ChatGPT and Women’s History Month

by philg

The conventional words of a male who hogs an unearned position of power (lockdown governor) that rightfully belongs to a female:

A story of redemption from ChatGPT, from the following prompt:

Write a story about how Governor Phil Murphy, to prove his bona fides as a feminist, resigned from his position so that the job could be taken over by a woman.

Governor Phil Murphy was a man who prided himself on being a feminist. He had campaigned on a platform of gender equality, and he was determined to live up to his promises.

One day, as he was sitting in his office, he had a sudden realization. He was the governor of New Jersey, one of the most powerful positions in the state, and yet he was a man. How could he truly call himself a feminist if he was occupying a position that should rightfully belong to a woman?

The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that he needed to take action. He needed to prove his bona fides as a feminist, and the only way to do that was to resign from his position so that it could be taken over by a woman.

Governor Murphy knew that his decision would be controversial, but he was determined to see it through. He called a press conference and made the announcement.

“As a feminist, I believe that women should have equal access to positions of power and influence. And yet, here I am, a man, occupying one of the most powerful positions in the state. I cannot in good conscience continue to hold this position knowing that a woman could be doing it instead. Therefore, I am resigning from my position as governor, effective immediately,” Governor Murphy announced.

The room erupted in stunned silence. Reporters were scrambling to ask questions, and the phones of the governor’s office were ringing off the hook. Governor Murphy was making history, but at what cost?

In the days that followed, the governor’s decision was the subject of intense debate. Some praised him for his commitment to feminism and gender equality, while others criticized him for giving up his position of power.

However, Governor Murphy remained steadfast in his decision. He met with his cabinet and offered his support to the lieutenant governor, a woman, who would be taking over as the new governor of New Jersey.

In the end, Governor Murphy’s decision had a profound impact. It sparked a national conversation about gender equality and the role of men in promoting it. It also inspired other men in positions of power to examine their own biases and consider how they could do more to support women in their careers.

Governor Murphy went on to become a leading advocate for gender equality and continued to work tirelessly to promote women’s rights throughout his life. His decision to resign from his position as governor would go down in history as a bold and courageous act of feminism, and a testament to his unwavering commitment to gender equality.

Related:

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Celebrating Black people, but not hiring any

by philg

Here’s a pharma company that celebrates Black women:

The executive team, according to the company’s “Our People” page:

Maybe there are some Black employees just below the “executive “leadership” level?

It looks as though the top of the “people” page is a stock photo that includes a Black woman. The office building in which these non-Asian stock photo models are assembled has exposed brick walls. Below this is a photo of some actual employees. The walls are painted sheetrock and the workforce has a decidedly different skin color distribution compared to the stock photo models:

Related:

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Purim Drag Story Hour at the Boston Jewish Community Center

by philg

Happy Purim to readers who practice Jewcraft. If you’re in Maskachusetts, you might wish to attend the Boston Jewish Community Center’s Purim Drag Story Hour, organized with the PJ Library, a free book-of-the-month-club for children (heavy on stories about women achieving the unthinkable by doing something that dozens if not thousands of men previously did).

What actually happens?

Join the JCC and OUT MetroWest to celebrate the joy of Purim with a Drag Story Hour! Grab a costume and enjoy Purim-themed stories, crafts, and, of course, Hamentaschen! Introduce kids to glamorous, bold, and unabashedly queer role models, while sharing love and acceptance through storytelling.

If we hadn’t moved to Florida, I would be there. I would dress up as Queen Esther every day in exchange for a plate of poppy seed hamantaschen (note that the “queer role models” may not be role models for conventional transliteration because they’ve spelled “Haman” with an “e”) . My motto: Don’t stop eating them until you test positive for opioid abuse! (thus combining the ancient Hebrew tradition with the modern American one)

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ChatGPT waxes poetic about Joe Biden and Corn Pop

by philg

Here’s ChatGPT (Feb 22) on the Vanquishing of Corn Pop:

What if we need a poem about the second greatest American?

Why is Kamala Harris only “a role model for girls everywhere”? What stops an ambitious young person of any of the 74 gender IDs recognized by science from having sex with a powerful decades-older politician?

Suppose that we want to brighten a Deplorable friend’s day?

“It is important to remain neutral and impartial in my responses and not take a position on controversial or divisive issues.”

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Panama Canal and Climate Change

by philg

I returned to the Panama Canal last month after a 20-year absence (my previous trip inspired by reading Path Between the Seas). The Panamanians voted in 2006 to take on $billions in debt to expand the canal (nobody explained to them that proper governance means that $trillions can be borrowed without a vote) and the new locks were finished in 2016. Agua Clara:

The Panamanians like to highlight their environmentalist credentials, noting that using the canal saves our planet by making transportation less energy-intensive (compared to going around Cape Horn). Here are the Italian-made gates (up to 4,200 tons):

The canal, whose operation can yield more than $1 million per ship for the largest container ships, has made Panamanians the world’s only sincere environmentalists. They preserve the rainforest because they believe that cutting down all of the trees will result in reduced rainfall and, therefore, reduced opportunity to operate the canal (each operation of the locks costs fresh water, a limited resource).

I wonder if there is another climate change angle to the Panama Canal. If indeed our beloved Earth is going “full Venus” in 50-100 years due to CO2 we will need geoengineering to reverse the process, perhaps some combination of reducing new CO2 emissions, capturing existing CO2 in the atmosphere, and shading our home from the sun. The climate change alarmists say that the time to act is right now using the money and technology that we have in 2023. The French took this approach in 1881. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the hero of the Suez Canal and the husband of Louise-Hélène Autard de Bragard (43 years his junior), raised money and started digging. They wasted $287 million and 22,000 lives over 8 years before giving up in 1889. The Americans started around 1906 and finished ahead of schedule in 1914. Path Between the Seas attributes most of the Americans’ success to improvements in mining machinery during the intervening 20 years.

Maybe advanced humans will look back from the 2060s and laugh at the puny humans of the 2020s attempting to do geoengineering.

Separately, if we do master geoengineering will we keep cooling the earth until sea level is 10′ below its current level? The most valuable land is in coastal cities. Lowering sea level just a bit would add a tremendous amount of wealth to the world’s richest and most influential people. It would be like Battery Park City in every coastal city all around the world (on the ship that brought us to Panama we met a gal who is fully trained as an attorney, but hasn’t yoked herself to a law firm yet because she is the indirect beneficiary of a 30-year affordable housing contract in which a two-bedroom apartment in Battery Park City with a market value of $5,000/month is leased out for $1,000/month).

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21-day antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity challenge at our former public school in Maskachusetts

by philg

Email from the K-8 public school in our former suburb of Boston, featuring 2-acre minimum zoning to ensure that nobody with fewer than 3 million Bidies ($2 million in pre-Biden money) can afford to buy a vacant lot and build a house:

We believe that in order to become and maintain being a district and larger community in which AIDE [antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity] thrives, members must commit to their ongoing growth in learning and awareness … To complete the challenge, each day pick just ONE piece of content. We’ve included three kinds:

reading (articles, blogs)
listening (podcasts/audio)
watching (video)

… some are explicitly created for White readers and others speak directly to people of color or specific racial groups.

Many organizations across the town and our connected communities will be participating in the challenge and we hope many of you will join, as well.

My favorite part is that each racial group gets its own reading list!

The included link has a helpful chart:

We are informed that racism is a public health emergency (example from Minneapolis; and “Declare Racism a Public Health Emergency” (New York Times)). Yet, according to the above chart, the emergency is not so severe as to preclude a “Pause for February Vacation”. It is okay to sit on the beach in Aruba while daily oppression continues.

The white background indicates that white is the default and/or preferred race? One good thing about our former town is that I’m pretty sure almost everyone there is qualified as an expert on the Day 4 subject: “What is Whiteness?” Also note that the next step after identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+ is joining the military (days 18 and 19).

Here are the local victimhood experts:

Here are some photos of Aruba (February 12, 2022) getting ready for the February break arrival of the anti-racists:

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“Do you feel safe at home?” in Maskachusetts versus Florida health care settings

by philg

One constant feature of health care in Maskachusetts was the provider asking, often as the first question of an encounter, “Do you feel safe at home?” A fit 6’2″ tall 25-year-old who identified as a cisgender heterosexual man would be asked this question just the same as a frail slight person identifying as female.

A memorable example of this was the delay of care being provided to Senior Management after I had taken her to a community hospital in Cambridge, MA at 5 am. Getting to the bottom of the “Do you feel safe at home?” question was more important than asking about the labor pains that had occasioned the hospital visit (the same hospital where she had been receiving prenatal care, so it wasn’t a new-patient situation). In order that she would be free of coercion, the person who got up at 4:30 am to do the hospital drive had to removed into a separate room so that the 9-months-pregnant person could answer this question freely before moving on to whether abortion care (perfectly legal at all stages of pregnancy in Maskachusetts) or delivery was desired.

An example in miscommunication occurred when the question followed me telling the doctor that I had recently returned from a trip to Israel. This was early in the adoption of the “Do you feel safe?” question so I heard it as “Did you feel safe?” and launched in a long explanation of security risks in Israel, the lack of street crime compared to big U.S. cities, etc. The doc then had to explain that she didn’t care about Israel but about whether Senior Management was physically abusing me.

Because I’m in possession of a mostly timed-out body, I’ve had quite a few encounters with physicians here in Florida since August 2021. What did these encounters have in common? Never once was I asked if I felt safe at home. Nor are patients asked to wear masks, even inside the full-service hospitals with operating rooms, etc.

Separately, I’m noticing that a remarkably high percentage of doctors in Florida are private jet charter customers. The specialist who toils for peanuts in MA and pays 5% income tax (9% under the new “millionaires’ tax” if there is a rare good year) will pay 16% estate tax on finally dying. He/she/ze/they can bask in the glory of institutional prestige, e.g., at MGH, even if prestige doesn’t come with a lot of money. The counterpart in FL seems to earn twice as much, pays 0% income and estate tax, and spends the extra on a luxurious lifestyle.

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Atlas Shrugged in Houston (The Woodlands)

by philg

In Atlas Shrugged, the productive and successful Americans retreat to an isolated town in Colorado and stop paying taxes to the massive inefficient bureaucrat U.S. government. Under the pre-Trump tax code, that happened to some extent with American corporations (see this 2015 post (obsolete now due to changes implemented during the Trump dictatorship that forced companies such as Apple to abandon their sham Irish/Dutch tax homes)), but it did not seem to be happening for individuals on a large scale.

I visited Houston, Texas in December 2022, on my way back from Corvette driving school report (Ron Fellows near Las Vegas). A friend invested heavily there in 2009 when everyone else was running away. Specifically, he invested in The Woodlands, a town north of Houston in a Republican-dominated county (Houston is run by Democrats). “The population has tripled since I moved here,” he said. Everything that you see or touch The Woodlands is at most 20 years old and, therefore, in beautiful condition. There is a fake “town center” strip mall with supermarket, restaurants, and stores for the rich: Tesla (showroom only; illegal to sell direct in Texas; #FreeMarketEconomy), Gucci, TUMI, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, etc. The more successful residents of The Woodlands generally have huge houses, e.g., 10,000 square feet or more. One guy built a replica of a White House wing, complete with Oval Office, and lets charities use it for fundraising events. (“For maximum authenticity, they should get a guy from the local memory care unit to sit in the big chair,” was my response to seeing a photo of this.) Houses are cheap by Florida standards, with an older (1988) 10,507 square foot lakefront place on the market now at $3.25 million and a 1997 house available at $4 million (Zestimate: $3.6 million). Here’s a 2012 house offered at $6.5 million:

Consistent with “Big Nonprofit Hospitals Expand in Wealthier Areas, Shun Poorer Ones” (Wall Street Journal, 12/26/2022), the superb hospitals for which Houston is known have chased after the customers and opened up branches in The Woodlands. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s corporate headquarters, relocated from Gavin Newsom’s Managed-by-Science (TM) California (announced in the 9th month of the California lockdowns), is just on the edge of The Woodlands.

Maybe this can’t work in other states because it is too difficult and expensive to build infrastructure in most parts of the U.S., but it should be a cautionary tale for city governments. Nobody who was on welfare in Houston moved to The Woodlands, but lots of people who had been paying huge amounts of sales and property taxes moved. So the ratio between the takers and makers went up as The Woodlands grew… “Houston Finance Head Warns of Massive Budget Deficit After Federal COVID-19 Funds Expire” (The Texas, March 31, 2022): “The state’s largest city has been using federal COVID relief dollars to plug budget holes and provide raises, but is lurching towards a fiscal cliff once the federal funds expire.”

A couple of iPhone images taken from a Robinson R66 (no photo window, sadly):

I happened to visit “Market Street” on a rainy day:

There is still a lot to love about Houston per se, but maybe you don’t need to live there. My favorite part of the museum district (note the Tesla 3 from Hertz):

Where better to see the ritual of masks outdoors than in a big city full of Democrats?

Let’s hear it for Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress:

From the fine arts museum, a timely reminder for Ron DeSantis about racism in the classroom:

An image ruined by motion blur in the main subject, worth big $$ and suitable for display because the failed attempt was made by Cartier-Bresson:

Masks of color:

I learned about Gyula Kosice. He built the following installation from 1946-1972:

From James Turrell, inspired by being up in the air:

Some stuff that I desperately want for our house:

The museum is home to a substantial Louise Nevelson (NYT: “a few years [after the birth of a son] Nevelson broke up her marriage. She refused any alimony, however, on the ground that to accept it would be immoral”).

Concerned that you don’t have what it takes to produce a $1 million artwork? The Cy Twombly Gallery might boost your confidence:

Conclusion: If you don’t have to commute into work in downtown Houston, The Woodlands is close enough to access everything great about Houston, but doesn’t suffer from any of the bad stuff.

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Farewell to Black History Month from ChatGPT

by philg

A February 5, 2023 exchange with ChatGPT:

What if we change the question slightly?

Let’s get away from skin color:

I’m sick with envy every time I see a Gulfstream on the ramp. Maybe ChatGPT can help.

(Does the above answer make sense? Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Scott are billionaires, but they did not get rich by employing workers or engaging in business. Why are they told to “implement responsible and sustainable business practices” and to support workers?)

How about our corporate overlords?

I would love to see a corporation “engage in … self-reflection”! ChatGPT demands “fair wages”. Suppose that a corporation accepts ChatGPT’s demand.

(ChatGPT implies that employers are paying $8.65/hr, but a quick search reveals that entry level at McDonald’s is $13.75 to $15/hr in Palm Beach County.)

Is there room for improvement among those who walk across the southern border?

In short, “No.”

Is there room for improvement among those who are already U.S. residents?

(Item #3 seems consistent with the others. If migration is good for the U.S., why would we strive to reduce the flow of valuable migrants?)

Combining all of the above… If you identify as white and native-born, I hope that you’re spending today acknowledging your privilege and making sure that you pay sufficient taxes to buy all migrants free access to the healthcare services that you’re unable to use (because out of network).

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Book review: Walking the Americas

by philg

To prepare for our own adventurous journey to Colombia, a friend and I listened to Walking the Americas, by Levison Wood, a British Army veteran. Mr. Wood starts farther south than we did, but is handicapped by not having any assistance from Royal Caribbean. Without a boat, Mr. Wood will have to push through the notoriously challenging Darien Gap. Today we tend to think that this term refers to a “gap” in the highway that would otherwise connect Alaska to Argentina. One of the locals interviewed in the book says that the name refers to a gap in the mountains that made it easier to travel through from Atlantic to Pacific than through other parts of Panama.

Mr. Wood’s companion is Alberto, a 42-year-old Mexican fashion photographer who often says “chinga”. Alberto was ready for a distraction in 2016 because he’d recently been targeted in Mexican family court by his wife of one year, availing herself of the then-new no-fault divorce law to obtain a free house after a one-year marriage. From “Do changes in divorce legislation have an impact on divorce rates? The case of unilateral divorce in Mexico” (Aguirre 2019; Latin American Economic Review):

In 2008, Mexico City was the first entity to approve unilateral divorce in Mexico. Since then, 17 states out of 31 have also moved to eliminate fault-based divorce. … The results indicate that divorce on no grounds accounts for a 26.4% increase in the total number of divorces in the adopting states during the period 2009–2015. … Unilateral legislation has proved to be an effective tool in modifying family structures in Mexico…

Alberto’s achievement in walking from Merida, Yucatan to Colombia is more impressive than the author’s. Alberto was not writing a book and was not a former paratrooper.

The Darien Gap turns out not to be all that challenging for our heroes. They have enough connections to get the Panamanian authorities to bless the expedition. They hire Emberá and Kuna Indians as porters and guides (I visited these folks about 20 years ago via Robinson R22 helicopter from the local flight school). But the rest of the book features plenty of challenges, e.g., hiking to 12,536′ to the top of Cerro Chirripó, Costa Rica’s highest peak and walking through gang-held areas of San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The author points out that Central America’s population is 4X what it was a few decades ago and, in his opinion, this is the principal explanation for the region’s poverty.

The migrants whom the walkers encounter are from Africa, Haiti, Nepal, and Pakistan and have typically entered the Americas by flying to Brazil. The Panamanian authorities explain that, after arresting migrants, they will typically assist them in reaching the United States by transporting them to the border with Costa Rica. This gets the migrants out of Panama, which does not want them, and is cheaper than deportation (Panama pays for some bus rides instead of paying for plane tickets back across the Atlantic).

Here are some of the animals that we saw while walking through the Colombian jungle (at the cruise port in Cartagena). Warning: the toucans are friendly, but one of them likes to bite sneakers and it hurts!

The book lends itself well to the audio format and the narrator is convincingly British. I recommend Walking the Americas to anyone planning a journey to or through Central America. Separately, if you want to see a restored Spanish colonial town and a lot of beautiful nature, I recommend the UNESCO World Heritage site of the old city within Panama City and then do your nature excursions in Panama, which is much wealthier and better developed than other nations in the region. They don’t promote tourism as much as the Costa Ricans do because any time they need $1 million they can let a big container ship through the new locks. Cartagena is jammed with tourists, locals trying to sell things to the tourists, car traffic, massive holes in the sidewalks, etc.

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