Month: January 2015

Folks:

Since I failed to keep any of my previous New Year’s resolutions… It is time to set up a standing/treadmill desk in the home office.

The best idea that I’ve seen is the Steelcase Sit-to-Walkstation. Since I am a big Steelcase fan, why not just buy it?

• the treadmill has a maximum speed of 2 mph, making it unsuitable for getting a little more of a workout when desired
• the treadmill cannot be inclined like a regular treadmill, again making it tough to get a workout
• the treadmill is of unknown provenance
• the product gets a bad review (but from a site that is run by a competitor, without very clear disclosure of the fact)
• the desk has a plastic top (good for durability but maybe not the best aesthetic for home)
• the monitor arm costs extra and might not work that well for a serious monitor, such as a 30- or 32-inch 4K display

Some of the advantages of the Steelcase product include treadmill controls that can slide underneath the desk, a great width (78 inches), and presumed sturdiness.

An alternative is to get the treadmill from a company that specializes in treadmills and a separate desk and any monitor supports.

The Human Solution manufactures its own standing desk, the UPLIFT, and puts a LifeSpan treadmill underneath. This is a well-regarded treadmill company. The treadmill costs about $1000 and could be swapped out easily if an improved treadmill becomes available. This treadmill won’t incline but it will run up to 4 mph and the belt is bigger than on the Steelcase (20×56″ versus 18×53″). The desk can be ordered in 80×30″ solid maple or cherry. It doesn’t have the big cross-brace of the Steelcase so it is tough to see how it can be as rigid. I haven’t found any independent reviews of the UPLIFT.

Instead of a monitor that swings back and forth between the treadmill and standing/sitting side I was considering just getting two monitors, two keyboards, and two mice. Hook them all up to one computer and then program in a keystroke command to swap which is the primary monitor (I think Display Changer from 12noon.com will do this on Windows; is it easy to do the Mac as well?).

One idea might be to combine the presumably bomb-proof Steelcase desk with the LifeSpan treadmill. One has to dig a bit but it seems that Steelcase does sell the 78×29″ height-adjustable desk separately (dimensions). And it might even be possible to get the Steelcase base without the plastic laminate work surface (and then get a solid wood desktop of one’s choice?).

What do readers say? Has anyone used the Steelcase or the UPLIFT or some other packaged system that will do treadmill, standing, and sitting?

[Note: IKEA has been playing around with a height-adjustable desk, but it is not wide enough to compete with the Steelcase or UPLIFT products.]

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The latest New Yorker has some great writing. David Sedaris gives us “Leviathan,” an ode to hosting extended family at the beach. The topics covered are small but the writing is big. If you insist on something weightier, “A Century of Silence” has a good history of the Armenian experience in Turkey.

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In the round of Boston-area holiday parties that I attended, a couple had been paid for by divorce lawsuit defendants not in attendance.

The alimony-fueled party was particularly lavish and fully staffed with caterers (at parties hosted by rich people who got their money by working or from a property division lawsuit, the cooking and serving was done by the hosts with help from guests). Although adults in Massachusetts are more likely than average Americans to have advanced degrees and earning abilities sufficient for self-support, alimony cash flows in Boston are 330 percent higher than in an average U.S. city (New York Times Dec 12, 2014 analysis; I am pretty sure that this is adjusted for the difference in incomes from city to city). Thus it is common for someone to have a $200,000 per year income (3X the Massachusetts median household income) and yet be officially dependent on a former spouse, from whom an additional $200,000 per year is collected and spent annually. Here’s an excerpt from our book that explains why the money has to be spent shortly after being received:

Attorneys report that both winners and losers tend to become profligate with money. “The defendant might have been a saver before the lawsuit,” said one attorney, “but then he’ll see how the courts penalize parents for being prudent with money. His plaintiff’s lavish spending on herself will become a ‘need’ used by the judge to justify higher child support and alimony awards. After mom wins she spends like a drug dealer because she’s spending someone else’s money and also because she doesn’t want to lose a modification motion on the grounds that her banking money every year demonstrates that her ‘need’ was overestimated. The father spends whatever he can too because he realizes that his plaintiff and the court will take away whatever he tries to save. Children who would have been very comfortably established in life end up with nothing from their parents.”

I already thanked the hostess of the catered party but does etiquette require me to track down and thank the guy who paid for the house, the caterers, and the $2 million in legal fees (in 2014 dollars; the divorce started decades ago) that opened the alimony taps?

Separately, one of the parties I attended was both to celebrate the New Year and also a housewarming. The approach was up a driveway that was the same length, width, and quality as a secondary highway in England or Wales. This terminated in a 50-car parking lot at the top of the hill. Given that the parking lot looked like the result of successfully robbing a BMW/Audi dealership I was confident that I had not arrived too early. Once inside I learned that part of the renovation of this house had involved the installation of a three-ton circular marble bathtub. We were all awed by the resulting Homeric scale of the master bathroom. The host intruded on our reverie, however, by pointing out that three tons of marble has a lot of thermal mass. “After you fill it with hot water, the water immediately becomes too cold. So you have to drain it and fill it up again.” He has been taking showers.

Related:

• “If I borrow your car and donate it to charity, does that make me a charitable person?”
• from a reader, “Make divorce tougher on women, says leading lawyer” (Independent (UK), December 31, 2014) where “the outgoing chair of the Bar Standards Board” notes that young women in England would likely realize their maximum spending power by remembering “Never mind about A-Levels, or a degree or taking the Bar course – come out and find a footballer.” (From our book: A professor of economics in Massachusetts, a typical “winner take all” state, said “The best career advice that I could give to a female freshman would be to drop out and stop paying tuition. Get pregnant with a medical doctor this year. Get pregnant with a business executive two years from now. Get pregnant with a law firm partner two years after that. She’ll have three healthy kids and a much higher after-tax income than nearly all of our graduates in economics.”)

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Paul Graham has written a pro-immigration essay titled “Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In”.

The anti-immigration people have to invent some explanation to account for all the effort technology companies have expended trying to make immigration easier. So they claim it’s because they want to drive down salaries. But if you talk to startups, you find practically every one over a certain size has gone through legal contortions to get programmers into the US, where they then paid them the same as they’d have paid an American. Why would they go to extra trouble to get programmers for the same price? The only explanation is that they’re telling the truth: there are just not enough great programmers to go around.

I asked the CEO of a startup with about 70 programmers how many more he’d hire if he could get all the great programmers he wanted. He said “We’d hire 30 tomorrow morning.”

I’m pretty sure that this is an illustration of my hedge fund manager friend’s mantra: “When the market gives you an answer you don’t like, declare market failure.” Presumably Graham’s pal could hire 30 great programmers tomorrow if he offered compensation significantly in excess of what Google, Apple, and Microsoft are paying and/or simply called up great programmers to ask “How much would I have to pay you to quit your job?” and then agreed to whatever price was quoted.

This is also an example of our philosophy around imprisoning drug dealers to end drug dealing. People are born with an innate calling to drug dealing, rather than having chosen the field due to the economic incentives presented by the market. Thus if we put all current drug dealers in prison there will be no more drug dealers. The analysis of the situation that Graham describes is similar. Just as there is no way to turn a retail clerk into a drug dealer (since he or she lacks the genetic disposition toward drug dealing) there is no way that if companies nationwide paid programmers more than the BLS’s median pay of $74,280 per year (source), additional Americans would be attracted to this field.

[Note that in my home state of Massachusetts, $74,280 pre-tax is $52,192 per year after tax (ADP Paycheck Calculator), i.e., comparable to what a person could get in annual tax-free child support following a one-night encounter with a $300,000/year earner. A person who wanted to have two children could collect more than $52,192 per year by having sex with two different Massachusetts residents, each earning $135,200 per year or more (see worksheet).]

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