Richard Berk

Here’s a Bloomberg article on Richard Berk, a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania whose algorithms are used for parole, probation, and sentencing decisions.

Risk scores, generated by algorithms, are an increasingly common factor in sentencing. Computers crunch data—arrests, type of crime committed, and demographic information—and a risk rating is generated. The idea is to create a guide that’s less likely to be subject to unconscious biases, the mood of a judge, or other human shortcomings. Similar tools are used to decide which blocks police officers should patrol, where to put inmates in prison, and who to let out on parole. Supporters of these tools claim they’ll help solve historical inequities, but their critics say they have the potential to aggravate them, by hiding old prejudices under the veneer of computerized precision. Some people see them as a sterilized version of what brought protesters into the streets at Black Lives Matter rallies…

 

Indonesia

The Intercept has an article on what is going on in Indonesia.

On the surface, the massive street protests surrounding the April 19 gubernatorial election have arisen from opposition to Jakarta’s ethnic Chinese incumbent governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as Ahok. As a result of pressure from the well-funded, well-organized demonstrations that have drawn hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — to Jakarta’s streets, Gov. Ahok is currently standing trial for religious blasphemy because of an offhand comment about a verse in the Quran. On Thursday, the day after he hears the results of the very close governor’s election, he is due back in court for his blasphemy trial.

Yet in repeated, detailed conversations with me, key protest figures and officials who track them have dismissed the movement against Ahok and the charges against him as a mere pretext for a larger objective: sidelining the country’s president, Jokowi, and helping the army avoid consequences for its mass killings of civilians — such as the 1965 massacres that were endorsed by the U.S. government, which armed and backed the Indonesian military.

Serving as the main face and public voice of the generals’ political thrust has been a group of what Indonesians call preman — officially sponsored street thugs — in this case, the Islamic Defenders Front, or FPI (Front Pembela Islam). Originally established by the security forces — the aparat — in 1998 as an Islamist front group to assault dissidents, the FPI has been implicated in violent extortion, especially of bars and sex clubs, as well as murders and attacks on mosques and churches. During the mass protests against the governor, FPI leader Habib Rizieq Shihab has openly called for Ahok to be “hanged” and “butchered.”

Indonesia is easily the largest and most important country that most Americans know little or nothing about. I don’t claim to know a lot about it, but I have been there, lived not too far away from there and interacted with people from there. My personal interactions with Indonesians have been very positive. More than once intrepid female Indonesian tourists have stopped me on the street and asked to take photos with me. This inevitably leads to small talk, which always seems to involve asking my martial status and how many children I have in the first minute. On the flip side, I remember an Indonesian woman asking me once to please not sit next to her on a ferry. I tried not to be offended but it was the last seat available. Eventually I managed to change seats with another female passenger, and that solved the problem. So in my personal experiences I have found Indonesian people very personable, peaceful, friendly and tolerant. Which makes the country’s history of ethnic and religious strife a bit hard to reconcile in my head. I have also known Indonesians of Chinese descent who left the country during the ethnic strife in the 90s, but they won’t talk about it much. And I’m aware of the awful things that happened in the 60s, possibly with U.S. government involvement, although I didn’t learn anything about it in school. It is sad if that sort of thing is happening again.

Change Agent

From Amazon:

On a crowded train platform, Interpol agent Kenneth Durand feels the sting of a needle—and his transformation begins…

In 2045 Kenneth Durand leads Interpol’s most effective team against genetic crime, hunting down black market labs that perform “vanity edits” on human embryos for a price. These illegal procedures augment embryos in ways that are rapidly accelerating human evolution—preying on human-trafficking victims to experiment and advance their technology.

With the worlds of genetic crime and human trafficking converging, Durand and his fellow Interpol agents discover that one figure looms behind it all: Marcus Demang Wyckes, leader of a powerful and sophisticated cartel known as the Huli jing.

But the Huli jing have identified Durand, too. After being forcibly dosed with a radical new change agent, Durand wakes from a coma weeks later to find he’s been genetically transformed into someone else—his most wanted suspect: Wyckes.

Now a fugitive, pursued through the genetic underworld by his former colleagues and the police, Durand is determined to restore his original DNA by locating the source of the mysterious—and highly valuable—change agent. But Durand hasn’t anticipated just how difficult locating his enemy will be. With the technology to genetically edit the living, Wyckes and his Huli jing could be anyone and everyone—and they have plans to undermine identity itself.

The Argument Culture

In 1998, Deborah Tannen wrote a book called The Argument Culture: Stopping America’s War of Words. Basically what it describes is a culture where the objective of every discussion is to win, not to seek consensus or at least come to understand the reasons for other people’s positions.

Our society has become overwhelmingly adversarial, with consequences not only in our ability to solve problems but also in our personal relationships.  The war on drugs, the battle of the sexes, politicians’ turf battles—war metaphors pervade our talk and shape our thinking, urging us to approach anything we need to accomplish as a fight between two opposing sides.

Tannen traces this tendency to the history of our educational system, and shows its roots among boys at play.  Exploring how other cultures approach opposition, and discussing the influence of electronic communication in ratcheting up the level of aggression, Tannen shows how we can move toward more constructive dialogue in our public as well our private lives.  This book will change forever how you see forces that powerfully shape our lives, and suggests new ways of reaching our goals.

The Retail Meltdown of 2017

The Atlantic has an article about “the retail meltdown of 2017”.

There have been nine retail bankruptcies in 2017—as many as all of 2016. J.C. Penney, RadioShack, Macy’s, and Sears have each announced more than 100 store closures. Sports Authority has liquidated, and Payless has filed for bankruptcy. Last week, several apparel companies’ stocks hit new multi-year lows, including Lululemon, Urban Outfitters, and American Eagle, and Ralph Lauren announced that it is closing its flagship Polo store on Fifth Avenue, one of several brands to abandon that iconic thoroughfare…

So, what the heck is going on? The reality is that overall retail spending continues to grow steadily, if a little meagerly. But several trends—including the rise of e-commerce, the over-supply of malls, and the surprising effects of a restaurant renaissance—have conspired to change the face of American shopping.

A lot of people like the car-dependent suburbs because they are perceived to be quiet, safe, and have good public education. But do people actually like sitting in traffic or have they seen that as a necessary price to pay. I like how the Place Shakers blog talks about this:

So what was the motivation [for the rise of auto-dependent retail]? I’d suggest it was (and still is, really) a desire for the easiest possible access to the stuff we want at the time — a desire so strong, it seems to me, that we began structuring our entire built environment around its fulfillment…

That’s why we built bigger arterials which fed bigger chain stores with more of the items we wanted to get our hands on. And why we built malls, where the variety of available goods seemed to increase exponentially. And it’s also why we established hefty parking minimums. Because you’re not effectively delivering on the promise of easy access to goods if you can pave the way to a warehouse full of stuff but leave no space to park within a few feet of the door. And parking within a few feet of the door is a fundamental part of the need being fulfilled.

But what happens when times and technologies change, and new ways of addressing our needs emerge? Suddenly we’re afforded new opportunities to prioritize how we spend our time and money.

In other words, we can get the stuff we want without spending so much time sitting in our cars, and we have figured out that there are other, better ways to be spending that time. I think something very similar is playing out with the trend of a lot of people working from home, at least on Fridays. By saving that commuting time to and from the office, your free up hours of your day for sleep, family, leisure, or extra productivity.

Philadelphia’s comprehensive subway system

Like Boston, New York, Chicago, and many European cities, Philadelphia had a plan to build a comprehensive subway system early in the 20th century. Hidden City Philadelphia describes why most of it was never built.

The “Taylor Plan” outlined creating subway lines along Chestnut, Walnut and Arch Streets, a loop to distribute riders of the Broad Street Subway around City Center, a spur into Northeast Philadelphia on Roosevelt Boulevard, and a line along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to points north. In his plan, Taylor outlined this Parkway line as an extension of the Broad Street Line, which eventually opened with service from City Hall to Olney Avenue on September 1, 1928. The Parkway-Roxborough (or Northwestern) line would have started as an subway at City Hall and then proceed below the Parkway to 29th Street, where it would have continued as an elevated line to Henry Avenue, following that road north past Wissahickon Creek…

The majority of Taylor’s planned routes never came to be nor did Philadelphia’s original transit master plan. Taylor was replaced in 1916 by a more pragmatic transit commissioner, William S. Twining, who took exception to many of Taylor’s ideas. Where Taylor saw transit as a stimulant of growth, Twinning believed that lines should only be built where there was already demand…

The last gasp of an enhanced mass transit system came in July of 1929 when Mayor Harry Mackey signed an ordinance for a ten-year transit program that included the Ridge Avenue subway line, the Locust Street subway line, and several other never-built transit routes. The Mayor authorized a $55,000,000 loan that never materialized. Unlike New York City, Philadelphia did not move forward with subway expansion projects to alleviate the city’s crushing unemployment rate during the Great Depression.

It’s a sad missed opportunity. It could still be done, and in fact it is being done throughout the developing world today. But U.S. leaders generally do not have the vision or imagination to consider even the possibility of picking up a plan like this.

value added tax

Here is a Fresh Air interview with T.R. Reid explaining how great the VAT is.

This is the most important innovation in taxation in the last 60 years. This is a tax that’s like a sales tax on steroids. It’s a tax – our sales tax is called a retail sales tax. The tax is only collected when the retailer sells you the book. But on a value-added tax, a tax is collected when the paper mill sells the paper to the publisher and when a publisher buys ink from an ink company and then the publisher sells it to a wholesaler and a wholesaler sells it to a distributor, distributor to the bookstore and the bookstore to you.

That tax is collected at every level, and every time you pay the tax to the other guy, you report it to the government to get a credit for the tax you paid which means every penny of tax that’s paid is reported to the government. So the VAT turns out to be a very easy tax for government to collect and a very hard tax for taxpayers to avoid. And so if you put in a value-added tax, they’re very steady collections, and it’s hard to cheat on.

And you could use that money to reduce the rate of the corporate or the personal income tax. So 176 countries have adopted this innovation. It’s a great idea. The only countries that don’t have it are a bunch of countries so poor they have no taxes and the United States of America. So I say in my book in taxation, Americans are still banging out letters on a typewriter and dropping them in a mailbox, and everybody else is texting and using Instagram.

So let’s do it. There are actually some signs the Trump administration might consider it. But instead of eliminating income tax, they may be thinking of going after the Social Security payroll tax.