Tag: random

Real People

When I was in college, I went out to a bar with some friends. They had a friend, who had graduated a year or two previously, visiting; this guy came out with us. This friend-of-a-friend and I were sitting at a table while everyone else was getting a drink, and the guy said he wanted to meet a beautiful girl like me … but he doesn’t know how to approach one. What, he asked me, would be the best “pick up line”? To which I quickly answered “Hi, I’m Eric”. Why is speaking to a cute girl different than talking to any other human being?

I subsequently learned that, indeed, young attractive women are treated a lot differently — the sort of things people assume are acceptable make the 2005 ‘grab them by the pussy’ recording … well, not surprising. My office at the University had been a photography darkroom. It had two separate rooms — an antechamber and the darkroom part. A friend of mine and I were in the darkroom part, and she was on the phone with someone. Glenn, one of my work-study students came in to speak with me. Not wanting to interrupt her conversation, I asked him to come into the antechamber. He proceeded to back me into a chair, physically restrain me by sitting on me, and kiss me on the mouth. My rather loud entreaty for my friend to come into the other room was met with an annoyed “I’m on the PHONE”. Luckily she finished her call before the student got beyond unwanted kissing, and he backed off when he heard her walking.

And to people who say “but no one reported it happening, so it didn’t happen”. I didn’t report the student either — there’s no evidence. There’s nothing beyond my say-so. And I’m sure he’s going to say it never happened. And that’s a scenario where I at least knew the person. Random guys at a club who take similar liberties — how would that work? Gently move his hand from my crotch to the table, then ask for his name and number? Remove yourself from the situation, and make sure a friend stays close to you at the club — that was my realistic solution.

Loopholes

When Mitt Romney was running for President, I recall some disclosure about his 401(k) value — something like 20-100 million dollars. The guy was like 65 years old. Even if he’d started contributing in 1978 & dropped in the full 30k you could do at the time … that’d be 1.2 mil in contributions over the course of his lifetime. Which is an amazing rate of return if you factor in normal market performance over the 34 years. Contribution limits sure aren’t 30k per year anymore! How do you get tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in an account? You get a special class of stock priced at one penny, put in 15k worth of it (1,500,000 shares) into your 401(k). And then revalue the stock at 10$ a share. Giving you 15 million dollars when there’s a 15k contribution limit.

Donald Trump’s billion dollar loss (great business acumen, huh?) — assuming it was a legit loss (and I think we know why the guy gets audited every year. If he’s still carrying forward his billion dollar loss … he’s got something funky on each return that may well flag it for audit) and it’s actually debt (not just loss of value) — where is that debt? That’s what reminded me of Romney’s 401(k) … if you are dealing with internal funny money, can you then proceed to buy that debt for pennies on the dollar (I’ll sell you this billion dollars of debt for a mere million dollars) and then never attempt to collect it? The debt still exists, your earnings are tax free as they are offset by that loss … but really there isn’t even debt.

Tax End Run

Donald Trump’s massive tax deduction explains why he so wants to get rid of estate taxes — you can take depreciation on buildings *but* you get bit when you sell the property (if I bought it for 1 million, took a quarter mil in depreciation, but then sold the thing for 2 million dollars … your net gain is 1.25 million dollars). Or when you die and it goes through probate.

*But* if we get rid of the estate tax … then someone without financial need to sell their buildings can avoid taxes due to depreciation, hand the properties over to their beneficiaries without incurring tax … and, bonus, those beneficiaries can continue writing off depreciation against their earnings.

Non-solutions

This post takes as a priori knowledge (i.e. not something I necessarily believe to be true based on my experience) that white flight is still a thing – that African Americans primarily live in urban centers – and that these urban centers are an absolute wreck of violent crime and disintegration.

I’ll admit to being advantaged by a lot of implicit bias — I’m a grown up white person. A female, though … and a female in science/technology fields … so it is something I’ve experienced occasionally. The first major company for which I worked, a top-level manager in the IT org hired in a lot of his at-the-time girlfriends. The new girl showing up was assumed to be incompetent, and it is a lot harder to convince someone of your competence if they start out knowing that you are only here because you are sleeping with the boss. Frustrating, but nowhere near the level of “the cops got called when I was standing at my front door trying to find my key”.

My specifics don’t give me a lot of understanding of minorities who suffer implicit bias, racial profiling, and outright discrimination … but I cannot fathom how “stop and frisk” is meant to solve either problem. Even if 25% of the people who live here are degenerate criminals, 75% of the people aren’t. Statistically you spend a lot of time hassling innocents — who may well not consider it a worthwhile trade-off to eliminate one burglar.

The nearest analogy in my life-experience is DUI and seat-belt check-points. I remember being late to work one morning because a seat-belt check-point was on my route. Slowed down traffic quite a bit, stopped on the queue waiting for my turn. Plus it took a couple of minutes for the check itself (they were doing about the nosiest check-point I’d ever seen — basically taking as much time as they could to peruse the plain-sight contents of your vehicle, asking questions, etc). There’s a sanctity of human life argument that says that the potential to save one life has more weight than a hundred people being delayed for twenty minutes that morning. Which, as a one-off … whatever. How many times, though, could I be detained before *I* don’t care all that much about the life of some goober who intentionally refused to fasten their seat belt.

And there’s a difference between reducing and relocating crime. New York City got very “tough on crime” and was able to reduce crime significantly. But Philadelphia saw a dramatic increase in crime — NY didn’t stop people from committing crime, they just stopped people from committing crimes *in NYC*. I don’t see stop-and-frisk having the slightest chance of reducing crime. Relocating, sure, but not reducing.

Knee-jerk reactions

Companies for whom I have worked have blown many millions of dollars on knee-jerk reactions to bad situations. Some of the biggest expenses never even addressed the problem at hand — but the business directive was essentially that we had a big problem and needed to be seen spending money “fixing it” even if a more nuanced study of the situation and solution showed a complete disconnect. No one outside the company could even see the details of Project CYA, and everyone inside the company was complicit in perpetrating the belief that Project CYA did whatever you needed it to do today.

I appreciate the need to do something immediately, but it seems more sensible to me that the immediate action be a stop-gap solution to provide time for a more thorough review of the situation. One of the most egregious examples was a situation where an employee was terminated under bad circumstances, drove over to one of our retail stores, and asked to borrow the logged on computer of a sales guy. Who let him use it. The guy then proceeded to credit thousands of dollars to his friends’ accounts. We spent a year and quite a bit of money implementing an identity management system — one that had many benefits, but didn’t stop an employee from letting someone else use their already logged on terminal whilst they went back and grabbed a cup of coffee. My proposal was a termination alert & photo e-mailed to all employees working within X miles of the terminated employee’s location code be sent for a few weeks while options (beyond the obvious “don’t let anyone use your logged on terminal – log off & let them go in under their ID) were explored. It would have taken a day of coding, but we already have each employee’s photograph in the security system for ID badges, a feed of terminated employees, and a work address for all employees. Sure, not everyone is going to read the message right away … but someone in the store is apt to have read it in the two hours between the guy’s manager bringing him in for the unhappy talk and the guy’s arrival at the retail store.

Reliance on knee-jerk solutions was the biggest fault I saw in George W Bush’s governance — the “trust my gut” and “go with my instincts” methodology. Without the hubris to come along later and analyze how those instinctive decisions worked out.

Trump makes George W seem positively restrained and self-aware. Beyond his constant self-aggrandizing, self-serving tax and regulation policies, and middle school bully approach to inter-social relationships … I cannot fathom how this man will lurch from manufactured crisis (the Iranians gave us the finger!?!) to manufactured crisis (Some world leader won’t meet me on the tarmac, I’m going home) to real crisis (Russia invades the Eastern Bloc, Pakistan and India decide to nuke each other, manufacturing continues to collapse even after illegal duties are slapped on everything brought into this country, Iraqis object to our plundering their oilfields and a whole host of other countries who fear the same thing join their defense against us).

The price of an egg

Pricing can be amusing – I always thought the 6$ roasted chicken at markets is 3$ chicken with today as a sell-by date. Toss it and you lose money, cook it and you charge more for it.

We recently stopped at McDonald’s during a marathon shopping excursion (and hungry/cranky tiny people are *not* good shopping partners). Don’t know the menu, so we went inside to take our time ordering. Sausage McMuffin = 1.29$. Sausage McMuffin With Egg = 3.29$. Umm, an egg costs 2$? An entire *dozen* eggs doesn’t cost that unless you want the “free range” “organic” ones from a major chain grocery store. A dozen from the guy down the street (fully free-ranged hens, but not certified organic) only costs 2$!

I know that pricing is determined by perceived value and demand. And the cheap sausage/cheese/English muffin option is included in the tiny ‘value menu’ section while the expensive sausage/egg/cheese/English muffin option is a huge menu tile in full color with a picture so a lot of customers (especially those in the drive-through who may not feel comfortable parking long enough to read the entire menu) may not even know the other option exists. But where else does a single egg cost 2$?!

Deregulation

I’ve always believed anarchy was a wonderful governance methodology — for very small communities of highly intelligent, self-aware individuals. I do not find the methodology scalable.

Pure free market principals suffer from the same problem. The free market involves informed actors making rational decisions. Rational is the word that always stood out to me — how many decisions (purchasing or otherwise) are truly rational?

But a recent report regarding a study from before there were regulations about disclosing the source of a study’s funding highlights the “informed” component. How can you be an informed actor without regulations that ensure the “facts” are not being paid for by industry associations?

This isn’t to say I believe we limitless regulations to avoid the possibility of an individual making a poor devision, or that it wouldn’t behoove us to review existing regulations to determine if they are still sensible. But I cannot understand anti-regulation fervor.

 

Debate “Instant Replay”

This: http://www.salon.com/2016/09/13/an-open-letter-to-the-commission-on-presidential-debates-bring-on-instant-replay/

Like my proposal of allowing AMT-exempted tax deductible donations to departments of the federal government, the implementation would be a little tricky but the outcome incredible. There are well defined facts, questionable facts, and then “facts” that have some kind of spin. It would be difficult to stick to the well-documented facts (is some research paper published by a group who got funded by someone benefiting from the result of the research still a “fact”?). I think I would stick to opponent flagged comments too — having a limited number of wrong challenges discourages challenging every statement. But as long as your challenge is substantiated, it isn’t like you’ll find yourself halfway through the fourth quarter, fourth down two yards from the goal line, and unable to challenge a call.

Alternately candidates could be provided a list of their top n lies and told that any of these statements will be immediately challenged by the moderator. The FBI says you were careless … you can say you thought you were doing everything you could, but were found to have been careless. There are recordings of you supporting a war, you can say you changed your mind as new information came to light (why no one does this is beyond me – the “he was for it before he was against it” thing a few elections cycles ago seemed to have such an easy answer to me. I was not privy to all of the information the President had available. Based on the information we were provided at the time, I was for it. Now that new information has been made pubic, I have changed my mind) but you cannot just say you opposed it.