A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Friends sent me two links today:
Feel better about your job!
Full post, including commentsVoting in Massachusetts is generally an uninteresting activity where the Democrat always wins and spending always ratchets upward. This year there is one interesting technical proposition on the ballot, a proposal to repeal an obscure “affordable housing” law that has yielded billions of dollars in subsidies and profits for developers. The folks behind this have a Web site at http://www.affordablehousingnow.org/. I surveyed the Millionaires for Obama in my neighborhood and they were generally in favor of repealing the law (“yes” on 2), which keeps towns perpetually in fear of falling below a state threshold for the percentage of units that are “affordable”. Once a town falls below this threshold, a developer can apparently buy a 5-acre lot and put up a 200-unit condo without regard to local zoning laws. The developer can apparently draw on taxpayer funds to finance his 200-unit condo as long as a small fraction of the units are sold relatively cheap (apparently a high percentage of the folks who get to buy the cheap units turn out to be friends and in-laws of the developer). If the project fails, the taxpayers are stuck with the loss. If the project succeeds, the developer collects the profit.
One bizarre aspect of the law as it has stood for some years is that the counting is done separately in each of the approximately 350 towns and cities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Massachusetts ) of the state. Instead of putting a pin in the map on top of an employer and asking “What’s the chance that a person could find an affordable place to live within a reasonable commuting distance of this employer?” the question is asked “What if someone really wants to live in Acushnet or Tyringham?” If a formerly compliant town were to split into two separate entities, it is quite likely that the law would kick into action because one of the two new towns would have a surplus and one would have a deficit of affordable housing. Despite the fact that nothing had changed from the perspective of an individual, millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies and lucrative zoning exemptions would begin to flow automatically.
Discussing the proposition made me reflect on whether affordable housing is an achievable goal independent of economic prosperity. Much of the cost of building a house is in materials whose prices are set on the world market by demand from successful growing economies, such as China and Brazil. If a country has a growing population and a shrinking or stagnant economy, inevitably housing is going to become less affordable for the average worker. A job that formerly was sufficient to afford a two-bedroom apartment will now be sufficient only to pay for a studio apartment or perhaps to share the two-bedroom apartment with another worker. What purpose is served by funneling hundreds of billions of dollars (nationwide) into subsidizing housing? Wouldn’t an American be better off in the long run with a smaller simpler house and a larger set of skills and better education? If so, why not put the money that we’re currently spending on affordable housing into free educational materials for the Web and into subsidized educational programs? (Assuming that returning the money to taxpayers is too radical an idea for any politician to propose.)
Full post, including commentsThis 2006 scientific biography of Andre Geim, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics this year, is interesting partly because of Geim’s refusal to stick to his Ph.D. topic in an attempt to get tenure. In the U.S. at least, universities generally restrict tenure to those who are “leaders in their field”, which is tough to achieve if you’ve only worked in a field for a few years. American universities thus tend to penalize the most creative professors since only the plodders are willing to stick with the same narrow topic for 6 years of Ph.D., 2 years of post-doc, and 6 years of assistance professorship.
[Geim’s success in Europe and England does not necessarily show that their systems are necessarily more congenial to the creative than ours, of course. More likely is that he was simply recognized as exceptional.]
Full post, including commentsI’m heading out to Las Vegas for a few days in the middle of this month, moving on to Seattle afterwards. It would seem that a certain Border Collie has not made enough friends in his 15 weeks on the planet to find a congenial berth in the Boston area, so the beast is going to get an introduction to desert life.
Some questions for readers…
Thanks in advance.
Full post, including commentsI just finished Freedom
The writing deftly captures the spirit of several different decades and when a scene is set in the 1970s or 1980s it seems realistic. Most novelists, e.g., Tolstoy, seem to love their characters. One of the reasons the typical novelist spends so much time writing a book is that he or she is enjoying spending time with the characters. With Franzen one gets the opposite impression. He seems to have contempt for his characters, despite any virtues they might have. If he spent time with them scribbling out 576 pages it is perhaps because he enjoyed feeling superior to all of them.
The novel has a couple of unconventional features. One is that two sections are supposedly diary excerpts by a female character. This is not convincing because the female character writes exactly like… Jonathan Franzen. The second unconventional feature is that Franzen introduces some characters within the last 1/6th of the book. They feel like afterthoughts and why do we want to invest time learning about them when the book is about to end?
One aspect of modern-day American life that Franzen captures is the pervasiveness of government regulation and war in our economy. None of the characters make money by working in a widget factory. One guy is involved in a very lucrative deal that hinges on obtaining government approval to do mountain-top removal mining. Another character is making obscene profits selling junk truck parts to the U.S. forces in Iraq; this would have seen implausible if I hadn’t read Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Others work directly for the government or for non-profit organizations.
According to Wikipedia, Franzen spent his childhood in the Midwest, his college years at an elite liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, and his adult years in New York City and Santa Cruz, California. For some reason, the novel calls for one character to be an in-your-face racist. He approaches a Caucasian guy having dinner with an Indian-American (South Asian) girl and walks right up to the guy saying “Like the dark meat, do you?” and “I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.” Is the scene set in any of the places that are familiar to Franzen and his friends? No. It happens in a restaurant in West Virginia. The scene doesn’t seem credible to me based on my many trips through West Virginia. Maybe in a fighting bar among drunk patrons at 1 am, but not at 7 pm in an Applebee’s. Perhaps a patron might think an unkind thought about a couple with different skin colors. Perhaps a couple with different skin colors might get some unwelcome stares, but a racist walking right up and saying “nigger” is simply not part of the Applebee’s experience, even in a small town that a fancy New York/California-based writer might regard as benighted.
The book seems well-crafted rather than clever or delightful. A lot of the main characters’ motivations do not seem credible. There is a saintly middle-aged guy whose wife has been depressed for years and sleeps in a separate bedroom. Yet he resists sleeping with his willing 27-year-old beautiful assistant who happens to live in the same townhouse. Franzen and his publicists have been hyping this as the Great 21st Century American Novel, but it falls well short of the standards set in the 20th Century by An American Tragedy
I’m testing out a Motorola DROID II
[An interesting peeve with this phone is that when you’re capturing a video and a new email arrives, the phone plays a loud “new email” alert over its speaker…. which is promptly picked up by the microphone and added to the video for all time. I would have expected that a low-priority alert such as this could be held by the phone for the typical minute or two that a customer might be spending making a video clip. Are the iPhone and Blackberry OSes smarter about this than Android?]
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