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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.

Model Justice – Plea Bargaining Blues

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As I explained in the first post of this series, I’m trying to build a computer model of certain aspects of the criminal justice system. This week, it’s not going well.

My goal is to build a model of how our justice system handles plea bargains, with an eye toward understanding (1) why a system built around the highly formalized decision-making mechanism of the trial doesn’t actually have many trials, and (2) what we can do about it. As I am neither a professional systems modeler nor a lawyer, this is mostly intended as a learning experience.

I plan to eventually give the model a bunch of parameters such as time spent waiting for trial, case quality, sentencing regime, defendant risk tolerance. If I do a good job building the model, then I should be able to find a set of parameters that make the model produce results that look like our criminal justice system: Lots of plea bargains, very few trials, etc. Then I can experiment with ideas for reform by tweaking the model parameters to see how the model responds.

I’m taking an iterative approach to building the model, starting with a skeleton that has some of the major moving parts of the criminal legal process, and then elaborating on parts of the model to flesh it out into something more realistic.

The most recent model is very simple: There’s only one crime, people are arrested at a fixed rate, they wait in jail for a fixed time, and then they have a trial, after which they may go to jail for a fixed period. I suspect my lawyer readers will be annoyed to learn that the entire trial — the core of their profession — is modeled as a single draw from a random distribution to get the verdict. Plea bargaining, my whole reason for doing this, isn’t even in the model yet.

It’s that last problem that I tried to fix. I’m trying to add a plea bargaining phase somewhere between arrest and trial, and I’d like to tell you about it. This story will not end well.

I started by thinking about the basic decision the defendant has to make during plea bargaining: Take the prosecution’s offer or reject it and go to trial. I think there are two main question to address: What does the defendant know? And what does the defendant prefer?

I’m assuming the defendant has knowledge of a few basic things:

  • The amount of time in the plea offer from the prosecution.
  • The possible outcomes of the trial, consisting of:
    • The probability of being found guilty.
    • The sentence they will serve if found guilty.

Here you see more of my assumptions: Everybody has the same information, and it’s correct information as far as it goes. Note that I’m not saying anyone knows how the trial will turn out ahead of time — I’m modeling it as a draw from a random variable — but I am assuming that both the prosecutor and defense know what that probability is, and that both can use it to make decisions.

When thinking about a random event, it’s helpful to consider the expected outcome, which is calculated as the sum of the value of each outcome times the probability of that outcome. If you buy a raffle ticket which has a 1-in-10 chance of winning $50, we can calculate the expected value of your ticket as follows: Your 1-in-10 chance is a way of saying p = 0.1 for winning, so we multiply that by the payoff, $50, and get $5. Your 9-in-10 chance of losing has p = 0.9, but you get nothing for that, so the value of losing goes to $0. Add up the expected value for all possible outcomes (5 + 0), and you get the expected value of your ticket: $5.

Similarly, if the defendant knows he will be found guilty half the time (p = 0.5), and he knows the sentence is 10 years, he can calculate the expected sentence as (0.5 x 10 =) 5 years. Once he receives the prosecutor’s plea offer, he knows everything he needs to know (under this model) to make a decision.

The key issue controlling the defendant’s decision is then his attitude toward the risk of going to trial. If the prosecutor’s plea offer is 5 years in jail — exactly equal to the expected sentence calculated above, then you could argue that the defendant should be indifferent to the choice between taking the offer or going to trial, since the expected sentence is 5 years either way.

The problem with that approach is that it ignores risk, and people don’t usually ignore risk. All other things being equal, people usually prefer to reduce their risk. There is a massive amount of evidence for this, including the existence of the entire insurance industry, where customers pay fixed premiums to avoid the risk of having to suffer losses. If this risk aversion extends to plea bargaining decisions, a defendant will choose a certain sentence of 5 years in jail over a 50% chance of spending 10 years in jail, even thought the latter also includes a 50% chance of going free.

But if the defendant prefers a 5-year plea over a trial with a 50% risk of a 10-year sentence, what happens if the prosecutor makes an offer of 5 years and 1 month instead? Well, the insurance industry is pretty profitable, which means that people are paying more in premiums than their insurance companies are paying out to cover losses, which means that (on average) customers lose money when they buy insurance. So I think it’s very likely that a defendant will agree to lose an extra month of life in prison to protect against the risk of losing an extra five years of life in prison. If criminal defendants are risk averse, they would be willing to accept a plea bargain for more time than the mathematically expected sentence.

I am modeling this risk aversion by calculating an adjustment to the probability of guilt that represented how that probability would feel to a risk-averse defendant. E.g. a 50% (p = 0.5) probability of guilt with a 10-year sentence has a mathematically expected sentence of 5 years, but to a risk averse defendant, even a 6-year sentence might be preferable to a 50% risk of a 10 year sentence.

I decided to calculated the adjusted risk-averse factor by calculating an expected probability of an acquittal as 1 – p, then raising it to a power specified as a model parameter, and then converting back to a probability of guilt by subtracting it from 1 again. E.g.

1 – (1 – p)a

where

p is probability of guilt

a is the risk aversion model parameter

I picked this method of modeling risk aversion because (1) I vaguely remember reading an article about risk aversion that modeled it like this, (2) it has the nice property that p = 0 and p = 1 both map to themselves, so it stays in range, and (3) I like the look of the curve. Here, for example, are the curves with a set to 1, 1.5, and 2 for comparison. Remember a = 1 means no risk aversion.

Now that I had a simple model for defendant choice, it was time to model the prosecution.

One of the fundamental differences between defendants and prosecutors, at least for purposes of my model, is that defendants are individuals who seek their own advantage in a single criminal case, whereas prosecutors work together across hundreds or thousands of trials to achieve a common organizational goal. So while I feel reasonably comfortable in assuming for purposes of the model that most criminal defendants will try to minimize their risk-adjusted prison sentence, I’m not nearly as confident in figuring out what exactly prosecutors are trying to achieve.

To keep the model simple, I’m going to assume that prosecutors want the opposite of what defendants want. That is, if defendants want to minimize the risk-adjusted sentence they expect, prosecutors want to maximize the aggregate expected prison sentence across all defendants.

You’ll notice I didn’t say the prosecution goal was risk-adjusted. That’s because if defendants are like insurance buyers, prosecutors are like insurance companies. For an individual home owner, the loss of their house to fire would be financially devastating without an insurance policy. But to the company that issued the policy, it’s just business. They issued policies for tens or hundreds of thousands of homes, and they are well aware that a bunch of them are going to burn down every year. Meanwhile, they will be collecting premiums on all of them, and very nearly all of them will survive through the year with no loss whatsoever. In investment terms, insurance companies are “diversifying away” the risk.

Prosecutors can do something similar. Using the example from above, a defendant going to trial against a 50% chance of a 10-year sentence has a mathematically expected sentence of 5 years, but he’s not going to serve 5 years. He’s going to serve either zero or 10 years. On the other hand, a prosecution team that deals with 100 of these trials will have a mathematically expected sentence of 5 years per case, which adds up to a aggregate expected sentence across all cases of 500 prisoner-years. And they’re actually going to get about 500 prisoner-years, which is 50% of the theoretical maximum of 1000 prisoner-years. In other words, in the long run, the prosecutor can earn the expected sentence on average.

Furthermore, defendants can only accept or reject the deal that the prosecutor offers them, but the prosecutor’s office can offer whatever deal they want, including dismissal or no deal, to all of the defendants. This means it’s ultimately the prosecutor who gets to decide which defendants get plea bargains.

However, they have to do that within a resource constraint: There’s a limit on the number of trials the justice system can support in any given time period (at least for the short term). So if 100 cases enter the system, there might only be enough capacity in the system for 30 full trials. For the system to keep functioning, the remaining 70 cases will have to be disposed of with a plea bargain.

But how do they choose which defendants get plea deals and which ones go to trial? Well, consider this batch of defendants:

IDProbability of GuiltSentence if ConvictedMathematically Expected SentenceRisk Aversion Adjusted Probability of GuiltAcceptable PleaDifference Between Acceptable Plea and Expected Sentence
A0%100.0000.0000.0000.000
B10%101.0000.1781.7780.778
C20%102.0000.2992.9910.991
D30%103.0000.4054.0541.054
E40%104.0000.5035.0301.030
F50%105.0000.5955.9460.946
G60%106.0000.6826.8170.817
H70%107.0000.7657.6530.653
I80%108.0000.8468.4590.459
J90%109.0000.9249.2400.240
K100%1010.0001.00010.0000.000

The first three colums show the probability of being found guilty, the fixed 10-year sentence, and the resulting mathematically expected sentence. The fourth column shows the probability of guilt adjusted for risk aversion (using an exponent of 3/4), and then the plea that the defendant would be willing to accept based on that risk adjustment. Finally, the last column shows the difference between the plea and the mathematically expected sentence. I.e. the premium in prison time that the defendant is willing to pay to reduce the risk of a 10-year sentence.

At this point, the prosecution plea bargaining strategy seemed obvious to me: If the goal is to maximize aggregate prison time, then the prosecution can maximize total prison time by offering plea deals to those defendants willing to accept the most additional prison time beyond beyond the mathematically expected sentence. Thus, if they only have resources for 3 trials for the defendants above, they should dismiss the unwinnable case A, plea out B through H, and go to trial on defendants I, J, and K.

That’s when I realized I had screwed up: If the prosecution is trying to maximize aggregate prison time, and if defendants will agree to more than the mathematically expected sentence because they are risk averse, then why would the prosecution ever go to trial on any case? By the assumptions I had made, they could always get more prison time with a plea offer. And yet…trials happen.

There’s a mistake in here somewhere. Possibly more than one. Either I’ve oversimplified my model, or else it’s flat-out wrong. Or both. A few possibilities spring immediately to mind:

  • Maybe I was wrong to assume both sides see the same probability of guilt. The sides in each case could have randomly different views of the quality of any given case. For all I know, all trials occur because the prosecution thinks it will be easier to prove guilt than the defense does.
  • Defendants may be risk-preferring instead of risk averse. Conventional wisdom is that criminals are more willing to tolerate risk than law abiding people. Or risk-preferring people, criminal or not, may be more likely to attract police attention.
  • Prosecutors may be optimizing for something other than aggregate prison sentence, such as conviction rate. Or prison times may combine in a non-linear manner: E.g. five 20-year sentences may be better for a prosecutor’s career than twenty 5-year sentences.
  • Maybe collateral (non-prison) effects of a conviction affect defendants’ decisions in ways that matter. E.g. If any conviction, including by plea bargain, could result in deportation, defendants might grasp at even small chances at trial.
  • I may need a more complex model of the trial outcome than just a probability of conviction. Maybe there are important phases or types of cases. Or maybe one side has more information and can consistently make better choices.
  • Maybe I need to account for interactions between cases in the prosecutors’ decision making. E.g. taking 5 aggravated battery cases to trial may use up resources that could be used on a murder case, which could affect how they make plea bargains.

Time to go back to the drawing board. At the very least, I’ve got some thinking to do. And maybe it’s time for me to actually read something written by people who study this stuff.

A Carnival of Street Photography

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Singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant released her first solo album, Tigerlilly, in 1995. I remember its top-ten single “Carnival” was all over the radio for months. And of course there was a music video to go with it.

I was disappointed with the video. I liked Merchant’s songs, but the video felt like she wasn’t really trying: It’s shot in black-and-white, and it just shows Merchant lip-syncing the song while walking the streets New York City. I thought it was the sort of thing an artist would throw together when the record company wants a video and the artist doesn’t really care.

Twenty-four years later I just caught the “Carnival” video by accident when YouTube automatically played it after something else. And I discovered it was wonderful. The video hadn’t changed a bit, of course. But I have.

About twelve years ago I got seriously interested in photography, and in the process of learning how to take pictures, I read about famous photographers. I was especially interested in the street photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Walker Evans, and Lee Friedlander. Familiarity with their work gave me a better artistic context in which to view the “Carnival” video.

What first caught my eye was that Merchant was taking pictures of people and things on the streets:

And the video would sometimes show the still photos that could have resulted:

That…looked a lot like she was doing street photography. And then just seconds after that, the video showed this image of a man standing the the deep shadows, with just a bit of light hitting his face:

That’s a classic street photography technique.

I had to restart the video and watch it a lot more closely. Not only is Natalie Merchant doing street photography in the video, but many of the scenes in the video itself are shot in the distinctive style of street photography. It’s four and a half minutes of artistically harsh shadows, strong angular lines, interesting people, strange reflections, unusual poses, and careful juxtapositions.

Heck, she’s even using a Leica camera, preferred by many street photographers:

It was clear that someone on this video knew their way around street photography. It turns out the video was directed by Melodie McDaniel, who is a professional photographer when she’s not making music videos and commercials. The photos on her website (especially in the archival section) show some definite street influence.

If you want to see more of that lovely street composition, here’s the full “Carnival” video:

The Senate Is Not Fair To People

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So, I saw this tweet, by yet another person claiming that critics of U.S. Senate apportionment rules are historically illiterate:

I’m sick and tired of this argument, and I responded with what seems to me to be the obvious rejoinder:

I realize this has become a partisan issue because of the elections, but the factual claim in my tweet is incontrovertible: People in low-population states have far more voting power in the U.S. Senate than people in high-population states, because every state gets two senators, regardless of the population. Thus, the 28 million people living in Texas are represented by only two Senators, whereas the 27 million people living in the combined states of Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming are represented by 36 senators. That’s an 18-fold advantage.

Several replies to my tweet were from people who seemed to think they were arguing with me, but who were actually agreeing with me, starting with the original tweeter I responded to:

These people are all making the same point I was making: The Senate does not represent the people fairly and equally because it privileges states. Originally, each state’s senators were elected by state legislatures. The idea was to give state legislatures a say in the federal legislative process. Thus the Senate would be more like the members of the earlier Continental Congress (or U.N. delegates today) than free-standing representatives of the people. 

The 17th amendment screwed all that up by switching the selection of senators to direct popular elections in the states. Nowadays, except for a few constitutional powers, the Senate is basically a smaller version of the House of Representatives, but with longer terms and badly disproportionate representation.

No, the 17th Amendment didn’t just make people think the Senate represents people. The 17th Amendment made the Senate represent people. Just not very well.

A few people took the tiresome path of objecting to my use of the word “democracy”:

And you should have learned in civics class that in the taxonomy of systems of government, a constitutional republic is a type of democracy. The United States is a democracy, and more specifically, a constitutional republic.

I’m not sure how to answer this one. Two conflicting responses come to mind:

  • You teach civics, and you don’t know a constitutional republic is a democracy?
  • Do you realize that in saying the U.S. is not a democracy, you’re agreeing with my assertion that we’re doing democracy wrong?

Look, the idea of fairness is a pretty basic ethical principle. It’s why the rallying cry of election reformers has so often been some variation of “one person, one vote.”  In utilitarian terms: Everybody matters, and everybody matters equally. Except when voting for U.S. Senators, where some people’s votes are a lot more influential than others.

Yes, it was designed this way on purpose. But that was a compromise (literally, it’s the Connecticut Compromise) necessary, given the concerns of the time, to form the United States into a stronger, more unified government. But just because the Senate’s structure was intentional and necessary doesn’t mean that Senate representation is fair or just.

I also realize that actually changing Senate apportionment would be extremely difficult. At minimum, we’d need a constitutional amendment, and even that wouldn’t be sufficient because Article Five of the Constitution explicitly prohibits amendments that reduce a state’s representation in the Senate without that state’s permission.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with arguing that the Senate’s structure was a good idea at one time, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with arguing that reforming the Senate is far too difficult to be workable. But you can’t argue that the existing structure is moral and right unless you can explain why you think disproportionate representation is a good thing.

Like this, for example:

That was just about the only tweet to avoid getting hung up on side issues and actually attempt to support the disproportionate representation.

My short answer to Forward Observer is that I’m against tyranny too, but tyranny of the majority is still better than tyranny of the minority. You limit tyranny by limiting the authority of government, not giving that authority to a smaller group of people.

And if you want to protect a minority, the Senate’s disproportionate representation shifts voting power to protect a vary strange minority class. It doesn’t protect racial or ethnic minorities, and it doesn’t protect religious minorities, or any of the other classes that are normally considered disadvantaged. And contrary to what Forward Observer is suggesting, it doesn’t even protect people who live in rural areas outside the “biggest cities,” because there are big cities in small states, and there are rural areas in big states. The people living in Las Vegas benefit from their influence over Nevada’s two Senators, and people living in the rural areas of Texas (or New York or California) lose by comparison.

To the extent that Senate apportionment rules protect anyone against tyranny of the majority, they only protect people who live in states with small populations, which is kind of a strangely defined group of people to be concerned about.

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