Across the United States, children have been left in the care of relatives and neighbors after deportations. In Venezuela, parents are clamoring for the return of their sons and daughters.
While some families have been deported together, many mothers and fathers have been landing in Venezuela without their children, setting off a diplomatic scramble inside the Venezuelan government to track down and repatriate the children.
Families clamoring for the return of their children have put almost all their hopes in Mr. Maduro. They have readily participated in government-led rallies in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, and recorded heartfelt videos shared on social media. In August, many families signed a letter to Melania Trump, the first lady, asking her “to listen to the cries of families.”
We’re informed that Venezuela (population nearly 30 million) is too dangerous for humans to occupy, which is why Venezuelans were able to claim asylum and Temporary Protected Status during the Biden-Harris administration (extended most recently on January 10, 2025, ten days before Joe and Kamala left office). At the same time, we’re informed that parents who love their children want their children to grow up in this place that is too dangerous for any human to occupy rather than in the cradle-to-grave welfare state of the U.S.
Separately, I still can’t figure out how any of this comports with the Constitution’s guarantee of Equal Protection or basic concepts of fairness and seeking to reduce inequality. In a Righteous American’s ideal world, a Venezuelan who was healthy enough to walk across the U.S. southern border is entitled to four generations of taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone. A Venezuelan who is too old, too sick, or too poor to make the journey is entitled to… nothing.
Advice from a guy who will be paying taxes to keep the Mamdani Caliphate running: “I would ask: “May I meet you?” before engaging further in a conversation. I almost never got a No.”
I hear from many young men that they find it difficult to meet young women in a public setting. In other words, the online culture has destroyed the ability to spontaneously meet strangers. As such, I thought I would share a few words that I used in my youth to meet someone that…
Grok is off in its own world (I could get it to use this puppyhood picture of Mindy the Crippler, but it simply ignored my request to use the one of the golden retriever standing on the windowsill of the minivan):
We document that female breadwinners do more home production than their male partners, driven by “housework” like cooking and cleaning. By comparing to same sex couples, we highlight that specialization within heterosexual households does not appear to be “gender neutral” even after accounting for average earnings differences.
Final sentence:
the next frontier of gender equality may be encouraging men to “lean in” at home, including teaching home production skills and changing norms about task provision from a young age. This will allow men to maintain competitiveness on the marriage market even in an environment where their labor market advantage fades
The PhDs who wrote this are saying that a man who is interested in doing a ton of housework will be pursued for marriage by women with great jobs, but it seems that they never met an actual woman with a great job who said “I want to find a good homemaker to be my stay-at-home husband”.
The absurdity of this idea becomes readily apparent when one considers the interaction between the authors’ ideas and the typical state’s family law and family court. The stay-at-home husband who gets tired of the hardworking middle-aged wife can sue her and collect alimony and child support in order to fund his new relationship with a young woman (or young women). She was the breadwinner and he is entitled to maintain his lifestyle after he discards her in favor of someone younger. From Massachusetts Prenuptial Agreements:
One case that we looked at involved a successful financial services industry fund manager. Due to the Wall Street-style checks rolling into the household, her husband decided to relax at home, watch the nannies raise the children, surf the Web, pursue hobbies, etc. As the wife was getting ready to retire the stay-at-home husband asked “Do I need this woman to earn more money?” The answer was no due to the fact that she was about to stop working. He then asked “Do I need her around to provide a stable environment for our children?” The answer was no because the kids were nearly launched. Did he need her to produce more children? It would have been biologically impossible due to her age. After a bit of litigation it turned out that, under the Massachusetts no-fault system, “I want to have sex with 22-year-olds off Craigslist” is as good a reason for a divorce as any. The husband got paid tens of millions of dollars down at the local family courthouse. Although he only netted half of the money that his wife had earned, his practical spending power had increased due to the fact that the wife, like a lot of self-made people, was a saver while he was a spender.
I find the paper interesting mostly because it shows the academic contempt for practical knowledge. They assume that American men without PhDs are behaving irrationally and need to learn from their intellectual superiors. Unemployed and low-income men who become champions at housework are going to snag hot wives who earn $500,000 per year because it will never occur to the $500,000/year women that they could be exposed to a family court lawsuit as soon as their hotness fades. That real-world American men aren’t pursuing the suggested strategy for “maintain[ing] competitiveness on the marriage market” doesn’t cause the academics a moment of self-doubt. They couldn’t even do a Google search, which would have yielded, for example, this Washingtonian article:
“What’s noteworthy to me is the fury of the women,” says Heather Hostetter, a prominent divorce lawyer in Bethesda who handles cases in Maryland and DC. “I just don’t experience that as much with men who are confronted with the fact that they have to pay alimony. And part of the fury relates to this idea of ‘What exactly am I paying for?’”
“It may be a shock to some women [because] they are not interested in supporting, nine times out of ten, what they call the ‘loser’—and that’s why they’re getting out of the marriage, because he’s a ‘loser,’ or he’s strayed, or whatever it might be,” says Cheryl New, a family lawyer who has been practicing in Maryland and Virginia for three-plus decades. “I think it is really hard emotionally for women to wrap their arms around this phenomenon.” Especially considering that in Maryland, Virginia, and DC, it doesn’t even matter how long (or short) your marriage was—you can still be made to pay.
One ex I spoke to told me that when she and her husband split four years ago, “he cleared the house out when he left. He took the TV, the china, my flatware. All of the things you would anticipate a man would say, ‘I don’t want this, you can have it.’ ” She pays child support and covers major bills for the kids—tuition, camp, insurance. “It’s a harsh reality,” as she put it. “I often look in the mirror and wonder whether this whole feminism thing backfired on me.”
These are the same folks who think that they can offer us practical advice on how to structure the welfare state (giving SNAP/EBT to 17 million in 2000 will never create 42 million SNAP-dependent Americans in 2025 (remember that there are additional federal food welfare programs so the number of Americans who receive taxpayer funded food is considerably larger than 42 million)), how we should change our lifestyle so as to reduce CO2 emissions enough to save our beloved Earth, how we can give every American unlimited medical procedures at a modest cost, and how we can have open borders without exacerbating what the same academics have identified as an affordable housing crisis, a working class wage crisis, a health care system capacity crisis, etc.
In case you’re wondering if it is only these three authors who have a blind spot regarding the family court exposure and the lack of any real-world women trying to find low-income stay-at-home husbands, here are all of the experts who assisted them:
We are grateful for useful comments from seminar and conference audiences at Brown, Harvard Business School, University of Michigan, Cornell University, Chicago Harris School, New York University, University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University, Arizona State University Applied Microeconomics, Barnard Economics of Gender Symposium, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics gender session, May Ridge Forum on gender economics, Society of Family and Gender Economics, New Advances in Family Economics Ravello, and Zurich Workshop in Economics and Psychology.
See also this hater who claims that men actually do more work once ensnared into a partnership with a female:
"Contrary to widespread belief, when you consider both paid and unpaid labor, fathers and mothers do similar amounts of work. In fact, on average, fathers do slightly more."
It’s Art Basel time again here in Florida. See Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Miami 2021 for some photos of earlier versions. Who wants to meet at the event on Friday for lunch? Please email philg@mit.edu with a subject line of “Meet at Art Basel” if interested. Alternatively, we can meet near my hotel for breakfast on Friday. Paying $2,000/night to be with all of the fabulous people in the heart of Miami Beach is a mere rounding error for me, which is why I’ll be across the Venetian Causeway next to Trinity Cathedral. I’ll be blasting back north via Brightline in the evening.
Gemini 3 has been out for a couple of weeks now. Who is finding it more useful than ChatGPT, Grok, et al.?
I gave a simple tree identification task to Gemini 3, ChatGPT, and Grok. All three failed the task with supreme confidence. A plants-only image classifier handled the task nicely and without any boasting based on the following images of a neighbor’s tree:
Here’s Gemini getting it wrong:
(It’s important to have cold-hardy plants here in Palm Beach County in case it gets slightly below freezing, as it did in 1989, or briefly snows, as it did in 1977.)
ChatGPT, “almost certainly” and with a convincing explanation:
Grok, asked “What tree is this?” answers that it isn’t a tree at all:
I can’t figure out why all three of these AI overlords did so badly. Yes, the plant classification web site has a smaller database of images to deal with, but given my prompt with the word “tree” in it why weren’t the general purpose AI services able to narrow down their search and do as well as a plants-only image database system?
Donald Trump made the news recently for ending the Temporary Protected Status for Somali migrants who live in Minnesota. USA Today (Reuters):
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Nov. 21 that he was immediately terminating the temporary deportation protections for Somalis living in Minnesota.
Trump’s move to remove protections for Somalis comes after years of targeting Somali immigrants in every campaign cycle in Minnesota since he first ran for president in 2016. The state has become a destination for Somali immigrants in recent decades dating back to the 1990s.
In the decades since the first wave of Somali migrants came to the state, Somalis have established flourishing cultural and business districts, sent their children to its colleges and universities, and elected leaders from their own communities to Minnesota’s city councils, mayorships, legislature and to the U.S. Congress.
(It’s an established journalistic fact that the districts are “flourishing”; household income for a typical Somali family in Minnesota was less than 200% of the poverty line (source), i.e., 2/3rds of Somalis in Minnesota were eligible for SNAP/EBT, Medicaid, public housing, and Obamaphone and, therefore, “flourishing” means “lifestyle funded by taxpayers”)
This will turn out to be just a few hundred enrichers, a fraction of 705 total (see below for nationwide data).
How many Somalis are there without Temporary Protected Status, i.e., Unprotected Somalis? About 20 million (i.e., the U.S. government takes the official position that Somalia is too dangerous for a human to inhabit and, at the same time, Somalia has one of the world’s highest rates of human population growth).
If we’re against inequality, how is it reasonable to anoint 705 Somalis as being worthy of protection and at the same time say that 20 million Somalis are not worthy of protection? If Somalia is too dangerous to inhabit, thus justifying TPS for some, why shouldn’t anyone currently in Somalia have the right to go to Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu and get on Turkish Airlines to take up taxpayer-funded residence in the Mamdani Caliphate? Here are some $2,855 flights from Mogadishu to JFK for Christmas Day (economy is available for $1,359, but presumably the U.S. taxpayer can afford to welcome Somalis in comfort and style):
Doesn’t a hatred for inequality require that we treat all Somalis equally, without preference for Somalis who are already here in the U.S.? Same question regarding other countries. Here’s March 31, 2025 data:
What’s special about 140 Lebanese in the U.S. that entitles them to TPS while 6 million Lebanese in Lebanon get nothing? Humans cannot survive in Cameroon, which is why the population has grown from 5 million in the 1960s to 30 million today (6X), so it makes sense that 4,920 Cameroonians are entitled to TPS. But why aren’t the remaining 30 million Cameroonians entitled to move to the US and enjoy TPS?
Happy Official Beginning of Christmas Season for those who celebrate. (I guess younger Americans think it is okay to decorate for Christmas even before Thanksgiving.)
Gretchen Wilson and lyricist John Rich in “Redneck Woman”:
And I keep my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long
It turns out that HOAs aren’t huge fans of this approach. Traditionally people get cheap strings of outdoor-rated lights and put them up themselves or hire professionals to do it for $thousands. The light strings then have to come down after New Year’s. The typical Florida house, however, is built with a lot of exterior light sockets. There are recessed cans underneath loggias, for example, and the typical house has plenty of loggias where people can sit outside in the shade. There will be some sort of front entrance light, perhaps coach-style lights with candelabra bulbs. There may be flood light sockets that can hold PAR38 bulbs.
Why not turn the house itself into the holiday light display? Replace all of the existing bulbs and recessed trims with RGB WiFi, Zigbee, and/or Thread bulbs? This is a report on our 2025 mostly-Govee solution.
We opted for an all-WiFi approach because we wouldn’t have to plug in a bridge, e.g., the one required by Philips Hue. Also, we have reasonably good WiFi coverage even outdoors thanks to TP-Link Omada (still going strong after 3.5 years, though it doesn’t even try to do most of the stuff that Unifi offers to do).
The front of our house has 6 candelabra bulbs that we replaced with Govee ($10/bulb). The 8 recessed cans we filled with Govee trims at $30 each. Govee, unfortunately, doesn’t make anything in PAR38 so we got Feit RGB WiFi bulbs at $15 each. For a table lamp inside we replaced a three-way bulb with a $20 Govee 1200 lumen RGB bulb. We already had some entryway recessed bulbs (BR40 and BR30) on the Philips Wiz system (their ghetto-level WiFi bulbs for people who don’t want to invest in Hue). I installed everything myself after borrowing a neighbor’s ladder for the floods and had it all connected up in less than two hours, including setting on/off schedules for each group of bulbs.
For a little more visual pizazz we indulged in two Govee light strips ($120 each for 100′) that we can hide in the bushes, but will likely have to roll up and store until next fall in order to keep them safe from the landscapers. These required some extra work because their power supplies aren’t waterproof so I purchased waterproof boxes from Home Depot. Finally, I tried to find a use for a 50′ string of Govee “permanent outdoor lights”, intended for under-eave attachment, that I’d previously tried out around a loggia in a failed experiment. These too have a non-weatherproof power supply.
The Govee app has a few built-in holiday schemes and, of course, lights can be infinitely customized by the patient or simply set to a solid color of one’s choice. Loyal readers won’t be surprised to learn how disappointed I was that there is no Pride festival scheme.
The Feit app is more basic and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have even a Christmas scheme. The Wiz V2 app is perhaps somewhere in the middle in terms of power/complexity. It probably makes the most sense to stick with either all-Govee or, if money is no object, Philips Hue.
How did it work out? The flood lights ended up being a mistake. A bright light of color (not a hateful “colored light”) pointing at the viewer’s face isn’t useful. We got plunged into a world of tech support hell with the WiFi Govee lights after an Omada outdoor access point failed and we let the TP-Link tech support folks in to change a bunch of roaming settings. The Govee lights don’t work well if the WiFi network is trying to be clever about supporting roaming and optimizing the access point selection for each device. Probably it is smarter to user Matter over Thread or Zigbee (Philips Hue) and thus have just one hub that is a WiFi client. Many of the Govee devices are compatible with Thread, though not fully controllable using their app via Thread.
Dear Readers: I’m headed to Minneapolis this week. Please email (philg@mit.edu) with a subject line of “Meet on Wednesday” if you want to get together on Wednesday evening. Perhaps we can meet at one of the coffee shops in George Floyd Square? It’s definitely safe after dark, right? Google AI:
George Floyd Square’s safety after dark is a complex issue with no single consensus, and opinions on it vary significantly among residents, business owners, and activists. … the area was often self-policed as an “autonomous zone,” and some residents reported that police and ambulances avoided the area, leading to increased crime, including fatal shootings and gang activity. Some nearby residents at the time reported feeling unsafe and experiencing ongoing trauma. … Police data from early 2025 indicated only a few isolated incidents of robbery, burglary, and gunfire over several months, suggesting a reduction in the previous levels of violent crime.
Robbery and gunfire only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and, therefore, at least “mostly peaceful”?
We are informed that the twin pillars of the Minnesota economy are marijuana (“hemp”) and harvesting federal welfare dollars (see below), but it is my comparatively boring life as a software expert witness that brings me to the city.
The hemp industry employs thousands of Minnesotans.
The new federal ban would eliminate jobs & pull the rug out from businesses operating under MN’s strong safety standards.
I am working NOW across the aisle to ensure states like MN can continue producing hemp & safe products. pic.twitter.com/1YVIe5A49I
I hope that none of the loyal readers of this blog went hungry yesterday.
Today is the 35th anniversary of the EBT system for food stamp benefits (later, “SNAP”). The Mickey Leland Memorial Domestic Hunger Relief Act was signed on November 28, 1990. Let’s have a look at inflation-adjusted spending on taxpayer-funded food:
We’re spending roughly 14X what we spent in 1970. What else has grown dramatically since 1970? The number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. is about 5.5X:
Suppose that Rahmanullah Lakanwal hadn’t shot and killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom nor shot Andrew Wolfe (currently in the hospital), as he recently did. How was admitting him and multiple family members to the U.S. under the Biden-Harris administration and granting him and his family permanent residence (asylum) under the current Trump administration supposed to make the typical American better off? We are informed that immigrants enrich us, but how specifically did Congress and federal bureaucrats envision that Rahmanullah Lakanwal was going to enrich us??
Separately, just a few hours after successful asylum-seeker Rahmanullah Lakanwal waged jihad in Washington, D.C., the United Nations reminded us that “Asylum is Life-Saving”:
Seeking asylum is a fundamental human right for people fleeing violence, persecution, war or disaster.
The same story makes it sound as though Rahmanullah Lakanwal loved marijuana and polygamy (“second wife”):
Mr. Lakanwal was part of that program and had resettled with his family in Washington State. … Muhammad, Mr. Lakanwal’s childhood friend, said he has last seen him a few weeks before the Taliban takeover in 2021, when Mr. Lakanwal came to Khost to marry his second wife. He had started smoking weed, Muhammad said, and ended up divorcing his new wife a few days after the wedding. Muhammed recalled that Mr. Lakanwal told him: “When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it, and it put a lot of pressure on his mind.”
Of course, there are quite a few U.S. states in which one can enjoy (“essential” during coronapanic) marijuana 24/7, but I’m not sure how Rahmanullah Lakanwal was going to earn enough to hang onto two female partners. I can’t find any story describing Rahmanullah Lakanwal as having a job.
Finally, let’s keep in mind that though Rahmanullah Lakanwal might end up with 100 U.S. citizen grandchildren (“with his family” implies that he came here with at least one wife and average total fertility rate in Afghanistan is around 5 (five children in a woman’s lifetime; not too many men become “pregnant people” in Afghanistan)) and Sarah Beckstrom’s genetics died with her, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Sarah Beckstrom and her hypothetical descendants were “replaced” by Rahmanullah Lakanwal (still alive) and his actual descendants.
Related:
Grokipedia on Omar Mateen: “Seddique Mateen, Omar Mateen’s father, emigrated from Afghanistan in the 1980s and became a vocal supporter of the Taliban, frequently expressing ideological alignment with the group through his YouTube program “Durand Jirga Show,” where he advocated for Islamist governance in Afghanistan and criticized U.S. interventions”
