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It’s Not Your Damned House

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God, I hate this argument:

“You lock your door because you want to know who’s coming into your home. It’s not because you hate the people outside. It’s because you love the people inside. Well, that’s what needs to be done with the USA, that’s why we have a border.”

It’s not your damned house. It’s our house. There are over 300 million people living here, and some of the people you want to keep out are people we want to let in, and we don’t appreciate you being a dick to our friends.

What really drives me crazy, however, is that people who say things like this are trying to draw an analogy to the right of home owners to control entry to their home in order to justify a restrictionist immigration policy that prevents me from inviting certain people into my home. If my prospective guests happen to have been born south of the border, immigration authorities will try to stop them from reaching my home, and if they get here anyway, authorities will enter my home against my will to remove them. 

People who say things like this are using an analogy to private property rights to justify a policy that undermines private property rights.

A Libertarian Meets the Honorverse

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My list of reliably entertaining fiction authors has become too short, so I’ve been spending a lot of time lately poking through the Amazon Prime discount bin trying to find new authors to read. Lately, I’m looking for military sci-fi or space opera. After a batch of disappointing starts — some books are free to read from Amazon for a reason — I decided to check out a well-known series that wasn’t free, but that would probably be decent: David Weber’s Honor Harrington series.

I’m part way through the first book, On Basilisk Station, and it seems to be fairly well written and plotted, but…parts of it are just painful. When Captain Harrington arrives in the Basilisk system, her command assumes responsibility for customs enforcement, including making sure everybody is paying the tariffs on the goods they are shipping. They do this by stopping and searching every ship that passes through — without a warrant from a judge or articulable probable cause (or the sci-fi equivalent) — and if they find something, they seize it without any apparent judicial proceeding. In parallel with one of the worst feature of American civil forfeiture, the ship’s crew are rewarded a fraction of the value of the seized merchandise, which in real life creates terrible incentives.

I’m pretty sure they will eventually stumble upon some enemy activity and get into some cool space battles, but this part where the supposed hero of the series is stealing from hard-working merchants to finance the Queen’s government is hurting my libertarian soul.

And now it looks like they are also going to be doing drug interdiction. Sigh.

Model Justice — Stalled On the Learning Curve

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The “Model Justice” series of posts (starting here) is chronicling my attempts to build a software model of certain aspects of the criminal justice system. As I explained in the most recent post, my first attempt at building a model ran into a dead end, so now I’m figuring out what to do for my next attempt.

I’ve identified several possible ways the model could be improved, and based on some feedback from lawyers Mark Bennett and Matt Haiduk, I think I want the new version of the model to eventually implement the following features:

  • Allow defendants to have some degree of risk love instead of risk aversion when making plea bargaining decisions.
  • Allow risk preferences to vary depending on case quality.
  • Allow limits to the extremes of case quality. E.g. Always some chance of acquittal/conviction no matter how strong/weak the case.
  • Allow prosecution and defense to have different views of the quality of the case.

In addition, I think I’d like to include a few other ideas:

  • Allow mixes of different types of cases. E.g. Different severity of crime.
  • Incorporate the way absolute sentencing severity — including collateral consequences — affects risk tolerance.
  • Incorporate the effects of defendants being stuck in jail pending trial.

I also want to switch to a different model of plea bargaining — one informed by economic thinking — that I’ll describe in a future post.

Before I can do any of that, I need to make a big change to my approach. The system modeling tool I’ve been using, Insight Maker, is designed to model entities that transition through a series of states. That seemed appropriate tool for modeling a defendant going through various stages of the criminal justice system: Arrest, pre-trial, trial, jail, release, and so on.

However, nearly all of the things I want to change will have an effect at only one point in the process: Plea bargaining. Even things that do not happen until after the trial — prison, collateral consequences — are only part of the model because of how they affect plea bargaining. So the cumulative effect of all these changes will be to greatly complicate the model’s plea bargaining logic.

Unfortunately, while Insight Maker is a fantastic (and free) tool, it’s not really engineered for that kind of complex programming. For what I’m planning, Insight Maker falls short in several ways:

  • You can add code to an Insight Maker model to control state transitions, or to execute independently as actions, but there’s no real place to add libraries of code that can be called from other code, which makes it awkward to do anything non-trivial.
  • Insight Maker code is using its own private language, invented by the author of Insight Maker. It seems quite competent for a small language, but it doesn’t feel like a full-strength programming language.
  • The editing environment for Insight Maker is primitive. It has an editor window implemented in JavaScript, but you can only open one piece of code at a time, and it doesn’t come close to the convenience features available in a modern language-aware integrated development environment.
  • When developing software, it’s nice to be able manage multiple versions of the code base so you can try different approaches and easily back out of bad ideas, but there’s no easy way to manage multiple versions of Insight Maker code.
  • You can download a model into a file, which you can edit in other tools, but you can’t easily modify or use the model in that format.
  • Insight Maker doesn’t have libraries of open source code that you can leverage in your program to add features or speed development.
  • Insight Maker graphic output is limited to only certain types of data and certain types of charts.
  • Insight Maker doesn’t appear to be thriving. The official Insight Maker forum has only had 15 topics posted in the last three months, and the Insight Maker news stream hasn’t been updated in almost a year and a half.

I considered a number of possible alternatives to Insight Maker. I would love to play around with a professional-strength modeling tool like AnyLogic, Vensim, Powersim, or isee systems’ Stella/iThink packages. AnyLogic in particular can be extended with Java, which would allow me to use a whole world of open-source Java code. On the other hand, these tools are heavily focused on modeling complex business processes, and they are priced as if a corporation was buying them. (Some of them have free or low-cost versions, but those often have serious limitations, not all of which are documented.)

Something like MATLAB/Simulink, in addition to possibly being pricey, is also really intended for modeling physical systems, not system dynamics or the sort of agent-based modeling I was doing. Wolfram SystemModeler is similar, which is a shame, because I already have a home user license.

Speaking of Wolfram, I could probably use Mathematica, because you can do anything in Mathematica, at least according to the folks who make Mathematica. I have a home user license for that too, and I’ve already used it on this project to generate some of the graphics for these posts. The problem is, I get frustrated with Mathematica when I try to do anything complicated, because it’s not like a normal programming language.

But that got me thinking…maybe what I really need is not a simulation tool, but an ordinary programming environment in which I can build a simulation. It wouldn’t have the fancy drag-and-drop block diagrams that all those simulation products provide for building models, but I’m not sure I need that for what I’m doing. I think the connections and flows are simple enough that I can model them with ordinary programming structures.

In that case, the obvious choice for me would be C# and the .NET Framework, since that’s what I work with on my day job. I have access to a ton of development tools, and I’m very familiar with useful code patterns, the development toolchain, and the general approach to developing a C# project. On the other hand, C# is geared towards building production-quality systems, but since I’m still designing the model, I would probably benefit more from a development environment geared toward ad hoc queries and prototyping.

I think I need something that works like R Studio, where I can type in simple commands to change things, run code, and see the results, so I can easily try lots variations and ideas. Or maybe I’d be better with a notebook-style interface, like Mathematica. Both of those also provide data visualization, so you can change something, run it, and see a graphical representation of the result. I don’t actually want to use either of those, however, because I find both R and Mathematica’s “Wolfram Language” to be very annoying for writing anything substantial.

And that brings me to Python. Even though Python has been around for over 25 years, I have never really needed it for anything I was doing, so I’ve pretty much ignored it until now. I tend to prefer heavily-typed languages like C++, Java, and C# that compile down into machine code to run efficiently. Python is an interpreted scripting language that is usually used for writing short programs that stitch together powerful components. (Also, it uses indentation to delimit blocks, which is different from practically everything else in the world these days.)

However, unlike scripting languages such as Perl (or special-purpose tools such as R), Python was actually created from the beginning with full-strength programming features, and it has grown to become one of the most popular computer languages in the world, especially in the data science community. (So if nothing else, learning Python could turn out useful later.)

For my purposes, Python ticks several important boxes:

  • Python is a full-strength software system with support for multiple-file software projects and organizational abstractions such as classes, modules, and packages.
  • Python is a mature, well-known, and widely used language.
  • Python is supported by numerous integrated development environments, including Eclipse (with the PyDev extension), Sublime, Visual Studio, Spyder, and PyCharm (for which I already have a license).
  • Python projects are just files in directories, so you can easily edit them in a variety of ways and version control them with git.
  • There are tons of usable third-party open source Python libraries at PyPi.
  • Python is thriving and growing as a programming language due to its popularity among the data science community, so there are plenty of resources.
  • There are development environments for Python that support both an R Studio-style environment (Spyder) and a notebook-style environment (Jupyter).

Of course, to use Python, I’m first going to have to learn Python. Writing tiny programs is easy and quick, but I want to build up a library of modeling components, so I need to learn about things like Python classes, Python modules, and Python packages, as well as figure out a development environment, all before I can start building the model.

I think it’s going to be a while.

How To Save Yourself From the New WordPress Editor

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Oh my God, I ran automated updates on the blog Friday afternoon without realizing that it was also going to update WordPress to version 5.0. So when I started to write a post that evening, I was met with this monstrosity:

WordPress has been threatening us with their new Gutenberg editor for months now, and I guess it’s finally arrived, despite the fact that the trial Gutenberg plugin has been getting abysmal reviews.

What the hell were they thinking? Gutenberg is trying to be some kind of low-rent page builder, allowing users to drag and drop feature blocks into a page. People who use WordPress to build commerce sites love that sort of thing, because it gives them complete control over the design of every page on an individual basis. I use WordPress for blogging, however, so I hated Gutenberg on sight.

Look, I just want to write stuff. I don’t want or need to make every single page look unique and different. Blogging for me is about content, not visual design.

When WordPress started talking about Gutenberg, I ignored it, because it figured it would just be another editor. I didn’t expect such a drastic change. I didn’t expect that I would have to stop and learn a new way of posting stuff. In essence, WordPress Gutenberg has broken the fundamental workflow of blogging: Open the page and start writing.

In the long run, It’s not going to be a huge deal for me. I deal with technical blogging stuff all the time, and I’ve worked with page builders before, so I’m sure I’ll get used to it. But I suspect some of the more curmudgeony bloggers out there (I’m looking at you, Greenfield!) are going to hate this change.

Fortunately, there’s a solution: Go back to the old editor with the Classic Editor plugin:

Note that it has already been installed by over 700,000 users. I’m one of them. I threw this post together in a few minutes in the old editor.

Update: If you only want to disable Gutenberg for some of the users on your blog, there’s the Disable Gutenberg plugin, which gives you detailed control over when and for whom Gutenberg is active.

#ThotAudit Is Really About Ethics in Tax Collection

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Oh dear God. I saw a tweet from Mistress Matisse, wondered what the heck she was talking about, and made the mistake of clicking on the tag, and now I’ve discovered a whole new world of idiocy in something called #ThotAudit.

First of all, I had to learn a new word: “thot.” Apparently, it means something like “slut” or “whore,” but it’s a relatively new word that showed up around 2011. Because, you know, American vernacular English didn’t yet have enough derogatory terms for sexually active women.

(When I was in high school, I literally didn’t understand why guys used the word “slut” to demean girls. “Wait a minute…you’re insulting girls…for wanting to have sex with us…? Why would you do that?”)

Anyway, #ThotAudit is some kind of weird campaign to report sex workers to the IRS for tax evasion, and it’s organized by exactly the kind of people you’d think would organize such a thing:

Online sex workers have slammed a viral campaign by right-wing “incels” and men’s rights activists to mass report them to tax authorities for allegedly failing to declare income.

The hashtag #ThotAudit, which appears to have been started by a Facebook user calling themselves “David Wu”, began to trend on Sunday after being promoted by controversial pick-up artist and “legal rape” advocate Daryush ‘Roosh’ Valizadeh.

“Online thots are finding out that all income generated from their breasts and vagina is taxable,” Mr Valizadeh tweeted.

“Men are aggressively organising to report all thots. I don’t blame them: these girls are getting a free ride via beta bux and a broken sexual marketplace that is rigged in the favour of females.”

Man, that whole “income generated from their breasts and vagina” line is creepy as fuck. Can you imagine having to spend every day of your life being that guy? Who worries about stuff like that? I guess the same kind of guy who whines about a “broken sexual marketplace.” #ThotAudit is so aggressively stupid that I don’t know where to start.

I guess I might as well start by anticipating that someone will accuse me of “white knighting.” That’s a term that pickup artists, MRAs, and other assholes use when some other guy steps in to defend a woman they’re bothering. It’s meant to taunt the other guy for using the appearance of chivalry in a weak attempt to get laid, because they can’t imagine any other reason for talking to — or about — women.

The thing is, I’m not white knighting, because I’m not defending these women. They don’t need my help defending against something this dumb.

First of all, it’s not like any of these #ThotAudit assholes have actual knowledge of tax evasion. They don’t have any information that they could give in a statement in a legal setting that would help establish any of the elements of tax evasion.

All the #ThotAudit assholes have is a suspicion that these women must be evading taxes because they are sex workers. And that’s on the basis of Twitter feeds and escort web sites, which IRS agents can easily find by themselves without help from the #ThotAudit twits. Heck, the #ThotAudit twits don’t even have the real names of the women they claim they are reporting to the IRS.

But let’s suppose, just for the sake of argument, that some #ThotAudit twit is actually able to get IRS investigators to take interest in a sex worker that he brought to their attention. If the investigators are able to bring the legal powers of the federal government to bear on the problem (I have no idea what level of proof is needed for this) they could probably trace a Twitter account or website to an actual person. And if they did that, what would they find?

Probably, a taxpayer.

In the case of purely online sex workers, like cam girls or phone sex performers, they have to be able to accept electronic payments, which will create records in the banking system that will make the income visible to the IRS, pretty much guarantying they will have pay taxes on the income. Things get a little more complicated with sex workers who accept cash payments in person, such as strippers or escorts. If the #ThotAudit jerks get IRS investigators to look into the finances of someone like that, what will they find?

Probably something familiar: A cash-oriented business.

The IRS is of course deeply suspicious of cash-oriented businesses because it’s hard for the IRS to know how much money they really receive when there are no electronic bank records of the payments. Everyone suspects that a lot of cash-based businesses cheat on their taxes, so the IRS would be right to be skeptical about the tax returns of sex workers.  But, well…the point of unreported cash income that no one knows it exists. The IRS isn’t going to be able to do much without proof of income.

And it’s not as if most sex workers don’t pay income taxes. Sure, if a customer pays them $300 cash, and they go to Target and use the money to buy groceries or clothing or a television, they won’t leave a paper trail, so they can cheat by not paying those taxes. But if they lead anything like a normal middle-class life, they probably have a ton of expenses that leave a trail. If they have a $2000/month mortgage, a $600/month car payment, and $300/month in utilities, plus $500/month for health insurance and another $1000 per month in miscellaneous credit card payments, they need to be able to show almost $6000/month in income to cover those expenses.

That means reporting somewhere around $18,000 in income every quarter and making estimated tax payments. It will be more if they want to put some money in the bank or pay into an IRA. So if the IRS takes a look at them because of #ThotAudit, they’ll find a woman reporting over $70,000 in annual income. They may suspect that she’s bringing in even more as unreported cash income, but it will be hard to turn those suspicions into evidence.

Given that the #ThotAudit douchebags aren’t reporting people in other cash-oriented business — bartenders, food truck operators, bodega owners, dry cleaners, farmstand owners, landscapers, housekeepers, dance teachers, handymen…or for that matter, male sex workers — it’s pretty clear this is just another excuse to harass women.

But it’s not even effective as harassment. I had to think for a while to convince myself that the threat to tattle to the IRS was toothless. But to actual sex workers, who know far more about the tax implications of their business than I do, this has got to be incredibly obvious. Sex workers on Twitter are certainly not frightened. They’ve been mocking #ThotAudit without mercy.

Look, sex workers deal with more than their fair share of assholes online. They are used to fending off time wasters and religious nuts and every would-be edgelord who thinks it’s epic to ask them if they suck dick for a living. They are used to harassment, and they have strategies for dealing with it. They are not impressed by someone threatening to mail a piece of paper to the government.

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