Author: philg

At a charity dinner on Saturday night I saw with a couple who had recently come to a rich suburb of Boston from Shanghai. The father had been home-schooled in upstate New York. He explained that he did whatever he wanted all year, including a lot of reading, and then spent two weeks each year cramming for an exam based on California standards that would show he’d learned everything necessary for his grade level (via these two weeks of work he was able to keep pace with students who physically attended public school in California for nine months). In Shanghai the children, age 5 and 11, had attended an international school that was so demanding the parents had to stay up tutoring until 11 pm some nights. Public school in the Boston suburbs, by contrast, is so easy that the children don’t need any after-school help. However, the mother now has to spend nearly all of her time managing household affairs. “We had three people to help us in Shanghai,” said the father, “but here just weekly cleaners.”

[How is it possible for an adult American to need to spend full-time maintaining a 20-year-old house? I got some insight into this the other day. The contractor’s favorite HVAC subcontractors installed a new A/C-heat pump system in our house last fall. Last week was the first hot/humid weather for Boston this year. Immediately there was a flood of water coming through the ceiling. I brought in my old HVAC contractor who explained that there are four drains on an air handler. One task for the installer is determining which drain is at the lowest point and hooking up the drain line to that one. Our unit had its highest drain hole connected to the line. There is a safety pan underneath the air handler that is supposed to catch any water that drips and, via a float switch, shut down the air handler. In some installations, however, there is a second drain line connected to a hole in the safety pan. If you intend to rely on the float switch you plug up this hole so that the water will actually trigger the float switch instead of spilling out into the attic. This hole was not plugged. Finally it is important to have a float switch compatible with the air handler. Flipping the float switch upside down did not actually shut down the system. So the original contractors did not do any of the three steps related to drainage correctly, nor did they test their own work.]

[Update: Here’s a photo from a fairly new luxury hotel in Cambridge (Le Meridien) showing the quality of local labor:

]

 

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Greece is in the news due to its imminent insolvency (can something be “imminent” and yet drag on for many years?). There is talk of money that Greece is supposed to pay creditors but also talk about bailout funds that the IMF and other countries are supposed to be giving to the Greek government. But what is the cashflow in this heavily indebted country? Is the Greek government still spending more than they collect in tax revenue, in which case presumably there must be a net inflow of cash? (let’s assume that Greeks themselves are smart enough not to lend money to their own government) Or is the Greek government no longer engaging in deficit spending and therefore they are paying down their sovereign debt, but just not as fast as creditors were promised?

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Check out Boston.com for an article about trying to take a Tesla on a day trip to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire (340 miles round-trip). They spent most of the trip worry about range and more than three hours of the trip shut down for charging. What about doing all of the recharging with renewable energy? WSJ has an article about a $2.2 billion solar-thermal electricity generating plant whose input of cash ($1.6 billion from taxpayers) was presumably at least as much as budgeting but whose output of electricity is only 40 percent of the expectation.

Good reminder for engineers that sometimes the TED talk works better than the final system…

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Aviation readers: Our two full-time helicopter instructors reached 1000 hours and were able to get jobs flying jet-powered helicopters. We filled one opening with one of our own graduates but need to hire a second full-time instructor (about 600 hours per year in the Robinson R44 per CFI) at East Coast Aero Club. Please email resume if interested.

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Today’s Investor’s Business Daily has an interesting chart in an article on U.S. economic freedom compared to what prevails in other nations worldwide. If you’re not diversified into foreign stocks, this chart should provide some motivation…

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Michael Sandel is a Harvard professor famous for teaching thousands of undergraduates, mostly from rich families, about “justice.” Semyon Dukach, one of our Boston-based software entrepreneurs, was recently tapped to be opposite Sandel on a public radio talk show (link; the amazing novelist Marilynne Robinson is also on the show (I recommend Gilead)). Sandel decries the use of market ideas in U.S. society, an extension of the course where he encourages Harvard undergraduates to aspire to make millions of dollars by working at the Clinton Foundation instead of tens of millions of dollars by working for J.P. Morgan.

Of what value is this philosophy to someone who doesn’t have a Harvard degree or come from at least an upper-middle-class family? Most people who work in a local Walmart, McDonald’s, or Department of Motor Vehicles rather than at J.P. Morgan did not make that choice affirmatively. What can people who live and work in a town without a global non-profit organization do after learning that the righteous path is to work for a global non-profit organization? Or consider Angelika Graswald, the Latvian immigrant who had to decide whether to sabotage her fiance’s kayak and collect $250,000 in tax-free life insurance immediately or instead to get pregnant and collect $872,796 in tax-free child support over a 21-year period from the guy. How are Sandel’s philosophical musings relevant to her?

Is it fair to say that Sandel is a philosopher only for the rich? And, if so, can a philosopher for the rich be considered an important philosopher?

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Seventy-two-year-old Tim Hunt, the English Nobel Prize-winner, was forced to resign a professorship after some public comments. This has gotten a lot of press due to the number of people who enjoy thinking of themselves as smarter than a Nobel laureate. Let’s benchmark Hunt’s career-ending statement against Kleiner Perkins’s experience employing Ellen Pao:

Tim Hunt	Ellen Pao at KP
Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab
You fall in love with them	Married partner wants to have sex with her
they fall in love with you	She wants to have sex with married partner, assuming that he will leave current wife and children.
when you criticise them, they cry	When you criticize her, she goes to court for “$16M. Shake that pu$$y!” (reader comment on February 2015 post, though it was later reported that Ellen Pao was seeking an additional $160 million in punitive damages)

Would it be fair to say that Kleiner Perkins incurred roughly $10 million in legal fees and a lot of aggravation to confirm Hunt’s hypothesis, at least with respect to this particular “girl in the lab.”?

[Update on the Ellen Pao case: the unsuccessful plaintiff now seeks $2.7 million to cover some of her legal fees and costs (cnet) in exchange for waiving her appeal rights against Kleiner, which presumably already incurred at least $10 million in legal fees and expenses. Coincidentally this is the amount that Pao’s husband owes in legal fees for one of his lawsuits and also the amount that the IRS is trying to get out of him (link from post about the total litigation generated by the Pao-Fletcher team). Will she get her fees paid? “You get your fees paid if you’re a female family court plaintiff,” said one litigator, “but having a vagina doesn’t get you a free lawsuit in other venues.” (see previous post about how Ellen Pao would have fared in family court)]

More productively, the Hunt case provides some guidance for universities struggling with how to get rid of old tenured faculty. The original concept of tenure was paired with a mandatory retirement age, e.g., of 65. Such age-based mandatory retirement is now prohibited by federal law and schools have discovered that it is not rational for highly paid and unproductive professors to retire. Being on campus is like being at a lively cocktail party. Why trade that to sit home alone?

Tenure doesn’t mean job security, however. A friend who is a physics professor at UC Berkeley points out that he “can be fired for any reason, except incompetence.”

A lot of older professors hold beliefs that aren’t in sync with current political dogma. People who were “liberal” in the 1970s would be called “reactionary” today. At Harvard College, 96 percent of professors support Democrats (Crimson). It should be easy to winnow out a lot of older professors simply by exposing their failure to keep pace with evolving concepts of what it means to be “liberal” or “Democrat.” Get out a video camera and ask a series of carefully crafted questions:

• Can you list five ways in which Caitlyn Jenner is an important positive example for America’s young people?
• Do you think that child support payments following a one-night sexual encounter should be larger than the after-tax income from going to college and working? (or indeed, your own paycheck from the university?)
• Why was Bobby Jindal wrong when he said “we cannot measure success [of Obamacare and other programs] by how many people are dependent on government.”?

Eventually one of these oldsters will probably say something sufficient to justify termination on the basis of creating a hostile environment, etc.

Related:

• “Women in Science” — why women can probably find better jobs than replacing Tim Hunt

 

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Classical music nuts who live in Boston (esp. South End, for example): Who wants to help with http://www.convergenceensemble.org/home/ (also see the Facebook page athttps://www.facebook.com/pages/Convergence-Ensemble/1564601347111675?fref=ts )? This is an organization offering chamber music concerts centered around Dorchester. A longer-term goal is to run chamber music concerts in schools. They have a great slate of musicians, composers, and teachers (see this page), but are short on everything else that makes a successful nonprofit. Email me if interested!

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The Silk Road web site resulted in a life-without-parole sentence for its developer.

Here are questions for readers:

1. would the operator of a site such as Silk Road have an edge in finding out the identities, locations, addresses, etc. of people buying and selling illegal drugs?
2. if the answer to 1 is “yes,” why wasn’t something like Silk Road set up by the FBI and DEA, run for a few years, and then the database used to round up people who’d been breaking the law?

 

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“Harvard’s Chinese Exclusion Act” is a Wall Street Journal article about how Harvard discriminates against Asian applicants. Here are a few excerpts:

How much harder is it for an Asian-American applicant? Mr. Zhao and the complaint cite 2009 research by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade that found an Asian-American student must earn an SAT score 140 points higher than a white student, 270 points higher than a Hispanic and 450 points higher than an African-American, all else being equal.

“Our children have to study much harder,” Mr. Zhao said late last month at a news conference. For young Asian-Americans, the perception that they must strive more than others only intensifies the competition for college admission. Then come the complaints from colleges that Asian-Americans focus too much on academics, and the cycle goes on.

But being half-Asian might be an advantage. Last fall I toured a prestigious liberal arts college campus with two friends (very comfortably retired from the financial services industry; dad is white and mom is Chinese-American) and their son. A student assured the boy that “there are a lot of special programs here for science students of color.” He checked “mixed race” on the application and was not only admitted, but was invited to an all-expense-paid summer program for “mixed race students.”

Is “never put down ‘full Asian'” a variation of the Tropic Thunder principle?

Kirk Lazarus: Everybody knows you never go full retard.
Tugg Speedman: What do you mean?
Kirk Lazarus: Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, ‘Rain Man,’ look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho’. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, ‘Forrest Gump.’ Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain’t retarded. Peter Sellers, “Being There.” Infantile, yes. Retarded, no. You went full retard, man. Never go full retard. You don’t buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, “I Am Sam.” Remember? Went full retard, went home empty handed…

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