Was Y2K an overhyped threat?

Remember the Y2K panic? There were fears that computers that came into widespread use in the mid-twentieth century, when the year 2000 seemed very far away, had been programmed with internal clocks that assumed that the first two digits of the year was 19. There was concern that when the year 2000 rolled around, many systems would crash because the computers might think the year had suddenly reverted to 1900 and thereby go awry. There were fears of planes crashing, power systems going down, the banking and financial sectors going haywire, and so on.

There was a lot of activity among computer professionals to take steps to solve the problem before the end of 1999. I personally did not do anything since I am not a computer professional. I also tend not to wait up on December 31 until the New Year rolls around but on that day I did decide to stay up until midnight to see what might happen. And there was … nothing. Everything was just as before.
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Moms for Liberty is an old story that keeps getting recycled

The group Moms for Liberty has been in the news quite a lot recently. I have said many times that when a group has words like ‘Moms’, ‘Parents’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Family’, ‘Faith’, ‘Values’, and ‘Freedom’ in its name, there is a very good chance that it is pushing a right-wing extremist agenda.

Adam Laats writes that groups like this that purport to stand for parental rights have always been around and follow a similar trajectory. They quickly rise to prominence and gain a lot of attention by seizing upon some current culture war hot button issue but that also carries the seeds of their eventual downfall. One factor is that they cannot control the message and many of the people who join the group say even more extreme things, going well beyond what the leadership thinks is politically palatable and they have to keep disavowing them. They also attract militant violent groups and other undesirables who see them as advancing their own goals and that association sinks them.

Laats tells the story of Alice Moore.

Everyone loves moms. Everyone. And that’s a problem for groups like Moms for Liberty.

The group revels in its inflated reputation as a “national powerhouse,” but its century-old playbook has always had a fatal flaw.

As the 1970s story of Alice Moore shows, white conservative mothers have always had great initial political success, but that appeal tends to spiral quickly out of their control.

Moore’s story might sound familiar. She rocketed into national prominence in 1974 by taking over her local school board, blocking books and fighting for “parents’ rights.” She ran as a nonpartisan “mother,” but in truth, she was an experienced activist for conservative causes. Long before she ran for school board, she had fought against abortion rights and against sex education in schools. She railed against public schools’ alleged progressive agenda, accusing them of “destroying our children’s patriotism, trust in God, respect for authority and confidence in their parents.”

Once on the school board of Kanawha County, West Virginia, Moore ignited a dramatic boycott of a new series of textbooks. She inflamed conservative opinion nationwide by claiming that the books trampled on parents’ rights. Moore warned that the new books would force white kids into feeling guilt and anguish about America’s racism.

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The anti-abortion zealots are losing their minds

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the US Supreme Court, various states have passed draconian laws to prevent abortions, and women seeking them have gone to other states where it is legal, most recently the case of Kate Cox in Texas. As a result, the anti-abortion people are advocating for ever more bizarre measures to prevent them.

A string of Texas localities have passed controversial ordinances banning so-called “abortion trafficking” – and another city may soon join their number.

Over the last several weeks, the city of Amarillo, Texas, has become embroiled in a debate over whether to pass an ordinance to block people from using the city’s roads to transport pregnant people seeking abortions in other states. The city council will meet on Tuesday to debate the measure. It is not expected to vote.

This type of ordinance has sprung up as part of a new anti-abortion tactic to undermine people’s ability to flee states with abortion bans. Since the fall of Roe v Wade, abortion foes have scrambled to find a way to cut off what they see as “abortion trafficking,” even though many experts argue that the US constitution protects the right to interstate travel.

What next? Imprisoning all pregnant women until they give birth to make absolutely sure that they cannot get an abortion?

The anti-abortion forces are fighting an unpopular war since most people favor at least some right to abortions, that it should be allowed with certain limitations. Roe v. Wade struck a tenuous balance on abortion rights that seemed to come close to where public opinion lay,. Overturning it has resulted in some people thinking that they can have a complete ban.

Moves such as this travel ban will only serve to reinforce the idea that the anti-abortion forces are unhinged extremists.

What would a criminal justice system in the absence of free will look like?

I read the new book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by neurobiologist Robert M. Sapolsky where he outlines the biological basis for why we have no free will. I will discuss the main arguments of the book in a later post but here I want to outline what he says about an objection that believers in free will often raise, and that is that if we say that all our actions are determined by our genes, history, environment, and random factors, and that we did not freely choose to do them, then people who commit crimes should not be blamed and punished. He agrees that such people should not be blamed for what is after all outside their control and that retributive and punitive punishments, that form such a large part of our criminal justice system, have no place. But that does not mean that we simply do nothing.

He sets up his argument by recalling how things have changed so dramatically over time in the way that we respond to people with illnesses like epilepsy or schizophrenia that cause them to act in ways that are dangerous to themselves and to others. (Chapter 13, pages 300-340) In the past, it used to be thought that their actions were freely chosen ones and they were punished accordingly, often in horrendous ways. Not anymore. Now we realize that they are victims of illnesses that cause them to behave in those ways, and we have changed our response accordingly. As he says: “Once, having a seizure was steeped in the perceptions of agency, autonomy, and freely choosing to join Satan’s army. Now we effortlessly accept that none of those terms make sense. And the sky hasn’t fallen. I believe that most of us would agree that the world is a better place because sufferers of this disease are not burned at the stake.” (p. 316)
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Temu: A rival to Amazon

Amazon has become a retail behemoth, driving out much of the retail competition. It did this by providing low prices for an immense array of goods and fast delivery, and with those methods managed to develop a huge customer and supplier base. The way it did that was by selling below cost and offering incentives to sellers and in the process running up huge deficits in the initial years. By those methods, it persuaded manufacturers and other retailers to sell through the site. I read about a company that sold diapers online and was doing well. Amazon tried to buy the company but when the company turned down its offer, Amazon cut the prices of its own diapers well below cost and drove the rival out of business. That kind of tactic is only possible for companies with large cash reserves or huge amounts of venture capital and other financing.

Initially, both manufacturers and consumers got a good deal. But once they all got hooked and Amazon became almost a monopoly, Amazon started squeezing them by raising prices. It is an old trick. Since manufacturers who sold through it had to guarantee that their product would not be available cheaper anywhere else, what they did was raise the price of their product everywhere outside of Amazon to be higher. Someone I know recently went looking for a part to fix his dishwasher. He found that Amazon had the lowest price but that the part at the manufacturer’s own site was a few cents more.

The Federal Trade Commission is currently suing Amazon for this and other monopoly practices.
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Film review: Minari (2021)

I recently watched this Korean film that has received a lot of praise. It tells the story of a Korean immigrant family (parents, two children, and the wife’s mother) trying to make a life for themselves in rural Arkansas and the increasing tensions between the parents as they worry about money and disagree as to whether they should stay or go back to California, and the complications caused by the arrival of the grandmother. (Youn Yuh-jung won an Academy Award for her role as the grandmother role and Steven Yeun was nominated for the role of the father.)

Here’s the trailer.

It is a curious film in terms of its narrative structure. Rather than pursuing one story arc, it is a series of vignettes about the family grappling with internal tensions, caused by different ambitions of the father and mother. The father wanted to move to this location to pursue his dream of creating a successful farm growing vegetables that are favored by Koreans, while the mother does not like the idea of leaving the California city they used to live to move to a mobile home set far away from any town, where the nearest hospital is an hour away. This is of particular concern because her young son has a congenital heart murmur that requires him to not run or otherwise exert himself.
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Sex work should be legalized and destigmatized

Kal Penn, this week’s guest host of The Daily Show, talked about the need to legalize sex work and highlighted how in Nevada they have done so with good results. Apparently Maine has also just decriminalized sex work. Let’s hope the movement spreads.

Although strippers are not sex workers, they too suffer from considerable stigma and hence are deprived of some of the protections that other workers enjoy and thus can be exploited and abused by the management of the places they work in and also by the clientele. Adam Conover, a big advocate of unions, had an interesting discussion with two strippers who unionized their place of work so that they could address these abuses.

Next step for Trump: Shrines and sainthood?

You have to hand it to serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). He has raised the bar for snake-oil salespersons to great heights, ingeniously finding new ways to part the suckers from their money. His new pitch is a real doozy.

Despite his claims, Donald Trump’s business career has had many more failures than successes.

His record of catastrophic investments has never held Trump back, however, and now the one-term, twice-impeached, 91-time felony-charged former president has embarked on a new hustle: selling little cut-out pieces of a suit he wore during one of his arrests.
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To buy a piece of the suit, people first have to buy 47 “digital trading cards”, each featuring an illustration of Trump, through the Collect Trump Cards website. Buyers will then receive a bit of the suit, or tie, that Trump wore when he was arrested – on charges related to his attempts to overturn the election – at Fulton county jail in August 2023.

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Giuliani ordered to pay $148.1 million in damages

It looks like the jury was well and truly angered by the way Rudy Giuliani treated the two poll workers Ruby Freeman daughter Shaye Moss in Georgia and unanimously ordered him to pay them whopping damages, well above the $48 million their lawyer suggested.

Giuliani said that he will appeal but then proceeded to absurdly claim that he could still prove his claims.

Giuliani, meanwhile, doubled down on his false claims about Freeman and Moss, saying again that he had evidence they were true.

“The absurdity of the number merely underscores the absurdity of the entire proceeding where I’ve not been able to offer one piece of evidence in defense, which I have a lot,” Giuliani said in a short press gaggle, promising to appeal the result.

“So I am quite confident when this case gets before a fair tribunal it will be reversed so quickly that it will make your head spin and the absurd number that just came in will help that, actually.”

He also continued to insist that his claims about the two women were justified. “I have no doubt that my comments were made and they were supportable and they are supportable today,” he said.

He has had plenty of opportunities to provide the evidence and prove his case and still has not done so. Even his lawyer did not bring up that defense in this trial, because Giuliani had in an earlier proceeding conceded that he had defamed the two women. While his lawyer expressed some contrition on his behalf, Giuliani seems to be living in a dream world where he thinks his lies will be believed.

Giuliani refused to turn over documents as part of the case and conceded earlier this year that he made false statements about the women. Howell found him liable of defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. The only question for the jury to decide was how much in damages Giuliani should pay.

Joseph Sibley, Giuliani’s attorney, conceded to jurors in his opening statement that his client had done something wrong by making false statements. But over the course of the week, he sought to distance Giuliani from the threats and harassment that resulted from the false statements. He also argued that the tens of millions of dollars they requested were not proportional to the harm they had suffered.

I really think Giuliani is delusional.