Beniamino Bufano Sculptures (1956), Hillsdale Mall

Top: Golden Bear
Right: Penguin and Two Babies

Palpable Energy

The ancient freezer's thick walls and door--
yes, they don't make 'em like that anymore.

I stopped by St. Pius Catholic Church to pick up the brown-bag lunches. Rain or shine, St. Pius members spend Saturday mornings assembling 100 brown bags for the people who come to Sandwiches on Sunday.

For 15 years churches take turns making hot lunches for all comers at the community center on Sunday; the brown bags are handed to diners as they exit.

Like last year, it was Children's Day at the community center. The parking lot and gates were blocked off, but the City staff let us in around the back.

We fed about 50 people today and thanked the City staff for their help. At a very basic level this must be what is meant by public-private partnerships.

At the Children's Day celebration the energy and bonhomie were palpable.

Its Name Was Its Destiny

In news that you may have missed, one planet in our solar system is covered with sewer gas clouds. Of course, that planet is Uranus.

a study in Nature Astronomy reveal[ed] that the cloud tops of Uranus are made principally of hydrogen sulfide, the gas that is principally responsible for the foul smell of rotten eggs and, yes, human flatulence.

Some mainstream publications described the finding more crudely.

Scientists finally confirm that Uranus is surrounded by fart clouds https://t.co/EUG9OvjCBt pic.twitter.com/Kk9NeCbDJs

— Popular Science (@PopSci) April 24, 2018

I like it when they use accessible language.

The Ear Knows

(Economist image)

One inviolate rule of grammar has been the prohibition of split infinitives. The Economist's new style guide proclaims a new rule: [bold added]

to boldly go where grammarians have feared to tread....Infinitives may be split.

The old rule hasn't been around that long, however. The earliest written reference is attributed to writer John Comly, who declared in 1803:

An adverb should not be placed between a verb of the infinitive mood and the preposition ‘to’ which governs it.

Once every three or four months your humble blogger is compelled to rephrase a split infinitive because, well, it's against the rule. But the fix often butchers the meaning, not to mention the rhythm of the phrase:

But the lazy remedy, merely to move a modifier one word left or right, is worse. Constantly to do this results in an odd, jarring rhythm. (Robert Burns wrote “to nobly stem tyrannic pride” because it has a pleasingly punchy beat to it.) And the “move it left or right” manoeuvre often means that the modifier ends up modifying the wrong thing, or creating an ambiguity.

(Rephrasing Star Trek's "to boldly go" as the discordant "boldly to go" or almost-the-same-but-not-quite "to go boldly" illustrates the problem.)

The ear knows.

That Paradisiacal Day

New gene-based treatments for cancer show immense promise----and have immense costs:

Novartis AG listed its newly approved cell therapy for cancer at $475,000, while Gilead Sciences Inc. priced its rival drug at $373,000.

But the price of the drugs is just the beginning, hospitals and insurers say. Administering these therapies can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the tab, including lengthy hospital stays and use of other services and medicines.

(WSJ graphic)

The Wall Street Journal estimates that the full cost of these state-of-the-art treatments ranges between $464,000 and $968,000. For rich people and their families there's little question that most, if not all, will opt for the treatment even if success is not guaranteed.

However, many cancer patients either won't have the money or will choose not to diminish their estate by up to a million dollars to extend their lives for an uncertain period.

Cancer newly afflicts over a million Americans each year:

In 2018, an estimated 1,735,350 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States and 609,640 people will die from the disease.

It will be years before the costs will have come down sufficiently to make a dent in the number of cancer deaths. Until then, dear reader, diet, exercise, and get regular check-ups so that you will make it to that paradisiacal day.

One Gig Politician

Tending to a stabbing victim after the sweep (Chron photo)

When an organization needs someone to shake things up, it often calls in an outsider (any allusion to national politics is imagined by you, dear reader). What can help the shaking is if the outsider has no interest in staying on, i.e., he or she wants to get in, accomplish concrete goals, then get out.

Interim SF Mayor Mark Farrell (whom I underestimated in January) is ridding the Mission District of homeless encampments . [bold added]

An army of cleaners, counselors and police descended upon the Mission District at dawn Wednesday — and by lunchtime, they had rendered the gentrifying district entirely free of homeless tent camps for the first time in recent memory.

And with that, San Francisco’s mayor had fired the first shot in what he said will be unending salvos of enforcement efforts in the coming weeks to try to rid city streets of tent encampments.

(According to the article, last summer the area had 287 tents.) I applaud Mark Farrell's determination. And he says he's not running for Mayor in 2018 or 2019.

“This is just the beginning,” Farrell said. “Tents should not be part of the permanent landscape in San Francisco. If, at the end of the day, a person resists everything we offer them in counseling, housing and other services, they shouldn’t be allowed to keep tents on the sidewalk.

“Maybe it takes a mayor not running for office to do it, but we need to clean up our streets throughout the city. We haven’t been pushing hard enough. We will now.”

Making this push, he said, is just part of what he characterized as a “sprint to the finish” of his short term as mayor, before someone wins June’s special election to fill out the late Mayor Ed Lee’s term. It is not, he insisted, part of positioning for a full-term run for mayor in 2019 — which he has repeatedly said he will not do.

Silicon Valley discovered that sometimes projects get done quicker and better in the gig economy. Maybe the same is true for gig politicians.

Heading for the Exits

The 1978 thriller is about a terrorist threat
to the San Andreas fault.

Economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore predict an acceleration of out-migration from high-tax blue states: [bold added]

In the years to come, millions of people, thousands of businesses, and tens of billions of dollars of net income will flee high-tax blue states for low-tax red states. This migration has been happening for years. But the Trump tax bill’s cap on the deduction for state and local taxes, or SALT, will accelerate the pace. The losers will be most of the Northeast, along with California. The winners are likely to be states like Arizona, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

We have waved farewell to dozens of friends and co-workers who have cashed out of their Bay Area homes and moved to warmer climes where their retirement dollars go much farther. The "goodbye, California" phenomenon has become marked.

As the writers note, the Tax Cut and Jobs Act will increase the exodus:

Now that the SALT subsidy is gone, how bad will it get for high-tax blue states? Very bad. We estimate, based on the historical relationship between tax rates and migration patterns, that the pace of out-migration from California and New York will soon double—with about 800,000 net out-migrants each of the next three years. Our calculations suggest that Connecticut, New Jersey and Minnesota combined will hemorrhage another roughly 500,000 people in the same period.

The slight silver lining is that people who want to buy a home should see more supply as emigrants list their properties. Also, the TCJA drastically reduces the income tax subsidy on interest and property taxes for high-end homes, leading to less demand.

More supply and less demand? Even non-economists can predict that today's Chronicle headline will not be repeated much longer: Bay Area home prices soar to new record

A Short History of Liberalism

The Economist produces an entertaining short history of liberalism, What Have Liberals Ever Done for Us?

If liberals were true to their founding principles, I would happily join their ranks.


Note: transcript below the fold.

Shepherd or Sheep

On Sunday both father and baby daughter were baptized. I had attended hundreds of baptisms but had never seen that pairing before.

It was also Good Shepherd Sunday, in which the Gospel reading was John 10 ("Jesus said, 'I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.'") Also read, of course, was Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my Shepherd").

During the sermon the priest asked if we were shepherd or sheep. (Sheep are followers, and it's not an insult to be a follower of Christ, i.e., a sheep led by a Shepherd.) A parishioner from New Zealand rose to announce that we were omitting a crucial component of the sheep-shepherd dynamic, namely, the sheepdog. Sheepdogs bring in a whole new set of metaphors and images. My head began to hurt. Sometimes one can carry on a metaphor too long.

Still unsure of whether I was a sheep or shepherd or sheepdog, I made my way to the Parish Hall for the post-Baptism feast. Filled with food and happiness, I bleated my approval.

You Can Afford It

When average, middle-class houses in our town began selling for a cool $1 million, we thought insanity had gripped the real-estate market. The insanity has doubled.

The 4-bedroom 1,950 square-foot house (pictured) was listed for $1.7 million and sold for $2.16 million.

It doesn't happen often, but we've seen Peninsula home prices fall at least twice over the past 40 years.

When a market is this heated, it's possible we've reached a market blowoff, soon to be followed by a fall.

Tax Commentary:
Those of us who have lived in our homes for more than 20 years are sitting on capital gains larger than the $250,000/$500,000 sale-of-home income tax exclusion. (Yes, few feel sorry for people with these problems.)

While it's generally sound policy to ignore the effect of income taxes in sell decisions, taxes in this case are large enough to keep some older homes off the market. For example, if married taxpayers have an after-exclusion gain of $1.5 million on the sale of their home, Federal and California income taxes could be about $400,000, adjusted by what else is going on in their returns.

It would be much better for tax-planning purposes to leave the older home in the estate and have it stepped up to fair market value after the taxpayers' death. (Under current law there will be no estate-tax consequence if the couple dies with less than $23.6 million of assets. I'm leaving out complexity--see your tax lawyer!). The beneficiaries, i.e., children, grandchildren, etc. can then sell the house with little or no income taxes due.

There are financial structures (reverse mortgages, installment sales, leases) that allow the homeowners to receive cash and pay the income tax on their homes during their lifetime. There are costs and risks associated with these maneuvers, however. As I said above, see your tax lawyer! You can afford it.

Stopping Things From Getting Worse

Helpful for me, this time. 

If it seems to be a "normal" cold or flu I don't like to go to the doctor. She'll just tell me to get bed rest and drink plenty of fluids.

In this instance, after two weeks of coughing and mucus (too much information?)--but without a fever--I finally went to see her. She prescribed an antibiotic. After 21 days I finally feel better.

Older friends and relatives have put off seeing a doctor until their condition became much worse than it had to be. I have to face the fact that now I'm one of those older guys.

It's not about being hypochondriacal, just being realistic about my age. It's not about not being able to tough it out; it's stopping things from getting worse.

Villain or Hero: It's Up To You

Philip Zimbardo today (Chron photo)

The study is so old that it was discussed in Psych 101 when I was in college. The study had so great an impact that it is still referenced today in popular, as well as professional, literature.

Philip Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment assigned students the roles of either prison guard or inmate. The two-week experiment was halted after six days due to the sadistic behavior of the guards and the traumatic effects on the prisoners. In a short period of time Dr. Zimbardo showed that even intelligent, rational students of supposedly good character could be induced to behave very badly.

What made him famous is not how he wishes to be remembered. Philip Zimbardo has spent the past decade studying heroism science. [bold added]

The key to “awakening everyone’s heroic instincts,” Zimbardo said, is twofold: first, redefining who a hero is. “We must debunk the myth of a ‘heroic elect,’ ” he said, and instead “promote the idea that heroes are ordinary people who take extraordinary action.”

Second, it’s about having a “growth mind-set” — a popular psychology buzz phrase coined by Zimbardo’s famous colleague and former student, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, for one’s belief that our abilities and aptitudes aren’t static but can be developed over time. “Heroism begins in the mind, with thinking of yourself as a hero,” Zimbardo said.

Philip Zimbardo forced us to look at unsavory truths. Now he is showing how to overcome those tendencies and be better people. May we be as driven and productive when we are 85.

Tax Day, 2018

The blog post from six years ago applies word-for-word, with just the reference to the years needing updating. Pathetic.

On many April 14th's we've burnt the midnight oil preparing our tax returns, and this year is no exception. For the 2017 tax return we're still awaiting a Form K-1 from a pass-through entity and will file Federal Form 4868 that will extend the deadline to October 15th.

Filing an extension postpones the need for doing some of the detailed work, but the lion's share still has to be done to determine whether and how much to pay with extension Form 4868. We also need to take a quick look at 2018 because estimated taxes are due the same day.

Thanks to April 15th falling on a Sunday, and Emancipation Day (April 16th) being a public holiday in the District of Columbia, tax-filers have a couple of days grace to work out the numbers. Too bad for residents of DC, though: now that everyone else in America has discovered that DC's special status allows everyone to file and pay one day later every six years, DC will never be granted Statehood. But don't feel bad for them: booming job and housing markets, as well as very low unemployment, ease the pain.

First Among Ladies

Two future Presidents and one First Lady, 1947 (Time)

Barbara Bush was the last of the "traditional" First Ladies, that is, she didn't have a career outside the home. Neither did she care to look the part of a lawyer or a librarian--in fact she "famously wore fake pearls and a $29 pair of shoes to her husband's Presidential inauguration" in 1989.

Barbara Pierce Bush was the daughter of Marvin Pierce, the publisher of women's magazines Redbook and McCall's, each a big deal pre-Internet. Her ancestor was Thomas Pierce, who was a resident of Charleston, MA in 1634 (Thomas wasn't on the Mayflower).

She was so blue-blooded that looking like a blue-blood didn't matter to her at all.

R.I.P.

Counselor, Heed Thyself

A friend with whom I have some business dealings gave me the bad news; he halted chemotherapy because the treatments haven't worked. No, the doctors haven't yet given a prognosis.

He wanted to talk about business. Okay.

He will call the lawyer. He'll forward the data to the tax accountant, after which I'll handle discussions. For computer issues he will talk to the IT guy. My friend was filling his calendar with detail.

After he was done talking, I assured him that I'll take care of any administrative matters that he's unable to finish.

Then I said, please think about saying things that you've always meant to say to your children and grandchildren. That's what's important. The legal and accounting stuff I can handle.

He got emotional, and we hung up a few seconds later.

Another way to show your love

I don't regret giving him advice, but I do feel guilty because I have done little to prepare for my own demise. Financial affairs are in minimally adequate shape---there's a will, a trust, and named beneficiaries where needed---but there's nothing about who I was, what I've learned, my dreams and regrets, or my hopes for those who will come after me. If they never met me, they won't know me at all.

Now that I'm mostly retired I have time to work on completing these important but (so far) not urgent tasks. As my friend showed, they may be more urgent than I think.

Note: the NIH's National Cancer Institute (cancer.gov) has published an informative booklet for friends and family: When Someone You Love Has Advanced Cancer.