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What if you own (or lease) an electric car and can’t charge it at home? This Technology Review article describes what it is like.

I charge my car in public parks and mall parking structures around Los Angeles, using a diversity of charging networks run by startups such as Chargepoint and Blink. I typically pay $5 to $10 to charge up. Every single station has been, for years, mediocre to terrible. The stations are often broken due to software or hardware problems, and remain out of service for weeks. Competition among electric car drivers for these public charging stations is fierce and intensifying. It’s practically impossible for me to find an open charging station during the day.

Even so, I see Teslas parked alongside Nissan Leafs, Chevy Volts, electric Ford Fusions, and electric Fiats like mine every time I visit my local public charge stations in Los Angeles (about every other day). I’ll often end up helping a confused and harried Tesla driver operate the charger. If I mention the free supercharger stations available only to them, they usually seem vaguely aware of them, but either don’t have enough charge left to reach one or can’t be bothered to drive out of their way.

Related:

• How to get a free car: lease an electric car (but sadly, not a Tesla)
• Smug, Rich Bastard for a Weekend (Tesla X review)

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Top executives in Silicon Valley often have a huge cushion due to a monopoly position and high costs to customers to switch. John Chambers, who built modern-day Cisco, is an exception. While Cisco has a great brand name it has to fight for every sale given that, by definition, its boxes must be able to communicate with all of the rest of the world’s routers and switches.

What does someone like this think of our upcoming presidential election? The MIT alumni magazine, Technology Review, asked him:

Between Trump and Clinton, who has the better technology policies?

If you’re asking, “How do you give middle-class America a pay raise? How do you create opportunities? How do you make the country more competitive on a global basis in a way that allows everybody to benefit? How do you change health care and education?”—well, those questions are all about a digital agenda, and yet I’ve not heard a single candidate articulate a vision on that.

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Folks:

I leave today for Paris. Would any French readers like to get together on Saturday morning, July 23? Or perhaps on Thursday or Friday of this week? If so, please email me (philg@mit.edu). Happy to chat about any of the subjects that I’ve written about, e.g., technology, travel, photography, and economics.

Mom and I are going to be on a Royal Caribbean cruise. I should be available to meet up at the following times:

• July 26, 4 pm: Helsinki
• July 30, 1 pm: Talinn
• July 31: 3 pm: Riga
• August 1: any time 11-6, Klaipeda (Lithuania)
• August 3, morning or evening: Rostock (Germany)
• August 4: 10a-4p, Fredericia (Denmark)
• August 5-6, flexible: Copenhagen

Thanks in advance for making the effort!

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I met a suburban elementary school teacher at our local airport. She has just finished her second year and is brimming with enthusiasm for the job. “Could you do nothing and still get paid the same?” I asked. She said “Pretty much.” I asked if there were any burned out older teachers in her school who did as little as possible. “Most of them,” she said.

Related:

• The public schoolteacher on incentives to work hard

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I was about to throw my Windows 10 laptop into a bag for a trip when I reflected that I hadn’t used the machine for about 10 days. So I fired it up and watched it spend about 2 hours syncing Dropbox (via LAN sync from a desktop machine on the same network; I had a few GB of new photographs and expert witness materials). Twelve hours later I decided to look at “Check for Updates” to make sure that Windows had taken care of itself. In fact there were still about six updates to be downloaded installed and the machine wasn’t scheduled to deal with them until the next morning at 3:00 am. So I told the machine to “install now” and then “restart now”. Part of the sluggishness may be that this 2012 machine has a mechanical hard drive (I wanted to upgrade to a Lenovo X1 Yoga, but they couldn’t ship an OLED version in time for this last summer trip so what is the point?).

I’m wondering if we’re at the end of an era where the Internet isn’t fast or ubiquitous enough to do everything in the cloud but we aren’t tied to our continuously connected desktops. Thus we become sysadmin slaves to our laptops (unless the laptop is our primary computer).

Related:

• My 2005 plea for turning the mobile phone into the desktop computer via a dock (the iPhone was introduced two years later, in 2007, so if this were actually a good idea one would think that it would have been done at some point in the last 8 years)

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At lunch today friends were discussing Donald Trump’s uninspiring choice of yet another older white guy as running mate. I said “He should have chosen Michelle Rhee.” What do folks think? She’s 10 years younger than Pence. She is not a man. She is not white. She has experience as a teacher and as an education bureaucrat. Of all of the things that the government does, running schools is near the top of the list of stuff that matters to a large bloc of voters (i.e., those with children and grandchildren in K-12). I would still be pessimistic about Trump’s chances but at least with Rhee as a running mate he would not put potential voters to sleep.

Readers: What do you think? Could Michelle Rhee have given Trump a bigger boost than Pence?

Related:

• “Can two old white guys win a U.S. Presidential election?”

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Folks:

Friends of mine in Massachusetts have been installing rooftop solar. Apparently there are some government handouts that expire at the end of 2016 that make it much more attractive to do now.

I’m wondering if the payback periods are not correctly calculated for a homeowner who is using savings that would otherwise be invested in stocks and bonds. Suppose that a solar array costs $50,000. Had that money been invested in stocks and bonds it might have yielded 2 percent or $1,000 per year. This $1,000 of income will be subject to a tax rate of anywhere from 25-40 percent, however, depending on city and state. The energy generated by the solar array and used within the home, however, is not taxed as income (but maybe if you end up selling it all back to the power company they will issue a 1099 and then you fill out a Schedule C for your power generating business?). Thus electricity for the person who buys a solar array goes from being paid for with post-tax money to being paid for with pre-tax money, no?

This perspective could be entirely wrong, though, if we bring in property tax. What if there is a 2 percent property tax on the extra $50,000 in home value? It seems that at least in some states there are specific exemptions preventing towns from raising assessments due to solar energy systems (e.g., Massachusetts).

What do readers think? Is now the time to do rooftop solar? On the one hand the government has set things up so that people who live in crummy apartments have to work longer hours to buy solar panels for rich homeowners. On the other hand, if one waits a few years the technology will presumably improve. I don’t like the idea of buying anything for the house unless it is sufficiently common to be found at Home Depot.

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The deCordova museum and sculpture park in Lincoln, Massachusetts (suburb of Boston) has two shows that photographers (and allies) won’t want to miss. Both close on September 18, 2016.

The first show includes portraits by Lotte Jacobi and Lisette Model. There are some powerful images that will inspire you not to throw out the slightly out-of-focus pictures that nonetheless capture a subject’s mood perfectly. The second is “Overgrowth,” which includes a lot of photography of tangled vegetation.

Go on a nice day for walking as the sculpture park and grounds are worthwhile.

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Donald Trump has apparently picked a boring old white guy as his running mate (nytimes). It is tough to believe that more than a handful of voters will be motivated even to research Mike Pence’s biography (and if they did they would learn that Pence was yet another lawyer-turned-politician).

More than a year ago I wrote a post about how it seemed impossible for any Republican to win the Presidential race. Donald Trump is not exactly a standard Republican, e.g., he promises various forms of protectionism so that American workers will enjoy a higher income without working harder or developing better skills. However, he is an older white guy, a concept previously rejected by American voters.

Does this choice of VP doom whatever chances Trump might have had? Could he not have found a 40-year-old non-white female running mate? (Though of course we must always recognize the possibility that a running mate identifying as “female” in July could identify as “male” by October or November…)

Readers: Are you shocked by this choice? Does it not seem that Trump could have enhanced his chances with a non-white female?

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It’s summer so one of my usual dog-walking companions sometimes brings one of her three children along. On a recent day it was the 15-year-old daughter, a girl who has been carefully sheltered within a two-parent home or at a private school. The topic of her future career came up. The girl volunteered “Everyone knows that if you want to make money you marry and divorce a rich guy. That’s why my parents sent me to a school full of rich boys with low self-esteem. All that they need is an understanding wife. Then, oops, divorce after six months.” From whom had she learned this? “A bunch of the moms at our school made their money this way,” she responded. “[friend’s name]’s mom did it three times. And [other friend’s name]’s mom made money by having a baby without being married.”

After a little more conversation, we established that she overestimated the likely profit from a very short-term marriage and underestimated the profits from having children out of wedlock (Massachusetts offers unlimited child support revenue following a one-night encounter with a high-income resident or visitor). This was consistent with the survey of adults that we did in Harvard Square.

The inter-generational aspects are kind of interesting. The teenager’s mom is a fully trained attorney. The dad is an MBA who works in the financial services industry. They entered the workforce before the 1990s child support guidelines made it straightforward to calculate the potential profits from having children. The daughter is intelligent and healthy and will be the repository of more than $500,000 in education (K-12 plus college). Yet she recognizes that, compared to working with her college degree at a W-2 job, under today’s U.S. family law system, she can expect to earn far more cash through a thoughtful use of her body and her children.

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