Drive now, talk later

People tend to think of time spent driving as wasted, and try to use it to multitask, most commonly by talking on the phone. I know people who specifically use the time driving to catch up on their phone calls. While most people know (or should know) that using a hand-held mobile phone while driving is not a good idea (and it is banned in some states and countries), many have the impression that using hands-free devices (as many cars have now) is safe. But that is not true. There has been considerable research to show that hands-free devices are as distracting to drivers, making them as dangerous to use. This article summarizes the research.
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Medicare tax avoidance by wealthy people

Medicare is the government-run health insurance program for people over 65 years of age. It is a very well-run program and funded by a tax on income that is automatically deducted from people’s paychecks. The Medicare tax is not huge. It is 2.9% for most people and 3.8% for high earners. If you are self-employed, or get any income that is not a salary or wage, you are still obliged to pay that tax when you file your annual income tax. I have done so routinely with any outside income I got from giving talks or from my writings. You fill in a separate form to report self-employment income and another form to pay the tax on it. It is pretty straightforward.

ProPublica has gone through the tax records and found that very wealthy people have exploited a loophole that enables them to avoid paying any Medicare taxes on their income. The article focuses on three of the most egregious tax avoiders.

The trove of tax records behind ProPublica’s “Secret IRS Files” series contains plenty of examples of billionaire financiers who avoided Medicare tax despite earning huge amounts from their companies. In 2016, Steve Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets, paid $0. So did Stephen Schwarzman, head of the investment behemoth Blackstone. Bill Ackman, the headline-grabbing hedge fund manager, was able to shield almost all his income from the tax.
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But these maneuvers by the rich hasten Medicare’s future crisis. Sometime in the 2030s, the program’s trust fund is due to run dry. Closing the loophole, along with eliminating other ways around the tax for wealthy business owners, could raise more than $250 billion over 10 years for Medicare, according to recent government estimates.

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Rage, rage against everything

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory in November, there has been a lot of anguished analyses by Democrats and pundits as to the reasons why Kamala Harris and the Democrats did not win. These have ranged from taking comfort in the fact that although they lost the Senate, they did not lose ground in the House of Representatives to pointing out that Trump’s margin of victory in the popular vote was not that large (about 1.5%). There have been suggestions that Harris’s loss was due to young people not voting in large enough numbers, that the Hispanic vote did not support Democrats as much as they have done in the past, to women voters not turning out in sufficient numbers to compensate for losses elsewhere. These kinds of analyses have suggested that tactical changes in the campaign, such as tailoring messages more towards the groups that dropped away, may have made the difference.

These analyses rarely tend to be definitive in their conclusions and to a large extent I have not paid too much attention to them. I have been trying to understand a more basic question.

There is no question that on objective grounds Trump is terrible both as a person and as a president. I am not going to make the case for that assertion, seeing it as self-evident. His awfulness has increased with time and yet his vote totals have also increased. What has concerned me is that Trump received over 77.2 million votes in November, more than the 74.2 million he got in 2020 and much more than the 63.0 million he got in 2016. His vote as a percentage of the total population has also gone up, from 19.3% in 2016 to 22.1% in 2020, to 22.6% in 2024. This quite extraordinary.
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There’s something happening here …

… what it is ain’t exactly clear.

The opening lines from the classic Vietnam war era protest song For What It’s Worth by the group Buffalo Springfield came to my mind following the killing on broad daylight in a city street in Manhattan, New York of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, America’s largest medical insurance company. What was not strange was that the killing triggered a massive manhunt and a blitz of media publicity. In the US brazen killings with guns happen many times daily and all over the country but it takes the killing of a rich person to trigger that kind of massive search for the shooter.

While that police and media response was not surprising, what was unusual was the seeming indifference, and even in some circles glee, of the public’s reaction to the killing. Thompson personally was an unknown figure, a standard corporate type, but he was clearly seen as emblematic of the evils of the private profit-seeking health insurance industry that are well-known and hardly need to be detailed. The chief one is that they try to make more money by finding every possible means to deny coverage for patient care. UnitedHealthcare was by some measures the worst offender. The resulting huge profits are transformed into huge salaries and bonuses for top executives and shareholder rewards.
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Prosecutorial lust for death

I have railed against the barbaric practice in the US of having the death penalty, something that many countries have dispensed with. But the existence of the death penalty also brings with it a set of perverse incentives for prosecutors. If they have a so-called death penalty case, one in which the district attorney or other body decides merits the death penalty, then the prosecutors in that case are also evaluated on whether they are able to get the jury to apply that penalty.

In most death penalty cases, there are two phases. The first is to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. If the person is found guilty, the next phase is to decide whether the person is to be executed. The same jury makes both decisions, and it is considered a sign of success if a prosecutor can get a jury to vote for death and is good for their career. So they try everything they can to ensure that the jury that is empaneled will be willing to vote for death if a guilty verdict is reached.
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Sarah McBride for president

It is not easy being the first to break through some barrier, especially in the field of politics. An elected official has to serve a broad constituency but the people who rallied behind you often expect you to make the advancement of the community that you represent your main priority. When Barack Obama was elected as the first person of color to be president, he had to strike a delicate balance and not be seen as prioritizing the community of color over every other group in every area. Some could argue that he went too far in not wanting to be seen as the ‘Black president’. But such ‘firsts’ have a big burden. Their main priority is to not mess up because to do so would confirm the prejudices of people that members of their community are not up to the task. Obama succeeded in that regard, even if some of us felt that he tried a little too hard to be accepted by the establishment.

As the first open member of the transgender community to be elected to congress, Sarah McBride is acutely aware of this tension, especially as the transgender community is facing so much hostility. In an extremely thoughtful interview with David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, she demonstrates a level of political maturity that is astonishing for one so young and new to the national political scene.
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Black bears are clever and resourceful. I am keeping well away from them.

I like nature and wildlife and support efforts to preserve both but prefer to view them from a safe distance. Not for me safaris and camping and hiking in the wilderness in the hope of seeing wildlife. Nature documentaries are more my thing.

My aversion to seeing nature up close was enhanced by this article about how black bears have become very common in the very popular (and expensive) resort area of Lake Tahoe that is in the Sierra Nevada mountain region and straddles northern California and Nevada. During the pandemic, a lot of Silicon Valley types moved there and took advantage of the work-from-home policy to decide to stay permanently. But the increase in population and the garbage generated has attracted black bears that now roam the streets of towns and invade homes and cars looking for food. The problem is exacerbated by those the locals call ‘tourons’, a portmanteau of ‘tourist’ and ‘morons’, who are careless about keeping food out of reach and act in ways that attract bears.

Unlike grizzly bears that can be aggressive and vicious, black bears supposedly tend to avoid confrontations and can be scared away fairly easily.
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The name of the book

In the comments to my review of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, there was a side discussion about the enigmatic title. Written in 1980, the book was a critical and popular success, selling over 50 million copies worldwide. This strange, long (538 pages), and difficult book set in 1327 formed the basis of a 1986 film starring Sean Connery as the English Franciscan monk William of Baskerville and Christian Slater as his Italian Benedictine novice assistant Adso of Melk. My review of the book was very negative, seeing it as pretentious. The second edition of the book published in 1983 has an unusual feature for a novel, in that it has a postscript by the author where he discusses both the book and the writing of novels in general. He begins with a discussion of the title of this book and the role of novel titles in general.

There is nothing about roses anywhere in the book. The word itself makes its only appearance in the form of an untranslated Latin phrase stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus, which are the words that end the book. (There are many chunks of untranslated Latin throughout the text that contribute to the book’s difficulty.)
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TV Review: A Man on the Inside (2024)

I recently watched this enjoyable comedy series consisting of eight half-hour episodes that is being streamed on Netflix. I expected it to be good because it comes with a pedigree and it did not disappoint. The series creator is Michael Schur who has had such hits as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Place with the last also starring Ted Danson who acts in this series.

Danson plays a retired professor of engineering who, after his wife dies after a prolonged period of dementia, falls into a lethargy that worries his daughter, his only child. She recommends that he take up some hobby and he stumbles across a classified ad in the newspaper that is looking for someone aged 75-85 who knows how to use a phone. He decides to apply and the job turns out to be with a private detective agency that has been hired by the son of a resident in an upscale retirement home in San Francisco to investigate the loss of his mother’s expensive ruby necklace. The detective agency feels that having someone pose as a resident would be a good way to solve the crime by gaining access to the all the people who live and work there. He does not tell his daughter exactly what he is up though, fearing that she might not approve or be worried.
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More on card randomization

After writing my post on the randomization of a deck of cards, I became more curious about this topic. In a deck of 52 distinct cards, there are 52x51x50…x3x2x1 possible arrangements. This is written in the mathematical notation 52! and is an enormous number. Perfect randomization of a deck means that starting with any given arrangement, after the shuffling process, all possible arrangements are equally likely and have the probability 1/52!. One can also think of it as saying that after the randomization process, a card that started out in any given position should be equally likely to be found in any of the 52 positions.

I learned that magicians for some of their tricks use the fact that shuffles do not guarantee randomizing of the deck, and so was curious to see how that might work. To illustrate this very simply, I started with a deck of just ten cards numbered 1 through 10 in order. I then cut the deck in two so that one half contained 1through 5 and the other half contained 6 through 10. Then I imagined a perfect riffle shuffle where the cards from each side are dropped one at a time alternately. You then get the order shown under the heading Shuffle 1.

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