Minneapolis in December

by philg

Having heard that politicians and bureaucrats in Minneapolis were handing out $1 billion to anyone who asked nicely, no matter how ridiculous the stated reasons, (NYT) I decided to head there in early December. Sadly, I didn’t find Tim Walz as easy a mark as Haji Osman Salad, Sharmarke Issa, and Khadra Abdi did, nor as easy a mark as 27-year-old Abdifitah Mohamud Mohamed did, and, therefore, I was compelled to slave away in a downtown office tower for three days. This is what I left behind (Palm Beach climbing out of PBI):

I arrived into a city where people need to be reminded to wear “bottoms” in the -7 degree temps:

(Shout-out to the folks who made the light rail system actually go into the airport and scheduled trains for every 15 minutes, even on a Sunday evening! (I love public transit almost as much as Ayatollah Mamdani and agree with him that it should be free! (so as to declutter our road system, designed for a country of 150 million people and now overwhelmed by a country of 350 million-ish))

The view from the office building where I worked included the Federal Courthouse and, just behind it, a marijuana store. In between, apparently, there used to be a strip club:

The fabulous Skyway system allows for a lot of urban trekking without ever being exposed to the harsh elements. This connects private and government buildings throughout the town at the 2nd floor level.

Senator Amy Klobuchar says that the hemp industry (a.k.a., marijuana, cannabis, or weed) is a cornerstone of the Minnesota economy (second only to diverting federal funds into the hands of young fraudsters?):

Consistent with Senator Klobuchar’s promotion, I was able to find marijuana for sale right within the Skyway system.

The only depiction of a heterosexual family that I found within the entire Skyway system:

(I asked Grok to analyze the above image, without saying anything about the races of the people in it: “Specifically for Black husband/white wife unions, studies show they have about twice the divorce rate of white husband/white wife couples by year 10, or a 44% higher likelihood overall compared to the national average.” ChatGPT and Gemini refused to speculate on this subject.)

I had to try the cuisine for which Minneapolis is best-known, i.e., Goat Biryani (“Tasty Halal goat meat served over aromatic biryani rice, topped with sautéed vegetables, raisins, and fresh herbs for a rich and satisfying meal.”) I also got a “Sambusa”, not to be confused with an Indian samosa, and they threw in a banana for reasons that were never explained:

This was at Mama Safia’s, a restaurant that was torched in the peaceful protests of 2020. NPR:

After dinner, it was time to visit LITT Pinball Bar.

In my peregrinations on the Skyway, I stumbled into a government building:

Note that the government takes the official position that it should spend taxpayer dollars on “disparity reduction”:

If Person A works 0 hours per week and Person B works 80 hours per week, it is the government’s job to try to make sure that they both have equal quality housing. If Person A played Xbox for all of K-12 and Person B studied then the government is required to spend money on getting A and B similar jobs (“Employment”).

To listen to public officials and local media in Minneapolis, the city is an integrated “community” of Somalis, white people with the federal checkbook, et al. That was the opposite of my experience. I never saw a Somali or Somali-American eating lunch with a white person in any of the dozens of Skyway restaurants that I looked into. I was the only non-Somali in the Somali restaurant. Everyone in the pinball bar was white. The Somali-American at the front desk of the office tower where I was working had so little connection to what went in the building that he couldn’t tell me if the tenant I was visiting was in his building or not, much less on which floor (the tenant occupies two entire floors of the building; the front desk guy had been on the job for 1.5 months). The two Somali Uber drivers that I had were unable to follow directions in English from the Uber app and took numerous wrong turns (this worked against their financial interest since Uber didn’t give them more money than the original quote). (By contrast, Uber drivers from Egypt and Ethiopia were able to follow the route. I never had a native-born Uber driver. My drivers were Mehad, Waleed, Hassan, and Abdihakim.) Consistent with Minnesota Compass data, in which two-thirds of Somali households had reported income of less than 200% of official poverty, I never interacted with a Somali in a job that would have disqualified him or her from taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone.

Speaking of people who are eligible for welfare… the public library is on the Skyway system and it is a magnificent building that also seems to double as a homeless shelter:

The library doesn’t celebrate excellence in writing, but rather diversity in writing:

To my delight, there was a magazine on how progressives who mouth land acknowledgments can put their words into action and actually give their land back to Native Americans:

For a city that claims to welcome Islamic migrants, the religion of Rainbow Flagism is surprisingly prominent. A “Be Proud At Your Library” rainbow library card is available, for example:

Within this vast array of Rainbow Flagism books, Has the Gay Movement Failed? from University of California Press was a standout:

He revisits the early gay movement and its progressive vision for society and puts the left on notice as failing time and again to embrace the queer potential for social transformation. Acknowledging the elimination of some of the most discriminatory policies that plagued earlier generations, he takes note of the cost—the sidelining of radical goals on the way to achieving more normative inclusion.

Rainbow Flagism is, of course, not the only religion covered by the library. Patrons can prepare for Kamala Harris’s favorite holiday with some featured books:

The library heavily features books on fascism, a timely subject now that the U.S. is under the boot of a fascist dictatorship (one that, nonetheless, the people who alert us to the fascism won’t flee; instead of moving to Canada, Mexico, Europe, or Asia, millions of Americans say that (1) the U.S. is governed by a fascist dictatorship, and (2) they are taking zero steps to get out of the U.S. and into a non-fascist democracy).

A couple of items for sale at MSP that relate to the handing out of $1 billion in taxpayer dollars that Americans outside of Minnesota had to pay:

A Follower of Science at the airport who chose to wear a respirator over a full beard:

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Ask Me About My Pronouns T-shirt not effective

by philg

We had a dinner guest from Manhattan the other night. In order to make him feel comfortable and at home here in Florida I wore my “Ask Me About My Pronouns” T-shirt from Target in Watertown, Massachusetts. I neglected to take it off before heading out on a neighborhood golden retriever walk and we happened to meet two relative newcomers to the neighborhood, refugees from Ann Arbor, Michigan. So I had a 20-minute conversation with them while wearing this shirt. During the entire time… they never asked me about my pronouns!

Ask Me About My Pronouns T-shirt
Ask Me About My Pronouns T-shirt from Target

Related… Happy National Pansexual Pride Day to those who celebrate.

Related… let me give a shout-out to Gretchen Whitmer for keeping our neighborhood property values robust. Because she made it illegal for this new neighbor to go into work he was able to keep his high-level job with a Detroit-area company despite having moved to tax-free Florida. Google AI:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer implemented some of the strictest and longest-lasting lockdown measures in the Midwest through numerous executive orders. These policies generated significant controversy, facing both praise for prioritizing public health and fierce criticism over their scope and economic impact.

Whitmer issued nearly 200 executive orders to contain the virus spread. The primary order was the “Stay Home, Stay Safe” order (EO 2020-21), effective March 24, 2020, which: Required all residents to stay home unless they were part of the “critical infrastructure workforce”; Banned all public and private gatherings of any number of people from different households; Ordered all non-critical businesses to temporarily close in-person operations.

In May 2021, Whitmer faced criticism and apologized after a photo showed her at an East Lansing restaurant with a large group, in violation of her own administration’s standing health orders at the time which required social distancing and limited table sizes.

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Self-driving cars will make piston-powered aviation even more ridiculous?

by philg

It’s International Civil Aviation Day (an odd day to choose when you consider what else aviation accomplished on December 7…). Let’s look at whether self-driving cars will make piston-powered aviation even less defensible as a transportation tool.

Last month I embarked on a day trip to Orlando for Free Play Florida. It’s a 2:15 drive from our house, nearly all of which is on roads that GM Super Cruise or Ford BlueCruise could handle as well as, of course, any of Elon Musk’s creations.

Much to my surprise, I was able to do this 150-mile trip via Cirrus SR20 in only a little more time than it would have taken, door-to-door, by car. The Cirrus was more fun, I guess, and saved me from the monotony of staying in a lane on Florida’s Turnpike for two hours (the autopilot handled nearly all of the enroute flying). Let’s look at the cost. Driving:

  • 300 miles round-trip at IRS rate of 70 cents/mile = $210 (and that’s the marginal cost for someone who already owns a car; day trips aren’t for the working class anymore, thanks to the miracle of coronapanic shutdowns that made cars cost more than $50,000 and the open borders that keep their wages low)

Flying:

  • I drove 50 miles round trip to the airport so that’s $35 at IRS rates
  • Two hours of Hobbs time in the old Cirrus round-trip at flight school rates (which include fuel) is about $1,000.
  • Three $20 tips, one at each FBO encounter: $60 (not required, but I enjoy saying the no-longer-ironic “This will pay for half of your next Starbucks” and, also, I like to reward people who go to work every day in what has become a work-optional society)
  • Rental car in Kissimmee (KISM) plus gas = $130. (Would presumably have been cheaper at MCO, but the general aviation fees there are higher.)

Piston GA is thus slower and about 6X the cost ($1,225 total). It was more fun because I interacted with some nice people at both Stuart and Kissimmee (other pilots, line guys, front deskers, the Go Rentals gal). Tesla FSD users say that they find the fatigue level from monitoring the self-driving system is only about one third of what is when actually driving. So the trip could have been done via FSD at the same fatigue level as a 50-mile-each-way excursion. Also, most Americans love to consume alcohol. More or less everyone at the Columbia restaurant in Celebration (Disney’s New Urbanism community) was drinking sangria and I could have indulged in a glass if I hadn’t needed to fly back later that evening (Grok says that I could have three drinks before getting close to the legal limit, but I’m a lightweight so my practical limit is one drink).

(Maybe alcohol will ultimately be banned in Celebration, though? In a 15-minute walk around the lake I observed at least three burqa-clad Muslims and I don’t know why they’d want their kids to see women in halter tops drinking margaritas at outdoor tables. There are plenty of dry towns in Maskachusetts. It would be tougher to implement this in Florida according to Gemini because FL Section 562.45(2)(c) prevents a locality from stepping on the state’s regulatory toes.)

Separately, I want to give a small shout-out to Signature (formerly “The Evil Empire”) for mostly keeping piston GA alive by waiving nearly all fees with the purchase of a minimal amount of 100LL at nearly all of its locations (not KTEB!). It’s an unwelcome economic event, I’m sure, when a piston aircraft shows up but Signature does a good job of hiding its disappointment.

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Harry Potter Pinball Machine Review (and the Free Play Florida experience)

by philg

I attended Free Play Florida in Orlando last month and the machine that everyone loved and wanted to play was the new Jersey Jack Harry Potter design. It has a fascinating and frighteningly intricate flow (I can’t imagine it being successfully maintained in an arcade and there were a few stuck balls). The lighting is much brighter and better than on some previous Jersey Jack designs where it is tough to follow the ball without strong ambient room light. The typical attendee was older, male, and white, but there were some kids and also some women (central Florida and, therefore, the nonbinary weren’t strongly represented):

Speaking of nonbinary, if you can overlook J.K. Rowling’s heresy against Science, i.e., her position that there is a distinction to be made between male and female humans, this would be an awesome home machine. I’ve never read the Harry Potter books and I can’t keep the movies straight, but I loved it!

On the flip side of the Jersey Jack world, they also had the Avatar machine. I thought the movie was dumb and the pinball machine is underwhelming. It ranks #32 in the Pinside Top 100 while Harry Potter is near the top (ratings for the CE version). There was never anyone waiting to play either of the two Avatar machines while there was always at least one person waiting to play one of the three Harry Potter machines. Speaking of waiting, there was no official policy but I never saw anyone play more than one game on a machine for which someone was waiting. It seems that in a society with shared values there is no need for an explicit rule. Everyone was super polite!

The Jersey Jack Godfather was also there. Although it is a great and still-relevant movie (Somalis in Minnesota seem to have been following “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns”), its underwhelming #70 ranking on the Pinside Top 100 seems justified.

What else happens when old white guys organize a convention? A classic computer area! Here’s an emulator for the PDP 11/70 that I used in 1978 as a Fortran programmer at NASA:

Lots of classic home computers as well:

And a luggable:

I would love to thank the person who built this enormous skee ball machine with 5-gallon buckets for the slots:

The convention featured pinball tournaments as well as a charity drive for Florida-based Project Pinball, which places and maintains machines in children’s hospitals nationwide. There were a moderate number of classic machines, but various commercial arcades have more and better-maintained collections.

The most unusual video game was this Jubeat rhythm game from Japan. You play against others around the world, I think, and log in using a Tokyo Metro card. The gal playing in this photo is an Orlando local who apparently loves Japan so much that she just happened to have a Tokyo Metro card with her. I played it and learned that I have no rhythm.

After the Sunday 4 pm wind-down for the convention, I zipped over to Celebration, a Disney-designed New Urbanism community. It’s only a few years older than our beloved Abacoa, but it seems uglier except for the lake. Here’s on example of the architecture:

As in our neighborhoods, they decorated for Christmas before Thanksgiving:

Some photos of the best that Celebration can look:

In a 15-minute walk, I encountered at least three women covered according to Islamic tradition, so that would make Celebration a better place for finding a Muslim community than Abacoa (I’ve never seen even a hijab, much less a burqa; teenage and adult females in Abacoa may wear short skirts, halter tops, bikinis, and other un-Islamic outfits):

Celebration has a distinctly non-Halal outpost of Tampa’s Columbia Restaurant, founded in 1903. Pork, bacon, and alcohol lurk everywhere on the menu, e.g.,

Finally, Happy Gazpacho Day to those who celebrate!

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Why don’t people on the other sides of frauds get fired?

by philg

We’ve read about a variety of frauds lately, some in the business world and some at the government trough. We hear about the fraudsters being sanctioned, but never the people who were responsible for ladling out the cash. Our first example happened at JPMorgan (source: Association of Certified Fraud Examiners):

In late 2021, JPMorgan announced they were acquiring Frank, a fintech startup founded by [precious female entrepreneur] Charlie Javice that promised to simplify the college financial aid application process. The company reportedly had more than four million users who used the app to help them navigate the complex and difficult process of applying for financial aid. However, by December 2022, JPMorgan filed a civil lawsuit against Javice, alleging fraudulent claims over the amount of customers Frank had. Instead of the around four million customers Javice reported, Frank had fewer than 300,000 actual users. Federal prosecutors then brought criminal charges in early 2023, and in March 2025, Javice was found guilty on multiple counts, including securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy charges.

The discrepancy was significant, as Frank had only about 7% of the users it claimed to have during negotiations with JPMorgan Chase. Evidence showed that Javice had actually hired a data scientist for around $18,000 to create synthetic user data, which was then presented to JPMorgan during the acquisition process as a selling point.

Wims Morris, a JPMorgan executive, relied heavily on Javice’s claims about user data.

How’s Wims Morris doing now? Her LinkedIn profile says that she’s now in charge of $88 billion in auto loans:

Next we go to the geniuses at BlackRock, in charge of $12.5 trillion in assets (mostly index funds?). “BlackRock Stung by Loans to Business Accused of ‘Breathtaking’ Fraud” (WSJ):

The lenders have accused [enricher] Bankim Brahmbhatt, the owner of little-known telecom-services companies Broadband Telecom and Bridgevoice, of fabricating accounts receivable that were supposed to be used as loan collateral. The lenders filed suit in August. They said Brahmbhatt’s companies owe them more than $500 million.

The lenders allege in their complaint that their investigation determined that every customer email Brahmbhatt-owned companies had provided to verify invoices over the past two years was fake. They also said they discovered fraudulent contracts from customers dating back to 2018.

In other words, it seems that anyone able to type “Please generate some invoices and customer emails for my hypothetical telecom company” into an LLM could collect $500 million from the smartest folks on Wall Street. A Google search for “BlackRock firings after Brahmbhatt fraud” yields zero relevant results.

The same lack of accountability can be observed in government. Somalis living in Minnesota managed to defraud taxpayers of more than $1 billion via various welfare program schemes (on top of the taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone to which two-thirds of Somali households in Minnesota are entitled by virtue of having over-the-table income lower than 200 percent of the poverty line (MNCompass)). It got to the point that even the New York Times was willing to implicitly criticize war veteran Tim Walz: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch”:

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness. … fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided. Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. … Ms. Hassan is of Somali ancestry, as are all but eight of the 86 people charged in the meals, housing and autism therapy fraud cases, according to prosecutors. A vast majority are American citizens, by birth or naturalization.

“The message here in Minnesota,” [Tampon Tim] Walz said, “is if you commit a crime, if you commit fraud against public dollars, you are going to go to prison.”

The worst part is not the $1 billion extracted from taxpayers who had to work extra hours to send money to Somalis and Somalia, but that people might mistakenly believe that Somalis, two-thirds of whom are entitled to every form of welfare (see above), aren’t “hardworking”:

“The actions of a small group have made it easier for people already inclined to reject us to double down,” said Abdi Mohamed, a filmmaker in Minneapolis. “The broader Somali community — hardworking, family-oriented, deeply committed to Minnesota — is left carrying that burden.”

Missing from the article: “Joe Bureaucrat was fired for not noticing this obvious fraud and ladling out more than one $billion in tax dollars.” Also missing… reader comments. The NYT disabled comments on the article from the beginning so that none of their readers could commit Wrongthink and erroneously suggest that Minnesota would be better off without enrichment by Somalis.

The Somalis who defrauded the white say-gooders of Minnesota weren’t Hollywood-style supervillains with IQs of 160. JPMorgan could have discovered precious female entrepreneur Charlie Javice’s fraud by making about 10 phone calls. Ditto for BlackRock and Bankim Brahmbhatt (believed to be back in India now after enriching the U.S. for enough years to obtain U.S. citizenship (FCC filings)). If nobody can be fired then what’s the incentive to perform basic due diligence?

Maybe I am out of step with the rest of humanity. For example, I would have imprisoned the Theranos Board, its attorneys, and anyone who invested other people’s money in Theranos rather than prosecuting and imprisoning Elizabeth Holmes. Believing that a Stanford dropout knew stuff that all of Europe’s PhD chemists didn’t know is criminal-level idiocy in my opinion! I would have sent Elizabeth Holmes out on a speaking tour (not a Hillary-style “listening tour”) where she could tell venture capitalists and money managers that sometimes credentials actually do matter.

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Venezuela is too dangerous for humans to occupy and also parents want their children to live in Venezuela

by philg

“Deported and Desperate to Be Reunited With Their Children” (New York Times, November 25, 2025):

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.

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Image creation in Gemini vs. ChatGPT and Grok

by philg

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.”

Gemini applying this for Mindy the Crippler:

ChatGPT does a comparatively crummy job:

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):

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The academic dream world in which high-income women seek energetic stay-at-home husbands

by philg

It’s National Special Education Day. Let’s look at the latest from the towering intellects of the Ivy League: “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too: Gendered Frictions in the Allocation of Home Production” (NBER with authors from Princeton, Penn, and a university in Chile).

From the abstract:

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:

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Meet at Art Basel in Miami Beach on Friday for lunch? Or breakfast in Miami?

by philg

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.

A prescient work by Christine Wang from 2021:

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Who’s in love with Gemini?

by philg

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:

Here’s a Yucca filamenta photo from a nursery:

What is the neighbor’s tree? Almost surely Coccothrinax crinita (Old Man Palm), an immigrant from Cuba:

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?

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