Category: Uncategorized

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 is an awesome book. Certainly you won’t be surprised to find that fishing is the most dangerous occupation in the U.S. (BLS paper), though of course our workers face nothing like the risks presented by those going after Patagonian Toothfish (“Chilean seabass”) in seas where the standard characterization is “Below the 40th latitude there is no law; below the 50th no god.”

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:

At 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

Full post, including comments

“The Hole in the Rooftop Solar-Panel Craze” is a Wall Street Journal editorial (May 17, 2015) that heaps scorn on the way that America’s crony capitalist system encourages domestic rooftop solar power. Here’s a sample:

Recent studies by Lazard and others, however, have found that large, utility-scale solar power plants can cost as little as five cents (or six cents without a subsidy) per kilowatt-hour to build and operate in the sunny Southwest.

Large-scale solar-power prices are falling because the cost to manufacture solar panels has been decreasing and because large solar installations permit economies of scale. Rooftop solar, on the other hand, often involves microinstallations in inefficient places, which makes the overall cost as much as 3½ times higher.

Yet the federal subsidies for solar amount to about $5 billion a year, with more than half of that amount going to rooftop and other, more expensive, non-utility solar plants. If the federal government spent the $5 billion instead subsidizing only utility-scale solar plants, I estimate that it could increase the amount of solar power installed in this country every year by about 65%. And without net metering and all of the other nonsensical state and local subsidies for rooftop solar, we could save this country billions of dollars every year.

The author doesn’t calculate the full amount of the wasted dollars because, presumably, it is too hard to find out what each of the 50 states is doing.

First, do we believe this guy? Brian H. Potts is the author and (1) he is a lawyer who works mostly for utilities, (2) he doesn’t look old enough to shave.

If Potts is right, is it reasonable for him to expect a program run by the U.S. government to be efficient? Car emissions reductions, for example, have been handled in what economists would call the dumbest and most expensive possible way. Instead of measuring emissions every year when cars are inspected and taxing each car owner according to miles driven and pollution emitted per mile, standards are promulgated for new cars and society has to wait 10-20 years to see an effect. The result is that a small percentage of older/mistuned cars generate most of the pollution (example study). Why wouldn’t we expect solar energy production to be handled in a similarly inefficient manner?

Related:

• my own 2008 pipe dream of converting the U.S. to electric cars instead of invading oil-producing nations

Full post, including comments

Somebody forgot to tell Bombardier how much richer the global rich are getting. “Bombardier to Cut Production of Most Lucrative Jets” is a May 14, 2015 Wall Street Journal article about how “tough economic conditions world-wide and geopolitical issues have reduced demand for its Global 5000 and 6000 jets, its most expensive long-range business jets currently in serial production. The production cuts will result in the loss of about 1,750 jobs and weigh most heavily on its Montreal-area operations, where about 1,000 workers will be laid off.”

[The Global Express is a Gulfstream competitor and costs about $50 million if moderately pimped out. It is a cousin to the Canadair Regional Jet that I used to fly (previous post about landing at LGA; another visual approach posting).]

Full post, including comments

“Tomorrow’s Advance Man” is a New Yorker story (May 18, 2015 issue) about the world of Marc Andreessen, NCSA Mosaic browser programmer turned venture capitalist.

The story explains how the top firms get consistently better returns than the less-known ones: “The imprimatur of a top firm’s investment is so powerful that entrepreneurs routinely accept a twenty-five per cent lower valuation to get it.” (i.e., they are buying at a lower price than competitors)

The market-clearing price for a competent venture capital partner is not very high: “[A16z] general partners make about three hundred thousand dollars a year, far less than the industry standard of at least a million dollars, and the savings pays for sixty-five specialists in executive talent, tech talent, market development, corporate development, and marketing.” Presumably the partners get some kind of boost when a portfolio company is sold, but $300,000 per year is what a senior programmer at Apple or Google could expect to earn (and more evidence that Ellen Pao would have made more money by getting pregnant than by working as a VC).

What would be a fair price for the job? Maybe $0:

The dirty secret of the trade is that the bottom three-quarters of venture firms didn’t beat the Nasdaq for the past five years. In a stinging 2012 report, the L.P. Diane Mulcahy calculated, “Since 1997, less cash has been returned to V.C. investors than they have invested.” The truth is that most V.C.s subsist entirely on fees, which they compound by raising a new fund every three years. Returns are kept hidden by nondisclosure agreements, and so V.C.s routinely overstate them, both to encourage investment and to attract entrepreneurs. “You can’t find a venture fund anywhere that’s not in the top quartile,” one L.P. said sardonically. V.C.s also logo shop, buying into late rounds of hot companies at high prices so they can list them on their portfolio page.

Full post, including comments

This interview with Andrew Ng, founder of Coursera and now head of a Silicon Valley lab for Baidu, is kind of interesting for revealing the divide between the Hong Kong/Singapore culture in which Ng grew up and standard American culture. Some choice lines:

I think that “follow your passion” is not good career advice. It’s actually one of the most terrible pieces of career advice we give people. If you are passionate about driving your car, it doesn’t necessarily mean you should aspire to be a race car driver.

When I talk to researchers, when I talk to people wanting to engage in entrepreneurship, I tell them that if you read research papers consistently, if you seriously study half a dozen papers a week and you do that for two years, after those two years you will have learned a lot. This is a fantastic investment in your own long term development. [Fortunately in engineering we are not necessary plagued by “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”]

… if you spend a whole Saturday studying rather than watching TV, there’s no one there to pat you on the back or tell you you did a good job. Chances are what you learned studying all Saturday won’t make you that much better at your job the following Monday. There are very few, almost no short-term rewards for these things. But it’s a fantastic long-term investment. This is really how you become a great researcher, you have to read a lot.

There is much less appreciation for the status quo in the Chinese internet economy and I think there’s a much bigger sense that all assumptions can be challenged and everything is up for grabs. The Chinese internet ecosystem is very dynamic. Everyone sees huge opportunity, everyone sees massive competition. Stuff changes all the time. New inventions arise, and large companies will one day suddenly jump into a totally new business sector.

To give you an idea, here in the United States, if Facebook were to start a brand new web search engine, that might feel like a slightly strange thing to do. Why would Facebook build a search engine? It’s really difficult. But that sort of thing is much more thinkable in China, where there is more of an assumption that there will be new creative business models.

I didn’t finish the article because there was an important NBA playoff game that I needed to watch…

Full post, including comments

Britons rejected a Labour Party Manifesto that is pretty similar to what Democrats here in the U.S. promise voters, e.g.,

Britain’s route to prosperity and higher living standards is through more secure and better paid jobs. But Conservative policies are causing whole sectors of the economy to be dragged into a race to the bottom on wages and skills. The Government has weakened employment rights and promoted a hire-and-fire culture. Labour believes our economy can only succeed in a race to the top – competing in the world with better work, better pay and better skills. Too many people do a hard day’s work but remain dependent on benefits. We will raise the National Minimum Wage to more than £8 an hour by October 2019, bringing it closer to average earnings. We will give local authorities a role in strengthening enforcement against those paying less than the legal amount. … Labour will ban exploitative zero-hours contracts. Those who work regular hours for more than 12 weeks will have a right to a regular contract. We will abolish the loophole that allows firms to undercut permanent staff by using agency workers on lower pay.

We will introduce tougher penalties for those abusing the tax system, end unfair tax breaks used by hedge funds and others, and bear down on disguised employment.

In other words, the rich will be taxed, the working class will earn more without having to develop any new skills, and the government will decide what are fair wages, at least for people towards the bottom of the wage distribution.

Should the Conservative victory in the UK lead to skepticism about my prediction that Republicans cannot possibly win the 2016 Presidential election? I don’t think so. The U.S. tends to lag Britain politically and economically by at least a few decades. Britons endured many decades of economic stagnation (chronicled and explained by Mancur Olson) and watched the defeated Germans and the invaded French overtake them economically before questioning the idea that government was going to solve all of their problems. Americans, on the other hand, still have a strong prejudice in favor of drama, expecting growth, and can’t accept that boring stagnation while interest groups fight over the scraps (Mancur Olson-style) is a real possibility.

A voter who expects growth as a birthright isn’t going to listen to Republicans talking about how taxes and regulation need to be reduced to encourage economic growth.

[Separately, a Web site whose initial programming friends and I were involved with (back in the 1990s) is supporting the election news. Guidestar.org made IRS Form 990s (tax returns of non-profit organizations) readily available. Here’s an analysis of the Clinton Foundation’s spending that links to the 990s on Guidestar.]

Full post, including comments

In 2009, Atul Gawande wrote “The Cost Conundrum” about how physicians in McAllen, Texas were making serious bank from running Medicare patients through extra tests, typically at facilities that they themselves own. “Overkill” (New Yorker, May 11, 2015) is a kind of follow-up. It turns out that the docs who previously ran up the huge bills now each get $800,000 from an Obamacare provision that rewards doctors who reduce the government’s costs.

[Separately the article notes that between 25-42 percent of Medicare patients per year get an expensive unnecessary test or treatment. Dr. Gawande says that our fancy machines are best at finding cancers that grow so slowly we’ll probably die of something else before they grow to become a real problem (the cancer is thus dubbed a “turtle”). Unfortunately they are not good at finding the fast-growing cancers (“rabbits”), which is why cancer death rates haven’t moved much.]

Full post, including comments

“New Jersey woman learns her twins have two dads at child support hearing” is a story Guardian about a lawsuit intensive enough to warrant a 22-page opinion by a government employee (the judge). What was at stake? The final award was $28/week in child support (we can presume that the defendant was not a big earner). As is typical when low-income men are sued, NJ.com reveals that father was the only person in the courtroom who was neither an attorney nor represented by an attorney (a quick Google search shows that Liana Allen, who worked for the mother/government, has an “Esq.:” after her name). (Failure to pay child support results in imprisonment but it is not technically a criminal matter and therefore the defendants have no right to an attorney.)

Don’t forget that the taxpayers will get to pay public employees to handle at least the prosecution and judging of one more lawsuit based on this mother. The mother and/or the office of child support enforcement on its own can pursue the man or men who may be the genetic father of the other twin….

Related:

• “Citizens and Legislators” chapter of Real World Divorce, in which the possibility of exempting low-income defendants from the litigation/imprisonment system of extracting child support

Full post, including comments

Folks:

I have an HP 2605 workgroup printer (hooks up to hard-wired Ethernet and then can print, supposedly, up to 35,000 pages per month; I have printed only 22,000 pages on it). Much cheaper and more reliable than an inkjet. I am replacing it with a LaserJet M553dn because the color accuracy has degraded to the point that it isn’t useful for printing photos (tried this cleaning procedure which had previously worked but it did not this time). I have some extra toner for the printer as well (the toner is worth about $300 at retail).

Does anyone know of a non-profit org in the Boston area that would be able to use this? It should be someone who needs to print a fair amount of black and white. I will provide delivery and setup.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Full post, including comments

“Venture Capitalists Help Connect Low-Income Students With Elite Colleges” is a WSJ article about a Silicon Valley startup that gets paid by elite universities with lavish marketing budgets to find low-income high school students to whom the schools can give away the product. (To call the university experience an “education” is a stretch for a lot of majors, as noted in Academically Adrift.)

Here are some choice quotes:

… QuestBridge, conceived in 2003 to connect disadvantaged students with elite colleges that pay a recruiting fee for the services.

“It seemed too good to be true and I thought it was a scam,” Francisco Guzman, who grew up in a low-income household in Elizabeth, N.J., said of when he first received a QuestBridge application by email. He landed a full scholarship to Stanford, and the 25-year-old is now a senior product designer for an Internet startup in San Francisco.

Students fill out online applications, and finalists are chosen by QuestBridge based on factors including academic performance, financial need and personal experiences such as having to work while attending school to help support their families. The list of finalists is sent electronically to participating colleges for their selections.

Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., accepted 22 QuestBridge applicants in 2008; last fall, that number increased to 70, representing 10% of its freshman class, said Art D. Rodriguez, dean of admission and financial aid.

If this QuestBridge startup is so much better than the (presumably vastly more expensive) college’s full-time staff, why not outsource all of the recruitment, not just recruiting for low-income students?

Full post, including comments