Month: October 2010

One of my favorite cousins traveled all the way from the hills above San Francisco Bay to attend Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity in Washington, D.C. this weekend. Stewart’s assertion is that political discourse in this country has become too angry and that if people are reasonable, common ground can be found. This led me to wonder how much common ground there already might be among Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Partiers.

Could there be values or religious differences among the parties? I would argue that these are of slight importance to most Americans. My evidence for this is that most Americans claim to be Christian yet spend money on a new SUV rather than driving a 5-year-old Honda Accord and giving what would have been the SUV payments to help the poor and suffering. Christian Americans very seldom follow the teachings of the historical Jesus when those teachings conflict with financial goals. A voter might have a personal preference about whether or not evolution should be taught in public schools, but is not likely to sacrifice personal consumption to realize that preference.

That leaves economic policy as the area of real dispute. Yet if you listen to politicians from the three parties, they all seem to want substantially the same things: a lavishly funded military and continued foreign wars, government transfers of money from working to non-working Americans (e.g., Social Security), unlimited government expenditures on medical care for those over 65 and for poor Americans (i.e., Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare), government workers enjoying high salaries, early retirement, and a comfortable inflation-adjusted pension.

The only important point of difference seems to be whether or not the above-mentioned “wants” are affordable for American society. For people who believe that America’s future prosperity will be much greater than today’s, the 2009 and 2010 federal budget deficits totaling $2.7 trillion (CBO source) are hardly worth worrying about. That’s about 20 percent of today’s GDP, but it would be only 2 percent of 2020’s GDP if we were to enjoy real GDP growth of 25 percent annually instead of our historical average of 3.3 percent . Similarly the unfunded pension obligations of states and cities, estimated at perhaps $4 trillion (Economist), will be easily affordable by a future generation of very highly paid American taxpayers.

Looking at the U.S. Census Bureau’s historical median income table (follow the P-5 link), Voter A could look at the median male worker’s income rising from $22,648 (2009 dollars) in 1953 and reaching $34,762 in 1973, perhaps because all of the technology innovations of World War II had finally been fully adopted by American industry. If that trend were to start again in 2010, perhaps explained by enthusiasm over the iPad, we could all expect to have 50 percent more income in 2030 than we do today and it would be correspondingly easier to pay off our debts, pension obligations for past and present government workers, and for the world’s most expensive health care. Voter A would presumably think it very reasonable for a politician or party to propose an expansion of government spending, in the same way that a college student might prudently borrow money in the expectation of having a reasonably well-paying job at age 35.

Suppose that Voter B, however, happens to concentrate on a different section of the same table. Voter B notices that median income for a working male American was actually lower in 2009 than in 1973, having slipped during those 36 years to $32,184. Voter B expects the average American to be no better off in 2030 or 2036 than he or she is today. Thus Voter B would think it insane for the government to propose spending a future generation’s money, in the same way that it would be insane for a 55-year-old to borrow money planning to pay it back at the age of 70.

The purported great divide and incivility among Americans in political discourse might be as simple as one group that thinks 2010-2046, economically, will look like two replays of 1953-1973 back to back while the other group thinks it will look like 1973-2009. As nobody has a crystal ball, there is really no way to be sure who is right. So perhaps on this election day we can be mindful that the person voting for the opposing party actually wants all of the things that we do; it is simply that he or she has a different expectation about American wealth circa 2046.

[The posting is not meant to minimize the importance of the choices that voters face. If optimistic Voter As prevail and are wrong about America’s future wages, the country is bankrupt. If pessimistic Voter Bs prevail and are wrong about America’s future wages, we’ll have unnecessarily deferred a lot of things that we desire.]

[You might ask why I considered only male Americans in this discussion. It is because women changed the way that they participated in the workforce over the years in question. It is more sensible to compare a male working in 1953 to a male working in 2009 than to do the same for women, whose educational and professional opportunities have been so greatly expanded.]

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I’m a member of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, part of a larger group criticized in a management consultant’s report for being perceived as “having a narrow bird-oriented focus”. I received a spam from the group yesterday urging me to vote in favor of preserving Massachusetts’s permanently temporary 6.25 percent sales tax. The sales tax had been 5 percent for decades, was raised by Governor Deval Patrick to 6.25 percent in 2009, and a ballot proposition would push it down to 3 percent in order to make Massachusetts retailers more competitive with online and New Hampshire stores (public employee unions are fighting this one, as you might imagine).

The push for higher taxes goes beyond birds, as the Audubon president notes “Along with many other nonprofits across the state, we urge you to Vote No on Question 3.”

The Audubon’s argument against the tax cut is that all state agencies would have less money. In particular, they cite possible cuts to budgets for running parks and monitoring compliance with federal “health and environmental standards” (the federal EPA has quite of a few of its 18,000 full-time workers here, so I’m actually not sure what state workers do to supplement the efforts of the 18,000 federal employees).

I thought it was odd that a non-profit organization would lobby for higher sales taxes at all. You could argue that high death or income taxes might help a non-profit organization by encouraging tax-deductible donations. But a sales tax that leaves everyone with a little less money to spend would be likely to reduce donations to non-profit organizations, no?

Another possible explanation comes from the fact that taxes reduce economic activity and growth. A society made poorer through higher taxation wouldn’t have as much money to destroy bird habitat through development. We wouldn’t have as many SUVs and McMansions. I don’t think this argument makes sense, though, because there are plenty of poor countries, e.g., Haiti, that are very poor and simultaneously have very degraded environments.

The one explanation that I can come up with is that Audubon is mostly funded by rich people whereas the burden of sales taxes falls most heavily on poor people. Were the sales tax to be cut, it is not credible that government spending in Massachusetts would be cut (most of our spending is determined by public employee union contracts and pensions). Therefore, income and property taxes would be raised and that would hit the folks who tend to donate to Audubon.

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I was talking to a friend of mine about how a remodeling project was going. “I’m tired of living with Mexicans,” was her reply (apparently the relaxed crew that shows up at 10:00 am every day is from south of the border). I thought that if I’d gotten that on video it would have made an awesome negative political ad.

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After getting some good advice here from readers on building the ultimate video editing desktop machine, I ordered an HP-490t, the top-of-the-line HP home computer, complete with 16 GB of RAM and a 160 GB solid-state boot drive underneath its six CPU cores. I did not order any hard drives from HP because I knew that it wouldn’t be long before 3 TB internal drives would be available. Imagine my delight when I found that Newegg had the latest 3 TB Western Digital Caviar Green drive in stock. Surely a brand new motherboard with a brand new build of Windows 7 would be able to talk to this new hard drive.

The $240 disk drive arrived without a cable and without screws, in order to give the consumer a chance to run some extra errands. Once screws and cable were attached, however, both the BIOS and Windows recognized the drive only as 800 GB in size. Some online reviews indicate that the product doesn’t work with Windows 7 unless you plug in an extra RAID card, which they provide (still no cable). At the cost of clogging up the last slot in the HP desktop therefore, the disk should in theory work. Except that the little RAID card that Western Digital provides is physically incompatible with slotting into a standard size case. The WD phone tech support guy said that the disk should work fine. He said “maybe it is something that was done to the BIOS when set up for the solid state disk” but could not explain where to look for a custom BIOS setting (I asked “is there a ‘recognize new hard drives as some other size than what they are’ setting in a typical BIOS?”).

So the drive goes back to newegg.com now… I’d be interested to hear from readers who’ve had success with a 3 TB drive.

[I should add that the machine has proven its worth for video editing. Those 6 CPU cores can convert high-def video to H.264 (MPEG-4 compression) in less than half of real-time, e.g., it takes about 30 seconds to export a 1-minute video. Photoshop and Premiere are responsive even though the source files are being pulled from a network-attached storage server (HP Mediasmart, as it happens, so this is an all HP show).

I should also note that Windows Live Movie Maker, a free Microsoft application, works great on this machine with the AVCHD files from the Sony camcorder. I can trim and assemble clips, add titles, and export compressed versions to .wmv. As the application is intended not to require any technical knowledge (unlike Premiere, which seems to assume that every user was a member of the Motion Picture Experts Group MPEG-4 AVC committee), it is hard to know what compression standards it is using. I picked “Zune HD”, which is 720p output, but I’m worried that it is some sort of Microsoft codec that will become unreadable when the company finally succumbs to Google’s Chrome OS.]

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Here’s a report from a day spent in Washington, D.C. earlier this week.

Washington can be one of the best places in the U.S. to enjoy the positive results of human cooperation. There is no better example than the crochet coral reef exhibit currently at the National Museum of Natural History. Each reef is made by dozens of volunteers. See it before April 24, 2011.

If you can’t afford a trip to France, Austria, and Sweden (or indeed, at current exchange rates, a Diet Coke in any of those countries), see the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo at the National Gallery of Art through January 9, 2011 (photo1; photo2). The downloadable brochure has all of the paintings (some high res versions on Wikipedia), which include a very modern-looking “Librarian” and late works such as Vertumnus (brochure cover; completed when the artist was 64 or 65 years old). The online video is also worth watching.

The mood in the imperial city is ebullient. Never have the bureaucrats had so much money to spend and never have they been able to control so many aspects of American life. The opportunities for reforming the chaotic and incompetent achievements of hayseeds in the taxpaying states are literally giddying. I pointed out that running $1.4 trillion deficits (White House forecast) might not be sustainable. The response from Obama-supporters (and nearly everyone I met in D.C. supports the ruler) was that “Bush also had deficits”. I’m not quite sure why this is a reassuring response. The Congressional Budget Office’s chart shows that the 2009 and 2010 deficits take us into uncharted territory (the 2005 deficit, for example, was about $320 billion). Even if we decide that $1.4 trillion is approximately equal to $320 billion, I’m still not sure why that should make us sanguine about deficit spending. The Bush deficits did not result in sustained economic prosperity. Also, the Bush debts were incurred at a time when the average estimate of America’s future prosperity was higher. A college student borrowing money in expectation of having a higher salary at age 35 is smart; a 55-year-old borrowing money in expectation of paying it back during his retirement is crazy.

Activity at Logan and Reagan National airports was a bit more brisk than I remember, so perhaps the economy is picking up. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that our system can handle an increased number of passengers. I flew mid-day on Monday and mid-day on Wednesday, which is traditionally one of the slowest days of the week and at the slowest time. Despite dozens of TSA’s 56,000 finest on duty at each checkpoint, the security lines required 15 or 20 minutes to clear and extended beyond the ropes (see Droid 2 phone photo below).

I’m wondering if the TSA’s new technology is slowing things down. I observed three TSA officers using a fancy backscatter X-ray machine to expose a terrorist disguised as an 80-year-old native-born grandmother whose replacement hip had set off the metal detector. They were also assiduously going through the luggage of terrorists disguised as middle-aged business travelers with 20 years of frequent flyer mileage history. After swabbing a packed suit in a roll-on case with a piece of fabric, they would wait for an explosives residue test to run. Advice: show up three hours early if you’re flying around Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My ground transportation experience in D.C. was in a rented 2011 Toyota Sienna minivan. The $30,000 machine was brand new with 368 miles on the odometer. How smart is a $30,000 brand-new U.S.-made automobile with a massive battery and at least a dozen microprocessors? The car did not know where it was (no GPS chip, though it had an LCD screen for the backup camera). The car did not know where the traffic jams were and hence could not offer routing advice to save time and fuel. The car did not know where it was relative to nearby cars and hence could not warn of an impending accident. The car did not know if it had been stolen and had no way to communicate with its owner if separated by more than the range of the keychain. The car did not know where nearby hotels and restaurants were (you’d think car makers would have put in a hotel and restaurant booking system if only to collect commissions). The car did not know if it was dark or light outside or if it was past sunset. The car did not know the speed limit of the road on which one was driving. The car did not have a way of identifying itself to a municipality or private business for automated toll or parking fee collection (instead the city of Washington, D.C. had recently gone on a spending spree to install inconvenient “pay to park” terminals all over the place; one parks, walks to the machine, inserts a credit card, waits, takes a printed piece of paper (i.e., some government worker or contractor is paid to replace the paper roll periodically), walks back to the car, reopens the car, places the paper on the dashboard, locks the car, and walks away (and then has to remember to go back to the car at an appointed time).

Perhaps the young people of Washington, D.C. will grow up and work to remove some of these inefficiencies from our economy? The D.C. public schools are statistically the nation’s worst and Michelle Rhee, the chancellor who had started to make a few changes, just got the axe.

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According to this Wall Street Journal article, a single public employee union is now the biggest spender in the 2010 elections, aside from candidates themselves. I.e., a union representing 1.6 million government workers is spending $87.5 million to encourage voters to reelect the politicians who give them pensions, pay raises, and other benefits. That’s more than the political spending of the entire U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3 million tax-paying businesses that collectively must employ tens of millions of private-sector workers. In “History of Public Employee Unions” (2009 posting), I learned that the idea that public employees could or should unionize is relatively new, less than 50 years old in most parts of the U.S. Thus after 50 years we may have reached a point in which politicians and government workers constitute a fully self-contained system in which politicians are guaranteed reelection and the workers are guaranteed much higher pay and benefits than private-sector taxpayers.

Related video: fireman talks to citizen.

Related analyses: several interesting articles in the Cato Journal, 30(1).

[These statistics aren’t the full story, since most unionized government workers belong to unions other than the one profiled in the WSJ (the New York Times says that there were approximately 7.9 million unionized government workers in 2009) and those unions will be spending independently. Companies that give money to the Chamber of Commerce to spend on political activities may separately support particular candidates (though really they are better off doing it through the Chamber because a company that supports one politician or party may alienate customers).]

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New Yorker magazine gives some sample definitions from the Google dictionary: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/10/18/101018sh_shouts_rich

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I got a credit card in the mail today from Chase. I had no idea that this account existed and I don’t need a thicker wallet (well, thicker with cash would be nice, but not thicker with plastic), so I called them up to cancel. I expected the agent to ask me why I wanted to cancel, offer me a higher credit limit, or make some other attempt to retain me as a customer. Instead, he said “Thank you. We’ll notify the credit reporting agencies within 30-60 days that this account has been canceled.”

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Here’s my report from a week of copiloting a friend’s fancy airplane.

First overnight stop was Las Vegas, which meant that we got to see the Grand Canyon, a spectacular sight even from 30,000′. One of the few dog-friendly hotels that I could find was the Loews resort in Lake Las Vegas, an artificial lake whose water is sucked out of adjacent Lake Mead and then pumped back in. It is pretty far from the Strip and was intended to be a self-contained dreamland of irrigated golf courses, Italianate condo complexes, and luxury hotels. They went bankrupt in 2008, sticking creditors (i.e., probably the U.S. taxpayer) with $1 billion in debt that would never be repaid. The casino and former Ritz Carlton hotel are both shut down. There are major gaps around the lake where the land was bulldozed in preparation for condo development, but no buildings were ever constructed. The condos that were built are about 5 percent occupied, based on my survey of evening lights in windows. Condo fees are $1 per month per square foot, or about $1000 per month on a two-bedroom apartment. They’ll have to go much higher unless a lot more people move in, since effectively the owner of one condo will have to pay for maintenance on about 20,000 square feet of space.

I took Ollie (four month old Border Collie) for a walk on the bluffs that formerly looked over Lake Mead. The lake is about half empty due to a combination of drought and the Southwest’s thirst for Colorado River water. It is expected to dry up completely in the next 10-20 years. A family of coyotes was living on what had been a boat ramp. Perhaps they are waiting for the humans to abandon Lake Mead and Lake Las Vegas and they’ll move into the condos. In a fit of optimism back in the 1950s and 1960s, the government built Glen Canyon Dam, upstream from Lake Mead but on the same river. The chance of there ever being enough water to fill both reservoirs is minute (the dams were built and water allocated based on data taken from the wettest century in 1000 or so years (source)).

Ollie enjoyed a trip to his first dog park in Henderson, Nevada. This is a fantastically efficient use of tax dollars in my opinion, creating a gathering place for taxpayers to enjoy each others’ company. Instead of a $14 billion tunnel to nowhere, the city built a few fences, put in some rugged agility equipment, and provided some shade and freshwater. I hadn’t been there too long before 30 police cars arrived to the development across the street and then four armored cars with “SWAT” painted on the side. The woman next to me said “Everyone in Las Vegas is first generation money. These people came from trailer parks. The wife got a job in a casino and the husband in construction. They had two kids, bought three cars, two jetskis, two ATVs, and kept taking out mortgages to pay for it all. When the economy headed south they just couldn’t handle being poor.” The incident barely made the news when I checked. A guy upset about his divorce was holed up in a house threatening to kill himself. He ultimate set the house on fire and ran out, but was apprehended.

We proceeded on to Minden, Nevada, just east of Lake Tahoe, where the soaring is some of the best in the U.S. We took a few glider lessons at Soar Minden, but unfortunately there wasn’t much lift. We left Ollie with the gals behind the desk at the Holiday Inn and went out for Basque food at JT’s. Minden and Gardnerville are home to at least three Basque restaurants due to an original community of Basque sheep herders who moved there when the West was settled (invaded?) by Europeans.

Seattle was mostly devoted to keeping Ollie entertained and killing off his intestinal parasites. I stayed at the University Inn, a simple hotel next to the University of Washington. The U has a literally awesome campus, with massive concrete buildings that tower above pedestrians. They have a tiled “Red Square” that is big enough to land a spaceship. I’ve already covered the scene at the dog park and at Norm’s, a dog-friendly restaurant, so I’ll limit myself to writing about the university neighborhood. Aside from a few sandwich shops, the restaurants around the university seemed all to be Asian or Middle Eastern. A lot of students were themselves Asian or Middle Eastern (complete with Islamic headgear for the women), but not nearly as high a percentage as you’d think from seeing all of the Teriyaki, Korean, and Falafel restaurants. Unlike Harvard and MIT students, most of the UW undergraduates had little or no interest in a puppy. What they were interested in was a visit by Barack Obama (story), which shut down much of the city and all of the airports for nearly 24 hours (a “revenue holiday” for area flight schools, charter operators, and other aviation businesses; we’re getting one here in New England on Monday (see this temporary flight restriction); our last Obama-imposed day off was a week ago when he came to Boston for a Democratic Party fundraiser (story)). I thought it was odd that students would be so enthusiastic about a politician who is spending all of their future income on gold-plated public works projects, unsuccessful wars, and expensive health care and pensions for older Americans. Then I reflected on the fact that if this generation isn’t well educated enough to get a job after graduation perhaps they recognize that they aren’t well educated enough to spend their own money; they need a wise government to spend it for them.

My one cultural excursion in Seattle was attending an outdoor rehearsal of Titanium Sporkestra, a tattooed marching band (video) undeterred by the cool evening air down by the waterfront. Ollie turns out not to be a huge fan of the bass drum.

After Obama had departed we were able to get access to our airplane at Boeing Field, fuel up, and depart. Air Force One was gone, but we taxied past Air Force cargo planes that had been ferried down from Alaska to carry SUVs for Obama and his entourage. We enjoyed a beautiful flight over the Cascades and Montana Rockies with the setting sun behind us, then landed around 9 pm in Fargo, North Dakota. The Holiday Inn there was hopping with a Shriner’s convention. In the morning we departed for Hanscom Field and arrived to find the wind at 20 knots gusting up to 27 knots, the most challenging conditions of the entire trip. My friend handled the landing beautifully, carrying a bit of extra airspeed and pulling back the power a little slower than usual. The touchdown was smooth and we hardly used any runway. Ollie ran from the airplane into the East Coast Aero Club maintenance hangar to see his friends, whining with delight at the sight of Claire.

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Never having served in the military, I did not have an opinion regarding the Clinton-era Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Traveling with a Border Collie puppy who yips and barks in a mournful manner when left alone for even a few minutes in a hotel room, however, I now realize the value of the idea.

After a haircut (for me) in a dog-friendly barber shop, Ollie and I had dinner this evening at Norm’s Eatery and Ale House (yelp). There were a lot of dogs underneath the tables in the restaurant. How can that be legal in dogophobic America? The restaurant doesn’t ask whether or not an incoming dog is a service animal. The patrons don’t tell the restaurant whether or not an incoming dog is a service animal. Ergo, as far as the restaurant knows, all of the dogs in the restaurant are service animals.

[I do wonder why Americans are so paranoid about dogs to the point that it would be illegal in nearly all states for a restaurant to say “we allow dogs”, giving the dogophobes fair warning. No dog has ever given a human AIDS, swine flu, a cold, malaria, herpes, or any of the other contagious diseases that occupy folks’ imaginations.]

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