Month: March 2019

Cuckolded by Cats

Signing up for a NextDoor account should be a prerequisite to moving into any new neighborhood. People need to learn what insufferable shits their future neighbors are before throwing down a deposit.


The local cat lady coalition is building a new homeless shelter. For cats.

My mother often complains about stray cats on her property. She says that back in her day, any critter that wasn’t tied down or locked up would be summarily thrown in a stewpot. Then again, she grew up during Chairman Mao’s Famine. No need for feral cat shelters back then, I bet.

The only thing cats have going for them is their supernormal resemblance to human infants. Their innocent wide eyes, their mewling cries, their unrelenting selfishness. By acting like human babies, cats trick childless women into adopting them as their own.

This is exactly what a cuckoo bird does. A cuckoo is known as a brood parasite; it relies on other species to raise its young. The female cuckoo lays eggs that mimic the host’s eggs, and when they hatch, the baby cuckoos grow faster and cry louder than the host’s babies.

FEED ME

In the wild, only 30% of baby songbirds survive to adulthood, so parents are motivated to feed the strongest birdlings first. The baby cuckoo quickly outgrows its adoptive siblings and pushes them out to die.

So it is with cats. I’m not ready to settle down yet, you think. I’ll adopt a kitten for companionship. Just one won’t hurt. Before you know it, you’re spending the next two decades paying for Fluffy’s food and heartworm meds, attending to her every meow. Maybe cat ownership isn’t the result of declining birthrates, but the cause of it.

Source: UK pet food manufacturer’s association and Office for National statistics (couldn’t find any US data)

The data checks out.

This is What Meritocracy Looks Like

As a Stanford alum, I feel obliged to defend my alma mater in light of the recent college admissions scandal. Yesterday, 50 people were charged in a racketeering conspiracy where wealthy parents paid million-dollar bribes to get their kids into fancy schools.

People are pissed because the revelation squashes any notion of college meritocracy. But…does it really? These backdoor students are, quite arguably, the very embodiment of what it means to be an Ivy League admit. Not only did the parents bribe their way around the admissions process, they deducted the bribes as charitable contributions. In doing so, these kids demonstrated the most important life skill of all: The ability to work the system.

Exploiting the system is what American meritocracy is all about! Examples abound on Wall Street and in DC, and this is even true in Silicon Valley. The Y-Combinator application specifically asks founders to describe a non-computer system they have successfully hacked. One notable YC founder wrote about his adventures in shoplifting, and his company went on to receive $72 million in funding. Incidentally, this guy is a graduate of both Yale and Stanford Law School.

So here’s what’s gonna happen to the parents accused of exchanging bribes for admissions. They’ll hire some white-shoe law firm, settle without admission of wrongdoing, and the students will go on to graduate with inflated GPAs and privilege intact. The best measure of merit is money.

(Don’t tell the plebes though. We need to keep them busy fighting for scholastic aptitude scraps so they won’t notice while the privileged elite pillage the world.)

Edit (14-March 2019): Here are some fun Ivy League admission stats. Between 10 and 15% of admitted students are recruited athletes, and up to 25% are legacy admits. I don’t see what all the bribery brouhaha is about — undeserving rich kids stealing spots from other undeserving rich kids.

Marital Torts

I’m late (as usual) to the Amazon affair, but I enjoyed Paul Krugman’s celebration of Jeff Bezos as “a hero of democracy, a profile in moral courage.” This is a guy who just cheated on his wife.

Compare Bezos to Intel ex-CEO Brian Krzanich, who was ousted after a consensual relationship with an employee. It reminds me of an old Robin Hanson post that asks why the law punishes rape (even “gentle silent rape”) far more than it punishes cuckoldry. Prof. Hanson was run through the wringer for this question, mostly because the ambiguity of “gentle silent rape” invites a lot of willful misinterpretation.

A relationship between a CEO and a subordinate may be the closest approximation I can think of to “gentle silent rape.” Gentle, because there is no physical force; silent, because it is kept secret; rape, because after #MeToo we no longer consider women to be capable of consent — particularly if there’s a power imbalance.

Many of the #MeToo accusations involved this sort of inappropriate-but-nonviolent affair, and the accused parties were invariably deposed. On the other hand, Jeff Bezos cuckolded one of his company’s largest shareholders (Washington is a community property state, so what’s his is hers) and faces no job risk at all.

Prof. Hanson is correct in stating that *criminal* law, and society in general, allow adultery to go unpunished, but the same is not true of civil law. There are countless media articles enumerating all of Harvey Weinstein’s alleged victims, and they all neglect the biggest victim of all — his wife. While most of Weinstein’s accusers sold their silence for less than a million (or a movie salary worth less than such), the woman formerly known as Mrs. Weinstein will walk away with $15-20 million and custody of the kids.

Wall Street now has something known as the “Weinstein clause”, where M&A targets have to disclose any allegations of inappropriate behavior — If misconduct is discovered later, it could hurt shareholder value. It’s dumb because the definition of “misconduct” changes every year.

Cuckoldry used to be considered misconduct. Until last century, most states recognized the torts of alienation of affection and criminal conversation. In theory, a wife has some property interest in her husband’s fidelity and vice versa. Therefore a mistress that steals the husband’s affection is violating the wife’s property rights. In 1998, Bill Clinton’s accusers were trailer trash and gold diggers, and Hillary the victim. Today, those same women are survivors, and Hillary the evil enabler.

In theory, Mackenzie Bezos could file a claim against Lauren Sanchez for being a homewrecker, and Sanchez’s husband could sue Jeff Bezos for diddling his wife. More likely, we’ll realize that Lauren Sanchez is the real victim here — poor thing was coerced into the affair, by the prospect of billions and billions of dollars.

Victim.

See Also:
H. Hunter Bruton. The Questionable Constitutionality of Curtailing Cuckolding: Alienation-of-Affection and Criminal-Conversation Torts. Duke Law Journal, 2016.