Hurricanes, Recency Bias and Attracting Clicks

Headlines I have seen online this afternoon/evening:


Hurricane Ian live updates: Biden warns of ‘substantial loss of life’ as storm strengthens back into a hurricane


Hurricane Ian - live: Storm may be ‘deadliest in Florida history’ as path heading to South Carolina


Within the last hour, there are nine confirmed deaths in Florida. Each one of them is tragic. The death toll will probably grow although we hope it won't. But is this the deadliest hurricane in Florida history? Not even close.

Labor Day 1935. A hurricane (we did not name them back then) battered Florida. It was a Category 5 hurricane and 423 people died. And that is NOT the deadliest hurricane in Florida history

The 1919 Florida Keys Hurricane resulted in 772 fatalities. I doubt Hurricane Ian will get anywhere near that number of deaths. Building codes have changed. The ability to evacuate has improved significantly.

But that wasnt the deadliest Florida hurricane either. The 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane had an estimated death toll of 3,000.
We have a bias in comparing major events to one another. We tend to ignore the older events. The media drives this, at least a part of this bias. It focuses on what is happening right this second, trying to make it appear as the worst, the deadliest, the bloodiest, whatever. If it bleeds, it ledes is still as accurate as ever.

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What kind of fool describes a Category 5 hurricane as a nothing burger? No, not Eric Trump or Donald Trump, Jr.

Meet Joy Gendusa. She is the CEO of PostcardMania dot com. You can read about what she did and how she tried to take it back here. When I was sent to an Air Force Base in Biloxi, MS in the fall of 1977 for training, we were told a story during our in-brief. Eight years earlier, Hurricane Camille blasted Biloxi. It utterly obliterated the Richelieu Apartments. Not too long after the hurricane had done its damage, Walter Cronkite was at the site of the concrete slab that was all that remained of those apartments. He said this:

"This is the site of the Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian, Miss. This is the place where 23 people laughed in the face of death. And where 23 people died."

The story was told of a hurricane party, thrown by people who also believed the impending storm was a nothing burger. The probleem is, the party never happened. But that wasn't proven until years later. What I heard in that in-brief etched in stone in my brain that hurricanes were not to be taken lightly.

I am tired and therefore rambling. The main point I wanted to make is about recency bias. The minor point is that we must never take tropical cyclones lightly. Their ability to destroy is virtually unlimited.

The Military Record of J. R. Majewski

J.R. Majewski is the Republican nominee in the race to represent Ohio District 9 in the House of Representative. He is seeking to unseat incumbent Marcy Kaptur. Majewski has made his military service a focal point in his campaign. Now there are questions about the veracity of his claims. Is he a "combat veteran"? Why did he leave the Air Force at the rank of Airman (E-2)? What happened?

At first, Majewski claimed that there was a brawl in a barracks that resulted in his demotion from Airman First Class (E-3) to Airman. Now the Associated Press has obtained a copy of a document showing that is probably not the case. That document is a copy of the Nonjudicial Proceedings that Majewski was subjected to. One of the news stories pointed out that Majewski waived his right to court-martial. When a commanding officer offers one of the people under their command nonjudicial punishment, the accused can refuse it; and go straight to court-martial. Majewski made that waiver.

The document also lists Majewski's rank at the time of the proceeding as being Airman First Class. It also shows that as part of his punishment that his rank was reduced to Airman Basic (E-1) but that part of the demotion was stayed, meaning he was only demoted to Airman. To put this into proper context, you need to know that promotion from E-1 to E-2 and from E-2 to E-3 is automatic. Automatic that is, unless you mess up somehow. Promotion from E-1 to E-2 comes after the first six months of service. Promotion from E-2 to E-3 comes ten months after being promoted to E-2.

This raises questions. Why was he never promoted back to the rank of E-3?

If he was a combat veteran and/or deployed to Afghanistan, why wasn't he awarded the campaign awards?

I do not believe for one moment that this guy was involved in classified operations that were so secret they were never recorded in his personnel record. He wasn't a Spec Ops type. He was someone who loaded and unloaded cargo/supplies from aircraft.

The irony is that had he not chosen to embellish his service beyond what it actually was, this would probably be a non-issue. An Article 15 (nonjudicial punishment) for DUI with no further problems would be understandable. Instead he kept embellishing and prevaricating and the result is obvious. 538 dot com projects his chances of winning the race against Kaptur are only 1 in 4. Long odds indeed. Especially when he puts his foot in his mouth often enough to have caught a case of athlete's tongue.

Why I Do Not Do Focus Groups (outside of those put on by my employer)

I got offered a chance to do a focus group this past week. I turned it down flat. Hey, it would have been an easy $100 for 2 hours. I don't do them. For the first time in a long time I'm going to write about why I don't do them.

Back in the 1990s I did lots of focus groups. Some were related to my work and others I just lucked into. The one that turned me off to doing them involved 7 other men and me. We were being asked to help with a new advertising campaign for Nissan. Their ad agency had come up with a new campaign built around a mysterious Japanese man reminiscent of Mr. Miyagi. Their tagline was "Feel the Magic" of driving a Nissan.

The leaders of such groups never start the questioning with the same person, so that no one is always first or last. For this particular question, I would go last. The question was, what did we think about the tagline. All seven of my fellow attendees said they thought it was group. Then the leader of the group turned to me and asked me what I thought. I was ready. "I think it sucks" was my response. He asked me why I felt that way and I pontificated for a moment. "A car commercial is supposed to make you want to go and test drive the vehicle. What does "feel the magic" mean in English? The slogan should make it sound like it would be fun to drive the car. Why not 'enjoy the ride.'"

Imagine my surprise weeks later when I saw a new Nissan commercial on television with "enjoy the ride" as the tagline. I felt ripped off. I came up with this great idea for them and all I got was $150 or so.

A couple of years back I had a conversation with someone who earns their living doing focus groups. I told her my story and she sympathized. Then she pointed out that I was paid to offer my thoughts, and they had paid for the right to use any of what I shared in the room. I don't feel so ripped off anymore.

But I'm not going to make that mistake twice.

The cruelty of the news business

The news business is harsh and cruel to the people who work within it. That's actually true of anyone who works in any "on-air" position in radio and television. I know this from my own personal observations. I was doing weekend overnights (Fridays and Sundays from 2am to 6 am and Saturdays from midnight to 6 am). My days as an FM jock.

I got a call at my day job (serving in the Air Force) from the station's program director. He had never called me during the week before. He called to ask me if I could do he 2 am to 6 am shift every night that week. I said yes without knowing why. I found out why when I arrived at the station that evening at 1 am to do my pre-show prep. The DJ I was going to take over from told me that the regular overnight guy had been arrested and missed shifts. As a result, he'd been fired.

They eventually hired a lovely lady who did a great job in the timeslot. She was doing the six pm to midnight slot on Saturday when I arrived to take over from her. There was a memo on the bulletin board. We'd had another open slot and the hope was that all of the DJs in the evening would move up one slot and I would get the overnight job on a permanent basis. There was a memo from the aforementioned program director. It announced the hiring of someone who'd been fired from a job in a larger market. He could call me to come in and fill-in, but he let me find out that I did not get the job I was hoping to get with a bulletin-board memo. My friend that I was relieving told me she had feared I would see the memo and promptly quit. I was a bit more mercurial then but that was not my style.

I mention this to show I have a tiny bit of understanding about what is happening at Los Angeles television station KTLA, Channel 5. Lynette Romero, who has 24 years of experience at the station departed suddenly. A poorly worded tweet from the station's official Twitter account. We, the audience, have been told that she was barred from the building. That her belongings were boxed up and brought to her outside the building. What could she have possibly done to deserve such horrible treatment after almost a quarter-century of employment?

She had the temerity to take a job with another local television station's newscasts. A step upward. How dare she leave them after all these years?

When I first read of her abrupt departure I wondered if history was repeating itself. KTTV, Fox 11 had gotten rid of Dororthy Lucey, Lisa Breckenridge and Jillian Barbarie in a "restructuring" Women in the news business are discarded because apparently executives in that business (not all, but a lot) believe that women do not age gracefully, like male news anchors do. But that was not the case here. Lynette had an opportunity and she took it. Good for her!

There is a backlash on social media at the moment. The question is, what will the long-term result be? Another station in the market gained a very talented news anchor; who has a gift for connecting with the viewers. KTLA is losing viewers. I have watched their morning newscast on weekends, every weekend for a long-time. No more.

I wish Ms Romero well in her new job. I wish the remaining on-air talent at KTLA's weekend morning news well, as they try to survive their incompetent management.

DIY or hire an expert

A friend of mine is also a tax client of mine. Recently they told me that their friends all ask they why they just don't do their tax returns themselves using one of the many oniine solutions. I offered a few examples of why an expert can make a difference that these non-intuitive software platforms cannot identify.

A couple of years ago I was doing a return for a longtime client. Very simple return. Two W-2 forms and a Form 1095-A. That is the form on which their health insurance marketplace coverage and Obamacre subsities are reported to the IRS. Because the client had underestimated their income when applying for marketplace coverage, they were going to owe the IRS just over $700. That is because they were being required to repay $750 of the advance premium tax credit subsidy they had received during the year.

But it was not yet April 15th. I did a little match and figured out that if my client put the $700 into a traditional IRA, their income for purpose of calculating how much of a subsidy they were eligible for; would be reduced. As a result the client saved $700 for their retirement instead of just paying the IRS. Online tax prep solutions use software that can do a deent interview, but software cannot come up with this kind of complex solution.

Here is another example. This was a client who had their own business. Aside from their sole=proprietorship, the return was fairly simple. The client's problem was they did not have enough cash on hand to fully fund a SEP-IRA before the filing deadline of April 15th. I explained to the client that if we filed for an extension of the filing deadline, it would give them another six months to put the cash together to make that SEP-IRA contribution. The extra time the client got by simply filing an extension saved the client over $4,000 federal and over $1,300 on state tax.

Sometimes it is a quirk in a state tax code that a client can take advantage of. We have one of those in California. People are often advised by attorneys, or friends, or their distant relative who fancies themselves a tax and law expert. LLCs do serve a purpose, but if you do not make an election to be taxed as a corporation, you are subject to the LLC fee. There is a minimum tax of $800 on LLCs (and other types of business entities) in CA. But LLCs are taxed on their gross sales and not their net income (revenues minus allowable deductions).


This is what that tax looks like

I have a long-time client who formed a new 2-member LLC and elected to be a partnership. The partnership had gross revenues of more than $500,000. So their total LLC fee and tax was $3,300. I advised them to make an election to be taxed as an S-corporation. By making that election, they cut their tax obligation to CA by $2,500. And because the entity is losing money thus far; they are paying no CA income tax on their personal returns.

A lot of tax returns are incredibly simple. If people want to do their returns on their own, more power to them. But there is a lot of value in the expertise of a professional. One last example.

Our proprietary software has a tool that allows us to demonstate the tax savings of converting a sole proprietorship to an S-corporation. For one of my clients whose return I did this year, those savings are over $8,000. Even paying the $800 minimum tax to CA, paying $600 for a payroll service and paying $580 for preparation of the corporate tax return, they will save over $5,000 by following my advise. Needless to say, they jumped at the opportunity.

So, what is the bottom line? There is value in consulting with a professional. In almost anything. You need to make the value judgment for yourself if you should or shouldn't seek out that level of assistance with your tax returns.

The story behind the story

Investigative journalist Jeff German died recently of stab wounds. That event takes my memory back to late January 1987. German broke the news that Liberace had been diagnosed as having AIDS. There was a firestom of reaction. Including a threat from his manager, the late Seymour Heller that he was going to sue the Las Vegas Sun on behlf of his client.

I was anchoring/reporting the news that weekend. CBS news called the station (we were an affiliate of the network) and asked for reaction to the threat from the newspaper. I managed to reach the newspaper's editor, Brian Greenspun. He gave me a statement with the newspaper's position (basically, bring it on, Seymour because truth is a complete defense) and I did a story for the network news.

What Mr. Greenspun did not know was that I knew how Mr. German had gotten the story. One of my colleagues at K-News 970 had sold the story to him. How my co-worker obtained the information is something I will never know, but I saw a copy of the diagnosis of AIDS for Liberace with my own eyes. I was amazed and wondered why our station did not run the story. Turned out our ownership did not want to have to lay out the money to defend against a lawsuit.

Let me be clear that there is nothing wrong with purchasing documents to break a big story, at least not in my mind.

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There was one other time I wound up interacting with the Las Vegas Sun during my time as a radio reporter in Las Vegas. It began with a phone call after 2 a.m. I was the reporter on call. "A plane made an emergency landing out on I-15 near Jean. Go out there and get the story. So I drove to the station, got the station's vehicle and got to the scene. The TV camera crews had come and gone. The pilot refused to talk to me, just as he had done with the TV people who got there before me. I chatted up the firemen who had responded and they told me the whole story. The plane had run out of fuel, causing the need for the emergency landing. The reason the pilot wouldn't talk about anything was that he was delivering the morning edition of the L.A. Times to be distributed to places in Vegas where it was sold.

Drove back to the station, did a couple versions of the story and then headed for home. When coming home from the station I always passed by this gigantic adult bookstore. I saw a bunch of cop cars there and pulled over to find out what was going on. There was a reporter from the Sun there and when he saw me, wearing my press pass, she went ballistic. She talked to a guy in a suit, apparently trying to keep me from getting access and the story.

The man in the suit was an FBI agent. He told me that he had promised an exclusive to the Sun. I basically said, "not my problem." I had the story on the air within an hour, pissing off the reporter to no end. Just a case of being in the right place at the right time.

Turned out this was part of a big bust involving organized crime at a number of adult emporiums.