Month: October 2004

A friend in Alaska sent this email in response to a postcard from warm sunny Greece:

“So, you are there…and… well…we are here… in the snow, sleet, rain, pestilence, fog, and darkness.  What more can be said?  The dogs are howling, the bears are hibernating, and we are hunkered in our camp, slowly cooking cassoulet while riding out the storm.  In fact, it has been so bad here that one of our local judges, Sam Adams, age 47, died of a heart attack while on a moose hunt a week ago, and he had to stay put with his hunting party for a few days before the clouds could clear and the plane could land. Can you imagine being one of the guys around the fire, wondering whether to put cards in Sam’s hand, or look for another moose, etc.”

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Picked up a copy of The Onion on the street corner in Manhattan and enjoyed this entry, headline “Tibetan Teen Getting into Western Philosophy”:

LHASA, TIBET—Deng Hsu, 14, said Monday that he is “totally getting into Western philosophy.” “I’ve been reading a lot of Kant, Descartes, and Hegel, and it’s blowing my mind,” Hsu said. “It’s so exotic and exciting, not like all that Buddhist ‘being is desire and desire is suffering’ shit my parents have been cramming down my throat all my life. Most of the kids in my school have never even heard of Hume’s views on objectivity or Locke’s tabula rasa.” Hsu said he hopes to one day make an exodus to north London to visit the birthplace of John Stuart Mill.

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This article on physician salaries should be emailed to undergrads planning their future and, perhaps more importantly, to any person with a PhD who insists on calling him or herself “doctor”.  It turns out that the average physician in the U.S. makes around $200,000/year after paying malpractice insurance and all other expenses.  The clever docs who specialized in radiology earn a median income of $350,000/year after paying their malpractice insurance premium of $12,000/year.  So next time the pompous PhD signs an email with “Dr.” ask him “Wow, are you making $200,000+/year?  No?  Why not?”

Maybe these are the folks who’ve stripped America’s car dealers of all the minivans…

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Just got back from a showing of the new Alexander Payne movie Sideways here in Manhattan. I went with a couple of old friends to this movie about old friends on a pre-wedding bachelor road trip in central California wine country. Everyone in the theater was laughing. Highly recommended.

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I keep reading about how the U.S. economy is in such bad shape and that people are out of work.  Yet when I try to buy a new minivan, either Toyota or Honda, I’m told “You have to wait three months to get your choice of color and options and you have to pay list price.”  What I want is a 2005 Honda Odyssey, Touring trim, white, with nav system (the center windows go up and down on the Odyssey, making it good for dogs).  The list price is something like $35,000 and presumably dealer profit is around $3000.  Toyota dealers were selling leftover 2004 Siennas for nearly list price as well!  If one listens to the John Kerry supporters here in Cambridge it sounds like doomsday for the U.S. economy.  If one walks into the local car dealer, however, it is apparent that the minivan-buying middle class has a lot more cash than back in 1998 when I bought my Sienna for $500 over invoice.

[p.s.  I’m going down to NYC tonight through Sunday morning.  More evidence that the economy is booming is supplied by the fact that nearly every Broadway show is sold out, despite $100+ ticket prices.  Any NY locals reading this blog with ideas for Thu, Fri, and Sat evenings?]

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I attended a dinner party this week in which all of the other guests were foreigners, coming from Mexico, Taiwan, and Colombia.  It was the night of the last presidential debate and the topic of the election came up.  All of the foreign guests espoused great hatred for George W. and blamed the Republicans in general and W specifically for all the violence perpetrated by the U.S.  These were all young grad students and post-docs and apparently America’s long history of violence hasn’t registered with them nor the fact that much if not most of that violence was authored by presidents from the Democratic Party.  I pointed out that the Japanese had killed fewer Americans in their attack on Pearl Harbor than died on September 11, 2001.  Yet Roosevelt, a Democrat, had killed millions of Japanese in retaliation rather than negotiate a settlement.  Kennedy started America’s Vietnam War, which his Democratic successor Johnson escalated.  Jimmy Carter, a famously wimpy Democrat, articulated the Carter Doctrine that any threat to control of Mideast oil supplies would be met with American military force then backed that up by funding a proxy army in Afghanistan against the Russians.  It would seem that W. and the Republicans have no monopoly on aggression in foreign lands and yet somehow the American people get a free ride.  If we can say “we didn’t vote for W” we are considered good citizens of the world.  George W. Bush attracts all of the hatred.

Maybe we should take advantage of the fact that we have our scapegoat in place.  We can make a list of all of the countries that we need to invade, install puppet governments in, or steal their natural resources.  If W. loses the election we go on a big military spree until mid-January and then Kerry can come in and say “We had nothing to do with the fact that Bush kicked your asses but sadly the U.S. government never apologizes for anything or returns any loot.”

[I did catch up by skimming the transcipt of the debate later.  My favorite thing that was said was from Bush:  “the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care.”  This is what distinguishes a visit to a hospital emergency room from a visit to McDonald’s.  Even if you don’t have health insurance and are going to be reamed out of $2000 for a simple X-ray the experience is pure Third World.  As far as the staff is concerned you are not their customer.  Insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid are the customers.  If an executive from Blue Cross showed up at the hospital she would not be kept in a waiting room overflowing with the sickest most contagious SARS-ridden people in the metropolitan area.  If nobody had health insurance hospitals and doctors would start to pay more attention to the patient experience.]

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The October 4, 2004 New Yorker magazine carries an interesting article by Ian Parker about Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne, which won the X-Prize.  Rutan discusses his concern during the first flight that his friend Mike Melvill, 63, might have been killed.

“I’d have lost a friend.  You could say, ‘I should pick a pilot who I’m less friendly with, a guy who’s a stranger to me and just working for me, so if he gets killed…'”  [Rutan] smiled.  “You could say, ‘Let’s have a lawyer fly it'”–a pause–“‘or a liberal.'”

Rutan is quite expansive on the uselessness of the federal government, especially as evidenced by the spectacle of NASA’s inefficiency.  Ian Parker inserts some balance by noting that Rutan operates from the Mojave airport, a recent recipient of $3.9 million from the FAA to improve taxiways.

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In last night’s presidential election debate Kerry confidently claimed that he had a plan for fixing Iraq and made it sound like it was going to be pretty easy.  Get some more countries involved, smile at Iraqis, move on.  It made me wonder whether it is wise for a politician to promise so much.  Americans who follow the news know that Iraq is a terrible mess and has been for most of its history as a country.  To myself and a friend who watched (she is a bleeding heart old-style liberal who hates W.) Kerry seemed ridiculously overconfident when he said that he had a plan for Iraq and was sure that it was going to work.  Did this strike an off note with anyone else who was otherwise a Kerry supporter?

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Back from Santorini and Crete, the final destinations of my little trip to Greece, I am reflecting on all of the conversations that I overheard among people about to get onto a ferry or an airplane and those staying behind.  About 80 percent of the time a man saying farewell to a traveler would say “Have a good trip.”  About 80 percent of the time a woman saying farewell to a traveler would say “Have a safe trip.”

Men apparently fear that the traveler will suffer discomfort, e.g., that a tour group of 750 Croatian college grads will pile onto the ferry in Santorini, all of whom need to pass through one standard-sized doorway on a car deck and thus the ferry will sail 1.5 hours late with people still stuck in the airless windowless car deck.  Or that you’ll show up in Heathrow after all the flights to Boston have left and learn that the rooms at the airport Hilton are 293 pounds per night ($522, about what a typical Brit spends on a one-week package beach holiday on Corfu or Crete, including airfare, hotel, and most meals (the airport information desk staff found me a B&B for $71)).

Women apparently fear violence and accidents.  Heathrow airport feeds this fear with periodic announcements “Passengers are reminded not to leave baggage unattended and not to look after baggage for other persons.”  I.e., if the person sitting next to you says “Would you mind watching this stuff while I go to the bathroom” you’re supposed to say “No” on the theory that they might be part of the Jihad Against Pret a Manger.

One odd item:  one of the movies selected by British Airways for the Boeing 777 flying from London to Boston was “The Terminal”, about a guy trapped for 9 months at an international airport (supposedly JFK but reconceived by Hollywood types who travel by private jet and never see the interior of a public terminal in the U.S.).

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Just finished a couple of fun books by Bill Blunden: Cube Farm and Offshoring IT.  Cube Farm should be required reading for young people considering careers as computer programmers.  Blunden goes from an enthusiastic undergraduate studying Physics at Cornell into a world that claims to be short of technically educated folks but in fact has few jobs for physical science nerds (“Adam Smith’s invisible hand was giving me the middle finger”).  Blunden ends up waiting tables for three years, going back to get a master’s in operations research, and then selling himself as a Java programmer.  He ends up at Lawson Software, a firm that competes with SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft in business software.  For young folks who are inspired by Bill Gates and the handful of programmers who’ve crafted popular games this book is a good introduction to the life of the average programmer.

Offshoring IT is a weaker book but it contains some fun facts to know and tell.  For example, we learn that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts spends $86 per subscriber per year on information technology.  And that New York City has stopped relying on India to process parking tickets; they’re now handled in Accra, the capital of Ghana, by workers making $70 per month.

Blunden makes the point that offshoring is a good way for a corporation to circumvent age discrimination laws.  Companies, especially in IT, like young workers.  They’re cheaper, have more energy, incur lower health insurance costs, and don’t draw retirement benefits.  Microsoft, for example, tries to hire the vast majority of its people straight out of college.  A company could not legally fire all of its older-than-50 workers and replace them with Americans fresh-out-of-college.  Yet it is legal to fire an older workforce in the U.S. and replace it with a young workforce in India, China, or the Philippines.

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