A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Back in 2003 I wrote a much-derided posting about how high school students should learn math, science, and engineering by building a bicycle. The latest issue of New Yorker contains “D.I.Y. School”, an article about a school in Malibu Canyon, Califronia where James Cameron‘s 11-year-old son built a motorcycle.
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I can’t figure out why Uber is so valuable. Someone who wants to find out what are the nearest available pizza vendors can open up Apple or Google Maps and see. If Uber/Lyft/et al. develop profits that are significant by Apple/Google standards what stops Apple and Google from adding “nearest available transportation providers” to their respective maps applications? Then they establish a commission for that service that effectively takes all of the profit out of Uber/Lyft/et al. Why should I have two Maps applications on my smartphone, one that shows 50,000 different types of businesses (Apple Maps, e.g.) and one that shows just one type of business? (Uber, e.g.)
Full post, including commentsThe world of photography is a poorer place as of yesterday due to the death of Mary Ellen Mark (age 75), one of America’s most effective artists in the book medium. A Google Image search will show some of her range but I would encourage readers unfamiliar with Mark’s work to get hold of some of her books. Most of her pictures were designed to be part of a series.
Sad.
Full post, including commentsEight of us went to Carnegie Hall on May 24 to hear the Verdi Requiem performed by more than 400 young singers (including my favorite Stuyvesant student!). The concert was organized by DCINY and featured an excellent orchestra. One of us is a fairly serious musician prone to critical comments, e.g., “What a pathetic joke” (Jean-Pierre Rampal concert in Boston Symphony Hall), and “Any guy who would sit down and write 106 symphonies, most of them bad, has just got to be an asshole” (after seeing Haydn on a program). Even he was won over by Claudia Chapa, mezzo-soprano. It is not easy for a young singer to work in that size venue but she handled it like someone accustomed to the Met’s gargantuan space. Baritone Christopher Job and tenor John Pickle also managed to fill the hall.
Full post, including commentsCould it be that the $15 per hour minimum wage adopted by Los Angeles results in some serious cash being earned… by lawyers?
Within a few years it will be illegal for anyone whose skills are worth less than $15 per hour to have a job in Los Angeles. On the other hand, not everyone is eligible for welfare. Especially for adults who cannot obtain possession of a minor child it can take a long time to get on SSDI, work their way through the public housing bureaucracy, etc. Humans don’t want to starve and markets tend to clear despite government prohibitions against people entering into agreements. (Recent example that I learned about talking to a Swede: “There are a lot of apartments in central Stockholm that are owned by the government,” he noted, “and the rents are set very low. But none are ever available unless you pay a large amount of cash to the current occupant. If you stay 5 or 10 years it works out to be roughly the same as the monthly cost of a private apartment.”)
How could the labor market clear for people that employers don’t want to hire at $15 per hour? Contracting! There is no minimum wage for an Uber driver. If it turns out that he or she earns less than the minimum wage the government will still permit him or her to continue to operate the 1099 business.
What would it look like in a restaurant? Instead of hiring people to clear tables and clean at an hourly wage the restaurant could hire a person to be responsible for one bathroom, a portion of the kitchen, and five tables at a fixed monthly rate. The person would bring his or her own cleaning supplies and work the hours of his or her choice, as long as the cleaning got done. The restaurant could spin off the waitstaff as well. Perhaps a waiter rents ten tables from the restaurant much as a cab driver will rent a taxi from a medallion (value up to $1 million in the pre-Uber era thanks to government regulation!) owner. Customers pay the restaurant for the food and the waiter for providing the service.
Note that some employers that don’t want to have low-wage employees are already doing this, albeit typically through a contractor that does hire W2s. See “Costco’s Second-Class Citizens” (Bloomberg 2013) for example or any big company that hires a cleaning service rather than employing janitors.
Here’s where the lawyers come in. If lawyers can persuade a judge that Joe Contractor should have been a W2 employee and that Joe Contractor earned less than $15 per hour then the judge can order a company to pay years of back pay, a potentially good deal for Joe Contractor and a great deal for his attorney. As the factors that separate a 1099 from a W2 employee are subjective this could be a very fertile area for lawyers.
What do readers think? Is this the frontier that finally enables all of those extra law school graduates to get jobs?
Full post, including commentsHaving loved The Queen we went with enthusiasm to The Audience (Broadway). Same writer (Peter Morgan). Same actress (Helen Mirren). The results, however, were disappointing.
The movie presents the Queen with a challenge: what to do about Diana’s death. The Queen’s dignified and protocol-bound demeanor makes a strong contrast with the maudlin public.
The play concerns a series of meetings, more or less weekly, between the Queen and various prime ministers. The Queen is required to back up whatever the prime minister has decided to do so there isn’t truly a problem to solve. Wikipedia says “Since Elizabeth rarely gives interviews, little is known of her personal feelings. As a constitutional monarch, she has not expressed her own political opinions in a public forum.” Thus everything in the play is made up and the dialog doesn’t seem very plausible, e.g., when the prime ministers reveal their weaknesses and fears.
The prime ministers are portrayed sympathetically, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher, played by Judith Ivey with a strong Southern accent(!). Thatcher’s Reagan-like transformation of British society is ignored; Thatcher’s support of the white South African government (the U.S. also supported them!) and her son‘s sketchy dealings are the only topics that come up between Thatcher and the Queen.
We learn from the script that the Queen, despite her outward appearance as a rich German-English noblewoman, is actually a socialist who supports labor unions, expanded welfare state benefits, higher taxes, etc. She is also a pacifist who opposes any kind of military action. Peter Morgan doesn’t supply any motivation for how she got to be this way, though. A rich American might come to this place after attending a university where it was socially unacceptable to support a smaller role in society for government (see The Crimson for how 96 percent of Harvard College faculty supported Democrats). But we learn from watching the play that the Queen was educated at home. Would the Queen adopt liberal attitudes in order to fit in? If so, to fit in with whom and why would she care? Would the Queen support a more generous welfare state because she felt badly for Britons who did not work? If so, we do not hear of the Queen ever meeting any working-age adult without a job.
One of the interesting things about The Queen movie is that it shows that someone who has lived nearly her whole life as a royal sovereign doesn’t think like the rest of us. In The Audience, on the other hand, the royal sovereign turns out to be Jane Average who happens to have access to some fancy houses and a yacht. At a minimum it would be nice to know how she got to be average!
Related:
“Quality, Not Just Quantity, of Infrastructure Needs Attention” (Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2015) has some interesting data. The U.S. has spent, adjusted for deprecation, 52 percent of GDP on “public capital stock” (infrastructure such as roads, bridges, train tracks, etc.) while the Germans have spent just 35 percent of GDP. What results have been achieved? “global executives” rated the German infrastructure superior to that of the U.S.
In other words the Germans are getting substantially better value for each public dollar invested.
Why the constant calls by Americans to put more money into public infrastructure if it turns out this is not one of the things that we can do competitively?
Related:
I was chatting with a litigator about Real World Divorce and politics. The subject of the Clintons’ roughly $22 million/year in earnings came up and the litigator noted “Monica Lewinsky could have done pretty well for herself if she hadn’t left the white gold on her blue dress.” What did she mean? It turns out that if Monica had stayed in the District of Columbia with Bill Clinton’s child she would have been entitled to roughly $2 million per year for 21 years, i.e., about $42 million total in tax-free profit.
What about the fact that some of the money was earned by Hillary? “A judge could use discretion to award child support based on the combined income in a variety of ways,” she explained. “One is by awarding a higher percentage of Bill’s income with the explanation that Hillary’s earnings can replace those lost to a child support plaintiff. Another is by accepting the argument that Hillary wouldn’t be earning any of her speaking fees but for her relationship with Bill and being part of the couple. A third way of getting a child support award based on the full $22 million would be to argue that much of the Clinton Foundation spending, e.g., on travel or parties, should be considered income to Bill and Hillary. Adding in a judge-determined amount from the Foundation to Bill’s income would bring his income for child support calculation up to $22 million per year.”
Full post, including commentsEmployees at five banks colluded to earn supranormal profits in rigged markets (nytimes). Presumably they were rewarded by their employers with correspondingly huge bonuses. Those bonuses by now have been turned into beach houses, Gulfstreams, etc. The government comes along more recently and fines “the banks” $5.6 billion. But it seems to me that this fine has to be paid by the shareholders of the banks, not past, present, or future employees. If we assume a labor market the employees of banks are paid a competitive wage. So the banks that have been fined can’t reduce salaries or their better people will jump ship. Thus it will be shareholders who pay. But public company shareholders, due to SEC regulations that prevent them from directly nominating board members, exercise virtually no control over what actions bank employees might take. How then can this fine reduce the likelihood of similar behavior in the future? Wouldn’t a rational current bank employee still seek to collude with counterparts at other banks, rig a market, make huge profits for a while, take home and keep huge bonuses, etc. Why does the employee care if at some future date a shareholder will have to pay a fine because of his or her behavior?
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If you want to stop feeling sorry for yourself and/or can’t find a gift for that co-worker who constantly complains about the job, Last Man Off: A True Story of Disaster and Survival on the Antarctic Seas
The book is written by an English marine biologist who signs on as a “scientific observer” that fishing boats are required to carry as a condition for hunting this semi-endangered species with 15,000-hook longlines. His particular boat is operated out of South Africa with a multinational crew that does not include any Americans:
After picking up our licence from King Edward Point [South Georgia Island], we sailed sixty miles north to the edge of the continental shelf. We would be fishing in water 800 metres deep, but just a few miles further north the seabed dropped off into the abyss. When darkness fell it was time to put our first fishing line in the water. Boats hunting for tuna, marlin or swordfish will set their long-lines to float near the surface, but we were interested in Dissostichus eleginoides, also known as Patagonian toothfish, which feed near the bottom.
Toothfish do not have the gas-filled swim bladder that allows other fish to adjust their buoyancy to cope with changes in depth. Many deep-water species lack these and are forced either to sink to the bottom or waste energy by perpetually swimming to stay up in the water column. Instead, toothfish have changed the very composition of their bodies to become neutrally buoyant. Their skeletons and even the fringes of their scales contain more cartilage and less calcium than do shallow-water species, making them lighter. Their big, dense muscles contain large deposits of lipids, and these buoyant fats are carefully distributed through the fish’s body to be most abundant near the centres of gravity and buoyancy. At their largest, the streamlined and powerfully finned toothfish can reach well over a hundred kilos in weight and two metres in length. They are an abyssal cruise missile with a toothy grin.
It takes a toothfish nine or ten years to reach maturity, when it can reproduce, at which point it is about three feet long and its only predators are elephant seals and sperm whales. The seventy-kilo fish we were hoping to catch may well have been alive for thirty, forty or even fifty years.
Death is always just a few seconds away:
Hannes leant over the rusty guardrail to hand the end of a rope to the deck below when a hook snagged his jacket arm. Within seconds, the fishing line began to tighten. He wouldn’t stand a chance if he was pulled overboard, whether he could swim or not. The water was just above zero, and the shock of the cold water would probably kill him before he could be freed. Within ten metres of the boat he would disappear into the ink of the night, no floodlights to illuminate his flailing arms as the anchor and weights towed him under, like a sardine bait in cheap oilskins. Even the weakest component, the nylon monofilament snood holding the hook, was strong enough to hold a struggling hundred-kilo toothfish underwater, which was plenty strong enough to pull a man overboard and down. Near my feet, a knife stood with its tip embedded in the wood of the bench. I had guessed that it was there for emergencies. It would take minutes to alert the bridge and to stop and turn the boat around as it steamed at six knots. Even if Hannes managed to free himself of the line in the water, I reasoned that he would flounder and drown before he could be found in the darkness. ‘Wo! Wo! Wo!’ Hannes cried out. His voice rang out over the thrum of the engine and the wind. The line went tight. Joaquim grabbed the knife and leant over the guardrail. Moments before Hannes was dragged overboard, the thin nylon sprang apart under the blade.
Whales can be formidable competitors:
The orca were not popular with the crew and were known to steal fish from the line, but I had been waiting to see them all trip; I tried to restrain my excitement. The fishing line twanged and Hannes swore as the whale plucked a toothfish from the hook just before it broke the surface. A dangling pair of fishy lips was all that remained on the hook, taunting the fishermen. The whale was not black and white, but brown and cream, like a sixties retro version. The tint is due to a film of diatoms (planktonic algae) that builds up on the whales’ skin in the Antarctic waters. No less intimidating than their northern cousins, they usually arrive in pods of seven to ten animals. There are several types of killer whales recognized in the Southern Ocean. Some are bigger, and are thought to specialize in attacking minke whales. Others patrol the edge of the ice pack hunting seals. The killer whale now lurking around our boat was of the type thought to eat mostly fish – two thirds of its diet – with seals making up most of the remainder. Toothfish would normally be out of their reach in the depths, but now they were like sushi on a fourteen-kilometre conveyor belt. More orca appeared, as the rest of the pod joined in. We were losing more to the whales than we were hauling aboard. I looked up to see a whale, fifty metres off to starboard, throwing a large fish into the air.
The boat gains a lot of weight mid-voyage:
The boat we were to meet, the Hai Gong You #302, was a ‘reefer’, one of the nomadic tankers that act as fuel stations for the world’s mariners. A bitter-sweet triumph of modern cost-cutting and efficiency is that a boat no longer needs to return to port to refuel or even to offload her cargo. Our reefer was waiting just outside the twelve-mile limit of the Falkland Islands’ territorial waters.
We had taken on ninety-two tonnes of diesel – much more than the small top-up we had required – and had offloaded only one sack of toothfish. This meant that we were now carrying over one hundred tonnes of fuel, sixty tonnes of fish and a few tonnes of bait, food, water and kit. The Sudur Havid was low in the water.
With our decks now closer to the sea’s surface, we would be more prone to taking on water from incoming waves. A heavy load could also affect our ability to return upright after being rolled to one side. Instead of bobbing like a duck, in the way Bubbles had described, the boat could struggle to rebalance after each swell. Almost forty years old, altered again and again from her original design, the Sudur Havid was being made to carry a dangerously heavy load.
The sea turns rough from Force 7 winds (Beaufort scale) and the senior officers decide to keep pulling in fish despite the fact that this requires some doors to be open that also admit water. The pumps clog from fish guts. The backup pump can’t be started.
At this precise moment, as I was on my knees, a tipping point was reached and passed. Unannounced, unacknowledged, but apparent to all of us just minutes later. The boat had been taking on more water than she could drain for some time but now the process had accelerated. Click. A light suddenly went on in my mind. I was no longer getting wet, the well was not being refilled. For once, the water hadn’t come back over to port. I looked over with dread at the starboard side of the factory, which was now six feet deep in grey murk. The water almost reached the ceiling, and the weight pinned the Sudur Havid down. A bird’s eye would see through the spray that she now lay with her heavy bow low in the water, and her stern slightly raised. She leant heavily, with her port side twelve feet up in the air and her starboard rail down in the sea. Waves broke over her and ran down her decks. The boat was no longer rolling, she was listing.
There had been no evacuation drill and the officers don’t have any plan to take EPIRBs or other essential gear into the life rafts. It turns out that an inflatable life raft is a wonderful device for abandoning ship in flat sunny conditions. With high winds and waves, though, getting into the raft and away from the boat is a challenge:
Relenting momentarily, we rolled away just enough to pop out from underneath her. The swells took us in the right direction away from the hull – five metres of freedom – only for the wind and the painter to reel us back. … It felt as if the boat were out to kill us. The underside of the stern tried to crush us, and the once-protective railings were now sharp edges to catch and tear the rubber tubes. … Morné had found a safety cutter, a small plastic item the size of a credit card, attached to the inside of the raft. He passed the serrated blade to Big Danie, who cut the painter. … Just when we thought we were clear, the boat shifted and the stern gantry came slamming down. This arch of heavy steel had once supported the trawl cables, but now the girders were slicing down on to the raft’s roof, folding the raft in two and forcing us underwater. The gantry caught my head: an irresistible force bearing down on me through the canvas canopy. The flat steel pressed against my skull so hard I wanted to cry out, but I was being smothered. Cold water rushed past my cheek. The raft flooded instantly as its rim was submerged. Frigid grey seawater plunged in, swirling around us. To my right, Morné felt someone push his head underwater at the last second, narrowly avoiding the full brunt of the crushing gantry. Fighting for breath, it felt as though he was metres below the surface. And then we were free. The boat shifted in the water and the gantry relinquished its hold. We were less buoyant now but still afloat and the wind and waves carried us slowly away. Our collision with the gantry had flooded the raft with thousands of litres of freezing seawater. Only the top tube of the raft now sat clear of the ocean’s surface; the other two that formed the walls were submerged. The floor bowed down away from us, sagging under the weight of the flooding. This made standing difficult and we were up to our waists and chests in –1°C seawater. But, thank God, we were leaving the boat behind.
The author sits in about three feet of freezing seawater:
Full post, including commentsAt first we bailed through both hatches on the raft, but the waves breaking over us and bursting through the windward side were undoing all of our hard work. Hannes and Big Danie held the windward hatch closed, and Morné and I bailed through the leeward opening instead. But when the raft rotated this soon suffered the same problem and the water poured back in. With the doors held closed, I tried bailing through a gap between the tubes and the canopy, but the amount I could discharge was piteous. … We busied ourselves checking the raft for more supplies. Morné opened the bag that Bubbles [the South African captain] had been packing on the bridge and looked inside. It contained our passports, Joaquim’s video