Month: January 2016

“Some Migrants in Germany Want to Go Home” is a Wall Street Journal article that includes some information on the practical economics of being a migrant in Germany.

It seems that asylum seekers get free housing, but it is not very high quality:

In October, Amer sold all his belongings in Syria and took his family to a safer life in Germany. Four months later, he wants to return to a country still at war.

Once in Germany, Amer discovered an unexpected reality: Instead of the small house he was hoping for and money to help him open a business, he was given a bare room in an old administrative building turned into an emergency shelter.

They also get a cash stipend:

Before leaving Syria, Amer said he had heard refugees in Germany got around €500 ($546) a month in benefits—a relatively accurate estimate. But he hadn’t realized everything in Germany costs far more than in Syria, he said, dressed in a black hoodie and sweatpants.

“I would probably need 10 years to reach the minimum standard of living of any normal German and the language seems impossible for me to learn,” said Amer, who worked in a snack shop in Syria and never attended university.

Having spent €15,000—everything he owned—to bring his wife, son and brother-in-law to Germany, Amer said he doesn’t yet know how he will pay for their return.

They can presumably get free health care in Germany’s health care system (not a simple single-payer one like in the UK or France).

Overall the package seems less generous than what U.S. welfare recipients collect. The total stipend is only about as much as a U.S. welfare family of three would receive in SNAP (food stamps). (Note that, perhaps coincidentally, the stipend is about the same as the maximum child support revenue obtainable in Germany, e.g., for someone who had sex with the richest person in Germany.) The housing sounds crummier than government-provided housing here.

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“Recognition” is a January 18, 2016 New Yorker story about a man convicted of rape in 1986 based on eyewitness testimony. Worth reading if you’re interested in how our criminal justice system operates.

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Down here in Orlando the art museum is running a “Women of Vision” show of works by photographers that the curators identify as “women.” How do single-gender museum shows, typically planned a year or more in advance, work in a transgender age? What if one of photographers identified as a “woman” during the planning stage comes out as a “man” just prior to the public opening? Does the show get retitled? Some works get removed? A note added that the photographer is believed to have identified as a woman at the time of the exposure?

[Museums also like to run single-race shows (except that explicitly featuring artists for being “white” or “white male” is uncommon). Does that still make sense in the Rachel Dolezal age?]

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In November 2013 I asked “Should we short Twitter?” The company was then valued at $18 billion.

Today the market cap is $12 billion (chart) and the Wall Street Journal is writing about desperate management changes (article).

At first glance it would seem that questioning Twitter’s value was a good investment idea. However, the price roughly doubled after I asked the question so a short investor would have needed capital, patience, and nerves to hang for more than two years.

Readers: What could Twitter do to earn more revenue and profit?

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Are you disappointed that the government hasn’t made it tougher to buy guns? Perhaps you’ll be pleased to know that a new layer of bureaucracy and waiting periods have been imposed on those who want to buzz around in a little trainer aircraft. “FAA finalizes rule on student certificates” explains that what used to take an hour will now take weeks.

What if you’re a terrorist? If you want to make sure that you’re legal during the flight to your terrorism destination, you’ll have to wait “up to three weeks” until your new plastic certificate comes in the mail. If you’re not too picky about the legalities of that final flight, you can, of course just open the door to an airplane and press the start button. (Heavier aircraft don’t have ignition keys.)

This will kill off a lot of business for flight schools, in the meantime. Europeans often come over here to get a pilot certificate. They get TSA clearance using a web site over in Europe. They do all of their ground school reading in the evenings. Then they show up during a three-week break from their job and hammer out all of the flying required for a license. Now they won’t be able to do this because they won’t be able to solo until they’ve been here for about three weeks.

#howtoshrinktheeconomy

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The Wall Street Journal has an article on Apple reaching a revenue plateau. It isn’t surprising that revenue is heading down, but the quote from management is disturbing:

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said he remains optimistic, noting that he sees future gains for iPad and continued growth from services such as Apple Music and other projects.

“We don’t live in 90-day quarters, and we don’t invest in 90-day quarters,” said Mr. Cook. “I’m so convinced that the things we are doing are right and the assets we have are enormous.”

Apple Music? Even if the company got a 100-percent market share in recorded music how could that move the needle for a company with roughly $233 billion in annual sales? If this is what the company’s management is relying on, investors should be terrified. (And Apple music is a crummy me-too product.)

What are Apple’s competitive edges going forward that could lead to substantial revenue and/or profit growth? The iPhone per se doesn’t seem like one of them. My iPhone 6 Plus became unstable in its 6th month of life, with hangs and crashes roughly comparable to what one might experience with Samsung’s version of Android on an older Note device. The Apple Health app is comically sloppily programmed and its user interface is inferior to what Samsung was offering with the Note 3 two years ago. People whom I know in professional video say that Adobe Premiere is at least as good as Final Cut Pro and that Apple lost a lot of loyalty with a major user interface change to Final Cut.

What about Apple’s supposed leadership in user experience? Plainly the Apple Health programmers didn’t get the memo, but surely the core iOS has a better/cleaner user interface than any Android or (gasp!) Windows phone? I might have thought so until I visited a neighbor. She is intelligent and well-educated, but not passionate about technology. She said that she had hardly gotten any phone calls for weeks. I discovered that her phone was in “Do Not Disturb” mode. She had entered this inadvertently by mistakenly swiping up from the bottom of the screen then touching the moon symbol (a nice icon but there is no explanation of what it means). No programmer at Apple had thought to have the phone display a confirmation dialog box after a few days in DnD mode. I decided to be a hero and reconfigure her phone so that this mode couldn’t be entered inadvertently. I would remove the moon icon from the quick swipe-up menu. Then I discovered that Apple was so confident in its broken user interface that, unlike with Android devices, there was no way to customize the choices.

Readers: What does Apple have that is way better than the competition? What should they be working on going forward? (they’ve got plenty of cash to do all of the R&D that they want, at least as long as they hire all of the programmers offshore so that they don’t have to bring the money into the U.S. and pay corporate taxes on it)

(My personal vote: Camera software. Sony and Samsung have slightly higher scoring cameras on DxOMark, but my experience with a Samsung Note 3 was that its practical capabilities were far behind the test scores. Maybe Sony is better. DxOMark says “Impressive autofocus in all conditions, the best tested to date” and “Very good white balance and color rendering in most situations” regarding the Sony Xperia Z5. Perhaps the Sony is actually the photographer’s best phone choice? (And the device is actually waterproof; rated IP68!))

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Henry Worsley, a descendant of one of Shackleton’s crew members, died after very nearly walking across Antarctica (nytimes). He was 55 years old and walked 900 miles pulling a 300 lb. sled. I’m assuming that he had at least some kind of solar power array to keep his satphone going. I’m wondering if more efficient photovoltaics could have saved his life. Given sufficient quantities of solar power, for example, could Worsley have enjoyed hot coffee every few hours and thus had more energy for the walk? Perhaps an electric motor on the sled would have been considered cheating, but surely not heat for the sleeping bag and/or tent?

I’m inspired that he got as far as he did, but sad that he didn’t make it safely all the way.

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“’90s Scandals Threaten to Erode Hillary Clinton’s Strength With Women” is a nytimes article about how Hillary Clinton participated in attacking and discrediting the women with whom her husband was having sex (or trying to have sex with), rather than supporting her sisters, which presumably would have eventually required divorcing the unfaithful husband.

The litigators we interviewed for Real World Divorce wouldn’t be surprised by Hillary’s decision. Had she sued Bill Clinton under D.C. family law, she would have been entitled to child support and alimony of perhaps $200,000 per year based on his salary as President. Bill Clinton’s historical earnings hadn’t been that large due to his holding down government jobs. She might have been able to share in Bill Clinton’s spectacular post-Presidential payday via an alimony and child support modification lawsuit, but a new award based on the discarded spouse’s post-divorce higher income is subject to judicial discretion (see “Peter Orszag beats the child support rap” for how a similar case played out in the D.C. courts; also see “the lottery winner in Massachusetts alimony court”).

It was economically rational for Hillary to stay married to Bill and therefore she did. If this required denouncing other women, that wouldn’t surprise anyone in the world of divorce litigation.

Readers: Where would Hillary be today if she had sued Bill Clinton in, say, 1998?

Related:

• “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” (2012 Atlantic magazine article) from one of Hillary Clinton’s subordinates at the State Department: “My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours…”

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“Marvin,” as Professor Minsky was known to nearly everyone at MIT, died yesterday. I’m sad that he is gone, but happy to have spent time with him on and off since 1979.

Marvin questioned many of the assumptions around Academia. He would show up to deliver a formal talk with a stack of notes and pick from them more or less at random. I wish that I could say that the results were amazing due to his dazzling intellect, but unfortunately the lack of an organized outline made these talks less than satisfying. Marvin was at his best in small groups or working one-on-one with others at MIT. What I remember most about him was his genial skepticism. If two people were arguing, rather than take one side, Marvin could show that both were operating from an assumption about the world that perhaps wasn’t necessary or true. He was a bit of a modern-day Socrates.

Marvin co-created one of the most successful university laboratories ever, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab (history). Though managed by others, at least for a couple of decades the style of the place was strongly influenced by Marvin. We could do anything we wanted, pretty much. We could build anything using parts from the stockroom. We could ask anyone for help at any time. Our $1000/month stipends didn’t afford a luxurious out-of-the-lab lifestyle (many trips to the “Twin Cities” strip mall McDonald’s; it took us years to realize that the “Twin Cities” were Cambridge and Somerville) but within the lab we had everything that we could have wanted. Marvin opened the lab physically and virtually to almost anyone with a sincere interest in computer nerdism. High school students came in on weekends to experiment with million-dollar mainframes, eventually becoming MIT undergraduates or founders of Boston-area software companies. As a 12-year-old I connected to the ARPAnet via a 300-baud modem in Bethesda, Maryland. I asked the administrators of the ITS mainframes at Marvin’s AI Lab if I could have an account to experiment with the Macsyma computer algebra system. Despite the fact that anyone with such an account could type a single command to crash the system, the “philg” account was created for me.

Marvin was not too interested in the dismal corners of academic computer science. He was the wrong person to talk to about operating systems, disk latency, or the relative merits of the latest programming languages and environments. Marvin was passionate about creating an artificial intelligence and was more than content to allow others, preferably in industry, to tackle the practical day-to-day computer science stuff. He expected IBM to develop System R and hoped that MIT would develop a computer that he could be friends with.

[Despite Marvin’s lack of interest in the quotidian aspects of coding, he ended up having a large indirect effect on the practical world of software. Richard Stallman wandered over to the AI Lab from Harvard and eventually founded the free software movement (not to be confused with “open source” unless you wanted a stack of AI Technical Reports thrown at your head).]

At age 62, instead of comfortably retiring in place at the lab that he’d created, Marvin jumped at the chance to be an early MIT Media Lab researcher.

Marvin was a loyal friend and family member. He would show up to a birthday party (sometimes my own!) even at the cost of a further slip to a deadline for one of his books. Marvin never used his success to try to climb the bureaucratic ladder within the university. Nor did he try to make money from his discoveries or his prominence. He supported his wife’s most questionable projects, e.g., the adoption of a fearful and periodically aggressive shelter dog (Prozac was tried; not sure if the dog read the literature regarding Prozac versus placebo).

He was a great research advisor and collaborator, as evidenced by the Turing Award of Manuel Blum, the impact of Logo (pushed mostly by Hal Abelson), the important and varied career of Gerry Sussman (Scheme, SICP, Digital Orrery), the invention of interactive computer-aided design by Ivan Sutherland, the definition of “AI” for at least a couple of decades by Patrick Winston, and the pioneering computer algebra work of Joel Moses.

Virtually everyone in American computer science has been strongly influenced by Marvin, either directly or through one of his students.

I will miss Marvin.

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A software engineer friend was wondering what to do about his career. He’s at a startup company that has been moderately successful (funds raise, product launched, first customers paying) but not successful enough to justify hiring a team. So he’s working by himself. I suggested working for Google or Facebook: “They’ve already got the users so whatever you build will be significant. They’ve got ready-made teams of competent people for you to work with.” I told him about a senior programmer friend who gets up every morning in the Boston suburbs, dons his biking gear, and rides down to Kendall Square to the Google office, works on some interesting problems with competent peers, then clocks out at roughly 5 pm to bike home. “Every month they direct deposit a massive paycheck into his bank account.” We agreed that it was hard to beat that programmer’s lifestyle.

Startups are in the news constantly. It feels as though you can’t spit in the street without hitting a 21-year-old college dropout who is negotiating to sell his second company. But does the news stream reflect the average? “Obama’s Legacy: Trump and Bernie” (WSJ) is a boring “Obama should be criticized for delivering to Americans the centrally planned economy that they said they wanted” article, but it happens to include some relevant data:

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of business establishments less than one year old rose steadily from 550,000 in 1997, peaked at about 650,000 in 2006, and then has gone straight down. The Kauffman Foundation’s 2015 entrepreneurship report puts startups in 2012 at just over 400,000.

The Brookings Institution in a 2014 report noted that since 2008 businesses closing annually have exceeded startups for the first time. Their yearly analysis dates to 1978.

For example, Kauffman’s report also notes that the rate of entrepreneurship among people age 20-34—who hire employees like themselves, new breadwinners—began dropping fast in 2011. The president said Tuesday that ObamaCare would help new-business formation. It is doing the opposite. Millennials, assumed to be the Obama base, have entered adulthood to endure a decade of slow growth.

Perhaps tech is an exception but it seems that overall Americans have gotten the message that it is best to be a W-2 employee of a larger enterprise. This makes sense when you think about the following:

• bigger companies have more access to corporate welfare, e.g., tax breaks handed out by states in exchange for locating facilities in particular places
• bigger companies pay a much lower tax rate because they can shift profits to divisions in countries other than the U.S., e.g., the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, or Singapore
• bigger companies can grow as long as there is growth anywhere in the world because they sell products all over the world

The downside of a Google or Facebook is that one can get stuck building a tiny irrelevant piece of something big. This seems particularly bad for a young person trying to build up a resume of accomplishments.

Readers: If you’ve been in a big company versus a startup recently, what can you say about the pluses and minuses?

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