Author: philg

W encourages murderous Iraqis

by philg

George W. Bush today, the most powerful man in the world, directly addressed Iraqis who are sniping and firing grenades at American troops:  “bring them on”, he taunted, according to this NYT story.  As noted in my Boston-Alaska-Baja-Boston 2002 trip report, this seems like a bad idea.  What better way to make a guy with an AK-47 feel important than by challenging him through a televised speech?


And surely American boys will die as a result of this speech.  It sounds like W. mano a mano with a young Muslim.  But having been a passenger on an airplane that makes a carrier landing does not make our President into a front-line soldier.  It will be some kid from North Carolina that gets killed.


It wouldn’t bother me to hear that an American foot soldier in Iraq was challenging the local ruffians.  But to hear a guy sitting at a desk 6000 miles away doing it?  Why aren’t military families objecting to this?


Will a day come when we Americans can hear our leader talking about something other than kicking Third Worlders around?  Something that would result in technological innovation and economic growth?

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Et tu Microsoft?

by philg

Cash-strapped U.S. companies, devoid of management imagation, strive to cut costs by moving IT staff to India.  They’ll do the same things with computers that they were doing in the 1980s and 1990s but do them cheaper.


Microsoft was the exception.  Yahoo Finance shows that they’ve got a 30.6% profit margin and $46.2 billion in cash.  These are what economists call “supranormal monopoly returns”.  Yet what do we find in today’s Reuters:  “Microsoft Shifting Development, Support to India”.  Microsoft is firing American workers and hiring in India.


[The other half of the Wintel duopoly is doing the same thing.   A friend of ours had his little company acquired by Intel.  They’ve had a hiring freeze in the U.S. for more than a year but would be happy to give him 20 newly hired programmers for his product… in China.  He’s now living in Shanghai and loving it, managing a medium-sized cubicle farm of eager under-25ers all recently graduated with Computer Science degrees.]


In a slightly related story, the New York Times today reports that the U.S. unemployment rate is up to 6.4 percent, its highest in 9 years.  The stock market is basically okay, though.  Investors realize that American corporations can make plenty of money without necessarily hiring Americans…

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Mauthausen concentration camp still a live issue in the U.S.

by philg

According to this AP news story, a guard from Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp was arrested today in Michigan.  It is rather ironic that the Europe’s war against its Jewish citizens is still a matter of public interest and debate here in the U.S. considering that for most Europeans it is history as ancient and irrelevant as the Roman Republic.  The story reminded me of a trip to Austria in May 2002.  Austrians would ask where I’d been thus far.  I’d reply “Salzburg, Mauthausen, biking down the Donau”.  Oftentimes their immediate response was “We had no idea that camp was there.”


Mauthausen has been turned into a very informative museum and one of the interpretive signs is a map showing the dozens of factories within a radius of about 60 miles to which thousands of Mauthausen inmates were dispatched to work alongside ordinary Austrians.  If the Austrians were indeed unaware of the existence of the camp they must have thought it was strange that some of their fellow workers were so shabbily dressed and getting thinner every day until finally they didn’t show up.

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A billion here, a billion there…

by philg

Ever since I started to fly it has been confusing to me that the FAA does not spend a few $million publishing charts, airport and airspace information, and terrain avoidance information for the U.S. on a Web site; this would greatly improve the availability of this information to pilots and therefore safety.  A federal report released today provides some insight.  This report looks at 20 computer- and software-heavy projects undertaken by the FAA over the last 7 years.  They found cost overruns of $4.3 billion and schedule slippage of up to 7 years (but never less than 1 year).


It is no wonder that a lot of decision-makers don’t want to invest in anything with an information technology component. 

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Dia:Beacon

by philg

An hour’s train ride north of Manhattan, straight up the Hudson River toward Poughkeepsie, is the new Dia:Beacon art museum.  I stopped there today on my way back to Boston from Washington, DC.  It is a vast warehouse of contemporary art, sort of like Mass MOCA, but much more a celebration of the art and the artists and much less about the building and the institution.  Where Mass MOCA has big signs talking about the history of each room, the Dia:Beacon has only signs giving information about the art.  Where Mass MOCA crams the art into whatever space is convenient for a season or two and then shoves it back out the front door, the art at Dia:Beacon has found a permanent home.  Each artist gets at least one room to him or herself.


Philip and Annie’s tips for would-be visitors:


1) Don’t judge Dan Flavin, the fluorescent tube artist, by what you see in Beacon; go to Marfa, Texas (another Dia-funded project).


2) The cafe is rough around the edges.  Eat before you arrive unless you just want coffee and carbs.


3) Don’t miss the Robert Irwin garden (same guy who did the garden at the New Getty) and the big collection of Serras in the adjoining basement.


4) Be sure to read the essay in the Sandback string sculpture room, which is also available on the Web site (pull down “Riggio Galleries” from the “Beacon” menu).  Favorite excerpts:  “space is both defined and imbued with an incorporeal palpability”; “each sculpture is newly parsed for the site”; “Fact and illusion are equivalents,” [Fred Sandback] asserts; “Trying to weed one out in favor of the other is dealing with an incomplete situation.”  [Getting to the Dia:Beacon had required flying through 30 minutes of cumulus clouds on an instrument flight from Gaithersburg, MD, the rest of which was obscured by the same kind of summer haze that proved fatal to JFK, Jr.-style; imagine if the airline pilots flying through the same conditions decided that fact (what the instruments say) and illusion (one’s natural perceptions of being straight and level or falling sideways) were equivalent.]


For pilots or people whose friends are pilots:  You get to Dia:Beacon by flying into Stewart Air Force Base, KSWF, an active base for C5 cargo jets.  The runway is 11,800′ long so if you have trouble landing a Cessna there don’t tell anyone.  Taxi over to Rifton Aviation and borrow a crew car (1994 Ford Escorts with 110,000+ miles on them, perfectly adequate with air conditioning and a radio, thus proving the previously stated theory about the $2,000 Chinese car) for a 15-minute drive over to the east side of the Hudson River.  Take the first exit on 9D and follow signs for the train station in Beacon.  The museum is just south of the train station.

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I wish that I had voted for Ross Perot…

by philg

I had an antipathy to Ross Perot, the independent presidential candidate, from the moment that I heard him speak on television.  He was talking about education.  Any time that you hear a federal candidate talk about education you know that he is trying to snow the voters.  The Federal Government has almost nothing to do with funding or delivering education in this country; it is overwhelmingly a local and state government show.


But it turns out that H. Ross Perot, Jr.is my new hero.  I was down on the Washington Mall on Sunday afternoon.  The Smithsonian was running a folk festival.  Instead of scheduling it from 5-10 pm, Mexican- or Italian-style, they’d scheduled it during the peak heat of the afternoon.  After one hour it became intolerable and I ducked into the Air and Space Museum to soak up the air conditioning.  Up on the second floor, they have a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter.  H. Ross Perot, Jr., a young punk with 500 hours, and J. Coburn, a 3500-hour Vietnam vet were the first people to fly a helicopter all the way around the world.


Two guys.  Big extra fuel tank in the back seats.  One (very reliable turbine) engine.  Refueling stop on a container ship.


(I’ve not kept up with the achievements of the children of our current President; perhaps the comment section will fill up with reports of their heroic deeds.)

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How to Get Rich from Online Personals?

by philg

One of the pleasures of being an old lazy person is helping young energetic people achieve their dreams.  I’ve been working with a young very capable guy since around 1997.  He sold his last company, traveled a bit, and is now starting up a business centered around online personal ads.  I’m supposed to be helping him but of course being old and lazy it would be much easier to harvest good ideas from the comments section of this blog.  So let’s hear your creative ideas for some new business that is somehow related to online personals….


To frame the discussion a bit, a bit of background (but not so much that ideas will be constrained):


1) in a world where people won’t pay for online subscriptions, they seem to be happy to pay for online personal sites (a plus for a new business)


2) more or less everything that can be monopolized on the Internet has been monopolized, i.e., assume that Amazon owns retail, eBay owns classifieds, match.com owns the underlying personals database, etc.  This means that you can’t start a business whose objective is to unseat or even compete with any of the established monopolies.  One’s goal must be to work within the environment that the monopolies have established.  (And possibly to get acquired by one in the long run.)


Thoughts?

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Why the Supreme Court affirmative action decision was right

by philg

The Washington Post carries an interesting article today on why the recent Supreme Court decision allowing the state of Michigan to continue its race-based affirmative action program is “welcome”.  The absence of these ideas from earlier debates shows how easy it is to forget that the American people have, in theory, some political power to change laws (Paul Krugman op-ed today reminds us of the opposite.)


(The Post article also carries a link to last week’s column in which the same writer argues in favor of a tax on imported oil, as at the end of my Israel Essay.)

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Privatization of Air Traffic Control

by philg

Measured objectively, the government sector of the United States runs some of the developed world’s worst-performing schools and the best-performing aviation system.  Yet oddly enough it is the air traffic control system that politicians propose to privatize.


Privatization is currently underway for flight service stations.  These are FAA employees who don’t separate airplanes from each other but instead provide varied forms of assistance.  You can call Flight Service on the telephone to ask about the weather before departing.  You can call Flight Service on the radio to ask where the thunderstorms are along your route or what the closest airport with good weather is.  You can call Flight Service in an emergency.  These folks are incredibly resourceful and helpful by and large and often go far beyond their job description in an effort to help pilots.


The folks at www.naats.org are trying to save their jobs and they’ve put together a very interesting audio clip that is worth hearing whether or not you care about this issue:  http://www.naats.org/docs/flightassist.mp3 (you may decide not to fly with beginner private pilots after listening to these emergency calls).


Plan for today… fly to Republic Airport on Long Island and swim in Bob’s pool, then back to Bedford and over to the Weston Town Green for a 7 pm concert by Not the Beatles (the infamous Luke, of Harvard Square fame, is lead guitar).  The concert is free but bring your own blanket and picnic.  Alex will be there!

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