Month: April 2010

One of the readers with whom I shared coffee this evening in Orlando had what looked like a stack of papers. One of the papers turned out to be a notebook computer with an aluminum case. It was marvelously light and very sleek. What was it? A Dell V13, which is buried among hundreds of other products on the Dell Web site. It sells for $450 with Linux and 2 GB of RAM, a 250 GB hard drive, and a built-in Webcam. Deficits: no optical drive (impossible at this weight and thickness); no Thinkpad-style pointer nub in the middle of the keyboard so you’re stuck with a trackpad (the owner said he would have preferred the keyboard nub but liked the machine anyway due to its “disposable price” so that he doesn’t have to worry about losing it or dropping it).

I’m wondering who designed this thing because it doesn’t look like anything that Dell has ever sold before.

[Update: I ordered a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge after reading all of the comments heaping scorn on the Dell and praising the Edge’s durability. Also, I have always loved the trackpoint in-keyboard nubby pointer thingy.]

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A recent New Yorker carries an article comparing a few books on happiness research. Folks are baffled by the fact that GDP per person has risen in the U.S. but reported happiness has not. One explanation not considered is that the government is now consuming a much larger share of GDP and the government tends to spend money in ways that don’t make people happy, e.g., by starting expensive wars, by imposing burdensome paperwork requirements on millions of people, etc.

[One bright spot in this research is “Afghans are, on average, a pretty cheerful lot. (The most cheerful areas of the country tend to be those in which the Taliban’s influence is stronger.)” So the U.S. government hasn’t managed to ruin everyone’s party!]

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A (single male) friend was interviewed by a magazine some years ago. They asked him “What would you do if you had millions of dollars?” His first thought was “Buy a helicopter gunship”, but in an attempt to use the article as a lure for single women, he softened his published dream to “a house with a yard big enough for a pony”. (He is now married with a lovely wife and three healthy children.)

I’m catching up on New Yorker magazines and I discovered an article about a boy who grows up and achieves his dream of having a personal helicopter gunship: “The Hunted”. I recommend the piece to aviation enthusiasts in particular. If you don’t have time to read the whole article, search for “Sunday Justice” and read the paragraphs of how this African cook is quoted in an American’s book written for Americans and what the New Yorker writer learns in a follow-up interview.

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Folks: I’ve taken some blog reader suggestions and will be staying two nights in Winter Park. Florida (in the Orlando metro area). I’d be very interested to meet folks for coffee in the late afternoon on Monday, perhaps at 5:30 pm. Please email (to philg@mit.edu) if interested in getting together and, if you have one, suggest a favorite place in downtown Winter Park.

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Today I flew with a friend across the Appalachian Mountains. We climbed up to 41,000′ in a six-seat jet and landed three hours later at a small airport where we picked up two children, aged 8 and 11. They’d been visiting their mother, who is stationed at a nearby military base. We brought them back to a military airport in New England where they were picked up by their father. The mother, a warm person in her 30s, is suffering from a serious form of cancer. She’s going into a West Coast hospital soon for an experimental operation that might prolong her life, but it also might kill her. So we found ourselves, at a small FBO, witnesses to what might be the children’s last visit with their mom.

What made the scene even sadder for me was learning that the mom had previously been sent to Iraq for 17 months. In some abstract sense it might be nice to protect Iraqis from each other, but it is painful when you see the cost to America’s children who lose time with their parents. Our lives on this Earth are short. Is it really necessary that we spend any significant part of them in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Note that I am not arguing for pacifism. We live in a sometimes-unfriendly world and I can accept that sometimes we find it necessary to drop bombs on people who don’t like us. Flying enough bombing missions to destroy a hostile nation’s military, industrial, and transportation capabilities (after which point it is tough to see how they could be a significant threat to anyone) is a fairly straightforward project and one to which our military is well-suited. “Moving into a country on the other side of the globe and trying to turn it into a 51st state” seems to be a better description of what we’ve been trying to do and the cost just makes me weep.]

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In February, I sent letters to the three Representatives whose Congressional districts include towns bordering Hanscom Field. I also sent letters to our senators, John Kerry and Scott Brown (the new guy). The letters asked for assistance with getting approval for East Coast Aero Club to take in foreign students, who constitute the best market for helicopter flight training. Though our school has been established for 25 years and has a very similar curriculum to other FAA-approved Part 141 flight schools, our application has become lost in a bureaucratic black hole. We explained that if we could get approval to bring in foreign students we could hire additional instructors and mechanics here in Massachusetts, thus growing the tax base. We figured that maybe a phone call from a Representative or Senator might cause a government worker to dig up and act on our application.

Today we got a call back from a staffer in Senator Brown’s office. She apologized for the delay, but the letter had gotten routed from Washington to Boston and disappeared in a big stack while they were getting organized. She is going to try to help us.

How about the other Massachusetts politicians, whose salaries we have been paying for decades with our tax dollars? No answer.

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in the harlequinade that we Americans choose to call “health care”. A woman with top-of-the-line insurance had an infection and, before prescribing an antibiotic, her doctor wanted an ultrasound to rule out a 1 in 1000 chance that there was an abscess. The doctor suggested that she visit the emergency room at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts, though in practice any clinic with a machine and a radiologist on-site or connected via the Internet could have done the scan. She arrived at the E.R. at 2:00 pm, was seen about 7:00 pm, and was discharged around 8:00 pm (I delivered emergency supplies of food at 5:30 and stayed until 7:30). Had she gone to a veterinarian, her odyssey in the health care system would have been complete, but hospitals and doctors aren’t generally able to send patients home with the required medications. So our exhausted patient had to make a trip to a separate pharmacy a few miles away.

One complicating factor yesterday was Patriot’s Day, a holiday for some folks in Massachusetts. Most personal service industries add staff during holidays. If a customer came into a restaurant on a weekend or holiday, he or she would not likely have to wait 5 hours for service “because it is a holiday and our waiters and cooks wanted to stay home with their families”.

The most painful knowledge for me was that there was almost surely an ultrasound machine and radiologist waiting idle somewhere in eastern Massachusetts but there is no Web-based system for finding facilities with short waiting times. This is presumably because customers’ time has no value in our health care system, but I reflected that even the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles took mercy on its victims and posted facility waiting times on the Web starting in the 1990s.

So… by spending a greater percentage of working hours paying for health care than any group of humans in the history of the world we Americans have managed to create an industry that is less customer-friendly than the DMV.

One exciting positive: Thanks to the heroic efforts of Barack Obama, a gay couple can pay the same $17,000 per year and wait the same 6 hours for a 20-minute procedure as a straight couple. Egalitarianism seems already to have been implemented at Emerson. I was not asked to explain my sexual orientation (if any) when visiting.

More: my own health care reform plan

[How would this have played out in countries that spend less than our $8500/year per person on health care? She would have gone to a pharmacist rather than a doctor, described her symptoms, and been handed the antibiotic 5 minutes later at a cost of between $5 and $50. Had there been an abscess she would have gone to a doctor a couple of weeks later.]

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The Spring 2010 issue of City Journal carries an article on the history of California public employee unions, their political influence, and the cost of pension obligations to the unions: “The Beholden State.”

Related earlier postings:

• History of Public Employee Unions
• The bankrupting of San Diego by Republicans
• California’s $500 billion in unfunded pension obligations

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Folks:

I’m helping a friend with a trip to Orlando, Florida this coming weekend. We would like to find a good hotel with the following characteristics:

• within a 25-minute drive of MCO
• in a neighborhood where it is possible to walk to restaurants, shops, entertainment, etc.

The last time we visited Orlando we stayed near International Drive and were forced to use the rental car all the time.

Separately, is there a good place to take tennis lessons near the recommended hotel?

Thanks in advance for the advice.

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The volcanic ash shutdown of transatlantic air travel makes me wonder why videoconferencing hasn’t been more popular over the last few years. The typical company still does not have a high quality videoconference capability built into every conference room, which may make sense given that the cost of a 1000′ conference room is about $30,000 per year and high quality hardware/software can be comparable in cost to a year of rent. I’m confused as to why schools that teach foreign languages don’t have a videoconference wall built into every language classroom. A Spanish language class, for example, could have a wall that opens into a classroom in Argentina or Mexico. The cost of a public school teacher in the U.S., including pension and health care obligations, can exceed $200,000 for a 4.5 day workweek over 9 months. The videoconference hardware/software cost would be insignificant compared to the cost of the teacher and one would expect learning to be greatly accelerated if the kids could be bridged to native speakers in a comfortable and natural manner. Even if the American school had to pay for the hardware/software on both ends it would still cost less than paying a teacher to stick around for one summer school.

So how come school trips to Europe have become steadily more popular and videoconference systems in our wired-up schools are uncommon?

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