Category: Uncategorized

Now that the iPhone 7 excitement has abated slightly, what about phones for people who don’t have money to burn?

A friend wants a phone with dual SIM cards. He used to be an iPhone user but reduced financial circumstances have forced him to leave Apple’s garden (after a few years of marriage with two kids his wife sued him and a Massachusetts court has ordered him to pay roughly 80 percent of his after-tax income in child support; the legal fees consumed most of his retirement savings). He would be able to use any smartphone operating system, but probably shouldn’t be spending more than $200.

What’s his best option right now?

Full post, including comments

Boring but important: “The Cost of Keeping Companies in the United States” (nytimes)

Some excerpts:

… in our zeal to keep companies in the United States, we have created policies where inversions benefit some shareholders at the expense of others. Perversely, the inversion rules are more likely to punish American investors and long-term investors to the benefit of senior executives, recent investors and tax-exempt investors, including those overseas.

Fifteen percent to 20 percent of shareholders in the deals we studied were made worse off from inversion. The anti-inversions tax rules are especially bad for long-term investors who have higher capital gains because they have seen their shares appreciate significantly over the years.

In effect, one group of shareholders writes a large check to the government for all shareholders to reap the benefits of lower corporate income taxes in the future.

Foreign shareholders also benefit, as the I.R.S.’s special tax rules don’t apply in other countries.

There’s a third group that benefits: corporate executives. We found that the chief executive’s wealth increases 3 percent to 4 percent, despite the personal tax consequences of inversion. This is in part because stock options, unlike shares, are not subject to capital gains tax at inversion. In 2004 the government added a tax on pay for executives of inverting companies but the companies began reimbursing their executives for this expense, passing the cost along to shareholders.

My personal take: It seems that whenever the government creates anything complex it opens up a new way for one group of Americans to steal quietly from another. Maybe this is why the Europeans lean so hard on the value-added tax.

Related:

• “Economy Recovery Plan” (my November 2008 piece where I proposed some measures to keep executives from stealing from public company shareholders)
• Principal-agent problem

Full post, including comments

I hope that readers are enjoying the Back to School season. Who is celebrating like Homer and Marge Simpson (“You’re the government’s problem now.”)?

Is it in fact possible to substantially turn a child over to the government, though? Surely you can’t get out of cooking breakfast for the kids, arranging after-school care, and supervising homework, right? Well… talking to a schoolteacher whose class is just outside 128, the Boston ring highway, I learned that the METCO kids get picked up by a government-provided bus at around 6:00 am from Boston, are served breakfast by public school employees, then attend class with the local kids. After school officially ends, the METCO kids are supervised by a government-paid teacher who nags them into doing homework. If they don’t play sports they’ll be placed on a 5:30 pm bus and be home around 6:30 pm (or never, depending on Boston traffic). If they are on a sports team they will catch a 7:30 pm bus and thus the parents will have been relieved of responsibility for their children from 6:00 am through 8:30 pm every weekday. What about cooking dinner? If children are told to eat big meals when the taxpayers are buying and reminded that Sumo wrestlers can reach 600 pounds on just two meals per day it seems to me that a parent’s culinary efforts on behalf of offspring could be limited to purchasing apples and cheese sticks for self-service at-home snacks.

What are the practical first steps toward unloading a child into METCO? This page explains the criteria. (The officials behind the page list “race” as the last and perhaps least important criteria, but people with whom I have talked say that children are sorted first by skin color. As one of the goals of the program is to “increase diversity, and reduce racial isolation” (home page), children are selected for having a different skin color than children in the suburbs. Essentially this means that parents of children whom government officials identify as “white” are out of luck due to the fact that Boston suburbs are already mostly white.)

Full post, including comments

From our anonymous insider…

Each week our class discusses a new patient that parallels the scientific theme(s) from lecture. Most medical schools are pushing away from the conventional medical school format: two years of basic science education followed by two years of clinical rotations in the hospital shadowing residents and attendings. The newer approach is integrating clinical experiences and lectures during the first two years.

This week we reviewed a patient with a metabolic muscle disorder who became addicted to pain medications and heroin. The case paralleled this week’s lecture topics of muscle structure, contraction and metabolism, including the dreaded Krebs cycle. A public health official came in to discuss the country’s opioid epidemic. In 2014 the CDC recorded 28,647 deaths, triple the 2010 number, from opioid overdoses (prescriptions and heroin combined). We learned that “among new heroin users, three out of four report having abused prescription opioids prior to using heroin.” (http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/heroin.html) Most heroin comes from Mexico: “Researchers believe the border detection rate hovers around 1.5 percent — favorable odds for a smuggler.” (Washington Post). Mexican heroin is unlike the “black tar” Southeast Asian variety of the 1970’s. Mexican heroin is close to pure and frequently laced with potent fentanyl, a synthetic opioid over 100x as powerful as morphine manufactured in cartel labs. (Prince overdosed on fentanyl.) Overdoses rise when fentanyl is in the mix.

Week 3 went by fast because of a few firsts in anatomy. We continued dissection of the gluteal region and the posterior lower leg. I saw a nerve for the first time — it was huge! The sciatic nerve runs through the thigh until it branches into the tibial and fibular nerve at the popliteal fossa (posterior knee joint). The sciatic nerve is about the diameter of a large pen with translucent threads firm to the tough running along its axis. This observation shattered the notion that nerves interact only at the microscopic level. I can imagine how hypertrophy or herniation of nearby muscles could constrict the sciatic nerve causing radiating pain down the leg. Interestingly, the tibial nerve lies superficial, above the arteries/veins, at the back of the knee. You do not want to cut yourself here… One of my teammates for our cadaver cut her hand with a scalpel, the fifth incident in three dissections. She was trying to isolate semitendinosus, a muscle of the hamstrings, with a scalpel and her hand instead of a probe.

Statistics for the week… Study: 8 hours (5 hours devoted to anatomy); Sleep: 6 hours/night; Fun: 4 nights out. Example fun: A fellow classmate (let’s call her “Jane”) and I joined the Hawaiian-shirted locals at the weekly outdoor swing-dance downtown. Dancing to the brass-heavy “beach music” band and wearing a thrift-store Hawaiian shirt, I would have fit in except for being 35 years younger than the average dancer.

The Whole Book: http://tinyurl.com/MedicalSchool2020

Full post, including comments

I escaped the kids last night and saw Hell or High Water, which starts out with two brothers in the Texas midlands who (1) are squeezed between a bank and a child support plaintiff, (2) need cash, and (3) have a lot of guns. All four of us (age range 19-60) were impressed by the film, but the retired Wall Streeter wondered “Why couldn’t they get a loan?”

Readers: What did you think?

[How realistic is the child support squeeze under Texas family law? The state caps child support profits, which means that the revenue from a one-night encounter with a high-income Texan is less than the median income of a college graduate. On the other hand, when a low-income or medium-income defendant is sued, the Texas guidelines are not that different from other U.S. states. The state government is aggressive in enforcing court orders against the losers of the state’s winner-take-all custody system (recent example: “Texas to Tie Car Registration Renewal to Child Support”).

How realistic is the reverse mortgage squeeze? nolo.com explains reverse mortgages. It looks as though a reverse mortgage can be undone by paying a big lump sum when the original homeowner dies (source).]

Full post, including comments

Who is excited about the iPhone 7?

Thoughts after the announcement?

My Haiku:

I miss Steven Jobs

Social Justice important

Camera more so

My thoughts watching the presentation…

The first portion is devoted to the design of the exterior. But if the phone is kept in a case, as most iPhones are, what difference does that make? Are consumers supposed to take their phones out of the case and wave them around for others to admire?

The new camera on the small phone… f/1.8 lens. The old one was f/2.2 so that’s about half an f-stop? More powerful flash but it won’t be powerful enough to serve as a fill light and who wants to take images lit primarily by an on-camera flash? Is the sensor actually bigger? Upgraded to Samsung or Sony size? Most of the example images seem to have been taken in undemanding outdoor sunshine. I’m going to guess that if what you want is a wide-angle image in low light the Samsung S7 or the latest Sony phones will do a better job due to their larger sensors.

The new camera on the big phone… two sensors, one with a wide-angle lens and one with a longer lens that Apple calls “telephoto”. Can we just say “I am taking a portrait so use the long lens?” Apparently that is what happens when you tap once and get “2X”. If this is in fact 2X magnification then the longer lens is not accurately described as “telephoto” but would be “normal” (the basic iPhone supposedly has a 29mm equivalent lens, so 2X is 58mm and most photographers would say that telephoto begins at 90mm).

Okay, it seems that the “telephoto” lens is 56mm full-frame equivalent. So that is a normal lens from the 1970s. And there is a “portrait” mode that just uses the normal lens. Maybe there should be a Cartier-Bresson mode in which the normal lens is used but there is no attempt to have a shallow depth of field. (Cartier-Bresson was famous for his reliance on a 50mm normal lens.)

As a parent I’m already sold on this new phone (the 7 Plus only) because it would be nice to have a reasonable portrait camera in my pocket at all times.

Getting rid of the headphone jack… headphones that plug in via the Lightning connector seems fine. Plus they throw in an adapter for old-style noise-canceling headphones that are expensive to replace. Nobody will be forced to go through wireless configuration hell to listen to music.

But if you want wireless configuration hell… they give us the AirPods. Another thing to charge and it doesn’t look as though they can be charged wirelessly. So you don’t plug in when you want to listen. You plug in a day before you want to listen. Unless you forget. And then you don’t get to listen. How will they stay in a person’s ear anyway? They look smooth and slick and ready to fall out.

Speaking of wireless… can this phone be charged wirelessly? If not, why not? Trying to make the case super-thin before the phone goes into the real case?

The new chip is 2X faster compared to two years, presumably due to having more transistors and a slightly faster clock. At least Apple’s mobile division seems to be adhering to Moore’s Law, unlike the world’s desktop and notebook computer makers.

Video towards the end: It seems that all iPhone 7 users will be young, attractive, and slender. Some will have tattoos. They will take pictures of other young attractive people. Thank God Apple is not making a product for people over age 35. Let Grandma fuss with Android.

The new storage capacities seem like a joke, still. My phone says that I’m using 40 GB. This despite the fact that I don’t have any music or commercial video stored on it. ForeFlight stores 3.4 GB of what I need to fly around the Northeast and then there are photos and videos that I’ve captured (17 GB). Somehow Messages is using nearly 1 GB. I don’t see how anyone could use an iPhone without at least 64 GB of storage, not unless he or she employed a full-time sysadmin.

Missing: Was there a mention of water resistance for the new phones? Did removing the headphone jack help? (the specs page says IP67, good down to 1 meter and “no ingress of dust” for the Burning Man crowd)

Full post, including comments

Robert Shiller purports to explain “Why Land and Homes Actually Tend to Be Disappointing Investments” (nytimes). Given the number of rich people wandering around who say that they made their money in real estate, I’m wondering if Shiller can be correct. What do readers think? Suppose that the rent on a commercial property covers the mortgage and other expenses. In that case 1 percent appreciation will become 10 percent per year if buyer has made a down payment of 10 percent and used leverage for the rest. Suppose that Shiller is right about the average but it is a volatile market and the buyer typically unloads any big losses onto a bank while keeping any big winnings?

Maybe real estate is a bad investment if bought for cash and then left to sit. But an individual real estate investor is probably not doing things that way. There will be a mortgage and the bank will take on much of the risk. If it is a commercial property there is rent received. If it is a residential property in which the buyer lives there will be rent not paid somewhere else.

At a wedding in Paris this summer the groom’s father chided the “boy” (over 30!) for not being a property owner. The dad talked about how, even with an entry-level job at an investment bank in London he had been able to purchase a flat while still in his 20s. We dug into this a little and found out that the flat and the entry-level jobs were still available and easy to price. The dad paid a little less than one year of pre-tax income for the flat. Today the same flat would cost nearly 20 years of income for an entry level banker. With that kind of appreciation in any of the places around the world where a person might actually want to live, how can Shiller be right? And with the world population continuing to grow while the number of desirable places to live remains relatively fixed, how can Shiller continue to be right? (It is possible that, compared to 1900, the U.S. actually has fewer neighborhoods where people can walk to shops, friends’ houses, social events, cultural events, essential services, etc., yet the population has grown from 76 million to 320 million. This has got to put price pressure on real estate in the handful of desirable neighborhoods, no?)

Related:

• “Universities and Economic Growth” (see the minute-by-minute analysis of an Econ 252 lecture by Shiller)

 

Full post, including comments

From our anonymous insider…

This week I learned about the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) Step I board exam. Typically taken after the second year of medical school, just before clinical rotations commence, the score on this exam is the most important criterion for the residency application (the first year of a residency is technically the future specialist’s “internship”). There is some bad news for nervous parents who worried about getting a child into the right preschool to ensure entrance to the right elementary school to ensure entrance to a prestigious high school to ensure entrance to a selective college to ensure admission to medical school: the real career-determining educational institution is the residency.

Our dean gave us some additional bad news this week: there is a worsening shortage of residency positions. (See “Squeeze Looms for Doctors; More Medical Students Are In the Pipeline, but Too Few Residencies Await Them” (WSJ).) Medical students have responded to this situation by applying to 15-20 hospital residencies rather than the traditional 4-5. Residency admission committees have responded to this flood of applications by increasingly their reliance on Step I board scores. All of our tests for the first two years are in fact covering the same material as the Step I test.

In our morning cellular/molecular biology lecture series, doctors and researchers may preface a detailed explanation with “don’t worry; you don’t need to know all of this detail for the test.” Nearly 20 percent of my classmates have at various points raised their hands to ask “is this going to be on The Test?” When the answer is “no,” I wonder how many tune out the nitty gritty details of a cancer signaling pathway or the extracellular matrix remodeling in vasculogenesis.

Three days this week, including the weekend, I joined a group of 6 or 7 classmates at a local bar’s happy hour for $2 beers and rail drinks. Roughly half of our class is female and one difference in conversation is that the men are less likely to talk about their romantic situation. Within the first 2-3 conversations with a woman, I’ve learned if she is single, dating, engaged, or married. About half of the women seem to be single, a fifth are engaged or married, and the rest are dating.

Though we have only recently met, it is already time for the class election. The positions up for grabs include president, vice-president, and a handful of Association of American Medical College student interest group representatives. Some eager beavers have been campaigning since the first week. There are three candidates for president and three for vice-president. All are male.

I did about six hours of homework total this week and went to bed every night before 11:00 pm.

The Whole Book: http://tinyurl.com/MedicalSchool2020

Full post, including comments

“The Most Exclusive Restaurant in America” (New Yorker) is a fun article about how far some people will go for a meal and how far others will go to be known for cooking meals.

Full post, including comments

It’s Happy Back to School Week nationwide. The Federal government’s regulation of bathroom usage was front-page news in the New York Times on August 22 (“Federal Transgender Bathroom Access Guidelines Blocked by Judge”). This leads me to wonder… why are there locally run schools in the U.S.? If the Constitution gives the Federal government the power to set bathroom policy in schools nationwide (let’s hope it isn’t part of the Interstate Commerce clause!), why not the non-bathroom parts of schools?

You might argue that bathroom use is a Civil Rights issue for transgender American youth. But access to an education of at least some minimum quality should also be a Civil Right, no? (“no” is the California Supreme Court’s answer to this question, actually) Access to a bathroom can be urgent, especially in our Starbucks era. But access to education, or lack of such access, may have substantial long-term effects. The central limit theorem tells us that about half of American children have access to below-average education and that millions attend spectacularly bad classes.

If the Federal government were to take over schools it would be able to ensure adequate resources and minimum standards, regardless of the local tax base. As a bonus, since the schools would be Federally operated, they could have the same policies nationwide with regard to transgendered students.

Could Federally run public schools work? Wikipedia suggests that this is how it is done in France: “All educational programmes in France are regulated by the Ministry of National Education (officially called Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, de la Jeunesse et de la Vie associative). … The teachers in public primary and secondary schools are all state civil servants, making the ministère the largest employer in the country. Professors and researchers in France’s universities are also employed by the state.” Obviously the French are able to do a lot of things that we can’t do, e.g., run nuclear power stations and health care without bankrupting themselves. But given the number of things that the Federales want to control when it comes to our public schools, wouldn’t it be simpler if they just took them over?

Related:

• Transgender Bathroom Solution from the Harvard Club: “Powder Room”
• Transgender Hostility in Massachusetts, the Commonwealth of Love
• How are any of the transgender-locker room laws supposed to work in practice?
• Can women be superior human beings in a transgender age?
• What does it mean for art museums to run single-gender shows in a transgender age?
• New York Times suggests that companies other than the New York Times hire transgender workers
• Rational employees will come out as gay or transgender prior to the next performance review?

Full post, including comments