Month: July 2009

I chatted with the line guys on the ramp in the Wilmington, Delaware airport. The election of Joe Biden to Vice President has caused some changes to the airspace. There is a permanently restricted area of airspace to the NW of the airport, around Biden’s weekend house. The airport gets shut down every time Biden commutes home at taxpayer expense. What kind of plane does Biden, a tireless advocate of reduced carbon emissions (source), use for the 15-minute flight from D.C.? “Boeing 757”, was the report from the ramp, “You wonder how the government can criticize private companies for using light jets when they themselves ride solo in the back of a 757.”

[Note: the shortest version of the Boeing 757 can hold up to 234 passengers plus a crew of at least 7 (source).]

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I’m planning a flight today from Bedford, Massachusetts (KBED) to Wilmington, Delaware (KILG). Having a few minutes of waiting time in the car, I called Flight Service to ask for the outlook for tomorrow. Phone calls to Flight Service were formerly handled by FAA employees, somewhat overpaid government workers who were based in small regional offices such as Bridgeport, CT, Burlington, VT, and Bangor, ME. The FAA Flight Service folks were often pilots themselves and they always knew a lot about local weather and procedures. The service was paid for by taxes on fuel sold to privately operated aircraft.

A couple of years ago, the Feds decided that they could save money by outsourcing Flight Service to Lockheed-Martin, the company that turned a $30 million Eurocopter into the $400 million presidential VH-71 (subject of recent Congressional inquiry when people figured out that each of these helicopters will cost the taxpayer more than an Airbus A-380). Lockheed-Martin consolidated Flight Service into a handful of central facilities, staffed with people who met the FAA’s minimum requirements.

I explained to the briefer the reason for my phone call: I wanted to know by what time I had to leave in the morning to avoid the afternoon thunderstorms that I’d see in a public forecast and that are typical in the summer. He said “There aren’t any thunderstorms in the forecast.” I was surprised and asked him to check the terminal forecasts again. He confirmed that he was looking at the 8 pm terminal forecasts, which are good for 24 or 30 hours depending on the airport. I asked him to look at the airports in between BED and ILG. He repeated that there was nothing to worry about.

When I got home, I looked at the same data that he’d look at, from the Web-based duats.com (requires pilot certificate to register; ADDS offers similar data to anyone). Here’s what I found…

Area forecast for Eastern Massachusetts: outlook VFR becoming VFR rain showers thunderstorms with rainshowers 12 noon EDT (16Z).

Southeast NY: Outlook: VFR with rain showers thunderstorms with rainshowers.

Boston terminal forecast, 9a-1p: temporarily visibility 4 miles, rain showers, mist, broken cumulonimbus at 2,000 feet [note that a cumulonimbus cloud is a component of a thunderstorm]

JFK terminal forecast, 2pm: wind 190° at 14 knots gusting to 20 knots, visibility greater than 6 miles, scattered cumulonimbus at 8,000 feet, 25,000 feet broken

Wilmington, DE (ILG) terminal forecast, 2 pm: wind 180° at 12 knots, visibility greater than 6 miles, thunderstorms in the vicinity, broken cumulonimbus at 5,000 feet.

Government privatization usually results in the perpetuation of a monopoly (in this case Lockheed-Martin is the only company which a pilot can contact to use the services that his or her fuel taxes paid for) and it is very difficult to specify quality, as perceived by the customer, in a contract.

[A few weeks ago, I was flying into the dreaded Washington, D.C. ADIZ. If you don’t have a flight plan, a squawk code, radar contact, etc., they can roll the F16s and shoot down your little 4-seater. I decided that my flight plan from the Westminster VOR to Gaithersburg (about 10 minutes in the Cirrus) was too precious to entrust to DUATS, so called Flight Service and gave them the plan over the phone. As I got closer to D.C., the controllers searched and searched but never could find my flight plan. Fortunately, they were able to use their discretion and allowed me to proceed to Gaithersburg, but Lockheed-Martin’s failure could easily have forced me to land short of the D.C. ADIZ, file a new plan via phone or Web, and take off again, a significant waste of fuel, time, and money.]

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Using Google App Engine, a recent O’Reilly book by Charles Severance, is a very rare animal: a self-contained book on software development. An intelligent person who had never written a computer program could, without referring to other books, develop a very simple application running on Google’s servers. The book has been slammed by some nerd reviewers on amazon.com for being shallow and wasting time explaining what HTTP and HTML are, but these are precisely the things that I like about the book. The chapter on Python starts with a section titled “What is Programming?”

A person doesn’t have to devote his or her life to reading dozens of interlocking books. This 240-page book is sufficient for a satisfying introduction to the world of cloud nerds. If the reader wants to go deeper, the online docs for all of the subsystems described in the book are available.

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I recently attended a baby shower, something that I never thought that I would do unless I had first gone to Thailand for a sex change operation (cannot afford U.S. prices for elective surgery!). Apparently this is the style with modern/older mothers and there were at least 7 or 8 other guys there.

The situation was made more challenging to my fragile sense of masculinity by the fact that I offered to re-park a car at a neighbor’s house, in order to free up parking spaces for additional guests. The owner had left her purse in the car and the locks on the old Saab, along with everything else, seemed to have failed. I decided that I couldn’t leave the purse in the car. Thus did I find myself walking to a baby shower carrying a woman’s purse.

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Californians are scratching their heads trying to figure out why their government has run out of cash. Some blame the constitution. Some blame the governor. Some blame the lobbyists. Let’s run a few numbers.

The median wage of a California state employee is $66,000 (source). The median wage among all Californians (including those state workers) is just over $36,000. The state employee can retire with a full pension in his or her late 40s or early 50s, which essentially means that the taxpayers have to pay for double the number of state workers that are required to provide current services. In addition to salaries that are much higher than private sector equivalents, the state employee has health care and other benefits that by themselves may exceed the total compensation of a full-time private sector employee. The reasonable question to ask is not “How did they run out of cash?” but “How was this ever supposed to work?”

The picture is worse than the numbers would suggest. A lot of new Californians are working illegally. Their wages, which may be paid in cash, are less than $36,000 per year, and are not reflected in official statistics. Yet an immigrant who arrives to take a $10 per hour job still requires teachers for his children, policemen and firemen for his neighborhood, etc.

California has a tax burden of 10.5 percent of its citizens’ income, higher than the U.S. average of 9.7 percent (source). Due to the fact that California government has grown so much in the past few decades, its pension and health care payment obligations for retired state workers are going to skyrocket in the next 20-30 years. (The inefficient states of the Eastern U.S. were more or less equally inefficient in 1980 and had roughly the same population and size of government workforce.)

California could become solvent… if it can insure that everyone who moves to the state for the next 30 years is a medical doctor earning at least $150,000 per year from Medicare, Medicaid, and other out of state sources.

[Related: This guy calculates that, adjusted for inflation, California government now spends 3.54X as much per citizen as it did in 1970. It seems hard to believe, but I don’t have enough data to contradict it.

The federal government is not doing a whole lot better, according to this Congressional Budget Office posting. What keeps the Feds going is their ability to borrow and print money.]

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In January I posted a theory that the U.S. economy might not do anything more dramatic than slide sideways, which would look like a downward slide relative to other nations, more or less as the U.K. has done since World War II. There is no law that says we have to grow or crash. It has been six months since that post and the economic numbers remain depressing but not terrifying. GM is still in the news, having absorbed perhaps another $50 billion in taxpayer funds and hopelessly ill-equipped to compete with the Tata Nano or the electric cars coming out of China. The government continues to expand but few have noticed any great improvement in the quality or quantity of services delivered by the government. Any growth in GDP seems likely to be roughly matched by our 1 percent annual growth in population, which will result in a reasonably happy government, but a disappointed people. The government will be a happy due to a rising tax base. The people will be disappointed because increased population will bring congestion, rising real estate costs, and constant per-capita income that most likely will turn into a falling income for most Americans, given that a lot of forces tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

How accurate does this assessment seem? Are you seeing evidence of a recovery in your neighborhood?

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The Supreme Court has spoken in Ricci v. Stefano, the New Haven firefighter’s case. An employer developed what it thought was a purely job-related exam and said that they would promote the people who did well on the test. The alternatives presumably would have been promotion based on seniority or popularity with supervisor (i.e., suckuptitude). When it transpired that some blacks and Hispanics whom the city had hoped to promote based on the exam failed to score well, the city tossed out the results. The Supreme Court has ordered the city to live by the test results and self-proclaimed advocates for blacks and Hispanics are broadcasting their displeasure.

Initially it seems reasonable that advocates for groups that did poorly on an exam would advocate against an exam culture. But thinking about it a bit more, I found myself surprised.

Suppose I am a member of Group A within society. The average manager thinks that members of Group A are incompetent and doesn’t want to hire anyone in Group A. Membership in Group A can be easily recognized in a face-to-face interview by skin color and therefore, unless nobody else has applied, no member of Group A is likely to get a job after a face-to-face interview.

An employer switches to using a written exam, graded by a computer program unaware of the group membership of test takers. The highest scoring test takers will be given jobs.

This should be a dream come true for me and the rest of Group A. To get a job or a promotion, all that I have to do is study for a written test. I don’t have to worry about my skin color anymore. If Group A has a particular dialect of English or funny accent that turns off employers, I am also freed from worry about how I speak.

If the belief is that Group A is being discriminated against because employers are prejudiced, one would think that any advocate for Group A would welcome a method of hiring or promoting that is blind to personal characteristics.

Suppose that all jobs in the U.S. were exam-based. We would not have had the election of 2004 in which John Kerry and George W. Bush competed for our top job. Neither of them did especially well on exams, as evidenced by their mediocre grades in college. Had ability to be President been judged by an impartial computer system rather than voters, it is unlikely that two white guys from Yale would have been the top contenders.

[Separately, has anyone seen any of the exam questions? A tremendous amount of journalistic ink has been spent on this lawsuit yet I have not seen any sample questions from the exam. Perhaps they were lifted from http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76rblackperspective.phtml, e.g.,

You have been invited over for cocktails by the officer of your trust fund. Cocktails begin at 4:30, but you must make an appearance at a 6:00 formal dinner at the Yacht Club. What do you do about dress?

A. Wear your blue-striped seersucker suit to cocktails and change into your tuxedo in the bathroom, apologizing to your host for the inconvenience.
B. Wear your tuxedo to cocktails, apologizing to your host for wearing a dinner jacket before 6:00 PM.
C. Walk to the subway at Columbus Circle and take the “A” Train uptown.”

Julian Bond, Black Perspective, Saturday Night Live, April 9, 1977]

[Update: The New York Times did a story on a Hispanic firefighter in New Haven who joined the lawsuit supporting exam-based promotion. He was unaware of his own score, though as it happens it was high enough to earn promotion. Last paragraph:

Gesturing toward his three young sons, Lieutenant Vargas explained why he had no regrets. “I want them to have a fair shake, to get a job on their merits and not because they’re Hispanic or they fill a quota,” he said. “What a lousy way to live.”

]

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