Colorado Income Tax Falls From 4.63% to 4.5% In 2020

Democrats passed legislation in 2019 reducing the Colorado state income tax temporarily to 4.5% from its current 4.63% flat rate, for the year 2020.

Meta: This is post 365 between this blog and its sister blog for 2019, a posting rate of 1 blog post per day.

Quote of The Day

Comics are sort of wild, because you have to understand acting and be able to draw that acting.

- Shawn Lenore (December 31, 2019). 

Wither China?

China presents serious paradoxes for conventional wisdom in both political theory and economic development. Here are some scattershot reflections on it.

On one hand, China has experienced immense rates of economic growth, year after year, without, so far, a really serious recession, and with huge infrastructure investments. It has built thousands of miles of high speed rail lines, major hydropower installations, and thrown up many cities as big or bigger than Denver in a blink of an eye.

Many countries have experienced the "demographic transition" associated with a shift from having a "Third World" economy to a developing one, with far fewer children per woman per lifetime. But, no other country has done so in such a forced, rapid and pervasive manner. Many countries have seen mass migrations from rural areas to urban ones to support economic development, but few have done so in such an intentional manner.

China's military has grown immense in scale and technology, almost despite itself. Unlike countries like Israel or North Korea, China's mobilization of active duty and reserve military personnel is not particularly intense relative to its population, nor are its defense expenditures relative to China's GDP. But, when you have roughly four times the population of the United States and an economy that is growing by leaps and bounds lifting more people out of poverty in the last generation or so than the rest of the world combined, that still adds up to lots of sailors and soldiers, and lots of advanced military equipment. It isn't that China has been particularly ambitious in its military build up either. Until the last decade or so, China's military technology, while sufficient to make it a "near peer" of the United States, has lagged behind the cutting edge of the United States, Japan, Western Europe and Russia. China doesn't really have a "blue sea navy" and is trying merely to be regional power militarily, not a global policeman that isn't designed to fight medium sized wars many thousands of miles from home for prolonged periods like the U.S, Russian, British and French militaries.

Chinese Communism diverged early on from the style of communism found in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In some ways, it was even more pervasive and disruptive of prior institutions than Soviet style communism. But, it was also more conscious of public opinion, less bureaucratic and established a loose approximation of Western style market based capitalism in its economy much sooner than the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did.

Soviet style communism collapsed dramatically in the matter of a few years, and also immediately converted from a system of state managed enterprises to the kind of oligarchic, ill regulated developing economy that i more characteristic of Latin America or South Asia. Organized crime surged at that same time, built on the records of decades of unavoidable corruption to circumvent state institution mismanagement of the economy in the Soviet era. And, the long term effect have been a devastating and prolonged recession so bad that deaths of despair, especially among men, have surged so much that life expectancies have plummeted.

In contrast, China's economy has been transforming gradually since the end of the Cultural Revolution (basically since about 1980). It now has property rights, but they are weaker and less absolute than elsewhere in the world, for example, with very weak protections from exercises of eminent domain. Corruption is pervasive, but, to a great extent this corruption is firmly entrenched in the very fabric of mid-level to senior level executives in business and government alike. Break neck economic growth, with an emphasis on construction, manufacturing and mining in ways that have leapfrogged intermediate stages of technological innovation by copying progress previously made by others, has allowed poor decisions in the financial sector and in business management to go unpunished as a rising tide lifts all boats.

But, unlike elsewhere, where economic growth has led to more transparency and firmer rule of law, and to greater freedom of expression and political rights, in China, the pervasiveness of heavy handed government control of the media and private political, academic, social and religious expression would put the world of 1984 to shame. China has somehow managed to do that without squelching economic growth, despite the fact that unlikely most totalitarian regimes, China's economy is not predominantly based upon the exploitation of natural resources and instead requires broad based enthusiastic and relatively decentralized efforts for a large, skilled and semi-skilled domestic urban labor force.

China has also taken rather draconian steps to reduce ethnic diversity among its ethnic minorities who are small percentage-wise but large in absolute number and approach genocidal levels.

Meta Footnote: This is the 9,750th combined post at this blog and its sister blog, Dispatches From Turtle Island.

New Colorado Laws In 2020

The following ten new laws each take effect in Colorado on January 1, 2020 (most laws take effect on July 1, in Colorado, so these are the exceptions to the general rule, something that is usually done when preparation to comply administratively is needed):

HB19-1177: Extreme Risk Protection Orders 

Better known as the red flag law, this was one of the most contentious items to arise from the 2019 legislative session. This bill essentially allows a judge to temporarily seize the weapons of someone deemed a threat to themselves or others. Dozens of counties around the state, including Weld County, have passed resolutions declaring themselves second amendment sanctuary counties, meaning they don't plan to enforce the new law. . . . Per the language in the red flag law, it requires that courts develop a standard petition form by January 1, 2020 -- and that law enforcement develop their policies by that same date.  It also means that families and law enforcement agencies can petition the courts for extreme risk protection orders beginning in 2020.  

HB 19-1267: Out-of-network healthcare services

This law seeks to prevent medical providers from sending so-called “surprise medical bills” directly to patients ... which involves patients who visit facilities in-network with their health insurance nevertheless receiving unexpected out-of-network medical bills. 

HB 19-1039: Identity documents for transgender persons 

This new law eliminates the need for a transgender individual to obtain a court order in order to get a new birth certificate. It also lets people obtain a new driver’s license or state identification document if their gender identity is different from their birth sex. 

HB19-1267: Penalties for failure to pay wages 

Under this new law, employers that fail to pay wages or meet the state minimum wage can now be charged with theft – something that can range from anything from a petty offense to a felony. Previously, employers convicted of refusing to pay wages would be guilty of an unclassified misdemeanor. 

HB19-1014: Retail food establishments inspection and suspension 

This bill modifies provisions of the Food Protection Act in the following ways:- It clarifies the definition of “imminent health hazard”- Removes the minimum amount of a civil penalty and sets the maximum at $1,000- Creates a new civil penalty process for inspection violations- Requires the system to communicate inspection results only be revised through the triennial stakeholder process.

HB19-1210: Local government minimum wage 

This law allows local governments to establish a minimum wage for people working in their jurisdiction. Previous state law prohibited local governments from enacting minimum wage laws separate from those of the state. Under the new law, local governments are limited in how the minimum wage can increase: either $1.75 per hour or 15% of the state’s minimum wage, whichever is greater. Colorado’s minimum wage will increase to $12 per hour starting on January 1, 2020.

HB19-1328: Landlord and tenant duties regarding bed bugs

This bill requires tenants to notify landlords about potential bedbugs as soon as possible, and that landlords must inspect the offending units within 96 hours of receiving notice. In addition, landlords are responsible for all of the costs associated with mitigating bed bugs.

HB19-090: Peer-to-peer motor vehicle sharing program

This bill establishes regulations for peer-to-peer car sharing programs. These programs – like the Turo app – essentially let drivers rent cars directly from their owners for a fee. The legislation requires record keeping for transactions in these programs, emergency numbers for roadside assistance and insurance coverage.

HB19-1283: Disclosure of insurance liability coverage

This bill requires that car insurance customers and their insurers disclose information regarding automobile liability insurance coverage to individuals making claims. This information includes the name of the insurer, the name of the insured party, the limits of the liability coverage and a copy of the policy. Failure to do so could result in damages of $100 a day beginning 31 days after this information is first requested.

HB19-1086: Plumbing inspections ensure compliance 

This bill changes the requirements for renewing and reinstating plumber licenses. For instance, beginning on May 1, 2021, persons renewing their plumbing licenses need to have completed eight hours of continuing education for every year that has passed since their last renewal. It also mandates the State Plumbing Board adopt new rules for continuing education requirements and standards by July 1, 2020.

From 9News.

Wrapping Up The Year And Looking Back

I am five blog posts away (between this blog and its sister blog with a little more than half the content at Wash Park Prophet) from a goal of 365 blog posts this year. This is on the low side compared to my posting rate in previous years, but still definitely very active as blogs go. 

A lot of the decline is due to shifting my creative output to Facebook and to posting questions and answers at several forums on the Stack Exchange network. I've probably made over 2,000 posts at Facebook for the year, where I am primarily a "Social Justice Warrior" (ignoring comments and "likes") and I also try to recognize the birthdays of each of my 1900ish Facebook friends. I am the number three contributor (in the world) at Law Stack Exchange, and a leading contributor at Politics Stack Exchange, in addition to participating at a lesser level at several other stack exchanges.

I've scanned at least 95% of the arXiv pre-prints posted in 2019 in the areas that I follow: astronomy, general relativity, high energy physics experiment, lattice physics, and phenomenology. I have bookmarked all of them that are interesting into several categories: "Physics" (basically everything that doesn't fit anywhere else), "Higgs boson", "muon g-2", "lepton universality violations", "Standard model constant measurements", "Neutrino physics", "Hadron physics" (basically quantum chromodynamics and nuclear physics), "Gravity" (including dark matter, dark energy, and astronomy), and "Matter creation" (including baryogenesis, leptogenesis, and nucleosynthesis). The most interesting that I've had time to write about ended up in about 85 blog posts at the Dispatches from Turtle Island blog.

I will have published 10,000 posts between these two blogs sometimes in the second half of 2020, about 15 years after this blog was started.

After many years of reading 40-50 books a year, 2018 was a total dud with only a handful of books read. But, in 2019, I am on track to read at least 12 books, with 30 pages to go in book number twelve (FYI, I count an entire manga series no matter how many volumes it has, often a dozen or more, as one book). 

I have six dead tree books (not all started in 2019) and nine e-books (two started in 2019, two started in 2018 and five started in 2017), in addition to the one that I'm almost finished with, that I am partway through reading and have't entirely abandoned (I usually give up if I have a long period of interruption after reading less than about 70 pages the first time). I probably won't finish more than twelve books this year, however, because the next three days are busy ones in turns of paying legal work.

I also journal regularly in bound paper journals and started my current one on January 1, 2019. I have five pages left to fill and three days to do it in. I'm not sure how many pages it has, but I'm guessing about 250.

I also write fiction for the desk drawer and have written about 18 pieces, a combination of sketches, scenes, story outlines and chapters, for perhaps a combined 100 pages or so, but not any publishable complete short stories or novels. I'll write at most one more before year end and probably not even that.

I've given several continuing legal education presentations this year accompanied by about four or five sets of written course materials.

I've read about 100 webcomics on a regular basis, some more faithfully than others, at some point in the last year. Some publish as often as three times a week. Others publish only every month or two. Most take hiatuses from time to time as well, and several have run their course and ended this year. I abandoned about half of them after falling hopelessly behind after an anniversary trip to Greece for a week and a half preceded and followed by intense work demands to make up for the absence.

I don't keep close track of my movie and TV series habits. But, of course, this year, I finally finished, 42 and a half years later, the nine movie core Star Wars series I've also seen the two stand alone feature films, many episodes of the animated Clone War series, a few episodes of the Mandalorian series featuring Baby Yoda, and I've read a few of the Star Wars universe books. I spent the early years of my love for fantasy and science fiction books trying to recreate the awe and wonder that Star Wars provided, until it became a life long habit.

I've also tried to wrap up several half-finished series I've been watching on and off on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and Disney Plus. There are a lot of these.

I've very much enjoyed listening to music on Spotify, including a lot of pop musics from Japan, Korea, India and Mexico. It has become very good at predicting what I will like in its customized music lists for me.

There Is An Active Modern Slave Trade From Uganda To The Gulf Monarchies

We don't need to wait for a dystopian world to arrive. In parts of the world it is already here.

The story quoted from below make a very credible case that a modern state slave trade between eastern Uganda and Persian Gulf monarchies, mostly involving women duped into thinking they are getting work as maids or servants (including involuntary organ donation), is something that it really happening now and not just a myth or a conspiracy theory. 

Enslaved Ugandans who complain in the Gulf states end up dead or grievously injured as punishment in incidents unconvincingly purported to be accidents (16 in the last year according to a Ugandan parliamentary report). 

The story doesn't talk about U.S. efforts to address this situation, because there have been none. The U.S. currently prioritizes trade with oil rich Middle Eastern monarchies over democracy or human rights.

When Christine Nambereke left Uganda for Oman last September, she hoped she was on her way to helping her husband and seven children fight crippling poverty. An agent had promised the 31-year-old a job as a housemaid with a monthly pay of 600,000 shillings ($168). But when she reached Muscat, she was sold as a slave. And when she returned to Uganda in early May, she was dead. 

Nambereke, from Bumbo village in eastern Uganda, is among 16 Ugandans who’ve died in the Middle East over just the past year, according to a parliamentary panel report from April this year. These women — all of whom died unnatural deaths after complaining of abuse — are just the most extreme examples of a growing epidemic of an increasingly open, modern slave trade that starts in Uganda’s eastern region and culminates in closed rooms in Gulf nations. 

***  

And for some, even death doesn’t bring closure. . . .  After 22-year-old Shivan Kihembo died in Oman in October — months after she had been sold there — her father, Patrick Mugume, was asked by his daughter’s “owners” for money if he wanted her body back. “I sold my land … and sent it to her boss in Oman before the body was released,” he says.  

***

Like Nambereke, Kezia Nalwanga returned to Uganda from Oman dead in April, with medical reports indicating that she died by strangulation. Authorities are also recording cases of abuse from countries where Ugandans are legally allowed to work such as Jordan, Juliet Nakiyemba died at the age of 31 in October. A postmortem showed her kidneys had been removed prior to her death.

*** 

When Zubedah Nakitende complained to her Jordanian employers that her hands were aching from work, her boss gave her what she thought was water to wash her hands. It turned out to be an acid that ate up her fingers. Unable to work anymore, she was sent back to Uganda — where she had to have her fingers amputated. “We should support such girls when they come back so that they go back to normal life,” says Sophia Namutebi, a respected philanthropist and traditional healer who helped Nakitende. “We should also support families of those who die while there.’’

Abuse of migrant workers in these countries from Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia has been around for years, and slavery was officially abolished in the last two or three decades of the 20th century in these countries, but reality has lagged behind the laws on the books.

One of the most stunning aspects of this is that authorities have been powerless to shut down this open illegality.

At fast-spreading weekly markets, some women are promised jobs in the Gulf only to be sold once they get there, while others — many of them girls between the ages of 10 and 18 — are directly and publicly “bought” as slaves in Uganda and then resold in the Middle East, according to Ugandan authorities, Interpol, independent experts, legislators, victims and their families. 

The public sale of women started at Arapai, eastern Uganda’s second-largest market located 180 miles northeast of the capital Kampala, in January 2018, says Edina Nagudi, the local government’s officer in charge of the region’s markets. It began with the auction of around five girls on each day of the market, but the number rose to 20 within two months, she says. The practice quickly spread to other regional markets such as Chapi and Sire. At Arapai alone, up to 50 girls are now auctioned in a day, says Nagudi. Overall, more than 9,000 girls and young women are estimated to have been bought at these markets since last year — for as little as 50,000 shillings ($14), according to Betty Atim, a member of Parliament. 

Interpol . . . has been able to rescue only 12 Ugandan women over the past year. 

* * *  

Given the blood and toil that ties them, one might expect close relations between Uganda and Gulf nations. But Oman, Jordan and Kuwait don’t even have embassies in Kampala. 

* * * 

[W]hat’s different with Uganda, experts say, is the openness with which women are being auctioned in markets alongside domestic animals and household goods. 

At the cremation ceremony for Nambereke, much of the anger of hundreds of mourners was directed at Ugandan authorities. Officially, Uganda has banned its citizens from seeking work in most Middle Eastern countries — barring Saudi Arabia and Jordan — because it doesn’t have any diplomatic agreements on workers’ rights with those nations, says Uganda’s minister of gender Janat Mukwaya. 

* * *

Uganda has a per capita income of $604, so Nambereke was promised three times what the average citizen earns. It’s also no surprise that the markets where illegal traffickers find women they can dupe or buy are predominantly in eastern Uganda. It’s a part of the country that has seen far lower poverty reduction than other regions, according to the World Bank, with electricity available to only 6 percent of families, compared to 32 percent in the country’s central region. To get around the ban, traffickers take the women across the border into Kenya after fixing up their passports, and then fly them to the Middle East. 

Because they’re traveling to countries they’re barred from legally working in, even those women who initially went thinking they were getting employed are scared to try and reach out to authorities, experts say. And their host countries — in a region not known for its defense of human rights of migrants — have little incentive to prioritize concerns for these slaves over those of nations that legally send workers there. And so the slavery mounts — as do the deaths. 

* * * 

Some, like Stella Namazzi, who escaped from her masters in Jordan, return with tales of horror. “We were lined up in a big room,” she recalls. “Those who wanted to buy us came and pointed out who they wanted to buy. We were sold as if we were domestic animals.” For the traffickers, there’s big money involved: The women bought for $14 are sold for as much as $10,000 in the Middle East, authorities say. 

* * *

But what about prevention and law enforcement? 

Uganda police spokesman Fred Enanga says they plan to raid the eastern Uganda markets where girls are being sold and arrest both the sellers and the buyers. John Mugisha, the probation officer in Uganda’s Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, says they’ve sent an investigation team to the country’s east to probe the slave trade. The ministry, Mugisha adds, has also requested a budget of 34 billion shillings (nearly $100,000) to help tackle the growing crisis and rehabilitate the children bought in the markets. 

Meanwhile, the government is passing the buck around and hasn’t been able to stop the practice. Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Henry Oryem Okello says the ministry of labor needs to act to arrest traffickers. Mugisha says the ministry of labor has asked local governments to step in with legal remedies. And the country’s labor commissioner, Lawrence Egulu, concedes that Uganda’s law against human trafficking is routinely violated but has no clear answer as to why the government hasn’t been able to put a stop to it. 

From Godfrey Olukya at OZY.

CFA Franc System In Trouble

In my opinion, the CFA Franc system has been a very positive contribution to Africa that has been a largely untold story. Monetary policy is an inferior tool at best for economic management, and the risk of corruption or incompetence in the central banking systems of these countries has been immense from 1945 to 2019 and continues to be.

A good counter-example is Latin America, which actually has a larger pool of competent civil servants to run their respective currencies than most members of the CFA Franc system, but in which almost ever country has at one point or another, frequently several times, experienced bouts of incredibly harmful hyperinflation due to mismanagement of monetary policy.

"Established in 1945, the CFA franc is used in two African monetary zones, one for eight west African countries and the other for six mostly petro-states in central Africa. Since 1999, it has been pegged to the euro, giving the member states monetary stability while supporting trade with Europe. 

In return, the members have to keep half of their foreign reserves in France, on which the French treasury pays 0.75 per cent interest."

A French official sits on the board of the regional central bank in both zones, and the currency is printed by France. Here is more from David Pilling and Neil Munshi at the FT. The French don’t like the optics it seems, and not all of the African nations benefit from losing the option of devaluing their currencies. The nature of the replacement system, however, is not yet clear. 

As an aside, occasionally you will meet people who claim this system costs the African nations hundreds of billions of dollars a year, through some kind of under-specified colonial imperialistic theft, combined with Junker fallacies I believe. You can file that one under “Big Time Conspiracy Theories That Most Americans Are Hardly Aware Of.” But I am, and it ain’t true: “…the current deal was actually profitable for the two African central banks because bank-to-bank credit is attracting a negative interest rate of -0.4%, but the central banks are receiving 0.75%.”

From here.

The Root Cause Of Asylum Seeking At The Mexican Border

The Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan think-tank, explains in a nutshell, why we have seen a surge in asylum seekers at the Mexican border with the U.S. (the murder rate in the U.S. in 2018 was 5.0 per 100,000 population).

Fleeing the Northern Triangle

More than half a million people from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras fled north in the first eight months of 2019, double the annual total in prior years. Many of them are seeking asylum from brutal violence, entrenched corruption, and grinding poverty in their home countries.

Quote Of The Day

You can say this in response to someone who asks you too many questions and then starts guessing, instead of waiting for an answer, perhaps to goad you into saying anything.

From here.

Quote Of The Day

From here.

Vox's Twelve Best Social Science Papers Of The Decade

1. “Free Distribution or Cost-Sharing?” (2010) by Jessica Cohen and Pascaline Dupas 

giving away anti-malaria bednets for free dramatically increases their usage relative to charging a small, nominal fee. 

2. ”Using the Results from Rigorous Multisite Evaluations to Inform Local Policy Decisions” (2019) by Larry Orr, Robert Olsen, Stephen Bell, Ian Schmid, Azim Shivji, and Elizabeth Stuart 

you can’t just take average results and expect that the same effect will hold in your specific case. 

3. “Understanding the Average Impact of Microcredit Expansions: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of Seven Randomized Experiments” (2019) by Rachael Meager 

Meager wrote a more accessible summary here)  

Does a study conducted in one place generalize to other places? Does say, distributing bednets for free work well just in the parts of Kenya where Cohen and Dupas did their experiment, or does it work in all malaria-affected countries? Will a charter school chain that appears to deliver higher test scores in Boston work in Houston? This is exactly the problem that paper number two above found to be so serious in education policy: results don’t always generalize.

Meager’s paper is groundbreaking because it offers a way to predict how well study results will generalize. “The relevant question is not whether the effects vary across settings but by how much they vary,” she writes in her summary.

So Meager uses techniques from Bayesian statistics to measure how much the results of a specific intervention — microcredit or microfinance programs for the global poor, of the kind offered by groups like Grameen or Kiva — vary from study to study. She doesn’t have a huge number of studies to go on (only seven) but she’s able to use this method to find that the effectiveness of microcredit varies a bit, but not a huge amount, from place to place. That suggests our evidence on microcredit is reasonably externally valid: The results in a new location are likely to resemble the results in past locations pretty closely, if hardly perfectly. 

4. “Does School Spending Matter? The New Literature on an Old Question” (2018) by Kirabo Jackson 

In this review (ably summarized here for folks without NBER access), Jackson walks through 13 recent papers, many coauthored by Jackson himself, that use highly rigorous near-random methods to measure the influence of money on school outcomes. . . . does pouring more money into public schools improve outcomes? — and the answer, Jackson finds in the research base, is yes. I previously thought per-student funding didn’t matter much; I now think it matters a great deal. 

5. White Backlash: Immigration, Race, and American Politics (2015) by Marisa Abrajano and Zoltan Hajnal 

White Backlash is one of those books published before the 2016 elections that started to feel sharply prophetic as Donald Trump won the Republican nomination and then the presidency. Three years after the defeat of Mitt Romney led to speculation of a new durable demographic majority for Democratic presidents, Abrajano and Hajnal presented a detailed, quantitatively rich counterargument. 

6. “Democracy for Idealists” (2016) by Niko Kolodny 

It’s easy to construct a narrative in which democracy in the United States is eroding. Kolodny, one of the leading political philosophers currently working on questions of democratic theory, quietly posted an article a couple of years ago walking through this literature and trying to determine what, exactly, should trouble us about it and what shouldn’t. Voter ignorance is not a dire threat to democracy, he argues, nor is a lack of “responsiveness,” which he convincingly suggests is an incoherent ideal. What worries him most are concerns about the distribution of political influence: the fact that some Americans’ access to political influence is far greater than that of other Americans. This concern agitates toward an expansion of suffrage and toward resisting efforts to suppress the vote. But it makes our concern with practices like gerrymandering harder to articulate. 

7. “The Coalition Merchants” (2012) by Hans Noel 

If public opinion doesn’t determine the future of public policy, as the studies limned by Kolodny suggest, what does? Noel tells a compelling story that places “coalition merchants” — party activists, sympathetic journalists, and other ideologues — at the center, deciding “what goes with what” and what it means to be a conservative or a liberal. intellectuals like William F. Buckley and groups like Americans for Democratic Action were crucial in identifying support for government services with support for civil rights. 

8. “Valuing the Vote: The Redistribution of Voting Rights and State Funds following the Voting Rights Act of 1965” (2014) by Elizabeth Cascio and Ebonya Washington 

Washington’s paper with Cascio tells a more hopeful story, of what can happen when a disadvantaged ethnic group is finally given suffrage in an authoritarian regime. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did a huge amount to break up the one-party states that prevailed in most Southern states after the end of Reconstruction, states which some scholars have likened to single-party dictatorships abroad. In doing so it gave black voters, and black communities as units, power over the provision of public goods that they lacked before. Cascio and Washington found that this shift produced meaningful changes, and in particular, a marked increase in government spending. They also offer some suggestive evidence that much of these transfers went to education spending, which (as the Jackson review above suggests) likely improved the quality of instruction for black students. 

9. “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” (2018) by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie Jones, and Sonya Porter 

You’d have to actively try to avoid including a paper by Chetty, Hendren, and the rest of the Opportunity Insights lab at Harvard on a list like this, given how much they’ve taught us about economic opportunity, segregation, higher education, and more (I have a big soft spot for Chetty et. al. on Danish retirement savings accounts).

Some of the findings are depressing but unsurprising: Black and American Indian children born into upper- or upper-middle-class families are nearly as likely to fall to the bottom fifth of the income distribution as to stay in the top fifth. Upward mobility for children born into the bottom fifth of the distribution is markedly higher among whites than among black or American Indian children. 

Others are depressing but surprising; conditional on their parents’ income (a big conditional, to be sure) black women outperform white women in terms of their individual earnings. This does not mean there is no income gap between white and black women (black women’s parents, after all, make a lot less on average than white women’s parents) — but it does provide strong evidence against both family structure-based and genetic explanations of racial inequality in the United States. 

10. “Cluelessness” (2016) by Hilary Greaves 

The choices we make have unpredictable consequences that ripple out for centuries or millennia, by affecting life and death. Greaves does a great job of explaining cases where this kind of cluelessness is fine (where we can just make our best guess as to which action will work out best) and in which cases it’s really, really troubling. 

11. “Occupy Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism (And Why They’re All Wrong)” (2012) by Charles Mills 

he does not, as some Marxists and other radicals do, reject the liberal tradition wholesale. While he acknowledges and emphasizes the explicit racism of figures like John Locke and Immanuel Kant, he nonetheless has tried to develop what he calls a “black radical liberalism” that can overcome these origins. . . . he provides a stirring defense of traditional liberal values — like protection from unnecessary state encroachment on individual liberty — as necessary for racial justice. “Liberalism’s failure to systematically address structural oppression in supposedly liberal-democratic societies is a contingent artifact of the group perspectives and group interests privileged by those structures, not an intrinsic feature of liberalism’s conceptual apparatus,” he writes. 

12. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (2017) by Virginia Eubanks 

Eubanks studies three specific algorithmic systems currently used by state and county governments in the hopes of making service provision more efficient. The opening example, of Indiana’s botched eligibility system that wound up wrongfully denying access to Medicaid and food stamps to thousands of people, is pretty straightforwardly awful. But the examples of Pittsburgh’s algorithm for evaluating the severity of child abuse and neglect cases, and Los Angeles’s system for determining which homeless people should receive housing assistance, are subtler and in some ways more eye-opening. 

The LA system, for instance, seems to mostly work well — except that it masks the extent to which the city’s problem is structural (a lack of housing supply and crucially a lack of funding for permanent supportive housing) rather than an issue of rationing better through better algorithms. The Pittsburgh system helps remedy a very real problem of limited child and protective services resources for addressing cases of abuse, but because the algorithm is poorly designed and is predicting the wrong variable, it risks criminalizing poverty in certain cases. 

It’s an early example of the harms that misaligned AI can cause as deep learning becomes more and more capable in coming years, and a reminder of what can go awry when politicians mistake technical solutions for political solutions.

From Vox (omissions from original not all noted editorially).

Wealth Likes Company

High income families enjoy living in wealthy cities more than poor cities because they can buy more interesting things and have more choices. 

Relative to low-income households, high-income households enjoy 40 percent higher utility per dollar expenditure in wealthy cities, relative to poor cities. Similar patterns are observed across stores in different neighborhoods. Most of this variation is explained by differences in the product assortment offered, rather than the relative prices charged, by chains that operate in different markets.

Link here Via Marginal Revolution. 

Tyler Cohen On Big Projects Worth Doing

Tyler Cohen at Marginal Revolution has a lot of very good ideas about things to study and do. I list the headings below:

More studies of super-effective people. 

A comprehensive analysis and critique of the NIH and NSF. 

Why is life expectancy so long in Hong Kong? 

Bloomberg Terminal for everything. 

A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system. 

Better answers for how to quantify worker productivity. 

What should Widodo do? (Ten page plans for economic development in countries).

A comparative study of foundations and their efficacy. 

Institutional critiques. 

Cultures of excellence. 

Regeneration at the government layer. 

IQ paradox. 

Credible plans for new top-tier universities. 

Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields. 

Mechanisms for better matching. 

What should Durkan do? (Ten page plans for urban development).

Quote Of The Day

I hate that she's given me no way to defy her -- my boldness is just as pleasing to her as my compliance.

- Amy Ewing in "The Jewel". 

Russian Military Still Hollow

Superficially and on paper, Russia's military is a close rival to the U.S., but its readiness and capabilities sometimes don't live up to  naive expectations.

Russia's only aircraft carrier, Admiral Kuznetsov, caught fire on Thursday morning during repair work in Russia's Arctic Sea port of Murmansk, according to Russian state news agencies. Six people are thought to have been injured and one person is believed to be missing so far, Russian state news agency TASS reported. 

The fire broke out during maintenance work in the first power unit and a thick plume of black smoke was seen from the upper deck. The area currently ablaze covers 120 square meters (1,292 square feet). Diesel fuel is currently burning, and firefighters are using foam to try to bring it under control.

From here.

Quote Of The Day

Challenge the findings of an investigation? Absolutely legitimate. Spin the parts that are good for your side? Everyone in politics does that. But to say up is down, day is night, apples are vegetables and baseball is played by horses on a chessboard? No. That’s not part of a healthy democracy.

Via Fully Myelinated. 

Lawsuits And The Alternatives

A really good lawyer, like the one in the webcomic excerpt below, for a high powered client, considers alternatives to bringing lawsuits that can solve the client's problem, in this case, a tabloid article contains nude locker room photos of our female protagonist that has made her wealthy boyfriend and her very unhappy. 

It also illustrates how important the cost and speed of litigation is to the manner in which disputes are resolved.

From here.

Quote of the Day

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

- Thomas Hardy

What Were They Thinking?

The Nissan Kicks (replacing the all wheel drive Nissan Juke), the Toyota C-HR, and now the Hyundai Venue, are all new "subcompact SUVs" (Kelley Bluebook calls them "SUV-lets") with front wheel drive only.

What were they thinking? Why bother creating a front wheel drive only SUV type vehicle?

I guess it makes sense for the California and Hawaii markets. But, for those of us who live in places that get serious snow, and who sometimes drive on dirt roads that turn to mud, this is insanity and an oxymoron of the worst kind.

Psychic Detective Yakumo

There are basically two kinds of love stories. In one, more than one person competes for the other's love. In the other, one person proves to someone who is hard to love that they are loved and can be redeemed. The second kind is uncommon. But, told well, it can be the best kind of love story.

Snuck away behind the mystery and supernatural elements, Psychic Detective Yakumo is an epic love story of the second type, which is why the series of novels have had two manga adaptation, an anime adaptation, a live action TV adaptation, and a stage play based upon it. 

The Limits of Diversification

Diversification only reduces risk if the risks are accurately quantified and not correlated with each other.

Quote of the Day

Wealth is careless -- so around it, you must be careful.

- John Green, "Turtles All The Way Down" (2017).

Disabling Drones By Disabling Their Eyes

Protestors in Chile and Hong Kong have used personal laser pointers to take down or disable drones monitoring the protests.

I've also been pondering another way to disable drones of all kinds by impairing their sensors inspired by the fact that the performance of my backing camera on my car is greatly impaired when I've driven through dirty, wet snowy roads that leave a thin layer of mud all over the lens.

What if you used spray paint, or hurled a fine mist of mud, or shot a paintball gun at the sensors of a drone? It would seem to me that this might be sufficient to take it out of action, and also to force soldiers within manned vehicles reliant upon cameras to target its guns or operate it, to get out of the protective hull to keep the vehicle fully operational.

What I'd Like To Have In A Future Social Media Platform

Consider this my request for proposals for Facebook® 2.0 (no claim to the trademark is made here, this is purely nominative use):

* I'd like a platform that doesn't show you the same post over and over again, even if it is shared and reposted (even months later), or at a minimum, minimizes repeat posts to just show the person posting it and new comments and content.

* I'd like a platform that clearly displays when linked material was published and gives old news lower priority without completely censoring it. At a minimum, it should prevent material that was breaking at the time but is now old news from appearing suddenly new.

* I'd like a platform the automatically flags and attaches to linked material sources debunking the link as fake, or including subsequent developments about events reported in the linked material.

* I'd like a platform that allows you to "bookmark" posts that you see for future review and reference without having to share them which can appear to endorse the posts or let the public know you are interested in something that you'd prefer not to advertise without having to read it right then.

* I'd like a platform that automatically makes a first shot at categorizing posts you've expressed interest in by subject matter. Posts could have more than one category. For example, a post about today's school shooting in Santa Clarita might have one "Santa Clarita November 14, 2019 shooting" category, and another category about mass shootings or gun violence. The categories would be personalized based upon cluster analysis of content you've responded to, posted or shared.

* I'd like a platform whose spelling checker has a larger vocabulary.

* I'd like a better way to review archived material.

* I'd like an ability to back arrow to the exact page you were on previously rather than seeing an updated version of that page that might not have what you were just in the middle of reading and accidentally clinked away from.

* I'd like a platform that automatically "yellow flags" posts and comments from people with a history of being the kind of people you unfriend, downrate, etc., but doesn't censor them unless you choose to do so.

* I'd like a platform that automatically shows you something describing the credibility and bias of sources of linked material, which you could manually adjust (e.g. maybe one to five stars that have a color from red to purple to blue reflecting their bias or white if unknown).

* I'd like a platform that automatically yellow flags potential friends who seem spammy or like fraudsters.

* I'd like a platform that allows you to flag a few categories of ads (not all of them, I recognize that they have to make money) that you'd prefer not to see.

* I'd like a platform that promptly (but accurately) resolves cases of two accounts for the same person, one real and one fake.

* I'd like a platform that allows two or three links that have a preview page in a post, rather than just one.

* I'd like more fine tuned control over what I am notified about. I usually don't want to know that someone reacted to a post or comment, but I do want to know if there is a comment that I might want to react or respond to.

* I'd like for there to be an easier way to retroactively change privacy settings for large numbers of prior posts at once.

* I'd like it to be fairly easy to deactivate features like the "Your Story" feature in Facebook. 

* I'd like a feature that you tell you, at least when you have a large enough number of friends, how many have unfollowed you and how many you actually reach with your posts.

* I'd like a way to sort posts with links from posts without links (both my own and other people's).

* I'd like a feature that stops a repeat loop GIF after a certain number of loops, unless you manually choose otherwise.

* I'd like a feature that translates non-English text embedded in an image.

* I'd like a feature that allows you to manually nudge your feed to have more or less or some kind of content without making an all or nothing rule about it. Hence, maybe you'd like more cat videos and fewer political posts, but don't want all of one and none of the other.

* I'd like direct messaging that don't involve "winks" and allows you to filter out or deprioritize direct messages targeted at lots of people at the same time.

* I'd like a platform that doesn't flag Wikipedia links as spam and trigger content filters for them.

* I'd like to be able to globally deactivate image hiding features designed to protect people from seeing gross or violent or not safe for work content, even though I think it is a good feature to have in the system.

Feel to add your own suggestions in the comments.

You Sunk My Battleship

Preface

People who make military policy and amateurs who follow it alike are in something of a vacuum when it comes to naval warfare.  While the Navy is a very large share of the United States Defense Department budget, there have been so few skirmishes in the past fifty years or so that it is hard to get a reality check on the multi-billion dollar expenditures involved. The few incidents which have occurred, meanwhile, have taken on disproportionate importance.  

While some naval history is too distant to be of much use, from the ramming battles between glorified rowboats of the Greeks, to the days of sails and cannons, it is fair, at least, to look at the experience of World War II, the last full fledged blue sea naval campaign in world history.  This experience has informed much of the current conventional wisdom regarding naval warfare, and while the lessons learned in World War II need to be updated to reflect technological advances that have taken place since then, they are too recent to safely ignore.

Among other things, World War II taught the lesson that the heavy armor of a battleship was no match for modern offensive weapons. 

As the Wikipedia article linked above explains:

Battleships were the largest and most complex, and hence the most expensive warships of their time; as a result, the value of investment in battleships has always been contested. 

As the French politician Etienne Lamy wrote in 1879, "The construction of battleships is so costly, their effectiveness so uncertain and of such short duration, that the enterprise of creating an armored fleet seems to leave fruitless the perseverance of a people". The Jeune École school of thought of the 1870s and 1880s sought alternatives to the crippling expense and debatable utility of a conventional battlefleet. It proposed what would nowadays be termed a sea denial strategy, based on fast, long-ranged cruisers for commerce raiding and torpedo boat flotillas to attack enemy ships attempting to blockade French ports. 

The ideas of the Jeune École were ahead of their time; it was not until the 20th century that efficient mines, torpedoes, submarines, and aircraft were available that allowed similar ideas to be effectively implemented. The determination of powers such as Germany to build battlefleets with which to confront much stronger rivals has been criticised by historians, who emphasise the futility of investment in a battlefleet that has no chance of matching its opponent in an actual battle.

Large Warships In Existing Navies

Today, there are only two ships of the battleship class in the world, both in the Russian Navy, only one of which is in active service, the 28,000 ton Admiral Nakhimov commissioned in 1988 is currently undergoing refit and is out of service, and the 28,000 ton Pyotr Velikiy, of the same class commissioned in 1998 is in active service.  

The 14,564 ton Zumwalt class destroyer of the U.S. Navy, the largest warship in the U.S. Navy that is not an aircraft carrier or non-combatant logistics ship, and is is arguably misclassified as a destroyer deserves a battleship designation. Just three Zumwalt class destroyers have three have been built (and no more have been ordered). One was commissioned in 2016, one was commissioned in 2019, and one is awaiting a commission later this year. It cost $7.5 billion per ship of total cost to build and has been severely criticized:

Mike Fredenburg analyzed the program for National Review after Zumwalt broke down in the Panama Canal in November 2016, and he concluded that the ship's problems "are emblematic of a defense procurement system that is rapidly losing its ability to meet our national security needs." Fredenburg went on to detail problems relating to the skyrocketing costs, lack of accountability, unrealistic goals, a flawed concept of operations, the perils of designing a warship around stealth, and the failure of the Advanced Gun System. He concludes:

"The Zumwalt is an unmitigated disaster. Clearly it is not a good fit as a frontline warship. With its guns neutered, its role as a primary anti-submarine-warfare asset in question, its anti-air-warfare capabilities inferior to those of our current workhorse, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and its stealth not nearly as advantageous as advertised, the Zumwalt seems to be a ship without a mission."

Each of the three ships of the Zumwalt class have two six inch guns and room to hold almost a thousand shells for them, but no ammunition (emphasis mine):

The Advanced Gun System (AGS) is a naval artillery system developed and produced by BAE Systems Armaments Systems for the Zumwalt-class destroyer of the United States Navy. Designated the 155 mm/62 (6.1") Mark 51 Advanced Gun System (AGS), it was designed to provide long range naval gunfire support against shore-based targets. A total of six of the systems have been installed, two on each of the three Zumwalt-class ships. The Navy has no plans for additional Zumwalt-class ships, and no plans to deploy AGS on any other ship. AGS can only use ammunition designed specifically for the system. Only one ammunition type was designed, and the Navy halted its procurement in November 2016 due to cost ($800,000 to $1 million per round), so the AGS has no ammunition and cannot be used.

Indeed, only twenty navies in the world have surface warships (including aircraft carriers, but not transport ships) larger than a frigate: U.S. (111), Japan (48), China (33), Russia (20), India (14), France (14), United Kingdom (7), Norway (5), Italy (4), Taiwan (4), Netherlands (4), Denmark (3), Germany (3), South Korea (3), Egypt (3), Saudi Arabia (3), Spain (2), Brazil (1), Thailand (1), and Morocco (1).

Only seven of these countries (China, Russia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Thailand and Morocco) would plausibly be U.S. naval warfare adversaries in the foreseeable future (while many of the remaining thirteen countries would likely be allies of the U.S. in an future naval warfare in their region). These seven plausible adversaries have 62 large surface warships ships combined. Of these only China and Russia are really serious concerns militarily and they have 53 large surface warships combined.

The Russian fleet's large ships, moreover, are split between several global regions that are distant from each other in some case (Northern, Baltic, Black Sea and Pacific). The aircraft carrier, the battleship, one smaller cruiser, and six destroyers are in Russia's Northern fleet. One smaller cruiser and five destroyers are in Russia's Pacific fleet. One of its smaller cruisers and one of its destroyers are in Russia's Black Sea fleet. Three of its destroyers are in Russia's Baltic fleet.

Several other plausible U.S. naval warfare adversaries such as Iran and North Korea have submarines but no large surface combatants.

Currently, the U.S. has 20 aircraft carriers (11 "super carriers" of 100,000 tons or more, and 9 amphibious assault ships which can carry helicopters, Osprey aircraft, Harrier aircraft or F-35B aircraft of 40,000-45,000 tons), Italy has 2, Japan has 4, France has 4, Australia has 2, Egypt has 2, and Brazil, China, India, Russia, Spain, Thailand and the United Kingdom each have one. In all there are 42 aircraft carriers in active naval service in the world.

Five aircraft carriers (one each from the U.K., China, Russia, India and France in order of size) are between the size of a U.S. super carrier and the smallest U.S. amphibious assault ship ranging from 42,000 to 65,000 tons (and only four of these from the China, Russia, India and France, and the ten U.S. super carriers, allow for something other than a vertical landing). The other eighteen aircraft carriers range from 11,486 tons to 27,100 tons (eleven of which are restricted to vertical takeoff and landing aircraft such as helicopters and the MV-22 Osprey). All twenty-seven carriers under 42,000 tons and two larger aircraft (one from the U.S. at 45,000 tons and one from the U.K. at 65,000 tons) are restricted either to short takeoff vertical landing aircraft such as an F-35B or a Harrier, or to vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

Eleven more carriers (including two that are only VTOL carriers) are undergoing sea trials or ordered: the U.S. 3, China 3, and South Korea, India, Italy and Turkey one each.

Currently, the U.S. has 22 cruisers (10,000 tons each) and Russia has 4 (one battleship with 28,000 tons and three cruisers with 12,500 tons) in active service. In all there are 27 cruisers in active naval service in the world. The U.S. cruisers are virtually indistinguishable from its destroyers and slightly inferior to them as they are older designs.

Currently, the U.S. has 69 destroyers (including 2 of the Zumwalt class), Japan has 44, China has 32, Russia has 15, India has 13, France has 10, the U.K. has 6, Norway has 5, Taiwan has 4, the Netherlands has 4, Germany has 3, Denmark has 3, South Korea has 3, Saudi Arabia has 3, Italy has 2, Egypt has 1, Morocco has 1, and Spain has 1. The largest destroyer in active service (other than the two Zumwalt class destroyers in active service) is 10,290 tons and many of which are considerably smaller. Some of the destroyer class ships are larger, more capable ships actually called frigates in an effort to make comparisons comparable. All ships classified as frigates for these purposes are under 5,000 tons, although a few particularly capable frigates between 4,000 and 5,000 tons are classified as destroyers. There are 219 destroyers in all of the world's navies combined.

In all there are 42 aircraft carriers over 11,000 tons and 7 other surface combatants over 11,000 tons in naval service in the world. Of those, 20 aircraft carriers and 2 other surface combatants are in the U.S. Navy and 1 aircraft carrier and 4 other surface combatants (one battleship and three cruisers) are in the Russian Navy. The other navies of the world have 21 aircraft carriers, only 10 of which are more than VTOL helicopter carriers. There are 244 other surface combatants bigger than frigates in the world in active naval service (of which 67 are in the U.S. Navy and 15 are in the Russian Navy).

The Japanese Naval Experience

The case that really brought this home for the Japanese was the sinking of the battleship Yamato.  This 71,000 ton ship with massive 18 inch guns was tough.  It  had previously survived a hit from a torpedo delivered by a U.S. submarine on Christmas Day in 1943, and two bombs that hit it in October of 1944, in the Leyte Gulf.  Two more 36,000 ton Japanese battleships, the Fuso and the Yamashiro, were sunk by naval gunfire and torpedoes in that same October battle.  Bombs damaged the 39,000 ton Japanese battleship Nagato in the battle of the Leyte Gulf badly enough to remove it from action. Ultimately, air power prevailed over the big guns and heavy armor of the pinnacle of the battleship era.  On April 7, 1945, the Yamato was sunk by carrier based U.S. aircraft and it took 2,498 Japanese sailors with it.  The 32,000 ton Japanese battleship Ise (already removed from service nine months earlier by a mine), and Japanese battleships Hyunga and Haruna were sunk by carrier based U.S. aircraft in July of 1945.

Japan had already lost its 32,000 ton battlecruiser Kirishima to 16” naval gunfire from the 47,000 ton American battleship Washington in 1942 in one of the last of the battles that went according traditional naval models of close range ship to ship combat, in this case, at a range of a mile and a half.  The 28,000 ton Japanese battleship Kongo was sunk by a submarine in November of 1944.  Its three sister ships were sunk by U.S. aircraft in World War II.

The American Naval Experience in World War II

Americans remember Pearl Harbor.  Yes, this carrier based air attack was a surprise.  But, a heavily armored hull did not prevent this attack from sinking the 32,000 ton U.S. battleship Arizona and three other battleships.  Four more battleships were seriously damaged, the 29,000 ton American battleship Nevada among them, although the Nevada was ultimately returned to service and survived further battle damage on multiple occasions.  Few naval strategists before Pearl Harbor had realized how vulnerable the fleet was to aerial attack.

The 33,000 ton American battleship Idaho ran aground off Okinawa in June of 1945.  American battleship Pennsylvania,  a sister ship of the Arizona, was taken out of action by enemy aircraft in August of 1945.

The 45,000 ton American battleship Indiana did exhibit the resilience in the face of damage which battleships are legendary for notwithstanding a mixed experience in real life.  It survived both a collision and a hit by a kamikaze pilot in 1944, and serious storm damage in 1945, and survived until decommissioning in 1963.  The 45,000 ton South Dakota similarly sustained and survived repeated battle damage. The 56,000 ton American battleship Iowa likewise survived serious damage from shore fire sustained in March of 1944, and the 47,000 ton battleship Washington survived a 1942 torpedo hit from a Japanese submarine and a 1945 friendly fire incident.

The German Naval Experience in World War II

Germany’s 51,000 ton battleship the Bismark found its fate at the bottom of the sea in May of 1941.  The British Royal Air Force damaged the 40,000 ton German battleship Gneisenau to the point that it never again was useable as a battleship in 1942.  Sister German battleship Scharnhorst, however, survived in the face of a seemingly never ending barrage of hits sustained.

The Italian and Vichy French Naval Experiences in World War II

Both Italy and Vichy France both saw battleships destroyed in port before they were ever launched.  

The planned 48,000 ton battleship Clemenceau was destroyed in its French port during a bombing raid in August 1944.  The 36,000 ton battleship Dunkerque, in the hands of the Vichy French, was damaged sufficiently to be taken out of action, and lost one in seven of its crew members, in July of 1940, by a combination of British warship attacks and torpedoes in two separate incidents.

The 30,000 ton Italian battleship Duilio wasn’t actually sunk, but a British bombing raid in November of 1940 took it out of service for about a year, and the ship served only a brief secondary role in World War II thereafter.  The 46,000 ton battleship Vittorio Veneto was taken out of action by British aircraft in 1941, then by a submarine, and then 1943 by another aircraft.  The 47,000 ton Italian battleship Littorio was taken out of commission by British aircraft by June of 1942.

The Spanish Naval Experience in World War II

The 16,000 ton battleship Espana was sunk by a “friendly” mine in July of 1937 during the Spanish civil war, killing a third of the sailors on board.

The British Naval Experience in World Wars I and II.

While it predates World War II, it is worth recalling that the 22,000 ton British battleship Dreadnought (the second of that name launched in 1906) which became synonymous with the very notion of a battleship, sank only one enemy vessel, a German submarine, in all of World War I.  It achieved this end not with its ten 12” guns, but with a methodology as old as Greek naval warfare.  It rammed it.

German dive bombing planes took the 30,000 ton British battleship Iron Duke out of service on October 17, 1939.  It Italian airplane’s torpedo took the 38,000 ton British battleship Nelson out of service for a year on September 27, 1941.  The British lost the 42,000 ton battleship Prince of Wales in December of 1941 to an attack by Japanese aircraft, after having suffered serious damage from naval guns, which was repaired, earlier that same year.  The 33,000 ton British battleship Queen Elizabeth was removed from service when an Italian frogman bombed it while it was in harbor that same month.