Month: November 2012

(Spoiler Alert!) Four of us went to see Flight, starring Denzel Washington, last night at the Boston Common theater. The aviation-related parts of the movie are moderately unrealistic. A plane suffers a pitch trim control failure similar to that which caused the crash of an Alaska Airlines MD-83 in 2000 (Wikipedia). One of the pilots figures out how to make a reasonably good off-airport landing nonetheless. After the crash, it is discovered that he is an alcoholic and cocaine user. (Some of the alcohol stuff seems to have been drawn from America West 556.)

Here are the parts that, based on my brief career as an airline pilot, struck me as unrealistic:

• the captain does the walk-around inspection, rather than the first officer, despite the fact that it is first flight of the day and annoying TSA security checks must be done and despite the fact that it is raining heavily; generally the first officer does the walk-around
• the captain engages in a lot of extra chat during the takeoff roll and initial climb
• despite heavy turbulence, the captain elects to speed up rather than slow down. In fact, the captain accelerates to the smooth air redline for no apparent reason. Nobody points out afterwards that this would have been likely to stress/bend the airframe.
• the captain tells the first officer to dump the fuel at one point, but smaller/newer airliners such as the one in the movie don’t offer this feature (Wikipedia); in any case, the engines continue to produce power after the fuel has supposedly been dumped
• no attempt is made to use any checklist during any phase of flight
• the captain consumes three bottles of alcohol apparently with the assumption that the airline’s accounting system won’t notice whereas in fact the alcohol stock on an airliner and the revenue from that alcohol are as carefully matched up as anything else in the American retail world
• the captain talks about a trip that he made in a Cessna 172 (slow four-seat airplane) from Georgia straight to Jamaica. This would involve a flight over Cuba, which requires a huge amount of paperwork in advance, or driving all the way around via Turks and Caicos and Haiti. The Bahamas would have been a much more likely destination for a carefree Cessna pilot.

The non-certificated member of our group asked us if we thought that the basic idea could have worked, i.e., rolling an airliner with a jammed nose-down pitch in order to produce level flight. The consensus among the pilots was that it could be possible.

We pilots were disappointed that the movie is not actually about aviation. It is yet another Hollywood celebration of addiction and recovery. If you’re not interested in alcoholism and AA you probably won’t love the movie, though it is well acted. It is unclear what one can learn from the movie other than “Being an alcoholic is a bad idea.”

[Separately, a friend in recurrent simulator training for the business jet that he owned was invited by the instructor to fly a few approaches, drink one glass of wine, and then fly an additional approach in the sim. It turned out that his performance was substantially impaired. So it is hard to understand how the main character of Flight could have done his job with so much alcohol in his system for so many years. The captain’s blood alcohol level was supposedly 0.24 percent. Compare to a Delta pilot arrested in Amsterdam for having a blood alcohol level of 0.023 percent (story). The FAA limit for private pilots is 0.04 percent, though with an additional limitation that there must have been 8 hours between the last drink and the flight. Most airline employees are subject to a 12-hour rule and a 0-percent limit.]

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A friend from Manhattan visited Cambridge last week. He was thrilled that President Obama won reelection, but told me that the main economic and social problem facing the U.S. currently is wealth disparity. It is not hard to see how rubbing elbows with the billionaires of Wall Street would make one envious (I remember walking down Madison Avenue a few years with with a millionaire friend; neither of us could afford anything that we saw in any of the shop windows (e.g., $20+ million apartments, $400,000+ Maybach automobiles, women’s shoes, etc.)). And indeed my visiting friend mentioned the absurd wealth accumulation on Wall Street as Prime Example #1 of our problem with wealth disparity.

On the other hand, from a functional on-the-ground point of view I can’t see how chipping away at wealth disparity would help grow the economy. Consider the most obvious way of reducing disparity: halting immigration. The U.S. has approximately 1 million legal immigrants each year. Many of these folks show up without any wealth and without the ability to speak English. Plainly they are not going to be wealthy any time soon. On the other hand, since many of these immigrants work hard, turning them away would shrink the overall GDP.

The second most obvious way of reducing disparity would be a tax on wealth. Indeed we have such a tax already: property tax. It does serve a wealth redistribution function as the owners of valuable property fund schools, police, fire departments, and government worker health care and pensions. However, the money from property taxes is kept within city or a state and not sent from a wealthy region of the U.S. to a poorer region. My friend was apparently against this idea, however, because he said that it was the federal government’s responsibility to shower New York City with tens of billions of dollars to help pay for cleaning up after Hurricane Sandy. Essentially after complaining that people in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (i.e., Wall Street) had misappropriated hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars in wealth from comparatively poor residents of Arkansas, my friend was advocating that folks in Arkansas pay additional federal taxes (or that their children and grandchildren be saddled with additional federal debt) to help out the owners of $100 million beach houses in the Hamptons and $2 billion office buildings in Manhattan. So the idea of transferring wealth from property tax revenues in a rich-to-poor direction is apparently politically unpalatable, even to a person for whom wealth disparity is America’s #1 problem. In any case, it is difficult to see how such a property tax transfer would help the overall economy. California has a system in place where local taxes are sent to Sacramento and then sent back down to local schools before being used to fund classroom instruction (i.e., it is illegal for a wealthy town to tax its residents and spend the money directly on schools). Despite this pioneering effort at wealth redistribution, the state has an unemployment rate that is substantially higher than the national average. An argument could be made that taxing away Wall Street wealth to fund schools in poorer states could improve educational quality nationwide and that would benefit the economy in the long run, but at least with public schools there is no known correlation between funding levels and educational outcomes.

On a “what happens when you wake up and make a decision about what to do today” level, it is difficult to see why the presence of absence of billionaires on Wall Street affects the willingness for those who aren’t currently working to start working. The easiest way to grow the economy is to give people who don’t currently work sufficient incentive that they start or resume working. I’m writing this post in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where roughly 8 percent of the housing is city-owned and much of the rest is dedicated for occupancy by low-income families. A friend pays $3000 per month for a two-bedroom apartment in a newly constructed luxury full-service building. This is her reward from studying assiduously during roughly 20 years of schooling, culminating at an Ivy League university, and working a demanding job. One of her neighbors is a family of five. The father is observed to spend his days drinking and chatting with friends in Central Square. The mother stays home to care for the three children. The family receives a $4000 per month three-bedroom apartment at no cost. The family receives free health care via Medicaid and a City of Cambridge program that supplements Medicaid. The family receives food stamps from the USDA. They get a free cell phone with 250 minutes per month of service paid for by the U.S. government (details). Each child will receive a free K-12 education from the City of Cambridge (funded with over $26,000 of taxpayer money per student (source; the true spending is probably well over $40,000 per year because the official budget does not include the capital expenses of the buildings, the value of the land, or the likely pension and retiree health care costs)). This family’s basic needs are met, but if they want luxury items, however, one of the adults will have to earn some cash. That would result in GDP growth and the government collecting some payroll tax (if done via a W2 job) or at least some sales tax. How would their decision to participate in the labor market be affected by whether or not someone in New York City is rich? How would that decision be influenced by the degree of richness enjoyed by the New York City fatcat?

Economists have published papers showing some correlation between wealth disparity and economic growth but I haven’t seen an explanation for causation. People have been observed to work more hours when tax rates are reduced. At least in the absence of the Welfare State, people have been observed to work harder when they need to support children. People have been observed to work fewer hours when their financial needs have been met, e.g., due to a trust fund, pension, welfare checks, child support payments that exceed the cost of rearing a child, or alimony. But is there any evidence that anyone looks at East Hampton beach house values on zillow.com in the morning before deciding whether or not go out and look for a job? If not, what is it about wealth disparity that causes an economy to shrink or stagnate?

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Mitt Romney was president-elect for a few hours, at least according to the FAA. With 1 hour and 15 minutes of notice, the FAA issued a temporary flight restriction (TFR) around a point in Waltham, Massachusetts where Romney and friends were presumably gathered. The TFR, which closed a portion of the Hanscom Field airspace, went into effect at 7 pm eastern time and was canceled a few hours later. Here’s the text that I received via email:

• All IFR arrivals or departures to/from airports within this TFR.
• Approved; law enforcement, fire fighting, military aircraft directly supporting the United States Secret Service (USSS), and MEDEVAC/air ambulance flights.
• Aircraft operations necessitated for safety or emergency reasons.
• Aircraft that receive ATC authorization in consultation with the air traffic security coordinator (ATSC) via the domestic events network(DEN).

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In December 2011 I posted a prediction that Barack Obama would win reelection by 51/49 percent of the popular vote. Today CNN says that it was 50/48 in favor of Obama. That leaves open the question of what happened to the missing 2 percent (if they went to third-party candidates, CNN apparently did not think anyone would be interested in learning to which ones)! Depending on how one looks at it, then, my prediction was off by 1 point for each candidate or it was correct in predicting a 2-percent spread in the popular vote.

[In my own state of Massachusetts, a 32-year-old Kennedy family member has been deemed by voters to be the most qualified person (out of 6.6 million) to represent us in Congress. We will now be smoking medical marijuana. We will be forcing automakers to scrutinize our laws to figure out under what circumstances to share repair data with consumers and third-party repair shops. We will not be having doctors inject us with drugs to put us to sleep like dogs (i.e., we will be kept alive indefinitely as monuments to a vibrant economy’s ability to pay for unlimited ICU procedures via Medicare). Tom Tierney, an actuary and potential source of unwelcome news (e.g., that promising to pay for something until a person dies might be expensive), was defeated 76/24 by career Democrat Ed Markey. My own suburban ballot, aside from the headline presidential and senate races, consisted primarily of Democrats unopposed by any Republican. Romney won 11 percent of the vote in Cambridge. Scott Brown, who had styled himself an independent, was replaced by Democrat Elizabeth Warren.]

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I visited a 55-year-old friend who is politically involved and considers himself extremely well informed. He spent today canvassing for Elizabeth Warren in Waltham, Massachusetts. Armed with a clipboard and data sheets on 50 solid Democrats and/or undecided voters, he was somewhat surprised by the shabbiness of the houses that he visited, all inhabited by people getting various amounts and kinds of government assistance. He said that the stories of how the native-born folks had ended up in poverty often started with a health problem. Thus he was hoping that one thing Warren will do is make health care available to poor Americans. “What about Medicaid?” I asked. He was not aware of the existence of this program. I said “I think it might be the fourth largest federal program, after Social Security, the military, and Medicare”. That did not help. He did not know about any government program to pay for routine medical care for any American under age 65.

[http://www.hhs.gov/budget/budget-brief-fy2013.pdf shows that Medicaid will consume about 30 percent of DHHS’s $941 billion budget or about $282 billion, but this does not count spending by the states. Page 66 of the document explains that this $282 billion is 58 percent of the total for the 57 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid. That means the total spending is about $486 billion.]

My friend could not understand how people in red states could be so stupid as to attempt to reduce the size of the federal government. “I think people in Texas get back 15 times the money that they spend in federal taxes. It is people in the blue states who pay to run the country.”

[http://taxfoundation.org/article/federal-spending-received-dollar-taxes-paid-state-2005 shows that Texas gets 94 cents of federal spending for every $1 that the state’s residents pay in taxes. Of course, this does not mean that the average Texan gets back 94 cents in value for every $1 spent. Most of the spending is presumably military and health care-related. So a hospital and doctor might get $50,000 for performing a procedure, but that doesn’t mean the patient experiences $50,000 in value (especially since the procedure might have been obtained for $8,000 in France or Israel). See this New Yorker article regarding Medicare spending in Texas.]

Separately, I had dinner with some foreigners on Friday evening. A couple from Canada who lives here in Massachusetts said “Is Scott Brown a Republican? I thought that he was an independent.” Conclusion: political advertising works remarkably well!

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Folks: Seven months ago I posted a question about Carbonite. It seems that the secret to their “unlimited” backup is that they throttle upload speed to about 1 GB per day so that it will take 5.5 years for a standard 2 TB hard drive to get backed up. A person who creates a modest amount of digital content every week, e.g., by photographing and videotaping a child, will find that his or her data are never backed up completely. In the comments to that posting, a lot of people recommended Backblaze. Is that still everyone’s favorite? They say that they offer “Unthrottled backups”, which means potentially as fast as 20-80 GB per day on a standard home Internet connection (cable modem or FiOS).

I can’t find any fine print on the Backblaze site that makes the service useless. In addition to their secret upload throttling, Carbonite has some fine print that excludes video files, such as MPEGs (e.g., the ones a parent might make of a child!), by default but Backblaze does not seem to.

[Separately, Carbonite never did manage to fix their software to stop growing 25+GB log files on my C: drive, a small SSD.]

[Update 11/15/2012: Based on the comments below, I installed CrashPlan. It is uploading 2.2 Mbps currently, maxing out the admittedly feeble Comcast cable modem upload capacity. So this makes it 22 times faster than Carbonite, throttled to 100 kbps.]

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