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I was chatting with an NYU professor. She recently taught a class at the university’s Abu Dhabi campus. I asked her what the students were like and she said that only four were Emiratis and “they were all girls; Emirati boys can’t be bothered since they know that they will never have to work.” It turned out that young people from all around the world competed for all-expenses paid slots at this college and the vast majority turned out to be foreigners.

As someone who hates to see money poured down the administrative drain I have long been a fan of UBI-style ideas (see my 1996 food-and-shelter idea, for example). But I’m wondering if experience in the Middle East should be studied before we go too far down this road. A lot of oil-rich Arab countries offer the basics of life to all of their citizens. U.S. and European taxpayers have been providing food, shelter, healthcare, and education to Palestinians since 1950 through a UN agency. The result seems to be low participation in employment (but maybe we will match them soon!) and a high birthrate: Qatar has the 6th highest population growth rate on the planet (CIA Factbook); the Gaza Strip is not too far behind at #13 (CIA Factbook).

Tel Aviv cab driver on the subject: “I told my kids that the only place ‘Success’ comes before ‘Hard Work’ is in the dictionary.” (works better in Hebrew, presumably; he had worked at a desk job for 36 years before retiring from that to drive a cab)

Related:

• Technology Review on UBI
• Why do robot alarmists and universal basic income advocates support expanding immigration?
• Wall Street Journal hires crackhead to analyze the economics of universal basic income?

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A friend of a friend is running for Congress in a district outside of Massachusetts. One big element of her campaign is that rich people and rich corporations should not have a large influence on American politics. She came to Boston to raise money at a private party in a 6,000 square-foot house that Zillow says is worth $3.5 million. Elizabeth Warren spoke in support of this candidate noting that she shared the goal of wanting every citizen to have equal power and not having politicians controlled by distant rich supporters. Neither politician addressed the apparent contradiction of coming to a different state to raise money from rich people whose interests may or may not align with those of the prospective Representative’s actual constituents.

The two women agreed on a range of issues. The state politician that they hate the most is some guy who “voted against equal pay” multiple times (this was in the state where the Congressional race is happening, not in Massachusetts). Free trade agreements are bad. President Obama is a godlike figure in most respects, but his support of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is misguided. Previous trade agreements should be reevaluated and potentially repudiated. (Nobody explained how this was different from Donald Trump’s campaign promises.) One thing that was especially bad about the TPP is that some aspects of U.S. sovereignty would be compromised and handed over to a transnational bureaucracy (“offshoring of power”). (Nobody explained how opposing this was consistent with telling the Brits to stay in the EU.) In the opinion of these female politicians, what is key to their support is that voters care passionately about women’s rights, especially the right to an on-demand abortion without any conditions.

The audience applauded loudest for the following propositions: (1) breaking up big banks, and (2) protectionism.

There were a lot of lawyers present and they got Elizabeth Warren on the subject of approving Obama’s federal judge nominations. Warren riffed on the subject of how federal courts are super friendly to big corporations (this will come as news to Fortune 500 companies facing patent infringement lawsuits in Texas).

The candidates and the audience agreed that Black Lives Matter though as it happened the gathering did not include any black people.

Stylistically it was possible to see how a novice politician becomes a professional. Elizabeth Warren used the word “fight” in nearly every sentence; her young protégé used the word “fight” only about one third as much.

Private audience reaction to the talk was less enthusiastic than the public reaction. An attorney specializing in Asian-U.S. deals noted that the TPP would have little effect due to existing bilateral agreements already incorporating most of its provisions. He said that Senator Warren greatly overestimated American economic power. “It’s not 1945 anymore,” he said. “Singapore and Hong Kong are richer than we are; Taiwan and Korea will surpass us soon.”

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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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