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I was enthusiastic about buying a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. My 1993 prediction of the death of Microsoft Office, in favor of collaborative browser-based apps, has stubbornly failed to come true. The Surface seems like a good travel companion. I can look at documents that are stored in DropBox and edit them with Office and then email them off to patent litigators (where my carefully crafted prose will ultimately be shredded 🙁 ). My DropBox plan is 1 TB. This seems to hold my current expert witness work plus a year of photos and videos (the rest to be archived on a 6 TB mechanical hard drive on my desktop computer, then backed up via CrashPlan).

One would think that the 1 TB of SSD is the most expensive requirement, with a Crucial driveretailing for $315 (though perhaps Microsoft pays less as a wholesale customer?). How much does the $315 of SSD pump up the price of a $900 Surface Pro 4? It is available only with a Core i7 CPU, which I don’t need, and 16 GB of RAM ($80 at retail?), which I do need, for a total of… $2,700 (to add insult to injury, it is not even available for pre-order in this configuration). This is more than I paid for my monster desktop computer, which includes a 1 TB SDD, a 6 TB mechanical hard drive, and 32 GB of RAM.

Who loves the Surface and wants to tell me that it is worth $2,700? And how is that keyboard? Could one type out the Great American Novel on it?

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The best answer for “how risky is that?” is generally “how much would it cost to insure against that?” Now Zurich, the Swiss insurance company founded in 1872, is saying that the cost of securing the Internet will exceed the benefits of connectivity by 2019: report.

Related:

• unemployed = 21st century draft horse?

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TIME magazine recently ran “Polygamy Is Natural For Some People,” an essay advocating that polygamous marriages be recognized in the U.S.:

As far as my second wife and I are concerned, we’re married. But changing the law would afford her legal recognition and protection.

Legalizing polygamy actually empowers women. … If such relationships were legally binding, all spouses would be protected and have an equitable stake in the common property.

… Currently, some polygamists abuse the system by putting their additional wives on welfare. States only recognize one spouse in marriage, therefore making “single mothers” out of subsequent wives. Legalizing polygamy would also help neutralize some of the social stigma. People tend to confuse legality with morality. Same-sex marriage was illegal in many states until this summer. Interracial marriage used to be illegal. The laws only changed because people stepped forward.

Monogamy is natural to many. Polygamy is just more natural to us, and I’m fighting for our rights as a family.

Readers: Have you seen other examples of mainstream publications running advocacy pieces for polygamy?

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I strolled down to the MIT Sailing Pavilion to get a few late afternoon photos and discovered that MIT now requires students to wear helmets:

 

(wind at nearby Logan airport was reported at 6 knots)

Separately, what about the Hovding airbag helmet for bicycling? Annoying to have to charge it every 10 hours but it seems like a better idea than conventional bike helmets.

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Some of my women friends on Facebook have been promoting “Michelle Obama Dropped Some Wisdom Every Young Girl Should Hear,” a story in which America’s First Lady gives the following advice:

If I had worried about who liked me and who thought I was cute when I was your age, I wouldn’t be married to the president of the United States today.

Is there a way to read this other than “Getting an education was primarily important because it enabled me to marry a richer and more powerful husband”? And, if not, why are women who style themselves as feminists (a version of feminism that is rather evolved from the 1970s “equality feminism” because many of those who liked this on Facebook have themselves chosen to marry high-income men and withdraw from the workforce) enthusiastic about this statement?

Related:

• section on modern ways to interpret “feminism” in our Rationale chapter

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Here’s an obituary from my suburb’s local newspaper: Peggy Schmertzler. I think that, in one life, it shows the fragmentation of family that has occurred in the U.S. due to a variety of technical and social forces.

The subject was born in 1931 and grew up in Baltimore. She moved to Boston to attend college and settled in a suburb with her lawyer-husband, thus severing her daily ties with her parents and any extended family in Baltimore.

Following a divorce lawsuit (the obit doesn’t say who sued whom, but statistically it is generally the woman who decides to sue (some Massachusetts data)), she moved to Cambridge, thus severing her daily ties with her husband and, presumably, former neighbors.

Her children then scattered to New Zealand, California, and a Boston suburb, thus severing their daily ties to each other and, for the non-Boston-area kids, eliminating the possibility of grandchildren having daily ties with this grandmother.

I’ve written before about how I think one reason that Mexicans might be happier than Americans, adjusted for income, is the central nature of Mexico. People either stay in their hometowns or move to Mexico City, but they don’t generally keep moving after that.

[Separately, the obituary shows how well-educated Americans are pulled into low-productivity-growth non-profit activities. Ms. Schmertzler “worked for the next 15 years in the nonprofit sector” and put 26 years of effort and time into “the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard.” (The GDP per capita of China grew from less than $2,000 per person to more than $8,000 per person during the same time period.)]

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“More grads choose industry over PhDs: Survey data reveal decade-long trend away from graduate school” is a story from MIT’s student newspaper.

I ran into a faculty member who is doing research for the federal government on where to fund PhDs. “We didn’t used to have postdocs in engineering,” he said. “But now MIT has more than one postdoc per faculty member. There are nowhere near enough assistant professorships for all of the PhDs that we are generating. So we’re exploiting them by paying them $50,000 per year.” (Paying a market-clearing wage is apparently now generally accepted as “exploitation.”)

Related:

• Women in science

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“U.S. Will Accept More Refugees as Crisis Grows” (nytimes) says ” The Obama administration will increase the number of worldwide refugees the United States accepts each year to 100,000 by 2017.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a decline in the labor force participation rate from 66 percent in 2009 to 62.5 percent today (chart). In other words, every year a smaller percentage of adult Americans are working.

Minimum wages are rising all over the country.

There are a variety of legal attacks on hiring people as contractors (potentially working out to below minimum wage) rather than as W-2 employees.

What will immigrants who are not selected for English fluency, education, job skills, or youth do once they arrive? If they are legal immigrants, especially if they have children, they will presumably eventually be eligible for the full range of welfare benefits, e.g., a taxpayer-funded house, taxpayer-funded health care, taxpayer-funded food, etc. According to this page, immigrants both legal and illegal collected welfare at a 57-percent rate back in 2009 (compared to 39 percent for native-born households with children; soon the majority of us will be dependents of the Great Father in Washington!). The same page, however, says that 95 percent of immigrant households in 2009 had at least one worker.

The U.S. has been successful at absorbing immigrants, but our largest waves of immigration (as a percentage of the population) were before the 1938 introduction of a minimum wage and many decades before we built a comprehensive welfare state (e.g., Medicaid was created in 1965).

What do readers think? Where will these new Americans fit into the labor force? Who will want to pay them $15/hour plus benefits?

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Atlantic magazine’s October 2015 issue carries “Are Bosses Necessary?” One of America’s more useful business school professors is quoted:

What’s enabling this shift [to Zappos-style holacracy], argues Thomas Malone, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, is simple: falling information costs. In his 2004 book, The Future of Work, Malone broke the history of organizations into three stages. In stage one, information is expensive to convey, so most decisions are made face-to-face in necessarily small firms. As communication costs begin to fall, Malone explained to me, we reach stage two, in which “it becomes economically feasible to send information to a single, central place for decisions to be made.” That is, the large, centralized hierarchy becomes possible. Then comes stage three: “As communication costs continue to fall, there comes a time when it’s economically feasible to bring information to all points, so in some sense, everyone can know everything.” In this third stage, the benefits of bigness can persist, but its traditional handmaiden, hierarchy, doesn’t have to. (Indeed, when the volume of information grows large enough, trying to direct its flow upward for evaluation can slow everything down.)

[See Malone’s “Semi-Structured Messages” paper from 1986.]

I want to push one of my old ideas… combine Edward Tufte’s sparklines (see explanation in this 2006 posting) with a 1200 dpi 11×17 color laserprinter. Take every number that matters to an organization and print it out every day on an 11×17 sheet of paper that is given to every employee. For a web site it might be “new registrations yesterday” printed in green if it went up from the moving average of the previous week, printed in red if it went down. Next to the number would be a Tufte sparkline to put the number into context. The next line down could be “500 Server Errors,” followed by “Average pages per session,” etc.

What do readers who work in companies with at least 50 employees think? Would it be helpful to arrive at work and find an 11×17 sheet of paper across your keyboard with perhaps 150 metrics of the company’s performance?

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I recently attended a deposition of an expert witness in a patent lawsuit. The depo was in a pleasant Southern university town where the median price of a detached house is $250,000.

In addition to be transcribed by an in-person court reporter, the deposition was being videotaped. I learned that the videographer’s fee was $200 for the first hour and $100 for each subsequent hour. A federal court deposition is typically 7 hours on the record and about 10 hours of total time including breaks. Thus the videography fee would be $1,100 for the day.

This is a job that requires no specific education (and certainly not a college degree). The videographer was using the following capital equipment:

• Sony MiniDV (tape!) camcorder (since nobody will ever look at this stuff, it is good if it goes straight to an inexpensive yet durable medium that can be tossed into a file cabinet and forgotten); about $225 for a “prosumer” model on eBay right now
• box of MiniDV tapes ($2 each; good for 1.5 hours)
• RadioShack four-channel mixer
• three lav mics plus cables
• RCA-to-stereo-1/8″ cord
• Manfrotto tripod
• pop-out background
• stereo headphones for monitoring the audio

I inquired and learned that, unlike a wedding photographer, the guy did not bring a backup camera to the job. If the camera had failed he said that he would “go to a store and buy a new camera.” Thus the total cost to get into this business would be under $1,000.

The actual work done by this videographer occupied about 1.5 hours during the 10-hour period. He had to set the camera on the tripod, mic up two lawyers and the witness, test and set levels on the mixer, change tapes four times, occasionally make an announcement, and pack up the gear. We were blessed with 50 Mbps symmetric WiFi in the hotel conference room (part of the university). He had brought a tablet computer and keyboard and was surfing the Web for the remaining 8.5 hours (while monitoring audio quality through the headphones and occasionally glancing at the video monitor on the camcorder).

The downside of the work is that it can be tough to be a solo practitioner. “Lawyers are lazy so they just want to be able to call one number and have someone show up,” said an attorney. “Maybe you could do it in a big city or Silicon Valley.” Thus it is typical for a middleman(woman) to take a cut. On the other hand, if the other side wants a copy of the videos it might be exactly the same price, i.e., another $1,100. And if there is a third party involved in the case? Another $1,100.

Related:

• American Guild of Court Videographers
• Career for young people: Reserve police officer in Massachusetts

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