I don’t know about you, but I often see exchanges of the following type (replace “murder” with any of a thousand different behaviors which are unkind to other people): Team Humanity member: “Murder is wrong. Gang A and Gang B murder people. Stop it.” Gang A member: “That is false equivalence. Gang B murders more people and more enthusiastically than we do.” Team Humanity member: “Stop murdering people.

So, one year into retirement and so far no regrets. I could rant at the abyss about the global state of affairs, but I know exactly how much attention the abyss would pay. Several people asked me if I was behind the Twitter feed @GoodTaxTakes. The answer is no, but I agree with probably 90% of it. Click on the title of this post for some thoughts about the current state of affairs in international tax which I can get away with because I don’t represent anyone anymore.

Per the Officer Down Memorial page, so far 243 police officers have died in the line of duty in 2021 and of those deaths, 132 are from COVID-19. So more deaths from Covid than every other cause combined. Remind me why police unions are opposed to masks and vaccination? Seriously, I don’t get it.

I was recently re-introduced to Simpson’s Paradox in statistics - how aggregation can mislead. (I’m just making up the numbers here to demonstrate the concept.) Suppose you have China with an overall illness survival rate of 95% and Italy with an overall illness survival rate of 85%. On the face of it, that looks like China does a better job of taking care of patients than Italy. But now suppose you look at the survival rate by age group and Italy has a higher illness survival rate in every single age bracket.

I made a comment to my wife about the fact I have ancestors on both sides of the Salem witch trials. So of course I had to prove it out against the family tree (old New England families with relatives who were very interested in genealogy; the family tree currently has over 7,500 people in the database). So, just for fun, here are the results: Actually Accused Winifred Henchman (1597-1671), eleventh great grandmother, accused and acquitted (1659 well before the Salem hysteria).

From the Doctor Who tv episode “The Doctor Falls”: “Winning? Is that what you think it’s about? I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone, or because I hate someone, or because, because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun and God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do, because it’s right!

I recently had a useless discussion with someone who was unwilling to either wear a mask or vaccinate and took the position: “If the vaccines work why the fear, and if they do not work why take the risk of getting them?” His refusal to wear a mask was based on his trust in his immune system “I’m healthy and if you wear a mask you are living in fear and halfway dead already.

I am in the process of reading a study on creativity and semantic distance. A McGill University newsroom article on it is here. The concept is fairly simple - more creative people will find connections between words that general usage would indicate are “less” connected. “Cat” and “dog” have the feeling of being “related” words. “Cat” and “test tube” feel like “more unrelated” words. Efforts have been done (see the study link) on measuring the “relatedness” of words by crawling the internet and measuring how close the word pairs are to each other in normal usage.

Someone raised a question about singing with a mask on, so experiment time! Obviously singing without a mask is more comfortable, but how does the sound change? I just threw these together for a listen (no production or effects or rehearsal). Yes, I know I’m flat in a few places - this was an experiment in singing with a mask, so not focused as much as I could have been.

The BBC has an article on why people should give compliments to others. There are studies that indicate that giving compliments results in a sense of reciprocity. Other studies indicate that people significantly underestimate how happy people would be to receive a compliment. All that being said, as an older male, there are a few things I need to remind myself about: Compliment something someone has done, not something they genetically have.

When reading stuff on the intertubes, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether a comment is stupid, ignorant, brain freeze or troll. You cannot see the other person and have no knowledge about their background. I would treat a lot of statements as simply trolls if I didn’t have the personal experience of an 18 year old American “honors” student ask me why people in Switzerland spoke German because their minds think in English.

I recently finished a 260 page analysis of some open source software projects at the request of someone in Switzerland (no one getting paid, this is open source software). That took about a month. It was followed by a week helping a guy in Italy resolve the performance problems of the software he maintains which had come dead last in the analysis. Then four days adding an feature to some software I have found myself as the maintainer at the request of someone else on the intertubes.

It seems like a lot of people would have no meaning to life if they didn’t have someone to hate. Fortunately I hate everyone so a lot of targets would have to go away. From time to time friends in the international tax arena call and update me on the latest goings on. Usually it is fairly clear that most of the parties at the table are engaged in political posturing but do not actually seem to want to resolve the issues.