The Colle delle Finestre

Alberto Contador just won the Giro D'Italia today, but in the penultimate stage yesterday, he finally showed a sign of weakness, allowing his main competitor Fabio Aru to drop him on the climb up the Colle delle Finestre. Aru ended up the stage winner, clawing back over two minutes on Contador, but after Finestre Contador regrouped and limited the damage on the climb to Sestrieres to end the stage. That left today's concluding stage as largely a ceremonial one, as is so often the case in the grand tours.

The climb up the Colle delle Finestre one of the epic, unique climbs left in road cycling because it occurs on dirt and gravel. Even though they're riding the most advanced carbon fiber bike frames, the professional racers looked like cyclists of yore, when the Tour de France was contested largely on dirt paths through the Alps and Pyrenees.

One of the rare times Contador has been dropped on a climb, this time up the gravel path of the Colle delle Finestre.

Contador is trying to win both the Giro D'Italia and the Tour de France this year, something not done since Marco “Il Pirata” Pantani did it in 1998.

The Robin Hood morality test

The Sheriff of Nottingham captured Little John and Robin Hood and imprisoned them in his maximum-security dungeon. Maid Marion begged the Sheriff for their release, pleading her love for Robin. The Sheriff agreed to release them only if Maid Marion spent the night with him. To this she agreed. The next morning the Sheriff released his prisoners. Robin at once demanded that Marion tell him how she persuaded the Sheriff to let them go free. Marion confessed the truth, and was bewildered when Robin abused her, called her a slut, and said that he never wanted to see her again. At this Little John defended her, inviting her to leave Sherwood with him and promising lifelong devotion. She accepted and they rode away together.
 

How would you rank the four people in terms of their morality and honesty? This is the Robin Hood morality test, written by a Sydney marriage expert. Submit your answer and then see the distribution of answers from others, as well as an analysis of what your ranking says about you.

Wife bonuses

And then there were the wife bonuses.
 
I was thunderstruck when I heard mention of a “bonus” over coffee. Later I overheard someone who didn’t work say she would buy a table at an event once her bonus was set. A woman with a business degree but no job mentioned waiting for her “year-end” to shop for clothing. Further probing revealed that the annual wife bonus was not an uncommon practice in this tribe.
 
A wife bonus, I was told, might be hammered out in a pre-nup or post-nup, and distributed on the basis of not only how well her husband’s fund had done but her own performance — how well she managed the home budget, whether the kids got into a “good” school — the same way their husbands were rewarded at investment banks. In turn these bonuses were a ticket to a modicum of financial independence and participation in a social sphere where you don’t just go to lunch, you buy a $10,000 table at the benefit luncheon a friend is hosting.
 
Women who didn’t get them joked about possible sexual performance metrics. Women who received them usually retreated, demurring when pressed to discuss it further, proof to an anthropologist that a topic is taboo, culturally loaded and dense with meaning.
 

Finally got around to reading this piece in the NYTimes on Upper East Side moms. Is this real?

The author wrote the piece to promote her new memoir titled, no joke, Primates of Park Avenue.

An Upper East Side wife penned this response with about as virally-optimized a title as even the greatest minds in the Buzzfeed labs could concoct: I get a wife bonus and I deserve it, so STFU. 2015 is shaping up to be the year every one tried to break the internet.

Al came out in favor of the idea of the wife bonus almost as soon as we moved to Australia. He’s got a very politically incorrect sense of humor and joked it was to reward me for being a “good little wife,” which made me laugh out loud. Seriously, though, we settled on the exact terms: When he received his bonus every year at the end of April, we’d each take a fifth after tax and bank the rest.
 
I’m exceptionally lucky to have a husband who values how important a job it is to stay home and take care of a child, as well as understanding how difficult it is to leave friends, family and career prospects behind to further his career. He was actually pleased to have a tangible way to recognize the contribution that I also make to the success of our lives.
 
The wife bonus gives me not only financial freedom, but freedom from guilt too. We have a joint account, and before we started the system, I was reluctant to spend our money on myself, even though my husband insisted he was happy for me to. Now that I have a quantifiable amount to treat myself with, I don’t feel guilty doing so.
 
The five-figure amount has pretty much stayed the same despite the economy. Last year, I bought a Prada handbag and Burberry raincoat for about $1,500 each. I tend to wait until I’m back home in London to spend my bonus because I can leave Lala with a member of the family and go on a week-long splurge to upscale stores like Selfridges. My favorite labels include Bottega Veneta, Chanel, Prada, Smythson, Erdem and Stella McCartney.
 

I will leave aside any personal judgment here and just observe that the furor reflects the evolving conception of marriage. Whereas once they were largely seen as economic arrangements, now we expect more from marriage, from our spouses. They must fulfill us in every way. I can't tell what the model of hedonic marriage has to say about wife bonuses, perhaps an economist out there has an analysis.

If the couples observed here just had shared bank accounts and the money flowed the same way otherwise, we wouldn't have any such furor. The framing is everything here.

Flat tire

Team Sky cyclist Richie Porte got a flat tire near the end of stage 10 of the Giro D'Italia, and a fellow Aussie from another team, Simon Clarke, stopped and gave Porte his wheel in a gesture of sportsmanship.

The moment was captured on social media, and when race officials saw the proof of the exchange, they penalized Porte 2 minutes and fined him 200 Swiss Francs for violating a rule forbidding members of one team from helping another (Clarke, not a contender, received the same fine). It's such an obscure rule that Porte and Clarke never thought twice about the exchange in the heat of the moment.

Cycling gets beat up much worse than other sports for enforcing strict drug testing. More cyclists are caught, leading the public to look upon the sport as tainted, but the drug testing rules in most other sports are a joke (e.g. the NBA, NFL, soccer, tennis) compared to cycling, so I'll defend cycling for putting its testing where its mouth is.

However, this is one time they should have forgiven Porte and Clarke. What could have been a great moment for the sport, a gesture of the type of sportsmanship we should encourage, turned into a moment where the letter of the law took precedence over the spirit of the law, and the spirit of sport, which is fair play. Porte already lost time on race leaders by virtue of the unfortunate flat, and what could have been a more exciting Giro lost one of its leading contenders.

For the same reason, race leader Alberto Contador shouldn't be fined for removing his helmet during the race, even as it is against the rules, and even as, to no one's surprise, Twitter users are in an uproar over the subjective application of the rulebook.

Meh

 From Adam Gurri's The Arc of the Universe Bends Towards Meh:

I think that McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity does a good job demolishing the notion that our prosperity rests on the continued poverty of others, and it is not alone in that. But if there’s one solid thing I took away from The Great Stagnation, and especially the debates that it sparked, it is that it is incredibly hard to think about progress, decline, and well-being, period.
 
Cultural conservatives often claim we’re in decline from the point of view of deteriorating values. Roy Baumeister’s book covering his work on willpower makes the claim that the Victorians took self-control much more seriously than we do, and we are the worse for it. More extreme claims of moral decline, are, of course, quite common. MacIntyre’s After Virtue tells you where he stands on the matter in his title. Mencius Moldbug, the the pseudonymous prophet of the Internet neoreactionaries, resurrects Carlyle among others to make the claim that we have fallen into complete lawlessness and immorality. He thinks the Victorians eradicated violent crime, but liberal ideology led us to abandon the very values that made such eradication possible.
 
Consider Baltimore. For those looking through the lens of decline, the writing is on the wall—the barbarians have stormed the gates, they are on the inside, they’re just waiting for the right moment to deliver the final blow to our crumbling civilization. For those looking through the lens of progress, the riots in Baltimore are unfortunate but the peaceful protests, and increased media scrutiny of cop violence there, in New York, and in Ferguson, Missouri all hint at a possibility of important reform. A chance to take a next step in the journey that began with the abolition of slavery, continued through the civil rights movement, and continues to this day, if we who inherited it make ourselves good caretakers.
 

I still can't escape the feeling that to seem smart, it's better to have strong opinions, loosely held, with about 50% of them being contrarian. Whether you're right or not matters very little in too many situations.