Month: October 2015

… you’ll like “Pond Scum,” a New Yorker piece that heaps abuse on Henry David Thoreau, our neighbor here at Hanscom Field.

(Personally I have always liked Thoreau’s travel writing the best, e.g., Cape Cod and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.)

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Readers who are cool enough to work in San Francisco or Silicon Valley: I’ll be in San Francisco, Napa, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz (Hackers Conference!) next week. Please email me (philg@mit.edu) if you’d like to meet for coffee in San Francisco (at the Galleria Park Hotel) on Tuesday morning, 11/3, at 8:00 am. Or, alternatively, in Berkeley (near Claremont/Ashby) the morning of 11/6.

Thanks!

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Friends have fraternal twins. Last year one of them shut down the school for a while (previous post). They’re in Fourth Grade this year and the teacher asked them to write down what they wished for. The boy wished for $100 billion for himself. His sister wanted (a) money to help the homeless, (b) world peace, (c) “a huge pool. It will be enormously long and will stretch around the world so children can have fun after school. I wished for a pool because I think people that live in Africa can take a dip in the pool after they have finished working in the hot climates.”

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Half of Syria and Afghanistan are moving to Europe. Is that a problem? Not if you own apartment buildings in Europe it isn’t! These new EU citizens will need a place to live. It seems safe to assume that they don’t have the capital necessary to buy a house. Thus this will put pressure on rents and enrich owners of residential multi-unit buildings. The pressure should continue for the next 20+ years as these immigrants have kids. The population of Syria, despite the challenges of living there, has risen from 12.5 million in 1990 to 22.85 million in 2013. The population of Afghanistan rose, over the same period, from 11 million to 30.55 million. Imagine the fertility when these folks can tap into European governments’ free housing, free health care, free food, and free education!

There are European REITs, of course, but a generic REIT or REIT index (example) doesn’t seem ideally positioned to respond to this new wave of migration. Will there be more office jobs? If not, owning an office building won’t be any more profitable than before. Will there be more cash in the retail economy? It seems unlikely, especially if taxes need to be raised in order to support the newcomers. So investors in shopping malls won’t get a boost. Thus it has to be a REIT specializing in housing and, ideally, huge charmless buildings (see this ft.com article for some ideas).

[Interestingly, when this is all over, and the owners of residential property are crazy rich due to government action (providing free housing to immigrants), guys like Thomas Piketty will be looking at the statistics and calling for additional government action to reduce wealth inequality.]

Related:

• “Small-Town Sweden Chafes at Migrant Influx” (Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2015) — the journalist notes that “the migration agency is desperate for rooms to lodge asylum seekers due to a housing shortage in Stockholm and other large cities.” Among the Swedes interviewed, the real estate developer who is going to profit by building “a shelter for asylum-seekers … from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan, and Somalia” was the most enthusiastic about the project and about immigrants: “This won’t increase social tensions unless those who already live there start them. I’m convinced these children and teenagers will behave. These aren’t people who’ve come here to start trouble, they’re fleeing wars.” (unclear from the article if the developer lives in the same town as the proposed shelter)

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What would it look like if a cosmologist tested theories about the universe instead of writing a bestselling non-fiction book of randomly assembled scientific-sounding sentence fragments? (Free title for the next tenured academic who wants to write one: The Elegantly Hidden Massively Parallel Enigmatic Universe, introduction and cautionary scolding about global warming by Neil deGrasse Tyson.)

Join me at MIT tomorrow to find out! Brian Keating (tagline: “that other UC astronomer who is not in the news”) is talking about experimental results. Coffee at 3:30 pm in 4-349 and the actual talk in 10-250 at 4 pm. Details on the Physics Colloquium page. After the talk we can get together and anyone who actually understood it can explain it to the rest of us.

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“Despite Vow, Mayor de Blasio Struggles to Curb Homelessness” is a New York Times story in which some of the nation’s leading experts on housing are interviewed. It seems that the great American minds featured can’t comprehend why it would be challenging to provide unlimited free housing in one of the world’s most expensive cities (and one that is expensive because it is a desirable and interesting place to live).

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I decided to try to entertain a child with an episode (12) of the new Cosmos TV show about the planet Venus, my personal favorite planet (other than Earth) due to the fact that my first job was writing software to manage data received from the Pioneer Venus orbiter.

The show tossed up some good history on scientific papers positing a link between the burning of fossil fuels and increasing global temperatures (we’ve know about this issue for more than 100 years). It also has some interesting stuff about early solar-thermal energy projects. What was most interesting to me, however, was how the show terrifies viewers by selectively presenting climate science. The positive feedback mechanism of polar ice melting and therefore the Earth reflecting less solar energy back into space (water is darker than ice) was presented, for example, but not the negative feedback mechanism of CO2 mixing with rain as the Earth gets warmer. It isn’t hard to present this succinctly yet completely. See these notes for Ohio State Astronomy students, for example.

Readers: is this typical of how the media presents Climate and CO2 cycle 101? Highlight the stuff that could take us straight into a Venusian situation but downplay or omit the negative feedback mechanisms?

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American media tends to have a persistently anti-Mexican bias. Life south of the border is plagued by corrupt government, drug gangs, poverty, etc. “Wal-Mart Bribery Probe Finds Few Signs of Major Misconduct in Mexico” (WSJ, October 19, 2015) calls into question the idea that Mexico is more corrupt than the U.S. (where getting a real estate project approved often requires political connections/financial contributions). Mexicans get a lot more for their health care dollar than do we (some data) and they’re happier than we are (chart). Mexicans offer a superior environment for building cars (it is not just about the wages: WSJ). Now Hurricane Patricia, one of the strongest storms ever, has come through and via a combination of preparedness, engineering, and organization to evacuate citizens and tourists, the damage to life and property was minimized (contrast to Katrina or Andrew).

Readers: What would it take for Americans to stop belittling the accomplishments of our neighbors to the south?

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I was interviewed by WCVB, Boston’s ABC station, about a commercial airline flight on which one of the pilots died en route. Here’s the clip from October 5, 11 o’clock news. (Of course they captured about 30 minutes of tape in which I coherently explained the roles of the captain and first officer in normal operations, the crew concept of flying, the practice of trading “pilot flying” and “pilot monitoring” roles after each leg. Nearly all of that was left on the cutting room floor in favor of a passenger reviewing the remaining pilot’s performance.)

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that, before benefits, the median wage for an American worker is $17/hour. The WSJ says that, before a recently negotiated pay raise, General Motors was paying $58/hour including benefits. As the benefits at GM are much better than typical benefits, perhaps the correct numbers for comparison are $20/hour ($17/hour plus the average benefits available to a median worker) and $58/hour (soon to rise to an as-yet-unknown number). The Journal article is interesting for a chart showing “profit/loss per vehicle built.” There was a quick change from loss in 2009 to profit in 2010, presumably due to the company being showered with tens of billions of tax dollars that didn’t have to appear in the accounting records in a standard fashion.

What’s interesting about this to me is that everyone seems comfortable with the idea of imposing taxes on median-wage Americans in order to support the continuing paychecks of Americans who earn about 200 percent more. If we model GM workers as government workers, perhaps this makes sense. Federal workers are paid about 78 percent more than the private sector workers whose taxes fund their paychecks (Cato). But on the other hand, it is theoretically possible that the federal workers are doing a better job than private sector workers and are therefore worth more. By contrast the job of a GM worker is easily compared to other manufacturing jobs in the U.S. BLS says that the median wage in “Production Operations” nationwide is only $15.25/hour.

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