The Dermaclip Tax

Posted on March 19, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

Yesterday, I posted and discussed ever-so-briefly a chart of inflated costs for various things over the course of the past two decades. Health care costs had accelerated almost as fast as a college education (well over 200%) in the years since 1999. Technology comprises maybe half of that rise, and for that we should be grateful and willing to pay. But the other half? To my mind, it is properly laid at the feet of lawyers who sue for the occasional broken toenail (or so it seems). Sloppy medical care will always happen. Always. We must remain vigilant as consumers.

Anyway, there are other reasons for the rise in the cost of health care. One of them is written about today and I wanted to grab this article and post it here for future reference. It was written by Ross Marchand is the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

______________________________________________

The American people – and just about all our elected officials – frequently and justifiably complain about the high cost of health care. But unless Congress acts, a tax increase on medical devices will take effect Jan. 1 and needlessly raise those costs even higher.

The 2.3 percent tax on medical devices was signed into law by President Obama and took effect in 2013. Fortunately, Congress passed legislation in 2015 and again in 2017 to temporarily suspend the tax. However, without further congressional action the tax will kick back in at the beginning of 2020.

Because the tax is only 2.3 percent it may sound like an insignificant amount. It’s not. Some medical devices are very expensive – for example, an MRI machine can cost up to $3 million. The 2.3 percent tax on that would amount to $69,000 – a cost that must be paid by someone.

Fortunately, patients may get a reprieve. Senators Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. (a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination) recently introduced a bipartisan bill permanently repealing the tax on medical devices.

Repealing the tax would make health care and health insurance that much less problematic (and arguably somewhat more affordable) for all Americans. While it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough, the repeal deserves support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

One reason you haven’t heard more objections to this tax is that most Americans don’t even know it exists.

A Pacific Research Institute scholar notes that the tax has been “priced into the costs of the product” and “has been applied inconsistently across products due to exemptions and short-term suspensions, which create difficulties for firms to plan and manage the tax; and, subjects some medical devices to double taxation.”

Of course, repealing this tax is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s needed to reform America’s dysfunctional health care system. But piecemeal changes can resuscitate the push for wider reforms. Just because lawmakers can’t agree on everything needed to improve our health care system doesn’t mean they shouldn’t agree on anything.

Patients in need of health care would hardly be the only victims of a medical device tax. During the original implementation of the tax from 2013 to 2015, more than 20,000 industry jobs were lost as companies faced nearly $30 billion in lower sales.

For medical device manufacturers big and small, stagnant sales led to less research into innovative products that can save lives. With fewer products sold, reduced access for patients and less innovation, new technologies were prevented from coming to market. Everyone suffered as a result.

In addition, gray areas abound in the Internal Revenue Service’s tax guidelines for the medical device tax, leading to uncertainty for the manufacturers of new cutting-edge products.

For example, the recently-invented Dermaclip™ is an alternative to stitches that can heal wounds more quickly and less painfully than conventional sutures. The rise of such easier-to-apply “skin closure devices” may lead to consumers being able to purchase and use them on their own, complicating the IRS’s exemption to the tax for any product “generally purchased by the general public at retail for individual use.”

By repealing the medical device tax, lawmakers can jumpstart health care innovation in the U.S. With a lighter touch from Uncle Sam, patients can see improved services at a lower price.

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on The Dermaclip Tax

Inflation and the Cost of Government Protection

Posted on March 18, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

I bumped into this chart via the writings of Jordan Peterson, he of Canada and the book Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. What struck me about this chart (authored by Mark J. Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan) is the near-total relationship of rising costs to government “protection.”

Many of us have been arguing for years that government should get out of the protection rackets: as examples, the college business and the ways in which health care is protected by a government that refuses to pass tort reform law.

In the case of the former, college costs, I am stunned at how expense has risen even as the perceived value has decreased. Who among us really thinks that a college education is worth 200% more than it was 20 years ago. Free money (well, at least as it is perceived by those taking student loans) has driven up the cost of college. Period. Full stop.

If students were forced to pay for college using their own money (no loans), I assure you college costs would drop. The universities couldn’t stay in business otherwise.

As to the latter – health care – the increases in cost have more to do with hospitals and doctors protecting themselves against lawyers as it does almost any other aspect of providing care. Yes, technology is costly and our health care system is heavily invested in things like hybrid operating rooms and PET-scans, among many other things. Indeed, health care economists estimate that 40–50% of annual cost increases can be traced to new technologies or the intensified use of old ones. But the other half? In my view it can be laid at the feet of personal injury lawyers. We need tort reform in this country and with it I can almost guarantee that heath care costs will start to decline.

Meanwhile, the costs of things none of us really need – cell phones, TVs, more clothing choices (seriously, how many shirts do you really need?) – have come tumbling down. I suspect that this is due more to the free market system and the advent of global trading. Cheap Chinese-made cellphones, including even Apple’s, have flooded the market and the demand has risen accordingly. Computer software is cheaper because of the incredible number of substitute products available. And so on. Not one word or whiff of government protection.

Housing costs have risen, again, because of 20 years of insane lending practices, wherein virtually anyone can get a mortgage and chase a somewhat constant supply of new housing (thereby increasing the price). Government restricts the building of new homes and viola! housing prices creep up.

College textbook costs have risen because publishers wanted in on the “free money” being thrown around by student loans. Two years ago I mistakenly required a textbook in one of my classes that carried a price tag of $180. Yet, within that text was nothing new, nothing that could not be covered, and was not covered, by a book six years old and about a tenth of that cost. You can guess what I did in the next semester. That’s right: I dropped the expensive book and required one that covered the material at a far better cost to my students.

We can only pray that wages keep pace.

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on Inflation and the Cost of Government Protection

The Science of Better Meetings

Posted on February 18, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

The Science of Better Meetings

By Dr. Steven G. Rogelberg

Feb. 15, 2019

“I wish I could go to more meetings,” said no one, ever.

Meetings consume and waste a massive, rising amount of individual and organizational time.  In a survey last year by Salary.com, “too many meetings” was the top time-waster at the office, cited by 47% of 3,164 workers.  The scheduling platform Doodle estimates that 700 million hours will be lost in U.S. workplaces this year to unnecessary or wasteful meetings.

But meetings themselves are not the problem.  They are essential to teams and organizations, supporting inclusion, communication, and coordination.  Abolishing meetings is a false solution.

Research shows that only one person usually leaves a meeting feeling good about it: the leader.

Sadly, most companies and most leaders view poor meetings as inevitable, like living with rain in London.  But, unlike the weather, meetings can be improved.  Researchers have been working on these issues for 15 years, including interviews and surveys of some 10,000 employees across many organizations.  Improving just one meeting a day yields tremendous benefits not only for the organization but for the person responsible.

Here are some ways to counteract the most common ways that meetings fail.

Recognize that you may be the problem.

We are poor judges of our own meeting leadership skills.  Research, published in 2011 in the journal Group Dynamics, shows that only one person usually leaves a meeting feeling good about it: the leader.  In a 1998 Verizon survey of more than 1,300 company managers, 79% of them reported that the meetings they initiated were extremely or very productive, but only 56% said the same about meetings initiated by others.  Clearly those running meetings and attending them are not aligned.

Though it’s rare, some companies seeking better meetings have surveyed employees to find out how much they felt all members contributed and whether meetings went beyond reiterating routine information.  At RSC Bio Solutions, a small firm in Charlotte, N.C., the CEO polled employees in 2016 and decided to rotate the leadership of daily short meetings to make them more productive.

Keep it small.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is known for instituting a “two-pizza rule”—if you need more than two pizzas to feed everyone, the meeting is too large.  A 2010 study conducted by consultants Bain & Company found that for each additional person over seven members in a decision-making group, decision effectiveness is reduced by approximately 10%.  A 2011 study of 97 work teams by three Canadian researchers found more counterproductive behavior and interpersonal aggression in larger groups.

Leaders should limit attendance to just the essential stakeholders.

And to widen the scope, they can ask those outside the meeting for their input beforehand and can provide minutes afterward—a technique that keeps non-attendees in the loop while letting them do their work.

Don’t take an hour. 

The Yerkes–Dodson law, which maps the inverted-U-shaped relationship between stress and performance, is well established in psychological research and holds that performance is optimal with some moderate level of pressure.  To achieve that in meetings, carefully consider how long you need—and then dial it back a bit.

Try a 48-minute rule in place of an hour, for example, to create focused, efficient discussion.  A regular fast “huddle” or a stand-up meeting (used by companies such as Apple, Zappos and Capital One) has similar effects.  A 1999 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that sit-down meetings last 35% longer than those held standing up, with no gains in effectiveness.

A 2009 survey of meeting-goers noted the importance of ending on time to avoid frustration and a domino effect on schedules.  To avoid running over, some companies use a countdown clock.  At the vacation website Tripping.com, the leader must contribute to a team beer jar if a meeting ends late.

Do a meeting “pre-mortem.”  

Studies show that having an agenda is a poor predictor of attendees’ perceptions of meeting effectiveness.  And it’s no wonder: A 2003 survey of 187 companies detailed in the Harvard Business Review found that, in about half of them, agendas were typically standard boilerplate, repeated at every meeting, or made up on the spot.

An effective agenda works like a plan for an event: It has clear goals or key questions to answer.  To get there, consider a pre-mortem—that is, envision how the meeting could go wrong and devise a strategy to prevent it.  Ask attendees for agenda items and assign ownership.

Research shows that such preparation increases engagement and a sense of purpose.  And if the agenda isn’t coming together, that points to an obvious solution: Cancel the meeting.

[Dr. Rogelberg is Chancellor’s Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the author of “The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance,” published last month by Oxford University Press.  The foregoing article appeared in the February 16, 2019, print edition as ‘The Science of Better Meetings.’]

Posted in Business, General Musings | Comments Off on The Science of Better Meetings

The Wealthy Have an “Optics” Problem

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

The following essay was authored by a “Dr. Hall” and ran on the Wall Street Journal’s website on February 1, 2019.  The WSJ did not provide Dr. Hall’s complete name.  I am capturing it here for my own reference and for those of my readers who might enjoy it.  It is Dr. Hall’s work.

Happiness seems to be in short supply today, with acrimony, incivility and bad, boorish behavior permeating society and the media from the highest echelons of government on down.  Yet happiness has always been something distinctively coveted by Americans.  The inalienable right to pursue it, along with life and liberty, was enshrined by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.

If we are to pursue it, however, we need to define it.  And to understand what Jefferson really meant by happiness, we must turn to a thinker who influenced him: the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the 4th century B.C.

Aristotle’s ethical system—as described in his major treatises, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics—revolves around the idea that the goal of human life is happiness, which he called eudaimonia. (In Greek, the root eu means “well” or “good,” and daimonian suggests a guardian spirit or one’s lot in life.)

Aristotle didn’t equate happiness with wealth, pleasure or fame. For him, happiness was an internal state of mind—a felicity or contentment that we can acquire only by living life in the best way possible.

Aristotle was born in a small, independent Greek city-state, but he spent years at close quarters with the Macedonian royal family. He was an eyewitness to the court of Philip II, Alexander the Great’s despotic father, who was ruthless, acquisitive and addicted to conspicuous consumption. Philip pitted his rivalrous lieutenants, wives, concubines and children against each other, and they responded by endlessly plotting bouts of reciprocal murder.

Aristotle saw that these seemingly fortunate members of the elite were actually miserable. Such people spend their lives acquiring material possessions or seeking sensory gratification, but on some level, they know that these pursuits aren’t conducive to true happiness. They may even recognize the right thing to do, but they are too weak or lazy to act on it.

Real happiness, Aristotle believed, comes from a continuous effort to become the best possible version of yourself. Like his teacher Plato and Plato’s own teacher Socrates, he subscribed to the ancient proverb engraved over the oracle at Delphi: Know thyself.

Aristotle’s common-sense prescriptions for happiness also offer hope for the wider community.

In his treatises, Aristotle analyzed a wide range of traits of character—in Greek, ethos, from which we derive the word “ethics.” These included libido, courage, anger, how we treat other people and how we regard money. All of us possess these properties, and happiness comes from cultivating each one in the correct amount, so that it is a virtue (arete) rather than a vice.  It is better to seek the average of the various traits in other words, the “mean” amount of each of the properties.

It is in this notion of the “mean” that Aristotelian ethics differs from other ancient moral systems. Aristotle does not teach, for instance, that anger is a vice and patience a virtue. Rather, he believes that when we feel anger in the right amount, at the right time and toward the right people, it is virtuous. Without it, we wouldn’t stand up for ourselves or for important principles. Failing to feel anger when we are wronged is a vice, but then so is excessive, misplaced or gratuitous anger.

And the same goes for every other quality. Fiscal responsibility, to take another example, is the virtue lying between the vices of parsimony—which Aristotle despised, especially in the rich—and reckless spending.

[Editor’s’ Note: If the present-day socialists have their way (and it looks increasingly likely that they will), we will embark on another of those wondrous “soak the rich” adventures that result only in the flight of capital out of our country.  It won’t work to “soak the rich” inasmuch as the sum total of ALL their wealth would run the government for maybe six months.

Nevertheless, I can understand the sentiment.  The rich in our country have lost their moral compasses.  Where one home is enough, they have 3 and 4 and more.  Where one car per person in their households is enough, they have entire fleets. Dare I mention the jets?  Today came the news that a condo (!) in New York City has sold for $250 million.  Seriously, a condo?  I could go on. The point is that they have too much and the poor people, well in sight from that condo, are watching, getting angrier.]

Good Aristotelians acknowledge both their best and their worst moral characteristics and work continuously at self-improvement. They try to develop habits of generosity, honesty, responsibility, integrity, fairness, kindness and good humor. The result is a comforting moral self-sufficiency that even bereavement, bankruptcy or sheer bad luck can’t take away.

Aristotle’s common-sense prescriptions for happiness also offer hope for the wider community. When he said that we are political animals, he meant that we flourish by cultivating the virtues in relation not just to ourselves and our families but also to our friends, neighbors and fellow citizens. He offers us a way to pursue our happiness as individuals, but his principles can help us to make the public arena a better place as well.

The rich in our midst have an “optics” problem.  They are seen as having way more than they can ever possibly use (which, of course, they do) and they are flaunting it.  Better that they figure a way to give away as much as they can as fast as they can and help others to realize the dream. The optics are terrible. Pitchfork producers are gearing up.

Posted in Business, General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on The Wealthy Have an “Optics” Problem

Cal Newport on Quitting Facebook, and The Death of Concentration (Part One)

Posted on January 27, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

Several years ago, I quit Facebook and never looked back.  There hasn’t been a time when I regretted the decision or somehow looked with envy upon those well-connected friends of mine who get all they need to know from Social Media.  I even began questioning what the definition of “need to know” was (or is), and, by and large, haven’t gotten a clear answer in the years since. I am happy not knowing about Jane’s new puppy or kitten, or Buffy’s new car.  I don’t, as it turns out, “need to know.”

American and other international companies seized upon Facebook as an advertising medium almost unparalleled in the history of the world.  This was, of course, Mark Zuckerberg’s secret sauce all along.  The service is free to users (“and always will be,” he says), but it reminds me of the old adage, “when a product is free, YOU are the product.”  Everything you do on the Net is somehow shoveled into Facebook’s engines and helps advertisers target you incessantly. You are indeed the product.

I have a hunch that while America is perhaps at its most polarized, politically and otherwise, there is a developing sense that Facebook and its ilk (Instagram, Snapchat, et al) are not as good for us as we might have otherwise believed. I hope so.

The mob reaction to the Covington High School event is ample evidence.  It took a Facebook-nano-second for the boys of Covington to get their almighty due in the court of public opinion.  Reputations were ruined and lives turned all but upside down.  Sad to see in what is supposed to be the most civilized nation on earth (it isn’t, not by a long shot).

Dr. Calvin Newport, a Georgetown University professor, was interviewed this week in the Wall Street Journal and had plenty to say about that event and the whole of social media. He teaches computer science at the renown D.C. campus.

“Because I don’t have any social-media accounts,” he said, “my encounter with the Covington Catholic controversy was much different than most people’s.  I read about the event days later in an old-fashioned newspaper column and learned that the social-media reaction had been incendiary and basically everyone was now upset at each other, at themselves, at technology itself.  It sounded exhausting.”

One of the seminal pieces I came across when researching my own doctoral dissertation was Newport’s 2010 piece entitled, An Argument for Quitting Facebook.  It was a blog post that came with instructions on how to deactivate your account.  I followed his instructions and left Facebook about a year later.

“Technologies are great,” he wrote, “but if you want to keep control of your time and attention,” you should “insist that they earn their keep before you make them a regular part of your life.”

Newport has never had a social-media account and jokes that such a public turning-inward, as it were, is lawful and not the least bit anti-social.  More to the point, he noticed that social media was impairing our ability to concentrate; yes, concentrate, which, as grandma often told you, is an “essential skill for professional and personal success.”

Right around the transition to mobile [from desktop computers], Newport observed that for many people a passing interest in social media was morphing into “compulsive use.” It tapped what is probably a human tendency to seize upon the so-called gambler’s fallacy (“I gotta keep playing this slot machine; it’ll pay off on the next hit I’m sure!”).

The transition to mobile meant that checking social media became a hand-held event.  And phones were everywhere, including the grocery store line. Still, it was a slower-moving medium. You might update your “wall” (as it was known then) only occasionally, and if you went on to check what your friends were up to in the morning, there would be no reason to check in the afternoon. Nothing had changed.

But then it did change. The smartphone, via Apple’s App Store and its agreement with Facebook to load software on every iPhone sold, made the practice far easier and thereby rendered social media as ubiquitous, which suited the commercial interests of social-media companies just fine, thank you.  User-engagement numbers tripled, then quadrupled.

Then came the “Like” button, along with Google’s “Plus” and Twitter’s “Follow Me,” the modern-era equivalent of three cherries on a slot-machine.  Cal Newport refers to them as “small indicators of approval.”

Well, not so small. These Likes, Follows, and Plusses provided “a much richer stream of information coming back to the user,” which proved even more seductive. The reinforcement is all the more insidious for being intermittent. Sometimes you’re rewarded for checking in, sometimes you’re frustrated. It short-circuits the dopamine system and feeds the compulsion. It’s like having a slot machine at your desk.

Facebook added to the compulsion by introducing facial recognition, yet another “small indicator of approval.” And one more reason to keep playing the social-media-slot-machine.

All of this, with Cal Newport’s help, led me to end my slot-machine habit.  Seriously, have I missed anything by not being on Facebook? Anything important?  My answer is an unequivocal “no.” And contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s assurances, and because I am not on the porous Facebook, my privacy has therefore remained intact. Notwithstanding Zuck’s commitment to “everyone having a voice and being able to connect,” I seem to be fine connecting in far more personal and immediate ways.

All the “connecting” and “voicing” on social media, to me, adds up to nothing more than an annoying static, the modern-day equivalent of so much cosmic noise.  Witness the Covington Catholic fracas. “Is anyone better off for having wasted hours and hours of time this past week exhaustively engaging half-formed back-and-forth yelling on social media?” Dr. Newport asks.

“On reflection, the answer is yes for one group in particular: the executives at the giant social-media conglomerates, who sucked up all those extra ‘user engagement’ minutes like an oil tycoon who just hit a gusher.”

Only Zuckerberg got rich, just like the tycoons of the 1800s.  The user reaped nothing, except for agitation and negativity.

“When I talk to people now who are very distressed about their digital life,” he says, “it’s not political things that they care about.”  Instead, he says, people are beginning to say, “I’m on this more than is useful, more than is healthy. It’s keeping me from my kids.  It’s keeping me from my friends. It’s keeping me from things I used to enjoy. I think it’s hurting the quality of my life.”

You cannot un-ring a bell, to be sure, and social media is here to stay, Still, he says, “we should have been warier about this idea of taking human sociality —incredibly powerful and shaped by a million years of evolution —and allowing 22-year-olds in California to reinvent it.”

Newport laments that everyone “writes the same article with tips for turning off notifications or some such. This is not working.  What people need is a full-fledged philosophy of how to use technology.”

I have come to participate in Newport’s experiment he calls a “digital declutter,” or what I call a “digital cleanse.” I even went so far as to invest in old typewriters.

Instead, I’d rather spend my days figuring out what I’d like to do with my time, including … nothing at all.  In the end, you see, human beings crave “high-quality leisure.”  Facebook and its ilk are, to my mind, low-quality.

And, so, like Cal Newport, I am glad I don’t own Facebook stock.  In business parlance, Facebook has what is known as a very weak connection to their user base, a user-base that is much fickler than they probably want to admit, simply because people like me are fine walking away from it.

And walk away I did.

In part two we will take a closer look at Newport’s ideas around our declining ability to focus, to concentrate, and how social media has played a role.

Posted in Business, Dissertation and Research, General Musings, State of the Nation | Tagged , | Comments Off on Cal Newport on Quitting Facebook, and The Death of Concentration (Part One)

Correlation is NOT Causation – Lest We Forget

Posted on January 22, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

Wanting this to be preserved for my own reference, I am posting this Wall Street Journal article (from January 22, 2019) to my Blog. I am especially proud of Mr. Rocca’s reporting of the John Jay conclusions; to wit:

“Researchers said they had found no evidence that homosexual orientation was a risk factor for abuse and suggested that the high proportion of male victims was at least in part a function of their greater availability, especially in the period before girls were allowed to be altar servers.”

So, here is the article, copyright belonging to the WSJ:

By Francis X. Rocca

Since last summer, the Catholic Church has been roiled by accusations that retired Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., molested male minors and sexually harassed adult seminarians and priests over more than two decades. The case has reignited a long and tense debate among Catholics over the question of homosexuality in the all-male priesthood. Some bishops, other clergy and laypeople have cited Archbishop McCarrick’s rise to power, despite widespread rumors of sexual misconduct, as evidence of a “homosexual subculture” in the hierarchy that they blame for allowing sex abuse and covering it up.

“These homosexual networks, which are now widespread in many dioceses, seminaries, religious orders, etc., act under concealment of secrecy and lies with the power of octopus tentacles, and strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations, and are strangling the entire church,” wrote Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican envoy to the U.S., in a manifesto published last August.

At a November meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco cited a study by the Rev. D. Paul Sullins, a sociologist at the Catholic University of America, positing a correlation among the incidence of allegations of sexual abuse, the proportion of Catholic priests describing themselves as homosexual and the reported existence of a “homosexual subculture” in some U.S. seminaries. The archbishop ruled out a “direct causal connection” between homosexuality and abuse but called for further study to explain the correlation.

Others in the church have denounced such statements as the scapegoating of gay priests. Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, one of the organizers of a summit on sex abuse that Pope Francis has called for next month at the Vatican, has dismissed any link between homosexuality and sexual abuse, which he says is rooted instead in “privilege, power and protection of a clerical culture.”

A study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, commissioned by the USCCB and published in 2004, found that 81% of the reported victims of sex abuse by priests were male. In a follow-up study in 2011, John Jay researchers said they had found no evidence that homosexual orientation was a risk factor for abuse and suggested that the high proportion of male victims was at least in part a function of their greater availability, especially in the period before girls were allowed to be altar servers.

Those alleging a connection between sex abuse and a homosexual subculture in the priesthood often cite the work of the late A.W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist and pioneer in the study of clerical sex abuse. In an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI in 2008, Mr. Sipe wrote that he had heard “from many priests about their seduction by highly placed clerics and the dire consequences in their lives that does not end in their victimization alone… This abuse paves the way for them to pass the tradition on—to have sex with each other and even with minors.”

Mr. Sipe also wrote that “sexual abuse of minor boys by priests must not be confused with a homosexual orientation…This is patently clear when a 35-year-old man abuses a 13-year-old girl. Heterosexual orientation is not blamed.”

The Rev. James Martin, author of “Building a Bridge,” a book about the church’s relationship with gay Catholics, dismisses talk of a “gay subculture” in the priesthood as malicious mythology. “There’s as much a gay subculture as there is an Irish subculture or a sports subculture. In a sense, it’s natural that gay priests and religious would congregate,” he said. But he denies that gay priests somehow control the hierarchy: “The notion that someone would be shut out of being a bishop or religious superior because he is straight is ridiculous.”

One point that all sides in the debate seem to agree on is that the priesthood today is a disproportionately gay vocation. Of the 37,000 priests in the U.S., Father Martin estimates that gay men make up anywhere between 25% and 40%. Janet Smith, a professor of moral theology at a seminary in Detroit who has called for “eradicating…homosexual networks” in the clergy, believes the proportion of “active homosexuals” varies widely but constitutes as much as 50% of the priests in some U.S. dioceses.

Why are so many priests gay? An oft-cited reason is that, before the growing social acceptance of homosexuality in recent decades, clerical celibacy was the respectable alternative for Catholic men who had no desire to marry. “Coming out as a gay man in a religiously engaged and conservative environment was just not an option, so entering the priesthood made perfect sense,” said Thomas Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University. “You could live in a community of men in seminary and after. It was a perfect scenario, perfect cover.”

Another factor seems to have been the tumultuous change in the church in the decades following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), when some 20,000 men left the priesthood in the U.S., most of them to marry. “Their absence, it can be argued, has dramatically changed the gay/straight ratio,” wrote the Rev. Donald Cozzens in “The Changing Face of the Priesthood” (2000).

The Catholic Church teaches that “homosexual tendencies,” while not sinful in themselves, are “objectively disordered” as an inclination to sinful acts. In 2005, a Vatican document said that the church “cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’”

Pope Francis has shown greater openness to homosexuality than his predecessors, and the most famous statement of his pontificate was a reference to gay priests: “If someone is gay and is searching for the Lord and has good will, then who am I to judge him?” Yet he approved a 2016 document reaffirming the 2005 ban, which he restated in his own words in an interview published last month. “In the consecrated life and the priestly life, that type of affection has no place,” the pope said. “For that reason, the church recommends that people with that ingrained tendency not be accepted for the ministry or the consecrated life. The ministry or the consecrated life is not their place.”

The pope didn’t call for the expulsion of gay men already in the priesthood but said that they must be “exquisitely responsible, taking care never to scandalize either their communities or the holy faithful people of God by living a double life.”

Some argue that the clerical life poses an unreasonable challenge for gay men. “It’s just not a good place for people with same-sex attraction to be in a same-sex environment,” said Msgr. Charles Pope, a pastor in Washington, D.C., who has written on the subject for the National Catholic Register. “If an alcoholic came to me and said, ‘I’m sober and I’m going to get a job working in a bar,’ I’d say, ‘That’s not a good match for you.’”

Father Martin agrees that “people who cannot live celibacy should not be clergy” but says that there is no reason to think gay people are less equipped to do so. “The catechism says that celibacy is what all gay people should do, so gay priests are following the catechism to the letter,” he said. “If you’re saying that gay men can’t be celibate, you’re saying that the catechism can’t be lived.”

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | Comments Off on Correlation is NOT Causation – Lest We Forget

Driver-Less Trains: This “Operator” is Somewhat Conflicted

Posted on January 19, 2019 by Dr Joseph Russo

This article cites “model train layouts” as the prototype, if you will, of the future vision for driver-less trains. From the Wall Street Journal on January 19, 2019, I am copying it here for reference.

My own model train layout is driven by me (the embedded video is the latest update on progress), using a remote controller and, at least insofar as I can tell, results in far fewer accidents than occur on the nation’s “real” layout of some 140,000 miles of track. I am being only somewhat facetious. Automation has certainly resulted in fewer accidents in any number of industries and every-day, pedestrian type applications.

I am somewhat conflicted, however. Our country hasn’t thought through what it will do with all the unemployed engineers and others displaced by robotic automation. We certainly have experience with what expanded leisure time can result in – to wit, the opioid epidemic amidst the thousands of laid-off mine workers here in Wyoming suffering from the “war on coal.” Men with nothing to do and no future tend to self-medicate.

Oh well. Time marches on. We cannot stop progress, such as it is …

Here’s the article:

SYDNEY—Mining giant Rio Tinto calls it the world’s largest robot: mile-long driverless trains traversing the sparsely populated Australian Outback on roughly 1,000 miles of track. American railroad companies, seeking to boost network efficiencies, call it the future.

U.S. rail-freight operators say greater automation will make their networks safer and more productive. They point to railroads owned by Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto as a blueprint for the 140,000-mile private U.S. network that moves vast quantities of everything from cars to corn.

A decade in the making, Rio Tinto’s driverless train system, called Auto Haul™, now manages roughly 200 locomotives that move iron ore from inland mines to coastal ports in Western Australia. The trains are operated hundreds of miles away, in an office block in Perth.

Rio Tinto’s network, which began formally operating in driverless mode late last month, is the first fully autonomous, long-haul freight railroad. Rail-company executives from countries including the U.S. and Canada have visited to see the technology in action, said Ivan Vella, Rio Tinto’s head of iron-ore rail services.

American companies say automating tasks once handled by crew will create fluid networks more akin to a model train set. Around 5 million tons of goods are moved daily on the U.S. network, which freight operators share with passenger trains, generating more than $70 billion in revenue annually.

Drivers have variable skills, so a generous distance is kept between trains. In doing so, companies sacrifice valuable rail capacity. Also, the different ways that drivers run locomotives lead to inconsistent wear-and-tear and fuel use, while human error accounts for more than one-third of accidents, according to the Association of American Railroads, an industry trade group.

Last November, miner BHP Group Ltd. was forced to derail a 268-wagon runaway train in Australia’s Pilbara region, the origin of half the world’s iron-ore exports. The train rolled away after its driver disembarked to inspect a wagon and failed to secure the brake.

Labor unions and some lawmakers worry about risks to public safety, cyber threats and job cuts from increased automation. Rail-freight companies have typically offered some of the nation’s best-paid jobs, with an average annual salary of more than $125,000, said the AAR, which represents most major railroads. The country’s biggest Class I railroads employed roughly 147,000 people in 2017.

“Americans want a rail network and a transportation system that serves the people, not one that simply makes money for stockholders by eliminating good jobs and quality rail service,” Railroad Workers United, a coalition of unions, said in a statement submitted last year to the Federal Railroad Administration, which was seeking comments on the future of automation in the industry. RWU opposes crews of fewer than two people.

Reaching a consensus among companies, unions and regulators on how many drivers, if any, should remain on board will likely take a long time, said CSX Corp. Chief Executive James Foote.

U.S. rail-freight operators, whose trains are typically staffed by a conductor and engineer, say the goal isn’t to do away with drivers immediately. They contend there are many steps to reach the sort of driverless network Rio Tinto has created, although a shift toward more one-person crews is anticipated as new technologies are implemented.

“The lack of certainty makes investments in technology and innovation cautious endeavors that result in small gains, not leaps forward,” the AAR said in a filing to the Federal Railroad Administration last month.

Today, efforts to advance automation are being held back by regulations that haven’t kept pace with technological change, executives say. They fear falling behind as vehicle makers develop self-driving cars and autonomous trucks.

The Transportation Department released guidelines on autonomous vehicles in October but didn’t address autonomous trains in detail.

Existing regulations typically dictate that tasks such as track inspections be conducted by people. Operators say this could be done better using an automated system.

The AAR has urged transport officials to grant waivers on what it says are outdated rules and allow railroads and manufacturers to create voluntary standards for safety technology, where possible. The Federal Railroad Administration was unable to comment because of the continuing government shutdown.

The 200-year-old industry has spent most of the past decade developing positive train control technology, designed to automatically stop a train to prevent collisions. That system, which uses GPS information and track data, has created a platform to operate trains more independently.

“The Rio Tinto example clearly shows the technology is here,” said John Scheib, chief legal officer at Norfolk Southern Corp. “It shows that our regulator needs to move more quickly to open the doors to such technologies,” he said.

Rio Tinto’s trains complete an average return journey of 500 miles in 40 hours. Previously, the miner had to shuttle nearly 100 drivers around these scrubby outlands to switch train drivers three times for each journey. That totaled almost a million miles a year and the changeovers added more than an hour to each return train trip.

Today, a train controller at its Perth operations center sets the route, then computers both at the center and on-board take over to make decisions. Before the system was set up, the miner faced repeated setbacks. The project ran three years late and to almost double the original budget.

“What Auto Haul does,” though, “is drive it better than the best driver, every time,” Mr. Vella said.

Of course, there are many people in Australia “who love driving trains [and] they are disappointed they don’t get to drive trains anymore,” he said. “We are trying to give them alternatives.”

Write to Rhiannon Hoyle at rhiannon.hoyle@wsj.com

Posted in Toy Trains | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Driver-Less Trains: This “Operator” is Somewhat Conflicted

One Thing to Be Truly Worried About? America’s Fertility Rate is Headed to an All-Time Low

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Dr Joseph Russo

This was penned by Michael Barone and appeared in the Wall Street Journal on December 19, 2018. Consistent with words of warning contained in Hans Rosling’s book Factfulness and in another wonderful book entitled, What We Should Be Worried About, this article is one of many we are sure to see in the coming months and years.  I am posting it here for the benefit of my MBA students

Numbers., numbers, numbers …

In 1957, 4.3 million babies were born in the United States — 4,316,233, to be exact.  In 2017, 60 years later, the number was 3,853,472.  That’s an 11 percent decline, in a nation whose population has nearly doubled over those six decades.  And although there are a few days left in 2018, the number for this year is sure to be lower still.

That’s the dominant finding from a thorough and alarming American Enterprise Institute report on Declining Fertility in America by Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies.

In recent years, demographics journalists have focused on slivers of the population — the increasing percentages of Hispanics and Asians, the decline in births to teenage mothers, low birth rates in high-cost coastal metropolitan areas.  Stone looks at the larger picture, that of total population, and finds that “the specter of low fertility, and ultimately of declining populations, has come to America.”

That’s a different picture from that of a decade ago, when American birth rates hovered around, and sometimes just above, replacement level.  That was a vivid contrast with substantially below-replacement-level birth rates in most of Europe and Japan, especially Japan where things are completely upside-down age-wise.

Those birth rates were buoyed upward by immigrant mothers, after a quarter-century of mass migration from Latin America, especially Mexico.  But Mexican migration fell toward zero in the 2007-09 recession, and births to immigrants in the U.S. sharply declined, too.

Some Americans might see that as good news. It suggests that a lower percentage of babies are born to mothers in disadvantaged households.

And just about everyone, as Stone notes, takes the continuing sharp decline in births to teenage mothers as good news too, considering that such children have tended to suffer negative outcomes.

But the negative outcomes of increasing infertility – and eventual population decline – have even greater implications.  To put it bluntly:

Who is going to pay for Social Security and Medicare when there are fewer working-age adults paying taxes for every oldster receiving benefits?

Welfare states assume expanding populations, and America’s potential parents don’t seem to be providing one any more.  Why?

Stone rules out one cause.  Surveys show that women want more children than they’re having.  That was probably not the case, or less so, when American’s fertility rate dropped in the mid-1970s.

The culprit this time is something that scarcely existed then: student loans for college.  Yep, student loans.  The top three items on Stone’s list of five causes are:

“increased young adult debt service costs due to student loans.”  

Number two is:

“decreasing young adult homeownership” due to higher prices and — here it is again — “student loans.”  

Number three is:

“increasing years spent actively enrolled in educational institutions, which tends to reduce birth rates dramatically.”

Government efforts to encourage higher education have, for many intended beneficiaries, backfired.  Nongraduates still have debt.  Graduates with politically correct degrees can’t find jobs.  College costs have been inflated by administrative bloat and country club campuses.  

“The entire educational complex is presently structured in such a way as to discourage family formation for young adults.”

The result is “delayed marriage,” which “explains the vast majority of changes in American fertility over the past 10 or 20 years,” Stone writes.  And though he doesn’t mention it, the increasing number of noncollege whites who never marry surely explains some of the rest.

What are policymakers doing to respond to this abrupt demographic challenge?  Approximately… nothing.  

Stone notes that the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security Administration and Medicare’s actuaries have not “even published stress-test scenarios of long-term fertility at 1.5 or 1.6” — just below the current 1.7 — “an incredible collective failure of foresight by almost all the economic bodies whose job it is to anticipate this kind of problem.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan, the one politician who gets it and who has worked strenuously to address such problems, and at one point got all his Republican colleagues to go along with entitlement reform, has just delivered his farewell speech.  Therefore, he’s gone, and no one is talking about the issue in his wake.  House Republicans will be in the minority next month, and they have no appetite for taking up the issue again.  Especially since President Trump has promised to leave entitlements entirely in place.  

And no significant number of Democratic officeholders is seeking to give up what they consider one of their party’s chief political advantages.

It’s quite a contrast with the late 1990s, when American fertility was higher, and Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were working on entitlement reform until the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.

One answer, of course, is to let in as many young – very young – immigrants as we can.  They ought to come with skills, but as long as they come with a desire to procreate, well, then, we might have hope.

Something to worry about in the years to come.

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on One Thing to Be Truly Worried About? America’s Fertility Rate is Headed to an All-Time Low

When a Product is “Free,” YOU are the Product

Posted on December 19, 2018 by Dr Joseph Russo

As my readers know, several years ago I walked away from Facebook and have never looked back.  The decision was simple: I came to dislike Mark Zuckerberg and his company, his privacy practices, his politics, and his history.  After all, especially in this era of #MeToo, we ought to stop and remember that Facebook was originally designed to rate girl’s looks and, well, you know, their … shall we say … bed’ability.  It surprises me that more women aren’t quitting Facebook on that basis alone, but Mark does a good job throwing his money at causes.

In my doctoral dissertation I wrote about the many ways Facebook and other social media platforms could be vehicles for harm and how they might not face the test of time. I hate to say “I told you so,” but I did. Facebook is losing traction among the key demographics on whose backs Zuckerberg’s stock priced is based. Google recently announced that they are ending Google+ and we all know that Twitter has all but stopped growing. 

Anyway, this news appeared in last week’s New York Times: 

Walt Mossberg, of whom I’ve been a fan for going on 25 years, has summarily quit Facebook. 

Remember, this is a man who has spent decades chronicling the impact of Silicon Valley’s policies; ergo, his exit from the social network speaks louder than most.

Mr. Mossberg, a veteran of The Wall Street Journal, said on Monday he would be deactivating his Facebook account, along with the Facebook-owned Messenger and Instagram apps. Stunning news, albeit something he felt compelled to post on … that’s right … Facebook. 

“I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here,” he wrote on Facebook.

While Mr. Mossberg didn’t list any specific complaints on Monday, his history of public writing left little doubt that his ire was aimed largely at the company’s policies and actions on user privacy. 

Wanna stay in contact with your loved ones around the globe? How about pen-on-paper with a stamp affixed? The Post Office needs the work. Or, even the good old telephone? Reaching out and touching someone in a personal way is far more memorable than a Facebook post, folks. 

Besides, all Zuckerberg cares about is how to make money. 

Remember, when a product is free, YOU are the product. 

Posted in General Musings | Comments Off on When a Product is “Free,” YOU are the Product

White Christmas

Posted on December 18, 2018 by Dr Joseph Russo

As the nation grapples with the putative messages contained within “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” I thought it would be nice to pause for just a moment.

The #MeToo Movement is out of control, and has now succeeded in banning an otherwise innocent and, for its time, a quaint and reassuring winter song (it isn’t a Christmas song, by the way).  They want the song banned because its lyrics suggest that consent is not forthcoming and the “wolf” continues his assault. An alternative interpretation would be that the man is being a gentleman and offering a safe harbor from the ravages of a bad storm. And, lest we forget, no less than the Academy Awards folk thought so much of the composition, that they awarded it the 1949 Oscar for Best Original Song.

Books, of course, will be next.  Hitler (wherever he is) is sure to be smiling.  Banning books was, after all, his specialty. 

But I digress.

So, here are some words about the best selling songs of all time. I begin with this:

The best-selling single of all time is the 1942 Christmas classic, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” Although the song was sung by Bing Crosby for the movie Holiday Inn, the tune was penned by composer Irving Berlin.

Now, get this: Knowing what he’d just written, and perhaps foreshadowing the success of the song, Berlin is said to have told his secretary, “Grab your pen and take down this song. I just wrote the best song I’ve ever written—heck, I just wrote the best song that anybody’s ever written!” The MeToo idiots will surely take umbrage at a man barking orders to his, we assume, female secretary. But so it goes.

Anyway, that’s a pretty bold proclamation. But, if you’d like to argue with Mr. Berlin, you might want to take a look at the sales records first.

The Bing Crosby version of “White Christmas” has sold over 50 million singles.  If you factor in other artists covering the song, it has sold over 100 million singles worldwide since it was first released in 1942.

By comparison, the next most popular single of any genre is Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind″ tribute to Princess Diana, with 33 million sales.

There’s clearly something magical about Christmas songs when it comes to sweeping the singles charts. Looking through the top 25 singles of all time yields five Christmas songs:

  • the aforementioned “White Christmas” with 31 million in sales;
  • Bing Crosby’s “Silent Night” (30 million sales);
  • Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (16 million sales);
  • Gene Autry’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (12.5 million sales); and,
  • Band Aid’s (whoever/whatever that is)  “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (11.7 million sales).

Between you and me, I am offended (offended! I say) that Mariah would have the gall to “want me” and not get hauled into court. Oh well. 

Merry Christmas.

Posted in General Musings, State of the Nation | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments