Month: March 2015

I read The Unsubstantial Air: American Fliers in the First World War and learned that World War I military pilots would climb to as high as 20,000′ without oxygen (and 22,500′ for some German photo reconnaissance equipped with oxygen). The Wright Brothers flew to an altitude of 10′ during their famous 1903 flight. So that’s 10 feet to 20,000 feet in 15 years. Not a bad rate of progress!

Full post, including comments

The New York Times carried an article today wondering how it was possible for wages to stagnate while the unemployment rate fell. This Bureau of Labor Statistics chart shows that the percentage of American adults who work has fallen from roughly 66 percent of the population (2005-2008) to just 63 percent today. Wouldn’t the BLS chart alone be able to explain a falling unemployment rate while wages remain about the same? With fewer people in the workforce, if there are the same number of jobs at the same pay rate, the unemployment rate falls and generates excited newspaper headlines and dramatic claims by politicians despite the fact that the same number of people go to work every day and get paid roughly the same.

What do readers think? Do all of these American adults on the sidelines have an effect on wage growth? Or are they not significant compared to the available workers worldwide?

Full post, including comments

Friends have been asking me about Harrison Ford’s crash landing in Santa Monica. It isn’t too surprising that a vintage World War II airplane with a radial engine suffered an engine failure. Generally it is impossible to get a new or factory-rebuilt radial engine, so you’re relying on at least some parts that are more than 50 years old, albeit regularly inspected.

The Facebook buzz seems to be at least partly along the lines of “Why do they let rich idiots fly their own airplanes?” I.e., pretty much the opposite of the reaction that people had to the engine-out landing of Captain Sully and Jeff Skiles in their Airbus, despite the similar nature of the problem and the similar solution (“choose a reasonable place to land”). Ford’s engine failed at a much lower altitude so he had less time to think and plan.

Perhaps this will be a good marketing opportunity for the Chinese owners of Cirrus Aircraft!

[You might well ask why did the engine choose to quit immediately after takeoff? There are a disproportionate number of power failures in the few minutes before landing and in the 30 seconds or so after takeoff. The pre-landing failures are easy to explain: fuel planning was close but not quite right, thus leading to running out of gas with just a few minutes to go (of course, a conservative pilot would elect to make an unplanned fuel stop rather than push his or her luck). The post-takeoff failures have to do with the fact that airplane engines are run at 100 percent power while rolling down the runway and climbing up to 1000′ or so. This is when piston engines tend to come apart, rather than in cruise flight when 65-75 percent power is standard. Robinson figured this out and designed its helicopters so that the piston engines never run at more than 80 percent power at any time. This reduced the failure rate so much that a piston engine that is typically overhauled after 2000 airplane hours is recommended for overhaul at 2200 hours in a Robinson.]

Full post, including comments

When I read about President Obama’s veto of Congress’s approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline (proposed in 2008), I was reminded of the fact that the U.S. announced the construction of the Alaska Highway, most of which is within Canada, prior to obtaining approval from the Canadian government. No wonder they hate their arrogant neighbors to the south!

[Separately, it is worth comparing the productivity of North Americans then and now. The 1700-mile Alaska Highway was conceived in earnest late in 1941. It opened less than one year later. We’re seven years into the Keystone XL project without a single mile of pipeline having been constructed. If it ever is finished it will be less than 1200 miles long.]

Full post, including comments

A friend attended Heli-Expo 2015. It seems that this is the year of the all-plastic helicopter.

• brand new: Airbus H160
• potentially consumer-priced: New Zealand’s Composite Helicopters
• back again from last year: Marenco Swiss Helicopter (first flight was October 2, 2014)

Related:

• my first-day Heli-Expo report from 2014
• my second-day report

 

Full post, including comments

Some friends and I were touring the Chelsea galleries last weekend. This happens to be one of the corners of Manhattan with a Tesla showroom (service is out on Long Island). The 11-year-old asked “What’s special about this car?” I responded with “You know how 4-year-olds have rechargeable cars that they plug in and then can cruise around suburban driveways?” (example at $118) This is the same thing but it holds five people instead of just one or two and it costs almost 1000 times as much.

Absent spectacular incompetence by the legacy car makers, it is hard to understand how Tesla can dominate the market in the long term. When battery technology advances to the point that an all-electric Honda Civic costs the same as a gas-powered Civic, why aren’t Honda and Toyota the natural market leaders? What will Tesla know that they won’t?

What do readers think? Any Tesla owners who want to comment on what they like about the car?

Here’s what a friend of mine said in 2013 about his Tesla:

It is absolutely fantastic. It drives like a dream, is incredibly powerful, and has plenty of room and creature comforts. My only complaints are that it’s big, which is taking some getting used to since I was driving a BMW 325i for seventeen years, and that the rear visibility isn’t good, although it has an HD camera that mitigates that. But I’m loving it, and regularly feel this strange urge to get up from my desk in the middle of the day and go on a drive.

[in response to “Is it just unbelievably quiet inside?”] Yes, it’s super quiet. The road noise is supposedly not as quiet as some other cars, and the insulation isn’t supposed to be as effective as some other cars, but the complete absence of engine noise makes for a surprisingly quiet experience. … The world will be so much less noisy once electrics take over, if it happens.

Full post, including comments

I asked an 8-year-old friend what she likes about her (public) school. It is in a prosperous Manhattan neighborhood.

“We have really good security,” she responded. “They don’t let anybody in.”

Are there really that many criminals who want to knock over an elementary school?

“We have a lot of lock-down drills,” she said enthusiastically.

Full post, including comments

A friend has a Steelcase Walkstation that was delivered in September 2013. This is the narrow version that is just barely wider than the treadmill underneath. I tried it out for 30 minutes.

The integration of the controls is nice, especially how they can slide out from underneath the desk surface. However, the controls always protrude to at least some extent.

The treadmill is manufactured by True, a leading brand, and it seems to work reasonably well. The belt was slipping a bit, which my friend attributed to his have over-lubricated the belt recently. The 2 mph maximum speed is a serious limitation for the home user who wants the option to go faster while watching a movie, for example. (The competitive LifeSpan under-desk treadmill goes up to 4 mph; I haven’t found one that goes up to 11.) The treadmill is quiet but not any quieter than any other treadmill that I have used at a low speed. The treadmill is 18″ wide, which turns out to be slightly too narrow for my size-13 feet. A standard treadmill belt width seems to be 20″ and that is what the LifeSpan (above) and NordicTrack (below) products have.

If you’ve been spoiled by the bomb-proof Steelcase desks of the 1960s and 70s, the Walkstation will seem rickety despite the cross-member. There is a long lever arm between the floor and the surface. The work surface is supported with only two legs rather than the conventional four. Those two factors combined make it easy to set the work surface in motion. A $200 table from IKEA is more stable. As this is not the “Sit-to-Walkstation” and there is just one user, my friend basically never adjusts the height. When we tried to adjust it, one of the lifting columns was jammed and thus we succeeded only in tilting the work surface. (i.e., it may not be any more durable than lower-priced competition)

Conclusion: If you want something like this and you’re 5’9″ tall or shorter (see the reviews), the NordicTrack Desk Treadmill is probably a better device. It costs one third as much. The treadmill can be cranked up to 10 mph. Unlike the under-desk treadmills, the treadmill can be inclined as well. Too bad the NordicTrack folks did not include sufficient height for taller consumers.

My research into home office ergonomics continues in the following areas:

• Swopper chair (recommended by a physician)
• height-adjustable desk that is wide enough to be used either sitting or standing (Uplift perhaps? Or Evodesk? Or NextDesk Terra Pro which can also hold an aquarium!) so as to create the equivalent of the Steelcase Sit-to-Walkstation but with (a) faster treadmill option, (b) natural wood finish, (c) sturdier.

If readers have experience with any of the above I would be grateful to hear about it.

Related:

• Tom O’Donnell in New Yorker on his standing desk: “sitting has been called the new smoking. The only difference is that smoking looks cool and is a great way to meet people and isn’t actually that bad for you. (I smoke.) Sitting, on the other hand, looks ridiculous and shameful—like you’re afraid to admit exactly how tall you are—and is terrible for you. … Won’t I look strange if I’m the only one in my office standing up to work? Not as strange as you’ll look when you keel over dead at your computer from a lethal combination of sciatica and weak calves. “

Full post, including comments

Today’s New York Times has some interesting stories on the subject of “Will Americans who are called to the field of education also respond to the call of economic incentives?”:

• “Some Owners of Private Colleges Turn a Tidy Profit by Going Nonprofit” (where “tidy” = a few hundred $million)
• “Central Figure in the Atlanta Schools Cheating Scandal Dies” about a school superintendent who “received more than $500,000 in performance bonuses.”

Spoiler alert: The answer seems to be “yes”.

Don’t miss the link from the first article to a story about a school with a $2.1 billion market cap working the same angle (also note the inability of the journalist to distinguish between investment in a company and its market cap). Speaking of market cap, it turns out that the “fair market price” in this insider’s deal will be higher than what investors are currently willing to pay on the NASDAQ.

[Note that these dovetail nicely with yesterday’s article by a philosopher demanding that America’s educators teach morality to students. And also with “Lawyer at Top of Huge Fraud Pleads Guilty”, an article about how “more than 131 police officers, firefighters and other city workers” who obtained disability benefits through fraud. (Note that working the disability system was a rational decision: “More than 100 of the applicants have pleaded guilty. A majority received no jail time but returned the money they stole.”)]

Full post, including comments

“State to offer early retirement deals; layoffs may follow” is a Boston Globe story about the state government here in Massachusetts facing a $1.5 billion budget gap. With a total population of 6.745 million and a working population of about 3.5 million, that means the average worker in Massachusetts needs to pay $429 more each year in taxes.

Let’s assume that government spending cannot actually be cut. My favorite pet idea for increasing government revenue is congestion pricing for the highways. If the average worker paid $2 per working day in congestion fees, the budget gap would be closed. Traffic jams would be eliminated and people could be more productive, thus generating more income, and paying more income taxes as well.

Another area worth examining might be the Massachusetts alimony system. This New York Times graphic (based on a study by Economics professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett) shows that people in Boston spend 3.3X as much on alimony payments, relative to their income, compared to citizens of the average American city. When an adult is a dependent on another adult and receives cash payments via a formula based on the difference between their incomes, both have a reduced incentive to work (see this academic paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, for example). The alimony payor may be in the 80 or 90 percent tax bracket for a marginal dollar of income (i.e., he or she will keep only 10 or 20 cents of an extra dollar earned), thus reducing the incentive to strive for higher pay and therefore higher tax payments to the state government. The alimony recipient will suffer a loss of alimony cash if he or she earns an extra dollar, thus also falling into an exceptionally high tax bracket and resulting in what the Fed economists call a reduction in labor supply (“given the high responsiveness of labor supply to marginal labor tax rates”).

For those who were never married, Massachusetts operates a similar adult-to-adult dependency system through its offer of unlimited child support profits. As in Wisconsin, the Massachusetts citizen who wants to have the spending power of someone in occupation X can either train to become qualified for that occupation and then work full-time or simply have sex with three people in occupation X. Economists would predict that if a person can get tax-free payments for having sex and spending 15 hours per week with children, something that he or she may already have wished to do, that person is less likely to pursue traditional W-2 employment with associated taxes.

As part of our research into family law nationwide we found a fairly typical upper income Massachusetts child support and alimony case where a University of Pennsylvania graduate out-earned her classmates by a factor of roughly 3.2X. After a four-year marriage with a two-year-old child, she sued her husband and obtained a mostly tax-free annual income of $143,808, plus defendant-paid housing and child-rearing expenses. Judge Maureen Monks of Middlesex County wrote, after the trial “[the plaintiff] now has a responsibility to contribute to her child’s financial needs commensurate with her training and skills. There are no health issues that would prevent her from seeking or maintaining some employment at this time. She is capable of earning at least part-time employment, especially given the employment of the full-time nanny and [the child’s] attendance at pre-school and camps.” The successful plaintiff declined our request for an interview but we tracked down the defendant and learned that, despite the judge’s admonitions, the plaintiff has not chosen to return to work. That’s a lost taxpayer from the Commonwealth’s point of view. (See “Women in Science” for more detail on this case.)

[You might ask how common it is for a Massachusetts resident to be affected by the effective higher tax rates that result from being a child support lawsuit plaintiff or defendant. The U.S. Census March 2014 Current Population Survey shows that 9 percent of women in Massachusetts, age 30-40, said that they were receiving child support. If we correct for the known degree by which Americans under-report alimony revenue, that means roughly 18 percent of Massachusetts women in this prime working-age group receive child support. If we assume that the typical child support plaintiff is collecting from slightly more than one defendant, roughly 15 percent of men in the same age group are paying child support. That’s roughly 16.5 percent of prime working-age people in the state who are discouraged from working. (Slightly higher if you want to include the men receiving child support and the women paying, but Census data show that 97 percent of people collecting child support in Massachusetts are women.)]

Massachusetts is #4 among U.S. states in the percentage of residents on Welfare (article: “Only Tennessee, Maine, and California ranked higher”). If you add in child support and alimony we are probably #1 in officially established adult dependency. (Children are only half as profitable in California and Maine, compared to Massachusetts, and the profitability of children in Tennessee is limited by a $25,200/year cap on child support for a single child.) We could presumably get a lot more people to work and pay taxes if they faced the same economic incentives as people in other states.

Massachusetts could consider trying to boost its competitiveness as a corporate headquarters by eliminating tax on corporations. The tax rate is currently 8 percent of profits, but it can also be 0 percent if a company has the connections and accounting/legal sophistication to qualify for various exemptions. The result is that about 5 percent of state revenue comes from corporate taxes (Tax Foundation). This analysis from Suffolk University characterizes our business tax laws as “a hodgepodge of poorly-conceived measures that violate the most fundamental principles of tax equity. They discourages business from locating in the Commonwealth and serve alternately as a target for revenue-hungry state government and a mechanism for dispensing largess to special pleaders.” Why not just tear it all down and be satisfied with collecting income tax, sales tax, property tax, etc. from the employees of and investors in companies that choose to locate here? Massachusetts could then eliminate all of the special programs (and the bureaucrats to administer them; partial list) that provide tax breaks to companies that are politically connected.

What about an equivalent to taxing natural resource extraction, something that works great for other states because it is tough to move an oil well from Alaska to New Hampshire, for example. Does Massachusetts have anything that is valuable and almost impossible to move? Yes! Universities, elaborate hospitals that are technically non-profits, and private boarding schools such as Phillips Academy in Andover (where King Bush II attended high school). Perhaps there are better ways to tax the profit-making parts of these institutions while leaving them as non-profits (albeit non-profits that have somehow managed to accumulate billions of dollars of what a corporation would call “retained earnings”!). For example, if a student comes to Boston and rents an apartment, he or she pays property taxes indirectly (through the landlord). If the same student comes to Boston and rents an almost identical dormitory room, no property tax is paid. Depending on the state, living in a fraternity or sorority may be be tax-exempt (see this article on a controversy in Vermont). From what I can gather, Massachusetts already collects real estate taxes from college fraternities and sororities. As each college student here requires some expenditures on a variety of public services (police, fire, public transport, etc.), the state could consider a “capitation tax” for everyone above the age of 18 who lives for at least 6 months in Massachusetts. There may be as many as 400,000 students here. An annual tax of $3,750 on each student would close the budget gap (coincidentally this is almost exactly 6.25 percent of the cost of attending Harvard for one year and 6.25 percent is the Massachusetts sales tax rate for general goods).

What do readers think? How does Massachusetts get out of this fiscal hole?

Full post, including comments