohibited by federal law and schools have discovered that it is not rational for highly paid and unproductive professors to retire. Being on campus is like being at a lively cocktail party. Why trade that to sit home alone?

Tenure doesn’t mean job security, however. A friend who is a physics professor at UC Berkeley points out that he “can be fired for any reason, except incompetence.”

A lot of older professors hold beliefs that aren’t in sync with current political dogma. People who were “liberal” in the 1970s would be called “reactionary” today. At Harvard College, 96 percent of professors support Democrats (Crimson). It should be easy to winnow out a lot of older professors simply by exposing their failure to keep pace with evolving concepts of what it means to be “liberal” or “Democrat.” Get out a video camera and ask a series of carefully crafted questions:

• Can you list five ways in which Caitlyn Jenner is an important positive example for America’s young people?
• Do you think that child support payments following a one-night sexual encounter should be larger than the after-tax income from going to college and working? (or indeed, your own paycheck from the university?)
• Why was Bobby Jindal wrong when he said “we cannot measure success [of Obamacare and other programs] by how many people are dependent on government.”?

Eventually one of these oldsters will probably say something sufficient to justify termination on the basis of creating a hostile environment, etc.

Related:

• “Women in Science” — why women can probably find better jobs than replacing Tim Hunt

 

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Classical music nuts who live in Boston (esp. South End, for example): Who wants to help with http://www.convergenceensemble.org/home/ (also see the Facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/pages/Convergence-Ensemble/1564601347111675?fref=ts )? This is an organization offering chamber music concerts centered around Dorchester. A longer-term goal is to run chamber music concerts in schools. They have a great slate of musicians, composers, and teachers (see this page), but are short on everything else that makes a successful nonprofit. Email me if interested!

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The Silk Road web site resulted in a life-without-parole sentence for its developer.

Here are questions for readers:

1. would the operator of a site such as Silk Road have an edge in finding out the identities, locations, addresses, etc. of people buying and selling illegal drugs?
2. if the answer to 1 is “yes,” why wasn’t something like Silk Road set up by the FBI and DEA, run for a few years, and then the database used to round up people who’d been breaking the law?

 

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