Gun Ownership Down And Increasingly Driven By Fear

The percentage of American adults who own guns is now 22%, with half of those guns owned by just 3% of American adults. This marks a steady decline in gun ownership. And, increasingly, gun owners say that they are doing so for self-defense and not for hunting or target shooting purposes.

This is according to the unpublished results of a new Harvard-Northeastern University study released by The Guardian newspaper.

The Powerful Lure of Marriage And Family

Few things trump big dollar economic incentives. But, a desire to marry and have children and raise them yourself is one of them.

The clients for Melissa’s company are all CEOs, and once a month one of them wants to fund her company to grow it big: A recruiting revolution! 

Melissa does not want a startup. She wants a family. She is restructuring her life to get what she wants. 

She hired another person in her company to take half her workload so she can focus on dating. She moved into an apartment that is big enough to actually live in so she won’t want to move in with the every guy she meets. She stopped traveling all the time because she can’t date if she’s out of town.

From here (hat tip Marginal Revolution).

I've seen similar statements made by specialist medical doctors who are women on dating sites. Lots of women in the twenty-first century in the United States, who are extremely economically successful, are still strongly attracted to the societal norm of getting marriage and having children while being supported by a spouse.

The problem, of course, is that if you are extremely economically successful, there are few men who can support you in the manner to which you are accustomed, and while they may want intelligent spouses (in part, because it makes their children more fit), they may not be particularly interesting in having an extremely economically successful wife.  Also, as women make up an increasing share of extremely economically successful individuals, the problem only gets worse.

To state the obvious, virtually no men who are extremely economically successful express a desire to (let alone act upon a desire to) become homemakers whose primary task for many years is to raise a couple's children while being economically supported by a wife (although extremely economically successful men certainly do express a desire to be married to a suitable wife and raise a family).  The goal of extremely economically successful men is much easier to attain.

As many studies have demonstrated, a very substantial share of income inequality among well educated and skilled women arises from the economic penalties associated with making that choice. See, for example, a recent study highlighted by Vox.

Now, that isn't the end of the discussion. First, one needs to consider if it makes sense to campaign to change the culturally driven gender scripts that seem out of place in these circumstances for men and for women alike.  Second, one needs to consider whether the economic penalties associated with taking a few years out of the work force to focus on children legitimately flow from productivity gains that come from not doing so, or if instead, this is merely a veiled and structural form of discrimination that has no legitimate economic basis.

Apparently, this is not a sentiment shared widely in Japan, where young professional women are increasingly rejecting the course of marrying and having children. I explain some reasons that this may be the case in comments on the piece here.

Effective Social Media Movement Politics

One of the most effective political action efforts on Facebook, in my humble opinion, is "Repeal the Second Amendment."

Most of the time, it posts a very factual local news report on an accidental shooting, an attempted or successful suicide, or a murder, often by children. Each incident is reported separately with only minimal commentary.  But, what it does is turn statistics, that engage your rational mind but doesn't require a personal commitment, into very human stories with emotional power that understatedly provides a call for action and a sense of urgency. And, because these tragedies take place almost every day someplace in America, sometimes several times a day, the cumulative effect is huge.

Also, it doesn't equivocate. While it makes occasional posts about particular legislative efforts related to gun control legislation, it doesn't focus on the minutia of the legislative process or spend a lot of time whining about the undo political power of National Rifle Association lobbyists.

Instead, it sets out, in its title, at the top of every post, a simple agenda. Repeal the Second Amendment.  It makes the case that a right to bear arms is bad policy that shouldn't be a constitutional right (which is the case in every other country in the world, even those that once had one in emulations of the United States) on the merits, rather than arguing the meaning of the amendment's ambiguous phrasing.

The campaign is a long haul, movement politics effort to shift public opinion. Everybody knows that the votes aren't there in Congress or in statehouses to achieve its goal any time soon.  But, by relentlessly humanizing the consequences of the status quo, it takes on the difficult but worthy task of changing that reality.

It may take many years or decades, but I think that its campaign, over time, is going to change public opinion about the harms associated with widespread gun ownership, and when that shift becomes great enough, change will happen.

Heroes Make A Difference

Reneita Smith of College Park, Maryland isn’t just dedicated to the kids she drives to school, she cares for them like her own. When the school bus full of 20 elementary school children Smith was driving suddenly caught fire yesterday afternoon, Smith’s only concern was making sure that each and every child in her care was off that bus and safe. 

According to Smith, an illuminated brake light indicator was the first indication that something wasn’t right. Neighbors who saw the incident said they saw flames coming from the wheels of the bus. When Smith realized the bus was on fire, she didn’t even hesitate over what to do. “I opened my door, took off my seat belt, and I got my babies off that bus,” she told NBC. Smith went back into the flaming bus repeatedly until all 20 students were off the bus. A neighbor herded the children into a nearby yard a safe distance away. Then, just to be sure everyone was accounted for, Smith went back into the bus. “I ran back onto the bus to make sure that every seat was clear,” she said.

From here.

One person's bravery can make all the difference between an epic tragedy and a merely bad day. Of course, in an ideal world, school buses wouldn't suddenly catch on fire and make it necessary for someone to be a hero to avoid a tragedy.

Eyes In The Sky

In an age when long range guided missiles are the norm, the ability of a warship to strike moving targets like enemy ships, aircraft and ballistic missiles, is the range of its sensors.  For line of sight sensors, the curvature of the Earth limits that range to about 30 miles.

But, the U.S. military's latest manned fighter aircraft, the F-35, is designed so that it can transmit the input coming into its avionics to U.S. warships in the vicinity, greatly extending the range at which U.S. ships can strike moving targets (and thereby keeping U.S. warships further away from, and ideally out of range of, fire from their opponents).

This could extend the effective range of long range guided missiles on warships targeting moving targets by an order of magnitude from about 30 miles to several hundred miles.

Colorado Supreme Court Rules On General Jurisdiction And Tag Jurisdiction

In the case of Magill v. Ford Motor Co., 2016CO57, decided today, the Colorado Supreme Court has enshrined in Colorado precedent two major new rulings on jurisdiction over corporations, both of which make it harder to sue corporations.

The case involves the Magills were injured in a car accident with an El Paso County man in Douglas County, where they resided.  They sued the other driver for negligence and also Ford Motor Company on a product liability theory.  By including a Colorado defendant in addition to Ford Motor Company, and by suing on state law tort claims, they escaped federal court jurisdiction. Under the traditional law of "general jurisdiction", Ford Motor Company could be sued on any subject in any state where it had a permanent office or permanent agent, and resided in the state at the location of each of its permanent offices including that of its registered agent in Denver.  So, the Magills sought to sue in Denver, which had a favorable jury pool and was convenient for many lawyers since the Ford Motor Company defendant could be considered to reside in Denver.  But, while this approach would have worked in 2006, it failed in 2016.

First, the Colorado Supreme Court rejected the doctrine (called "tag jurisdiction"), applicable in cases where individuals are served with process, that serving a defendant with process in a state gives a court in the state where the service of process took place, jurisdiction over the defendant even if the defendant has no other connections to the state.  This mirrors a 9th Circuit case reaching the same conclusion in 2014 (the same post notes that the 9th Circuit also reached the same conclusion regarding the jurisdictional effect of having a registered agent in the state).

An important subset of this ruling, partially related to its second holding, is that registration of an agent for service of process in a state, which had originally been required by states of corporations doing business in the state so as to give the state's jurisdiction over the corporation, is no longer sufficient to confer general jurisdiction over the corporation.

Second, following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Daimler A.G. v. Bauman, 134 S. Ct. 746 (2014) (covered in this post when it was decided), the Colorado Supreme Court has applied the doctrine that "general jurisdiction" over a corporation, which previously allowed suit on any subject to be brought against a business in any state in which it had a regular office or agent for the conduct of business, is now limited to jurisdictions where the corporate defendant is "at home" which basically means the state where it is incorporated or where its headquarters is located.  Thus, Ford which is incorporated in Delaware and has its headquarters in Michigan is not "at home" in Colorado.

It also made rulings on venue under the Colorado Rules of Civil Procedure, holding that the City and County of Denver was not a proper venue, despite the fact that Ford had an agent for service of process in the county, when the underlying car accident took place in Douglas County (a Denver suburb) where the Plaintiffs also resided, and the other driver was an El Paso County resident.  Thus, the neither the address of the agent for service of process for Ford nor the location at which the service of process was secured, was sufficient to establish venue, in addition to being insufficient grounds to establish general personal jurisdiction.

The Colorado Supreme Court remanded to allow the Denver Court to transfer the case to a new venue (presumably Douglas County where the accident occurred, although El Paso County would also be proper because a defendant resided there), and then to determine if Colorado has "specific" personal jurisdiction over Ford Motor Company due to the connections of the facts of the particular case to Ford Motor Company (which is almost surely will, because the accident took place in Colorado).

In this particular case, the only practical effect will be a new judge in a different county not terribly far from the one where the suit was brought originally (which will actually probably be less convenient for Ford Motor Company's out of state legal team than the original venue, but critically, will have a more defendant friendly jury pool in either Douglas County or El Paso County).  But, the precedent will come up in almost every lawsuit against an out of state corporation brought in Colorado.

The decision was unanimous, because its central holding was largely foreordained by the U.S. Supreme Court and the collateral rulings made which were not dictated by that ruling, will make the related doctrines much simpler than if they had gone the other way (possibly also tempting the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case to review it).

Reasons To Fear Election Season

* The risk of Trump being elected is much greater than the risk of losing a round of Russian roulette. Nearly 20% of Trump supporters disapprove of President Lincoln's decision to free the slaves. Racial resentment is the best predictor of support for Trump.  There are twenty-three states where Trump is favored to win, although this support is exceptionally weak this year in many of those states.

There mere fact that one candidate is more likely to win than another candidate does matter, because a future with President Trump is a dystopian one.  Another fault - Trump is overeager to use a nuclear weapon in war. 

But, even more frightening is the fact that so many Americans have such awful beliefs and that Trump has liberated them to stridently support those abhorrent beliefs that even conventional Republican politicians had publicly disavowed. Trump has legitimatized racism. Trump has legitimatized xenophobia and anti-Muslim hate. Trump has pushed many Republicans to decide that they don't care about corruption or bigotry. Trump has legitimatized support for torture. Trump has undermined perceived U.S. support for NATO which has made the alliance less effective.

In other words, this election season has undermined the range of issues upon which there is a political consensus. And, this election season had completely undermined the norm of civility in politics, which was a process value that many conservatives in the Republican party had long supported.

* The Presidential election process coincides with the process of renewing the ranks of political party officials, so the Republican party will now have a glut of Trump supporters, which could sustain the transformation of the Republican party towards a white nationalist far right party.

* Indiana Governor Mike Pence, Trump's running mate, is a more conventional politician, but every bit as hateful as Trump himself.  So, should scandal or lack of interest cause Trump to cease serving as President, the alternative will be no better.

* This is an election where the people in the states who know the candidates best don't like them.  As of today, Clinton has only a 7.8% chance of winning Arkansas and that is probably inflated by some poor statistical choices in the model I'm relying upon. Trump has only a 1.7% chance of winning New York (both estimates are per 538).

* Even if Clinton becomes President (as is likely by a large margin) and even if the U.S. Senate shifts to at least a 50-50 partisan split (which is reasonably likely), the Republican party is likely to retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives, which means more years of deadlock.  And, usually, the party that does not control the Presidency is the one that makes gains in off year elections.  If Republicans hold both the House and the Senate, the deadlock could be even more severe and long lasting.

* The vast majority of seats fill by the public on election day are in state and local government.  And, voters in these elections are overwhelmingly grossly under informed accord to a study by Professor Steve Rogers of Saint Louis University. There is almost no voter imposed quality control at the state and local level.

[V]oters don’t make decisions about whether to reelect their state lawmakers because of their specific policies, campaign promises, voting records, or any of the other things you’d normally expect to be relevant to their position as local lawmakers. That’s because the politics of statehouses turn out not to be local at all. Instead, Rogers finds there’s one major factor in deciding who controls the statehouse: the popularity of the American president. . . .

We have an idea of American democracy that goes something like this: The Constitution gives different politicians oversight over different governmental bodies, which in turn affect citizens at the national, state, and local levels. 

The politicians who control these different governmental bodies are, naturally, different people. So if a state lawmaker is doing a crummy job or passing unpopular legislation, her constituents can punish her individually at the ballot box. 

There’s just one problem: This seems to be not at all what really happens. . . .

[J]ust 1 percent of local news is about statehouse news. The vast majority of local coverage — more than 60 percent — is instead about the presidential election, one study found. 

Fewer than 20 percent of voters can identify their state legislator, according to a Vanderbilt study published in 2013. An even higher number have no opinion about whether said legislator is doing a good job. . . .

Voters are about 6 percent more likely to vote against their state lawmaker if they disapprove of their state legislature, and they’re about 9 percent more likely to do so if they disapprove of their governor.  . . . . Rogers looked at a big data set of online polling from the 2008, 2010, and 2012 elections. He found that voters were more than 40 percent more likely to vote against their state lawmaker if they disapproved of the president. (That controlled for the pull of partisanship, or voting against a lawmaker because he or she is a member of the opposition party, according to Rogers.) Overall, attitudes toward the presidency were more than three times more important for a legislator’s reelection bid than attitudes toward the state legislature itself. . . . 

Even earlier in the process, it turns out that state legislators are much more likely to face a challenge at all if they belong to the party of an unpopular president. (This turns out to be a big deal because only 33 percent of them get challenged at all.) 

This is somehow still true even when the president is not on the ballot. . . .  And it’s not just the Obama administration — Rogers looked at data going back decades. 

"This happens across every president," he says. "The relationship between presidential approval and seat change emerges for pretty much any set of elections since we have been measuring presidential approval." 

Simply being a member of the president’s party increases the odds that state legislators will get a challenger by about 4 percent. By comparison, overseeing 4 percent growth in your state’s economy — a feat in only a tiny handful of states — increases your chances of avoiding a challenger by just 4 percent. . . . "State legislators have relatively little control over their own elections."

Those of us who are familiar with political science and have worked in electoral politics, of course, have long known that this was the case. The myth that local government is closer to the people and is more accountable is completely false.

Perhaps the saving grace of this analysis is that partisanship does matter in partisan races, and for something on the order of two-thirds to four-fifths of voters (the former based upon formal partisan affiliation and the latter including independent voters who are leaners), a candidate's partisan affiliation is highly informative of which candidate the voter would prefer if given full information in a partisan general election race.  Ironically, even most people who are very well informed about politics would make the same decision if they had only a political party cue, because more informed voters also tend to be more partisan voters.

Likewise, the fact that so many races are uncontested in general elections is largely a combination of the fact that partisan affiliation is so salient and that gerrymandering insures that a large share of all partisan electoral districts (including whole states and whole counties) overwhelmingly favor one political party or the other.

In other words, partisan electoral politics are a dull instrument. They allow voters to favor one of two major political parties or the other, but very little else.

It is particularly dull because there is a strong norm among voters who have a say in whether incumbents are renominated to represent the party for another term in an election, to support the incumbent absent the most egregious scandal on the part of the incumbent. So gerrymandering and the incumbency preference of party nomination voters combined, make incumbent partisan politicians almost impossible to remove in the absence of term limits outside the small minority of competitive electoral districts.

Thus, voters have very little practical impact on whether particular state and local elected officials are effective at their jobs, whether state and local governments are well run by legislatures, and very little ability to discern if they are effective.

Now, in non-partisan races, and in competitive partisan races, truly uninformed voters aren't a horrible thing, because so long as they either abstain from voting in races about which they have no informed opinion, or vote in a manner that is effectively random, even a small informed minority, perhaps 10% of the electorate, for example, that had an informed basis upon which to vote would keep us in good leadership.  And, the tradition of well informed newspaper editors (who, after all have read all of the stories related to the candidates and usually having interviewed them as well) make endorsements that are a primary source of information for lots of "informed voters" allows the local media become kingmakers imposing a non-coercive means of quality control in down ballot elections.

But, if otherwise uninformed voters do vote in races they know nothing about and do base their decisions on Presidential popularity, which is not a directly relevant factor, this slightly informed preference can swamp the influence of the minority of better informed voters in an election.

Consolation Prizes

* A first female President would be a landmark and could cement a liberal leaning Supreme Court for the foreseeable future.

* Trump could drag down ticket Republicans down with him, leading to more Republicans in Congress and in state government.

* A landslide Clinton victory could discredit "Trumpism" in the Republican party for a long time and encourage reforms that would make the Republican party a more civilized and decent party.

* Trump may have poisoned a generation of Hispanics, Muslims, and other demographics with significant conservative political views against the Republican party. If the GOP makes a long term lurch to the farther right, it could lose the center it needs to hold power in many key state and in Congress.

See also my 2010 post on Meaningless Elections.

The South Was Opposed To Giving Women The Right To Vote

The geographic boundaries of opposition to civil rights have changed only modestly in the last 97 years.

The 19th Amendment gave women the constitutional right to vote. As required to propose a constitutional amendment, more than two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives supported the amendment.  But, it was opposed throughout the Southern states, almost uniformly.  The vote was held on May 21, 1919.  The amendment subsequently passed by the required two-thirds majority in the U.S. Senate, and was ratified by the states on August 18, 1920.  Many states, including many that had previously rejected the amendment (in some cases decades later), subsequently ratified the 19th Amendment after it was a moot point.

The House had previously voted by the required two-thirds majority, but with a much narrower margin on January 10, 1918, but the Senate narrowly rebuffed that attempt.

It is fair to infer that if the South had been allowed to secede in 1861, that the Confederate States of America would not have granted women the right to vote until long after 1920, if it would ever have done so at all (which the global experience suggests that it eventually would have).  Many Southern states symbolically ratified the 19th Amendment in the period from 1941 to 1984, and it would have taken until 1984 if the ratifications were made at the same time in an alternative history, for the measure to receive the necessary supermajority approve in the Confederate States of America.

Hickenlooper Still Awesome

Gov. John Hickenlooper put aside a self-professed fear of heights and rappelled from the rooftop of a downtown Denver skyscraper Thursday to help raise money for the Cancer League of Colorado. 

Hickenlooper, donning an orange Broncos jersey, went “Over the Edge” of 1600 Glenarm Place, a 32-story, 384-foot tall residential tower on the 16th Street Mall.

Via the Denver Post.

IRS Same Sex Marriage Laws Take Effect

New tax regulations providing for same sex marriages under U.S. tax laws took effect on Friday.

Knowledge Creates Heroes; Ignorance Creates Victims

2 teen boys in Pennsylvania are being hailed as heroes after they halted a kidnapping on their bikes. Temar Boggs and his friend recognized Jocelyn Rojas’ face from her 'missing' posters just hours after she’d been abducted off her front lawn. The teens were quick to chase Rojas down, and the little girl is now safe with her family.

Law enforcement, perhaps due to its para-military character, loves to keep the public in the dark about active investigations.  But, sharing information with the public converts the public into an army of potential heroes from an army of potential victims.

Pitifully Small Criminal Justice Debts Are Devastating If You Can't Afford To Pay Them

One 13-year-old in Arkansas who could not pay several hundred dollars in fines for truancy, the report found, spent three months in detention instead. 

In another practice that deepens inequities, about 20 states charge fees to have juvenile records expunged or sealed; in South Carolina, for example, juvenile offenders must pay more than $300.

Just as in the area of bond payments, which keep people incarcerated for months or years pending trial if the defendant can't afford to pay the bond, juvenile court cost debts as small as $200 can mean a year or more of additional probation, or worse, if the defendant can't afford to pay them. It is hard for someone used to small fines not being a big deal to realize what a big deal they are if someone can't afford to pay them.
The New York Times story linked above links to a recent report out of the Juvenile Law Center that corroborates the findings.

Why Do Words Become Unpopular?

The word "impenetently" means almost exactly the same thing as the word "remorseless" and "unrepetenant", with very little difference even in connotation.

Could that be the reason why "impenetently" is almost never used, while "remorseless" and "unrepetenant" are relatively more commonly used words?

How many sets of words that are such close synonyms exist in the English language?  Is English typical or atypical in this regard?

If two or more words mean almost the same thing, will some of them eventually win the war to be used more often while others fade into disuse?

Could the winner have something to do with the fact that "impenentently" could be more easily confused with another relatively common word, "impertinently", while "remorseless" and "unrepentant" have no false friends?

Could it be that the prefix "im-" has fallen out of favor, while the prefix "un-" and the suffix "-less" have been more popular?

Also on the language front, the English language, in practice, has very specific rules about the order in which adjectives are used in a sentence that native users almost universally follow even though they have no idea that they are doing so and they are not consciously aware that the rules exist.

Life Jackets Save Lives

Most recently a twenty-three month old baby was saved by a life jacket that kept her head above water while she was trapped in an air pocket in an overturned boat.

Who Creates Works Protected By Copyright In The United States?

A new, first of it kind, empirical study of copyright registrations in the United States provides detailed demographic information and related analysis regarding the authors of protectable works. The report reaches its conclusions by "statistically analyzing the 15 million entries that comprise the Copyright Office’s full record of registered works from 1978 through 2012."

Apple's Irish Tax Scam

The company whose name is on two of the laptop computers and three of the phones in my family pays almost no taxes, largely due to an arrangement that books most of its income to Ireland which has graciously consented to tax almost none of that income in exchange for investments that boost the local economy.  The tax rate imposed by Ireland on Apple's profits is a mere 0.005%.  The boost is not insubstantial.  Apple's European headquarters is in Ireland and it's operations there create thousands of good Irish jobs.

How big of a tax break is Apple getting?  According to the European Union which says that the tax break violates E.U. treaties, about $14.5 billion.  In other words, about $3,000 of taxes avoided for every man, woman and child in Ireland.

Ireland, meanwhile, is doing its damnedest not to collect any of it, because it knows that Apple's love for Ireland is runs no deeper than the tax break it gets.

U.S. diplomats, in turn, also wants the E.U. to back off, not because it loves the fact that Apple can park tens of billions of dollars of untaxed cash in affiliated foreign companies, but because the U.S. Treasury will get a piece of the action should Apple ever wish to repatriate the funds.

The arguably legal techniques that Apple is using to indefinitely defer its income in a foreign tax haven are not new.

When I was an intern for a Congressman on the Ways and Means Committee while I was in college, one of the projects that was perennially on the to do list in the office, but never got tackled because it was such a daunting issue to understand well enough to know how to reform it, was the indefinite deferral of taxation of income allocated to tax havens of foreign affiliates of major U.S. companies.

A quarter of a century later, the tax break is still there and it has gotten obscene.

45,000 ISIS Fighters Killed Since 2013?

U.S. intelligence believes that since September 2015 ISIL appears to have lost 25,000 fighters in combat (mainly in Syria, Iraq and Libya). . . . about 45,000 ISIL fighters have died since 2013. It’s believed that ISIL currently has only about 20,000 fighters available, mostly in Syria and Iraq. There are a few thousand more in northern Libya, eastern Afghanistan and Egypt. In all five countries ISIL is under heavy attack.

From Strategy Page.

Air strikes, about 75% delivered by U.S. forces, have been pivotal in destroying ISIS military equipment and bases.

Of course, ISIS (a.k.a. ISIL a.k.a. Daesh) have also inflicted horrific casualties on its targets.

For example, today's paper notes that the Associated Press with the help of local reports and satellite imagery has identified 72 mass graves of people killed by ISIS in which 5,000 to 15,000 people are buried, including almost all members of one tribe in the region, and large numbers of members of the Yazidi religion whom ISIS has attempted to genocidally exterminate.

ISIS has lots significant amounts of territory during the campaign from its peak, but the Syrian part of the conflict is profoundly complex with many players who have mixed loyalties.  Also many of the predominantly Sunni Arab people subject to ISIS rule are skeptical that the Shi'ite controlled and Iran allied Iraqi government is a desirable alternative.  People without good alternatives keep fighting for their side until a good alternative materializes, even if they are clearly outmatched and will suffer many casualties as a result.

The Economic Impact Of Driverless Cars

The self-driving car appears to be sort of almost here. 

A driverless future will obviously have enormous economic, social, and cultural consequences. To mention a relatively trivial one from my own piece of the pie: A large percentage of the work done by many small law firms and solo practice lawyers involves things — traffic accidents, drunk driving, etc. — that will pretty much disappear in a world without drivers. 

A more consequential effect will involve the millions of people in the US alone who currently make their living by driving cars and trucks. 

In short, driverless cars could be a major technological shock in all sorts of ways, both good and bad.

From Lawyers, Guns and Money.

A household Roomba.

In a related note, I'm also interested in the potential impact of industrial grade Roombas (i.e. robot vacuum cleaners) when they start to be used to clean commercial buildings and mow lawns.  The Wall Street Journal profiled the latest in robotic lawn mower technology this past April.

Office 365 Email Still Sucks

Office 365 is the crappiest, slowest, most annoying email system I have ever encountered, and that is really saying something. I could write reams for you about its stupidities and detrimental effects on my productivity. Its attempts at showing intelligence are perhaps its worst feature. 

From here.

The author's particular complaint is the program's inept efforts to get you to put times you discuss in your emails in your calendar.

This isn't the only thing wrong with it, of course. But, after a recent advanced Microsoft Word continuing legal education class that I took, I now realize that MS Office is far more evil than I had previously imagined.

The fact that such a crappy piece of software has managed to maintain the predominant share of the market for these kinds of programs, in which 99% of the users don't use the programs as intended, is one of the better proofs that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds.

We Fail Children

We Fail Children.

The United States does a quite credible job of meeting the needs of senior citizens through programs like Social Security, Medicare, the Medicaid nursing home program, SSI, veteran's benefits, tax favored retirement saving programs, age discrimination in employment laws, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (whose beneficiaries are disproportionately the elderly).

But, the United States does a quite poor job of meeting the needs of children.

Poverty: Child poverty rates in the United States far exceed those of most developed nations, and our welfare system for them is relatively anemic.

Health Care: The Medicaid program for poor children is fraught with problems related to the fact that it expects providers to render services for far less than market rates provided by health insurance and Medicare.  Almost all other countries have paid maternity leave while the U.S. does not. Drug research for children and pregnant women is discouraged.  No health care system is more expensive.

Child Care: Child care and pre-school is expensive and the quality of these options is patchy.

Education: While the U.S. has many adequate public schools and a far number of excellent ones, a great many children (overwhelmingly poor and minority) are hellholes. No country in the world has a more costly system of higher education for students, with very protections for students from dishonest educational practices.  Access to higher education is regulated mostly through the costly and damaging system of admitting students who aren't ready for their planned course and then flunking them out in short order.

Juvenile Justice: The United States routinely invokes the criminal justice system for misbehavior by children that doesn't warrant it, until recently was a global outlier that allowed life without parole and deaths sentences for juveniles, and still often imposes excessively long sentences on juveniles and makes grossly excessive use of solitary confinement for juveniles.  Furthermore, the quality of due process for juveniles accused of committing crimes is deficient, and the secrecy in the court system surrounding the juvenile proceedings does more harm than good.

Abuse and Neglect: In most places, our system for identify and protecting children suffering from abuse and neglect seriously mishandles cases on a routine basis, and our foster care system is almost universally abysmal.  For example, in the Denver Public Schools, homeless children are faring better than children in foster care.

Custody Disputes: Our court system does a poor job of handling parenting time and parental responsibility issues, which are frequently navigated by parents without lawyers who are grossly unqualified to do so; child support awards while much less haphazard than they once were and easier to collect than they once were tend to be miserly small (of course there are exceptions to every general rule), and custody decisions are made by a single judge with minimal familiarity with the family who has virtually unfettered discretion under a largely unelaborated "best interests of the child" standard.

Military Families: The U.S. military is pretty much the only employer in America that provides more compensation to employees (i.e. active duty military personnel) who have larger families than it does to single soldiers and to soldiers without children.  in part because of this, a lot of young adults who have already started families join the military and a lot of young soldiers start families.

But, while it is relatively compassionate in this regard (although many low ranking soldiers with families are sufficiently low paid that they qualify for welfare benefits also), the military's record with military families is decidedly mixed.

Simply having policies that encourage and accommodate soldiers having families is somewhat problematic because the intrinsic nature of the job is that sailors on naval ships and soldiers deployed to foreign war zones must be away from families for prolonged periods which is a strain on families, which would suggest that policies that favor family deferral would make more sense.

Even when deployed on bases in the U.S. and in peaceful allied countries where families can accompany soldiers, the military's habit of constantly shuffling troops from base to base across the nation and world has seriously harmed generation after generation of military children.

Another issue recently identified is that military discipline directed at a soldier who commits adultery or mistreats his family frequently most hurts the soldier's family members whom the military conduct standards are designed to protect by economically harming soldiers upon whom they are economically reliant, discouraging families from reporting misconduct towards them and exposing them to abuse risk.

The military also provides inadequate care to veterans, particularly those with service related PTSD or other mental health issues, imposing a burden on their families.

Why?

One possible reason for this broad range of failures is that our democratic system, rather than failing to work as design, works too well. It rewards groups of people who regularly cast informed votes, and people who are able to devote time and treasure to the political process.  Senior citizens do all of these things.

In contrast, children are, by far, the largest group of people who have no right to vote. Only the oldest are mature enough to devote time to the political process, and almost none have significant economic ability to advance political causes.  And, less affluent parents of young children likewise tend to be short on time and treasure to devote to politics, are often ill informed about the process and candidates, and are not reliable voters.  Children are a large and diffuse population with little means to self-organize.  And, while their advocates in the form of school teachers, have an interest in promoting education funding, many other needs of children have few natural political advocates.

Utah is a notable case where the Mormon church institutionally and Mormon families who tend to have more children and to have children for more years of their lives, advocate more strongly for children than in most states, and that shows up in policy and budget decisions in a manner quite atypical of other states that are strongly politically conservative.

Institutions like mainline protestant churches that were once major advocates for children's well being, now have very few children as their congregations age and have declining institutional clout.

Admittedly, this is a weak theory, because while it is adequate to explain the American situation, it doesn't explain why the situation in different on many of these issues in other countries that also have a democratic process in which children do not vote.  But, maybe it is a beginning.