Author: philg

A friend proudly showed me his new business card. He is a now a full-time senior official with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A few minutes later his wife told me about the painful cost of buying health insurance through COBRA. The state tells employers with more than 11 workers that they must provide employees with health insurance, so surely they would be providing it to their own employees? “It’s not a permanent position so they don’t provide it,” explained the wife.

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I’m just about done listening to Haiti After the Earthquake as a book on tape. One thing that Americans could take away from this book is how much we over-invest in central government and housing. As noted in my previous posting, the earthquake had little long-term effect on Haiti’s GDP despite the fact that Haiti’s central government was mostly destroyed (ministry buildings in the capital city flattened; civil servants killed while at their desks) and approximately 1.5 million were rendered homeless. What have Americans invested in during the last few decades? A bigger central government (state governments count too, since a lot of states are roughly comparable to Haiti in population (10 million)) and fancy houses. Haiti’s GDP didn’t shrink; should we be surprised that the US GDP is growing only slowly?

Farmer is not a believer in the old saying “If the government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away everything you have.” He wants governments in rich countries all over the world to raise taxes so that more money can be given to Haiti’s government (not spent directly by NGOs in the country). At the same time he decries traditional Big Government policies such as agricultural subsidies that render Haitian agriculture uncompetitive (thus requiring more people in Haiti to live on hand-outs from the countries that are providing hand-outs to their domestic farmers). Farmer doesn’t explain how governments can be as big as he wants them to be and at the same time immune from lobbying by farmers and other competing domestic groups looking for hand-outs. The U.S. provides a good example here. When Congress raised taxes on American workers and investors, it spent the money to subsidize the U.S. health care industry (“Obamacare”) rather than to help poor people around the world get better health care, clean water, etc.

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Folks:

In one of my offices I have two Steelcase 42″ lateral filing cabinets, purchased back in the 1990s, supporting a 120-gallon aquarium (rule of thumb is that an acrylic aquarium weighs 10 lbs. per gallon, including the tank and gravel):

I’m setting up a new office and thought it would be nice to replicate the set-up. I contacted Red Thread, the Steelcase retailer in Massachusetts, and the saleswoman, Jessica Andrews, responded with “… that will not work. That is far too heavy for these lateral files, we don’t recommend it.” I replied with the photo above. She answered with “The particular file you have under that tank currently, is a work horse. Unfortunately, Steelcase no longer has that series. Their files have come a long way over the years, they are more environmentally friendly…less metal. Therefore, we cannot say that these files will support that tank.”

So I asked how much the new cabinets weighed. The answer was over 300 lbs. each. Given that a 96 lb. wooden cabinet can support a 220-gallon tank, was it really the case that 600 lbs. of steel couldn’t support a 120-gallon tank? I’m asking the Steelcase cabinets to handle 1/11th of the load per lb. of stand. I asked her if she could repeat the test that I did before placing a heavy aquarium on these cabinets: Have three 6′-tall guys sit on them and see if the drawers still function normally. She responded “we are not going to have employee’s sit on a lateral file” and then Frank Tenaglia, VP of Sales for Red Thread, added in a separate email “As Jess stated earlier, our 3 drawer lateral files are not intended to hold 120 gallon fish tanks. We want no part of this.”

Do any readers work in an office with a 42″-wide Steelcase lateral file (2- or 3-drawers high) of recent vintage? Have a trio of 200-lb. guys available and willing to sit on top for a test? If so, please let me know what you find! Alternatively, if you have some of these newer, supposedly wimpier cabinets from Steelcase and something heavy on top, please let me know how it has worked out.

Thanks in advance for any help.

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Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, wrote “I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.”

Could it be that the positive business press coverage is proof that straights and gays are treated differently in the business world?

Imagine if Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, had written “I’m proud to be straight, and I consider being straight among the greatest gifts God has given me.”

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This being Massachusetts, some friends are very upset that the rest of the U.S. doesn’t see the need for a Congress controlled by Democrats. Here’s what I wrote to comfort them: “Don’t be too worried about the Republicans. Remember that they are politicians and seldom what they promise. Also once they get to D.C. they tend to become fans of big government and continuing whatever the government has been doing. On the grounds that the federal government ran no schools or universities, Reagan promised to kill the recently created Department of Education and their budget has grown every year since…”

What do folks think that Congress might do now? I would like to see them freeze the tax code for five years so that regular business people have time to read it before it changes again. Of all the stuff in my November 2008 Economic Recovery Plan I think the simplest to implement would be flexible capital expense depreciation. Currently the situation is a mess. Section 179 deduction limits were $500,000 for 2013. They are $25,000 in 2014. It makes the tax code seem arbitrary if there are huge swings like this from year to year.

I can’t see Congress wading back into the Obamacare swamp since nobody in Washington (or anywhere?) can understand the American health insurance or health care system. Most of the spending is entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and now Obamacare. Then add pensions and our war machine that even a Nobel Peace laureate could not scale back. So what could Congress actually do that would make a difference to an ordinary American?

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A friend showed me a video of professional actress Shoshana Roberts walking around New York City. The two-minute film was edited down from 10 hours of being out on the sidewalk, both day and night. My reaction was “Back in the 1970s if you said that you’d walked around New York for 10 hours, in various neighborhoods and at night as well as during the day, people would ask ‘How many times were you mugged?'”

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The results are in and 60 percent of Massachusetts voters agreed that Massachusetts voters should be paid for up to 80 hours of extra time each year if the voter or someone in the voter’s family is sick (see Question 4). It seems almost too easy. Ask people to vote on whether or not they should get paid more. I’m sort of surprised that we haven’t seen (and passed) ballot questions on giving ourselves 8 weeks of paid vacation annually, a company car, and other executive-level perks.

Who among us does not believe that he or she deserves a 10-percent raise?

[Separately, can sick leave as mandated by this new law function just as well as vacation days due to the fact that the employee can say “my parent was sick”? How could an employer ever verify that? After a certain amount of sick time an employer can usually ask for a doctor’s note, right? But can an employer ask for a doctor’s note regarding a relative of the employee?]

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I attended a screening of Mexico Pelagico this evening at Harvard. The one-hour documentary features a group of passionate Mexico City dwellers who spend their weekends over a three-year period seeing what is to be seen in the open ocean near Mexico’s coastline and islands. They are sufficiently passionate about sharks that they snorkel down to some sizable sharks that have been hooked by fishermen with buoys and free them. Essentially this is underwater dentistry where the patient is big and strong enough to kill the dentist and the dentist also can’t take a breath (no SCUBA gear for these folks most of the time).

The film is a mixture of underwater footage that you might find in an IMAX movie and interviews with the shark/ocean enthusiasts.

Recommended. (Should be available via Netflix eventually.)

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Ever since September 11, 2001, the government can usually justify whatever it does on the grounds of security. Sports team owners wanted banner-towing aircraft banned from overflying stadiums and thus competing with in-stadium ads. They got their wish shortly after September 11, but since the government did not want to be departing from its “airspace belongs to the public” concept, all aircraft were banned. (The restriction was just recently updated. See this page for the latest draft. Note that the restrictions are specific to stadiums where teams owned by particular organizations are playing, e.g., “NCAA Division One Football” or “Major League Baseball”.)

This didn’t get any press coverage, but an anti-media TFR put in place over Ferguson, Missouri has generated some (nytimes). It seems that everyone in the government could agree that high-res TV footage of rioting Americans was something that the world could live without. First the FAA banned aircraft from going below 5000′ above the ground and then 3000′. Arguably the TFR had some rational basis since the police wanted to fly their helicopters around. On the other hand it is smack up against the main St. Louis Airport and therefore already very tightly controlled by ATC (nobody could fly in that area without an ATC clearance anyway).

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Folks:

I’ve got a Verizon Samsung Note 3 that has tortured me for months with a Contacts manager that thinks the best results when searching for “Bob” are (1) people not named Bob, (2) people for whom only an email address is available (i.e., I couldn’t call them if I wanted to). I also can’t get over the fact that voicemail is not integrated. My final verdict on the Note 3 is that it is a good tablet but a terrible phone (due purely to software; I don’t mind the size even when using it as a phone).

Separately, I am spending a lot of time in a new suburban house where the Verizon coverage is non-existent. I don’t think other carriers will be much better because this is an area where people tend to obstruct the construction of towers. However, I notice that T-Mobile phones are programmed to be able to make calls over a WiFi connection.

So I’m wondering if I can solve two problems with one purchase: a T-Mobile iPhone 6 Plus. Has anyone tried using this over WiFi on a regular basis? How well does it work? (This review is positive.)

Any other general comments from people who’ve switched from Verizon to T-Mobile?

[I did make some phone calls to Verizon. It started out with them asserting that the coverage at the house’s address should be great. Then they tried to sell me a “range extender” (i.e., make the customer pay for using the network every month and also to build the network and backhaul the traffic). I asked the tech support guy what the range extender had to be plugged into and he said “nothing.” The wall for power? No. An Internet router for communications? No. It could just be placed on a coffee table and would magically make the service in the house better? Yes. (As you might expect, the box actually does plug into the wall for power and into a router for Internet but it also needs a view of the sky so that it can get GPS location; VZ doesn’t trust the customer to enter the home address I think.) Did the fact that the Verizon FiOS installer couldn’t use his own mobile phone standing in the driveway convince them? That’s a different department. Instead of taking my word for it/their own employee’s word, they opened a trouble ticket and paid someone to drive out there. The person reported back to them that there was no coverage. Verizon then closed the trouble ticket without texting, emailing, or calling me. I called back a month later and they are now offering to send me a range extender at no charge but they don’t have any in stock. If it works, I might be about to stay on the VZ network though I am thinking that the ability to make calls over WiFi might be useful in other folks’ houses who also have poor signal.]

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