Month: October 2015

People with moderate incomes often express an idea of the form “nobody can spend more than $X per year.” So they’re surprised by the public company CEO who seeks to have her golfing buddies on the Board ladle out $20 million per year in shareholder cash. How can she actually spend the after-tax$10 million per year? Or consider Katie Holmes, whose net worth from acting is about $25 million and whose profit from her short-term marriage to Tom Cruise was supposedly about $15 million after taxes (this article provides some background on Holmes’s divorce litigation strategy). She is supposedly returning to the courthouse in an effort to increase the profitability of her child beyond the current $400,000-per-year (tax-free). A reader comment on the Redbook article on the subject is “She needs more than $400 THOUSAND PER YEAR to raise one child? Seriously?” And what about rich retired people? Some of them give half of their money to charity but how can they spend the remaining few $billion?

New Yorker magazine has the answer: “The Couture Club,” complete with photos:

The client on the neighboring yacht, a Russian woman who was relaxing with her family in the fading light, had sailed into Portofino to see the results of Alta Moda’s work.

The [$1700] sundress was a bargain compared to Alta Moda creations, which start at about forty thousand dollars and can cost much, much more.

Suites cost upward of three thousand dollars a night. Portofino, which covers less than a square mile, did not have enough hotel rooms to accommodate all four hundred of the Dolce & Gabbana guests, and some had booked hotels in the neighboring town of Santa Margherita Ligure, or in Rapallo*—a ten-minute boat ride away. A fleet of Mercedes minivans had been amassed from Milan and Genoa, and two dozen boats had been rented for the weekend.

Full post, including comments

My Facebook friends have been posting Columbus Day items that reference our theft of this great continent from the Native Americans, e.g., “A store had a sign outside that said ‘Columbus Day Sale.’ Does that mean that I can walk in there and take anything that I want without paying?”

Do we have the mental energy and space to reflect on what we might owe the 5 million current descendants of the American Indians? The favored/featured victims in the media lately seem to be (a) transgendered individuals, and (b) women. Those two categories together account for at least 160 million people. If we are going to fret about these 160 million disadvantaged souls can we truly reflect on the fact that the 5 million Native Americans would be crazy rich today if we gave them back their land and paid rent for it?

[Separately, “What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech” is the New York Times’s latest entry in the war-on-women theme. The author says that she “earned a bachelor of science degree in physics in the 1970s but left the field” (a curious statement by itself since, ordinarily, one would need a PhD in physics simply in order to enter the field of physics) and is now a teacher of creative writing. She describes research in which women were frightened off from computer nerdism by Star Wars posters, which could well be a reasonable reaction to the extent that the posters included any depiction of Jar Jar Binks. Neither the author nor any of those reader comments approved by the NYT asks the question “Why would a young American woman want to spend years training to be a computer programmer when she could have the same spending power (median pre-tax pay $74,280) simply by having sex with three computer programmers and collecting the resulting child support? (or by having sex with one dermatologist)” Nor does anyone ask “If, as the author suggests, women don’t major in CS because, though they yearn to sit at a desk for 50 years and code, they feel that they don’t belong with all of the guys already in the department, wouldn’t we expect to find a large enrollment in CS departments at colleges that are 100% female?” Nor, finally, does anyone ask why the author, who chose a career in creative writing/hanging out with humanities majors, and the quoted psychology professor, who chose a career in psychology, are so passionate about women other than themselves becoming programmers.]

Full post, including comments

Over the summer the Boston Museum of Fine Arts segregated pictures by the skin color of the subjects (previous posting). This fall they present an exhibit segregated by the inferred income class. “In Boston, a Class-Driven View of Dutch Art” (WSJ):

The exhibition, which opens [today] and closes Jan. 18, splits the classes into upper, middle and lower, with each occupying its own gallery space. They are broken down into further subdivisions in each room, with a fourth space devoted to “Where the Classes Meet,” which includes depictions of the dark interior of a blacksmith’s shop and a bustling town square in Amsterdam.

Full post, including comments

Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery (Marsh) is a great book in the English tradition of experts writing for laypeople (contrast to the standard American presumption that laypeople are too stupid to understand any technical subject). I’ll write more about this book later but one of the things that struck me was that England seems to have retained its system of private litigation for malpractice despite the fact that medicine is now socialized/government-run:

‘Mrs Seagrave’s daughter was threatening to sue us last night,’ he said. ‘She said we were all hopelessly disorganized.’ ‘I’m afraid she’s right but suing us isn’t going to help, is it?’ ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It just puts one’s back up. And it’s quite upsetting.’

The case was over an operation I had carried out three years earlier. The patient had developed a catastrophic streptococcal infection afterwards, called a subdural empyema, which I had initially missed. I had never encountered a post-operative infection like this before and did not know any other neurosurgeons who had either. The operation had gone so well that I had found it impossible to believe it might all go wrong and I dismissed the early signs of the infection, signs which in retrospect were so painfully obvious. The patient had survived but because of my delay in diagnosing the infection she had been left almost completely paralysed and will remain so for the rest of her life. The thought of the conference had been preying on my mind for many weeks.

I had not dared to ask for how many millions of pounds the case would probably be settled. The final bill, I learned two years later, was for six million [about $9 million].

I wonder if UK-based readers of this blog can shed some light on this arrangement. If the government runs most of the hospitals and also the court system, why would it send medical malpractice cases through the court system to be decided by lay judges and juries? Why not legislate an administrative process for compensating victims of medical mistakes? Why have a system where Person X gets paralyzed from a neurosurgeon’s mistake and gets $X million in compensation while Person Y, starting from roughly the same circumstances and suffering the same paralysis, gets $Y million, purely due to variations from jury to jury?

(And speaking of mistakes, you definitely don’t want to read this book before heading anywhere near a hospital:

I hope I am a good surgeon but I am certainly not a great surgeon. It’s not the successes I remember, or so I like to think, but the failures. But here in the nursing home were several patients I had already forgotten. Some of them were people I had simply been unable to help, but there was at least one man who, as my juniors put it in their naive and tactless way, I had wrecked. I had ill-advisedly operated on him many years earlier for a large tumour in a spirit of youthful enthusiasm. The operation had gone on for eighteen hours and I had inadvertently torn the basilar artery at two in the morning – this is the artery that supplies the brainstem, and he never woke up again. I saw his grey curled-up body in its bed. I would never have recognized him were it not for the enamelled plaque with his name by the door.

)

 

Full post, including comments

For years I have been wanting the bottom half of a drone. Why? We already have the top half at East Coast Aero Club, i.e., a standard helicopter or airplane. For capturing images out the side of a helicopter, why not use the bottom half of a drone (the gimbal and the camera) to take stabilized video and stills? It seems as though the clever engineers at DJI (now a $1 billion drone company!) had more or less the same idea: the DJI Osmo. I have ordered one to try out. I am a little concerned that a gimbal designed to cancel out the vibration of a smooth electric-powered quad-copter will not be up to the challenge presented by a piston-powered two-bladed 2400 lb.-gross-weight helicopter. As soon as the Osmo shows up I will provide a full report.

Meanwhile… what do readers have to say about DJI and its products? The Osmo can supposedly support their high-quality Zenmuse X5 camera/gimbal with a four-thirds system sensor. Has anyone tried out the high-end imaging devices from DJI?

Full post, including comments

Ad-blocking has been in the news lately. To me this is a sign of just how abusive web publishers have been. For the sites that I have run over the decades(!), whenever someone would propose a form of advertising I would preface my response with “Remember that everything on the page has to be something interesting to and useful for the readers.” If the proposed ad could not reasonably be expected to interest a reader then it couldn’t go on the site.

This is not a new idea. Look at New Yorker, for example. The ads are generally interesting and feature great photography. Maybe you don’t want to buy a $10,000 outfit but the ad is entertaining for a few moments.

At photo.net we didn’t have any ads at all until Google Ads became available because that was the first system that put reasonably relevant-to-the-content and relevant-to-the-readers ads on pages.

Perhaps the “ecosystem” (as the VCs like to say) has been permanently damaged by the glut of page views available from Facebook, et al. Nonetheless my first response to “consumers are taking the trouble to install ad blockers” is that publishers are violating what should be the first principle of publishing: include stuff that readers want/need.

 

Full post, including comments

Cato has updated its study on federal versus private sector pay. Total compensation for government workers was 1.78X what private sector counterparts earned. Adjusted for working hours, job security, and stress presumably the government option would be even better.

Young Americans should make sure to look at this before selecting a career.

[Separately, I’m wondering if the growing disparity makes government move more slowly and increases the burden of regulation. Nobody ever gets fired for saying “no” or “not yet” or “we need more time/paperwork/study.” Thus whenever there is a regulated industry and/or government approval is required, the easiest way for the government worker to preserve those 1.78X larger paychecks and pension checks is to say “no,” “we’ve never done that before,” or “please submit some more documents.” (And, actually, the pay cut from moving from public sector to private sector could be much steeper. The 55-year-old administrator getting $178,000 per year (salary, pension, etc.) who is fired after 25 years in government may not be worth anywhere near $100,000 per year in the private sector even if the skills, background, and experience are nominally comparable.)]

Full post, including comments

“The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is an Atlantic article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, recent winner of a MacArthur “genius” award.

There is a lot of interesting stuff in the article, but to me some of the most interesting is how the writer and editors think about ambiguous facts.

For her research, Pager pulled together four testers to pose as men looking for low-wage work. One white man and one black man would pose as job seekers without a criminal record, and another black man and white man would pose as job seekers with a criminal record. The negative credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of both the black man and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man more. Startlingly, the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal record. The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one. “High levels of incarceration cast a shadow of criminality over all black men, implicating even those (in the majority) who have remained crime free,” Pager writes. Effectively, the job market in America regards black men who have never been criminals as though they were.

It is uncertain as to why employers in this particular study were unenthusiastic about hiring black workers. It is possible that there was an association between “black” and “criminal” as the writer/editors suggest. But isn’t it also possible that employers avoid hiring people who could sue them for employment discrimination? Every black worker carries an additional expected litigation cost compared to a white worker. Alternatively, perhaps it it is the media itself, which loves to report on how black Americans do worse than white Americans in school (2009 posting on the subject). Perhaps it is the New York Times that has reduced the value of blacks in the marketplace by continuously reminding employers that race can be used as a rough guide to academic achievement. Yet the author and writer are confident that they can get inside the minds of the employers surveyed and know precisely why they preferred to hire non-black workers.

Much of the article concerns Detroit, whose decline is characterized as an unavoidable natural phenomenon, akin to an earthquake or hurricane: “Over the past half century, deindustrialization has ravaged much of Detroit. African Americans have had to deal not just with vanishing jobs but with persistent racism.” Are there no humans in Michigan who played any role in making Michigan an unattractive place to do business? (There are plenty of newly constructed car factories in South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, and Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana. (WSJ article from 2008)) The author and editors seem comfortable with that inference.

As the U.S. continues to slip downward in the world ranking of GDP per capita (CIA Factbook), I wonder if this will be Americans’ (both black and white) way of explaining the slippage: “we had nothing to do with it.”

[Separately, why would an employer want to deal with people like this, who blame their failures on external factors? Why not build a facility in a location where workers will take responsibility for the quality of their work? And if that is the goal, how to find such a place? If the goal is a factory within the U.S. (perhaps to capture government handouts/corporate welfare), is the answer to find a map of Atlantic subscribers and locate where the smallest percentage of residents subscribe?]

Full post, including comments

Ayn Rand wrote 1088 pages of Atlas Shrugged to disprove the theory that every Russian immigrant can be a Nabokov. What I remember from wading through this sea of prose (about 15 years ago, to see what the fuss was about) was (a) an astutely observed description of the bureaucratic mind, and (b) the idea that the most productive American individuals flee the bureaucratic/socialist constraints to form their own society in the mountains of Colorado. My thoughts about the book at the time were that, like Karl Marx, Ayn Rand succeeded pretty well as a historian (describing the American fondness for bureaucracy and top-down government planning of the economy) but failed as a prophet. The share of the U.S. economy consumed by government has grown since the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged (chart), but few individuals have fled (example exception).

I’m a little embarrassed by this idea but now I am wondering if Ayn Rand might not have been mostly right in her prophecy, just wrong about the structure of the fleeing. In Atlas Shrugged individuals fled physically. What if we looked at the extent to which corporations have fled virtually?

If I recall correctly, not everyone sought to flee in Atlas Shrugged. The less productive chose to stay around as cronies of the government or collectors of government hand-outs. The least productive American enterprises certainly seem to be sticking around: education, health care delivery, health insurance, etc. I haven’t heard about an American hospital system engaging in a corporate inversion with an Irish hospital or funneling all of the profits through an offshore trust in the Netherlands. What about our corporate heroes, though, such as Apple and the pharmas? There is still a lot of accumulated wealth in the U.S. so they operate here but, perhaps with an eye toward the Tax Foundation’s tax competitiveness index (U.S. rank: 32/34), are virtually fleeing to other jurisdictions as their tax and/or profit home.

• “Curbs Don’t Stop Tax-Driven Mergers” (WSJ on inversions)
• “U.S. Beer Maker Says Tax Code Encourages Foreign Takeovers”
• “The Hypocrisy of ‘Helping’ the Poor” (nytimes article by Paul Theroux suggesting that managers of U.S. companies act against shareholders’ economic interests by locating factories in the U.S. South)

Full post, including comments

As a society we have invested more than $1 billion in web sites, e.g., healthcare.gov, to allow Americans to search for health insurance. Is there an analogous site that lets Americans search for actual “health care”?

Newspaper articles complain that Americans go to the emergency room (“ED” as the docs call it) too much. To some extent this could be because the U.S. has so few doctors per capita and therefore regular doctors are typically too busy to see a walk-in. I’m wondering if there is also pressure on hospital emergency departments from the fact that it is hard to find a provider that (a) is open, (b) has available appointments, and (c) accepts one’s insurance. The market economy provides this for restaurants. For example, one can search with Yelp.com for restaurants that are nearby, open, and accept credit cards. What’s the analogous service for finding medical care? If there isn’t one, should we be surprised that people drive to the nearest hospital instead of spending a couple of hours making phone calls to various clinics and doctors’ offices?

[Fresh data: I have had a sore throat for a week, so today decided to look into the possibility of getting a “quick strep” test from a nurse. I called my regular primary care doctor’s office, meaning that I shortcut the process of figuring out where facilities were located and which accepted my insurance. I was on hold for 7 minutes and 45 seconds before the front desk staff could determine whether or not the office would be able to see me. As it happened, they were able to see me but not able to do a quick strep test. The doctor explained that for a small practice such as this one (she has about five partners in this office) the “federal CLIA” paperwork and regulation was too onerous to make it worth doing even the simplest lab tests on-site. How can CVS clinics do it then? “They’ve got a big company behind them so they can spread out the cost a lot better,” she responded.]

Full post, including comments