Category: Uncategorized

In the department of “Why you don’t want to invest in a U.S. aviation company,” back in 2010 I wrote up a review of the Icon A5 amphibious seaplane that the company promised to ship in 2011. They made a lot of noise in July 2015 about delivering the first production unit, but have been quiet since then. This AOPA article indicates that real production won’t begin until some time later in 2016.

Back in 2010 I wrote

It is not hard to see who would want to buy a fun toy like the ICON A5, but one has to wonder who funds a company like this. Suppose that ICON sells al 500 airplanes and collects $200,000 in revenue from each customer. That’s $100 million. Suppose that two percent of those 500 aircraft are involved in fatal crashes in which a jury finds ICON liable, either for telling unlicensed pilots that they could learn how to fly an amphib in 20+ hours or for not including a gear-down-in-water warning system. That’s 10 crashes. Suppose that each crash costs $10 million. One hundred percent of the company’s revenue has thus been paid out in legal awards.

It appears that the company has been thinking along similar lines. The AOPA article describes extraordinary efforts by the company to limit its liability through 41 pages of legalese that have been sprung on formerly unaware customers. The company imposes a transfer fee on anyone who tries to sell an airplane, restricts training and maintenance options (the owner of an FAA-certified aircraft actually would end up with far more flexibility), and gives itself the right to repurchase aircraft in case an owner has the opportunity to sell one at a profit. The company has imposed a 6000-hour, 30-year airframe life, which is kind of odd considering that composite aircraft aren’t subject to metal fatigue and this plane is not pressurized, which is the typical reason for having an airframe life (e.g., the TBM has a 12,000-cycle or 16,200-hour life limit).

Here’s one comment:

I just refused the proposed contract. Asked for a refund of my deposit. I have signed nothing with Icon; yet they first refused to return all of my deposit, then agreed to refund the whole deposit in about 6 weeks IF I agreed to another lengthy document regarding my rights. I have refused to sign anything this company conjures up. We will see how long it takes them to return my money. I am extremely disappointed.

Related:

• Now that Icon has cranked up its prices, what you can buy for about the same money: Grumman G-44 Widgeon (Alaska-ready five-seat twin-engine IFR-certified amphib), available on Controller right now for $200,000 to $325,000

Full post, including comments

My Indian-American friends tell me that kids in India generally aren’t kept on a schedule and that the concept of a fixed “bedtime” doesn’t exist at all. Children may stay up as late as 11 pm or midnight at family gatherings, for example, and children left with immigrant grandparents for a weekend will not be kept on a bedtime schedule.

The U.S., on the other hand, seems to have an entire industry devoted to putting kids to bed at a specific and consistent time.

Readers: Are my friends’ experiences representative? If so, is there a practical and/or long-term effect from this lack of schedule?

Full post, including comments

Folks:

Alaska Airlines paid $2.6 billion to buy Virgin America. You might think “Well, they bought 57 high-quality Airbus-brand airplanes so of course they had to pay a lot.” Yet it seems that Virgin leases its planes (press release) and the balance sheet shows only $180 million in “Property Plant and Equipment,” which is presumably how an Airbus would be categorized.

If the U.S. had a truly competitive market for air travel, wouldn’t the value of Virgin America be a lot lower? An established company such as Alaska wouldn’t even want to bother buying a competitor but would instead just lease its own Airbus fleet from a standard source and then start operating them on whatever routes that Virgin America currently operates. Given how unions and airlines work, this should actually be a lot cheaper because Alaska would hire new pilots and flight attendants at first-year pay rather than bringing in senior union members.

Other than oligopoly rents being extracted from American consumers due to a lack of competition, how else can we explain the high value of an incumbent airline with virtually no physical assets?

Full post, including comments

How often does one see engineering as part of a TV show or movie? And how often does one see a friend of mine on TV? These exciting rare events are combined tonight at 9 pm on TBS in an episode of America’s Greatest Makers.

This is especially recommended for those who have a passion for pediatric dentistry. Also if you like magic semiconductor gyros. Finally if you have always wanted to know what a Google Project Tango toothbrush would look like.

Readers: Please let us know what you think of the show and of Anubha’s product.

Full post, including comments

“Why smart people are better off with fewer friends” is a Washington Post article summarizing research about the relative merits of city and rural life:

they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. “The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy” the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness. But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed.

“The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

Kanazawa and Li explain: “Residents of rural areas and small towns are happier than those in suburbs, who in turn are happier than those in small central cities, who in turn are happier than those in large central cities.”

There’s a twist, though, at least as Kanazawa and Li see it. Smarter people may be better equipped to deal with the new (at least from an evolutionary perspective) challenges present-day life throws at us. “More intelligent individuals, who possess higher levels of general intelligence and thus greater ability to solve evolutionarily novel problems, may face less difficulty in comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations,” they write. If you’re smarter and more able to adapt to things, you may have an easier time reconciling your evolutionary predispositions with the modern world. So living in a high-population area may have a smaller effect on your overall well-being — that’s what Kanazawa and Li found in their survey analysis. Similarly, smarter people may be better-equipped to jettison that whole hunter-gatherer social network — especially if they’re pursuing some loftier ambition.

Could it be that there is a simpler explanation? Suppose that people who are unusual in any way seek out similarly unusual folks for friendship. If you are 1 in 1000 there are 20,000 people just like you in a big Chinese city. That gives you a lot of choice of friends. If you are average, on the other hand, you can find similar friends in even the smallest community. High intelligence can be modeled like any other abnormal personal characteristic that leads to affinity in friendship.

[Confirming the cited research to some extent, in this ranking of states by happiness, the least crowded states seem to be where Americans are happiest, but some of that may be due to the fact that costs of living are typically low in uncrowded states (no matter how many immigrants we pack into the U.S., a 1/4-acre lot in Alaska (#2), Montana (#3), or Wyoming (#5) will probably still be pretty cheap). My home state of Massachusetts is ranked #30 despite having the #6 rank for income. Don’t forget to check realworlddivorce.com before moving; unless she has already sued the father of her children, a woman who agrees to move from Massachusetts to Colorado may be giving up $millions in potential profits from child support and also will give up her more-than-90-percent chance of winning sole custody.]

Full post, including comments

“Think millennials have it tough? For ‘Generation K’, life is even harsher” is a Guardian article about people age 14-21 and how bad their lives are going to be.

Let’s take this piece by piece. These folks have to share the planet with 7.125 billion others right now and perhaps 10 billion by the time that they are middle aged. It seems reasonable to assume that the average person within this generation won’t be able to consume as much of the scarce stuff, e.g., real estate, as people in previous generations. On the other hand, what if robots get good at construction? A person who is young in 2016 might be living in an incredibly swank high-rise apartment build by robots in 2050.

How about food? Produce might be lower quality due to long supply chains but there is much more variety than in the middle of the 20th century.

Transportation has been getting cheaper due to airline deregulation, especially in Europe where monopolies haven’t formed. Transportation will be a lot safer for young people because they will spend most of their lives in robot-driven cars.

How about physical security? Very few people in the 1950s had to worry about being killed or injured by Jihadis. Young people in those Western countries that have welcomed Muslim immigrants face a rapidly growing risk of being killed (“Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been over a nine-fold increase in the number of deaths from terrorism, rising from 3,329 in 2000 to 32,685 in 2014.” — Global Terrorism Index) and the certainty of wasting a huge amount of time and money in security-related processes. Perhaps it will become impractical, except in Asia, to operate public transit and host in-person sporting events during the lifetimes of today’s young adults. On the other hand, street crime is down from its 1960s and 1970s levels. (The woman who walked around New York for 10 hours and accumulated two minutes of interesting video footage would probably have been a crime victim if she had done that during my teenage years.)

What about economics? The world is getting richer at roughly a 3.5 percent rate (IMF) while the population grows at only 1.1 percent per year (Wikipedia). Thus on average young people today should become much richer than 20th Century global citizens. [Why do we think that they are worse off? When Carrier closes a factory in the U.S. and opens one in Mexico, the headline is “2100 Americans lose jobs” not “2100 Mexicans gain jobs” (example: World Socialist Web Site).] Although young people worldwide may be better off, on average, young people in developed countries are saddled with massive debt obligations undertaken on their behalf by politicians of the 20th and early 21st Century. Absent spectacular economic growth, young people in previously rich countries will pay breathtaking amounts of tax to fund health care and pensions for former public employees who retired before today’s 14-21-year-old was born.]

In developed countries there are a lot of ways for people to earn money that didn’t exist 50 years ago. An able-bodied man, for example, couldn’t have collected welfare in 1960. Today he can get cash from SSDI, a free house from a public housing authority, food stamps, free health care, etc. He couldn’t have targeted a high-income woman for marriage-then-alimony back in 1960, but today he can. An American woman can have sex with a low-income man and, nine months later, get on the fast-track to public housing and a wide range of other benefits (see The Redistribution Recession for the enthusiasm with which young American women have responded to these incentives). An American woman can have sex with a high-income man (or series of men) and, ever since around 1990, be entitled to tax-free child support that exceeds median household income (see Real World Divorce for the eagerness with which American women have responded to these incentives). [Note that this doesn’t work in most Civil Law countries such as Germany; a woman who had sex with the richest man in Germany would earn only $6,000 per year unless she could relocate to the U.S. and obtain the jurisdiction of a U.S. court. So, as with the overall economic growth situation, it is important to look at country-by-country variations.] Americans who prefer a W-2 job but don’t want to exert themselves have a much wider range of government jobs available with much higher compensation than formerly (CATO).

People express alarm regarding the rise of the robots. But what if robots are 100X more productive than humans? If there is even a small tax on the wealth created by robots, e.g., through conventional income or consumption taxes on humans or companies that own robots, wouldn’t that then serve to completely replace current government revenue? And with a little more growth in robot production, wouldn’t a low tax rate on that production also quickly exceed all current human pre-tax income? How can people be worse off if they live in a world where a robot is always ready to build them a house, cook them dinner, etc.?

How about entertainment? A smartphone or tablet allows 24/7 entertainment at a low cost. That was unavailable at any price in most of the 20th Century. On the other hand, perhaps people socialized more and were happier on balance? And with a higher population density the average person will be less happy (example research summary).

Being healthy is better than being unhealthy. Young people have access to a lot of medical procedures and drugs that weren’t available to previous generations. Many of these seem to be harmful and/or not worth the cost (especially when you consider what else people could do with 18% of their gross paychecks). But on the other hand if you would have been dead in the old days and are alive now it is hard to see how you can be worse off. (Though actually, if you believe American juries, Hulk Hogan and Erin Andrews are worse off than dead people because, compared to the survivors of people who were killed, they were awarded more money in actual (not counting punitive) damages from publication of a sex video (Hogan) and a nude video (Andrews).)

Being educated is better than being uneducated. It was trivial for people in my generation to get into colleges that are today regarded as prestigious (MIT had a roughly 50 percent acceptance rate when I applied in 1978! Beyond perhaps picking up a sample test book for $10, nobody bothered studying for the SAT). The K-12 education system hadn’t yet been reconfigured as a welfare program for employees. On the other hand, if you wanted a college degree you had to take four years off to get it. There was no Western Governors University.

Readers: What do you think? Should we feel sorry for these 14-21-year-olds who will have to pay through the nose for our Social Security, Medicare, public employee pension obligations, etc.? Or feel envious because they will have robots doing all of their work for them?

Full post, including comments

Boston has a lot of historical and natural advantages, e.g., all of the colleges and universities that set up shop over the past 375+ years. This study, however, ranks us 56/78 in terms of public spending efficiency. Typically I would question a study such as this, but Washington, D.C. ranks dead last, which squares with common sense and direct personal experience. California cities buried under pension debt also rank pretty low, which makes sense due to the fact that they’ll soon be spending most of their budget on paying former employees. The authors of the study try to adjust for how challenging it is to run a public school:

To control for major cross-city differences in economic status among cities, we adjusted education spending levels by two key economic factors: poverty rate and median household income. Moreover, given that education spending is further affected by the percentage of children in single-parent families and the percentage of households that do not speak English as their first language, we adjusted expenditures on these two measures as well.

[Note that a Massachusetts resident who sets up what the authors describe as a “single-parent family” by having sex with a dermatologist, dentist, or other higher-income resident or visitor should be able to get $1-3 million tax-free under the Massachusetts child support guidelines and may have wage income on top of child support profits. So a “single-parent family” may well have a spending power that is above the median household income for the state, unlike in some other states where child support revenue is capped (e.g., Minnesota). Thus the authors might need to work with finer-grained data to sort out children with just one parent on food stamps from children with just one parent in a Beacon Hill townhouse next to John Kerry‘s. On the third hand, due to the higher financial stakes and winner-take-all outcomes, Massachusetts has much more intensive custody, and child support litigation than other states, which tends to result in children who are psychologically damaged and harder to educate even if the winner parent becomes fairly rich.]

And also for how tough it is to keep citizens from attacking each other:

To control for major cross-city differences in the economic status of cities, we adjusted police-spending levels by three key economic factors: poverty rate, unemployment rate and median household income. The adjusted “Per-Capita Police Spending” measure assumes all cities have an average for each of the three factors. This allowed us to compare return on investment (ROI) of police spending net of cross-city differences in these key economic indicators.

Under some of these adjustments Boston’s economic success, most of which is probably accounted for by stuff that happened 100+ years ago, works against us.

The same folks ranked Boston 52/65 in 2015’s Best & Worst Run Cities.

Readers: Based on your experience in other cities that are featured in the study, what do you think?

Related:

• Despite high levels of income and wealth, Massachusetts ranks 30/50 for happiness.
• “Why Have Democrats Failed in the State Where They’re Most Likely to Succeed?” (The Nation), describes Boston as ” the spiritual homeland of the professional class and a place where the ideology of modern liberalism has been permitted to grow and flourish without challenge or restraint” and then notes that Massachusetts “has the eighth-worst rate of income inequality among the states; by another metric it ranks fourth.”
• Now I get to pay some of GE’s bills (Massachusetts and Boston taxpayers fund GE’s new urban lifestyle)

Full post, including comments

Opponents of Donald Trump suggest that his supporters are motivated by racism, e.g., Trump’s proposal to favor non-Muslim immigrants and to attempt to restrict illegal immigration.

Why couldn’t Trump supporters be motivated instead by a desire to see a President who wasn’t looking to cash in on the back-end?

Let’s consider the Clintons. They presided over an immensely powerful government whose actions benefited some private citizens and corporations more than others (see the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, for example). It seems that some private citizens and corporations have seen fit to give the Clintons more than $100 million in speaking fees in the years since they left public office.

How about Barack Obama? Over the years, Obamacare should add literally hundreds of billions of dollars to the revenue of insurance companies and health care providers (for what other industry is it illegal for a consumer to decline to purchase the product?). Following his departure from office, could Obama make hundreds of millions of dollars giving talks to medical associations, hospital executives, and insurance companies? If so, doesn’t that function as a payoff for services rendered?

A vote for Trump may be many things but why can’t it be a vote to shut this system down? Though he seems to have inflated his wealth to some extent he is unarguably at least a moderately rich bastard. Thus a typical voter might hope that he wouldn’t want to sell out his fellow citizens in order to benefit a corporate or individual from whom he in turns hopes to get cash post-Presidency.

Full post, including comments

At least in Syria, the Russians were able to show up to a conflict zone, achieve their desired military results, and pack up and leave. We Americans, on the other hand, seem to spend 10+ years in places without even figuring out what our goals might be. “The Bidding War” is a March 7, 2016 New Yorker article that sheds some light on the subject:

America’s war in Afghanistan, which is now in its fifteenth year, presents a mystery: how could so much money, power, and good will have achieved so little? Congress has appropriated almost eight hundred billion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan; a hundred and thirteen billion has gone to reconstruction, more than was spent on the Marshall Plan, in postwar Europe.

One result has been forms of corruption so extreme that the military has, in some cases, funded its own enemy. When a House committee investigated the trucking system that supplied American forces, it found that the system had “fueled a vast protection racket run by a shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.” Its report concluded that “protection payments for safe passage are a significant potential source of funding for the Taliban.”

The system has also made a few individuals very rich. Hikmatullah Shadman, an Afghan trucking-company owner [in his late 20s], earned more than a hundred and sixty million dollars while contracting for the United States military;

Related:

• Who finances the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? We do. (a 2009 posting where I asked “Who has been financing these guys for eight years? What if the answer is ‘us’?”)

Full post, including comments

My #1 reason to carry a phone is to have access to emails and atttachments, #2 is to make phone calls, and #3 is to take pictures. Thus last Wednesday I decided to switch from an iPhone 6 Plus, which has a good-for-a-smartphone camera, to a Samsung Galaxy S7, which supposedly has a great-for-a-smartphone camera (DxOMark; my results so far).

Samsung disfigures the Android operating system to some extent, but not quite as ruinously as on my old Note 3. The Contacts manager by default seems to sync only with those contacts for which Google has a phone number. (See this posting for how it used to work and especially the link to this demo video.) Samsung cannot seem to leave alone the list of roughly 100,000 people with whom I have ever corresponded by email. If I type “Just” on the keyboard in the Memo app, for example, or anywhere else that the Samsung keyboard is in use, the keyboard offers me a completion option of an email address that starts with “Justin.” This is extremely annoying and there does not seem to be a way of disabling the brain-damaged idea of suggesting random email addresses while leaving the reasonable idea of suggesting English words. Nor does the “dictate with Google voice recognition” icon show up on the Samsung keyboard. Fortunately this can be fixed by downloading and installing the Google keyboard, which has a configurable “suggest contact names” option that is much more reasonable (names of actual contacts, not 100,000 once-contacted email addresses).

The physical design of the device is sort of attractive. Unfortunately, the last time that you will see the device as designed is in the Verizon store. Presumably there are some dexterous folks over in Korea who can use this device in its naked state. If you’re a stupid white man with fat clumsy fingers, however, the bezel of the phone is so thin that the fingers you’re using to grip the phone are perceived as touching the glass, thus rendering the interface unusable. I wrapped the phone in a Tech 21 case partly for protection but mostly so that holding the phone didn’t put in commands. The Samsung Edge is presumably even more of a user interface disaster and the Verizon store employees did not recommend it. The “edge” control is smart up against the on/off button so you’d have to be truly nimble to use it as designed. Plainly the Edge idea can’t work if the phone is wrapped in a truly protective case.

At night it is nice that the phone shows the time, date, and battery charge level continuously on a portion of the OLED screen. The OLED screen is beautiful, but at the default brightness setting of “max brightness” the battery life seems inferior to the iPhone’s. You’ll want a car charger and an office charger! So far I am not missing the larger, but lower-resolution, screen of the iPhone 6 Plus, even when using the Kindle app to read books. (The S7 screen specs are “1440 x 2560 pixels (~577 ppi pixel density)” compared to “1080 x 1920 pixels (~401 ppi pixel density)” on the iPhone 6 Plus according to gsmarena.com.)

The home button is not recessed, unlike the iPhone’s. This led to a lot of inadvertent “device on” time with my Note 3. Instead of fixing the physical design, Samsung has added complexity to the interface with a buried-under-display-and-wallpaper setting called “Keep screen turned off” that says “Prevent the screen from turning on accidentally while the phone is in a dark place such as a pocket or bag.” The home button, if double-tapped, does instantly get to the camera app, even if the phone is otherwise locked. This is easier and quicker than the swipe access on iOS.

The waterproof nature of the device is game-changing if you ever get near swimming pools and/or have kids. You can take a picture while standing in a pool. You can receive a phone call while lying on a pool float. You don’t have to be fearful that a child will knock the phone into water.

The device is easier to use as a flashlight than is an iPhone. You can allocate one of the “quick swipe” buttons to the flashlight on/off button. The device is also easier to use to check the weather. Instead of having to touch the “weather” icon to see the current outside air temperature, it appears in the upper right corner of the home screen, along with a sun/cloud/rain icon. The home screen also lets you say “Ok, Google” and start asking for assistance. It seems to work a lot better than Siri. Samsung Pay supposedly works a lot better than Apple Pay or Android Pay (comparison), but curiously was not included with the phone in the box. Supposedly the Samsung Pay system doesn’t require that the merchant have any special hardware. It simulates the magnetic strip on a physical credit card. It took about two minutes to set up with a Chase Visa card and then worked at Walgreens. The fingerprint reader works better than the one on the iPhone.

Speaking of electromagnetic magic… being able to charge the phone at night by placing it on a little stand is great! (Unfortunately you have to pay $70 extra for the Samsung wireless charger, though it does hold the phone at a good angle for checking the time from almost anywhere in a room.)

If you hate to check voicemail you’ll be pleased to see that the Phone app and the Voicemail app are almost completely separate. If the phone actually did see a call so that it shows up in “Recent” and there was a voicemail message left there will be a subtle tape recorder icon that appears (what do those two reels mean to a Millennial? Why not an icon of a Poulsen wire recorder?).

Samsung’s health tracking app seems to have become less user-friendly compared to what came installed on the Note 3. However, it is still better than Apple’s pathetic effort. You can enter your weight on various days (and/or have a compatible scale push them into the phone) and also a weight goal, but it doesn’t offer the option of the Steve Ward diet.

What about the camera? So far it does seem to be almost as great as everyone says. It is responsive, the autofocus is accurate and fast, and the indoor image quality is far better than the iPhone 6 Plus’s. It is easier to adjust settings than with Apple’s software, though personally I think that the camera on a phone should do the job in Auto mode 99.9% of the time. The camera position on the back of the phone seems more prone to capturing the owner’s fingers than did the iPhone’s camera. Results so far are on Google Photos (which has no ability to caption images; one can type a description but it is deeply buried; I wonder if the team that built Gmail contacts has moved on to the Photos group…).

I’m living with Android right now rather than loving it. iOS has grown in complexity but remains simpler than Android or at least Android+Samsung. The Galaxy S7 seems to have much faster and more powerful hardware than did the iPhone 6 Plus so most stuff happens nearly instantly. On the other hand, oftentimes it is stuff that I didn’t want to happen. On the third hand, there does seem to be an amazing world of capability available to those who have the patience to learn all of the extra features and settings. (Example: if you turn on “Send SOS messages” and press the power key three times it will send a message, including pictures or an audio recording if desired, to emergency contacts.) The device does have an “Easy Mode” that hides most of the complexity. I hadn’t expected to be ready for “Easy Mode” at my current age but I am tempted…

Summary: The whole is slightly less than the sum of the parts, but the sum of the parts is vastly greater than what you can get from Apple right now. Samsung needs to rethink its user interface testing procedures so that testing is accomplished with real Google accounts (e.g., ones that do have 10,000+ email-only “contacts”). Samsung should probably kill more than half of its projects that modify stock Android. Perhaps they need to hire Marie Kondo for a corporate kumbaya session where people can ask if there is anyone on Planet Earth for whom an individual OS tweak could conceivably spark joy.

[Anyone have a good idea for what to do with my old iPhone 6 Plus? It is a 64 GB Verizon version that I don’t think it is locked. I paid $900 for it about nine months ago, supposedly unlocked at a BestBuy, and then activated it on the Verizon network. gazelle.com says that it is now worth $255. Can it be used on a network other than Verizon’s?]

Wishlist:

• I can buy a nearly indestructible $20 flashlight with a rubberized exterior. Why can’t Samsung repackage this phone so that it comes from the factory essentially with the same physical dimensions and feel as the current phone in the Tech 21 case?
• The camera should be twice as thick to accommodate (a) an all-day battery, and (b) a larger camera sensor and lens

Full post, including comments