Category: Uncategorized

Folks:

The Obamacare exchange, healthcare.gov, web site has been in the news lately. It supposedly cost a lot of money to build and doesn’t work very well, but none of the news articles seem to explain what it does.

For example, does a consumer actually complete a transaction on the healthcare.gov web site? Or does the site simply allow a consumer to fill out a form that gets forwarded to an insurance company where coverage will be established?

And what did it cost to build? It seems safe to assume that it was more than the $25 million in funding that sufficed for Google’s expansion for the first six years. (Wikipedia) Was it more than the $327 million that California spent on their state exchange? (see this earlier posting)

I am testing out the Samsung Galaxy Gear (a.k.a. “the Geek Watch”) and associated Note 3.

Let’s start with the health applications. The phone has a built-in pedometer and a “walking mate” app that says that I walked 6821 steps on this sedentary day (sitting in a meeting, sitting in a car, a 1.2-mile round-trip walk to a restaurant) and covered 3.4 miles. The app is part of “S Health,” which says that a 6′ tall male like myself shouldn’t weigh more than 169 lbs. (that was about what I weighed as a 15-year-old who regularly swam laps in the MIT pool). If I want to feel good about my body and lifestyle, though, I can just look at the watch, which says that I walked 11,000 steps and 5.3 miles (about 300 of those occurred at a 45-minute business lunch at which my companions will swear that I never left my chair).

How about messaging? My main application is Gmail and it would be nice to see new messages on the watch… except that one can’t. The only email that can appear on the watch are messages that get delivered to the “Mail” app, designed for IMAP/POP accounts. Text messages show up on the phone, which would be great if I were a teenager. Even for a teenager, though, it is annoying that even if a message has been read on the watch it still shows up as new and alert-worthy on the Note 3 (i.e., reading the message on the watch does not clear the “new message” alert on the phone). If you want to respond to a text message on the watch, you can do it with voice recognition (very unreliable) or a voice call. Why not a menu of canned responses such as “yes,” “no,” “will get back to you in 15 minutes” or whatever?

My favorite feature on the watch is that it can be configured to show the current time and date as well as the next event on any of one’s Google calendars (I could never get the iPhone to sync with more than one Google calendar). Unfortunately getting the phone to show the time involves either pressing a button (like on a 1970s LED-based digital watch) or shaking one’s wrist a bunch of times. Another good feature of the phone is seeing who is calling and being able to answer or reject a call by swiping on the watch (i.e., no need to pull out the phone when in a meeting). In a quiet environment it is possible to use the phone while speaking into the watch and listening from the watch and I have done some short calls that way.

You’d think that a watch would have wireless charging so that you could plunk it down on a night table at bedtime, but in fact it needs to be wrapped in a weird little plastic case that lines up with some charging pins on the bottom of the watch. Heading out for a trip? Better remember to pack this strange custom charger because the battery life on the watch is about two days max. The Note 3 also lacks wireless charging.

As the founder of photo.net and a moderately annoying parent-with-camera (results), photography is important to me. One thing that I liked about the iPhone 4S that I used for the last two years was that the camera was very responsive. It was possible to take a bunch of portraits in succession without a lot of shutter lag. The Note 3 has a camera that is comparable in basic image quality to the 4S camera but the software imposes unpredictable shutter lag and, oftentimes, several seconds of inaccessibility after a photo while a “processing….” pop-up appears over the viewfinder. The Samsung has some clever modes, of which my favorite is one that drives front and rear cameras simultaneously so that it is possible to send a postcard from a vacation with a big outdoor scene and a small inset face of the phone owner (captured by the front camera). As a practical photo tool, though, the iPhone 4S seems much better and the 5S is surely another world altogether. (The watch can take photos and videos but I haven’t played with it too much yet.)

Despite having pretty close to the world’s largest screen, the Note 3’s screen still isn’t wide enough for all of the little notification and status icons that are ever-present at the top. Is the watch connected? There’s an icon for that. Continuously displayed despite the fact that if you have your phone in your pocket and the watch on your wrist it is in fact always connected. Verizon adds its own layer of ugliness with a “Caller Name ID” application that proudly leaves an icon at the top of the phone screen if it was ever able to determine a caller’s name. Have Bluetooth and near-field communication enabled, as you’re pretty much likely to 24/7 if you use the phone as intended? Those will be permanent status icons up at the top of the screen. Because there is so much clutter on the status line I don’t know how any phone customer would notice an important notification.

The Samsung TouchWiz interface adds apps that run on screens that would otherwise be places to hold icons for launching apps. The phone comes preloaded with some of these “widgets” that are mostly just big adds for additional apps. Where users previously had to understand two modes of interacting with a phone, i.e., “interacting with operating system” or “interacting with app” Samsung makes them understand a third (“interacting with widget”).

The speaker in the Note 3 has a lot of distortion if you try to listen to music at a normal volume level. The ringer is not loud enough for middle-aged folks who carry the phone in a pocket. If you do manage to catch a call and hold the big phone up to your ear, whether or not you can hear the caller speaking is dependent on precise phone/ear alignment.

The Note 3 is spectacularly poor at holding onto a WiFi connection in my apartment. Though not a large place, there is a brick wall splitting it down the middle, which has lead me to operate two base stations, both with the same SSID. The Google Nexus 7 and 10 devices are very good at picking the stronger base station and switching appropriately if I walk around the apartment. The iPhone was good at this but not as good as the Nexus 7. The Samsung will go on and off the WiFi network every few minutes even if one is simply sitting in the same place in a part of the house where one of the base stations should dominate. Similarly, when carried right up next to a base station it will show just two bars of WiFi signal strength, telling me that it hasn’t been smart enough to switch (disabling WiFi and reenabling then shows a connection with full strength).

Returning to Android after a couple of years away is a startling experience in creeping featurism. The Nexus tablets are reasonably clean and simple to use, though I have come to prefer the iPad. But adding telephony capabilities and the extra Samsung software results in a lot of extra complexity. This phone was shipped from Verizon to me. Why isn’t there a simple standard voicemail section as there is on the iPhone? I’m supposed to download Google Voice and engage in some configuration magic and then it will maybe sort of work like the iPhone (except it won’t because the place that you go when you’re alerted to a missing call is nowhere near the place where you’d go to launch the Google Voice app)? When I switched from Android to iPhone I sorely missed the Back button that was off the screen on Android. But on the Note 3 and maybe on any Android the function is not always consistent. Worse yet is the “menu” key that lets you configure options and settings in some apps. I was trained on the iPhone that everything that one could do with an app was somehow accessible by touching somewhere on the screen. With Android this is true of many apps, but some apps have important settings and options that are accessible only from the off-screen buttons. These are easy to forget, particularly as they are not true buttons on the Note 3 and are often simply not visible (they are backlit when touched).

To end on a positive note (so to speak), I like the Samsung touch keyboard. It takes advantage of the large screen by showing both letters and numbers at all times, which makes it much more convenient to enter passwords, street addresses, etc.

In January 2011, I questioned whether paying able-bodied people to stay home and play Xbox for 99 weeks was a smart idea. In January 2013, I wrote about academic studies that found that indeed the American economy’s recent period of high unemployment and high long-term unemployment was closely tied to our politicians’ decision to pay people to stay home. Last night a reader sent me a link to an October 2013 paper: “Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment in the Great Recession: The Role of Macro Effects,” by economists from the University of Oslo, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the University of Pennsylvania. The authors look at integrated labor markets that happen to be intersected by a state border. In markets, there are workers who have the same job opportunities but potentially different maximum duration for unemployment benefits.

The conclusion? “We found that unemployment benefit extensions have a large effect on total unemployment. In particular, our estimates imply that unemployment benefit extensions can account for most of the persistently high unemployment after the Great Recession.”

In my October 1 posting I predicted that the government shutdown would last for 8 days. So it looks as though the risk of me having to buy everyone a Taco Gigante is increasing.

How is the shutdown affecting my friends? Here’s a note from one who lives in Concord, Massachusetts:

The Minuteman National Park has cordoned off all of its parking lots. Busloads of people are still showing up, but now the buses are parked on the sides of Monument Street, creating, well, monumental traffic jams. They don’t chain off the lots at night or on holidays. Why do they do it now? Because a central bureaucrat in the National Parks Service or in the White House told them to. Our public servants feel it’s their job to make our lives difficult to prove how important they are. This is what happens when Americans vote for more and larger Government …

There is a lot of news lately about the Federal government potentially running up against a debt limit and not being able to keep borrowing. This raises the question of how the government keeps track of debt. http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/ doesn’t explain anything about the information systems used by the Federales. Are we sure that we didn’t blow through the debt limit some months ago? http://www.fms.treas.gov/index.html makes it look as though some efforts are being made to keep track of the cash, but with $16.94 trillion to track, it seems possible that bonds and other obligations could slip through the cracks.

How do we know what we know about the debt?

A friend emailed me “When Wealth Disappears,” a nytimes op-ed by Stephen King, chief economist as HSBC and the author of When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence. The guy starts out by pointing out the obvious: old established governments such as the U.S. and its counterparts in Western Europe are spending way more than they can ever hope to take in via tax revenues. He says that profligate spending worked out okay in the past because of five factors that generate crazy amounts of GDP growth: (1) globalization of trade, (2) financial innovation, (3) social safety nets that encouraged consumers to spend rather than save, (4) women entering the labor force, (5) increasing percentage of people going to college.

Is the guy too pessimistic?

On globalization of trade, Apple was able to Fedex an iPad directly from the factory in China to my parent’s house in Bethesda, Maryland. However, for a smaller enterprise there remain substantial obstacles to working with people in India and similar foreign nations. Improved telecommunications and video conferencing systems should help here.

On financial innovation, one the one hand you’d think that that Collapse of 2008 shows that it would be nice to have our finance industry be a lot less innovative. But on the other hand, the fact that it costs us more than 8 percent of GDP (source) indicates that there is a lot of room for cost reduction here. For example, shouldn’t it be possible to match savers and borrowers in the home mortgage market for a lot less than we are currently spending?

Regarding social safety nets… if the government runs out of money and people need to work in order to pay rent, buy food, obtain health care, wouldn’t that motivate a huge number of people to go back to work? CNN says that the employment rate right now is near a 30-year low.

Women entering the labor force… that does seem as though it was a one-time event. On the other hand, if cities and states run out of cash to pay retired 50-year-old government workers their pensions there will be a lot of able-bodied middle-aged folks reentering the work force.

As far as the quality of education goes, the people most likely to celebrate the value of a college education are those who haven’t been in a classroom lately! Books such as Higher Education and Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses show that there is a huge amount of room for improvement in what gets delivered during four expensive years.

What if Americans simply pushed themselves to be better workers, e.g., by showing up on time every day, being more organized, answering customer inquiries faster and more reliably, following up? Couldn’t we get a lot of GDP growth out of that?

I went to the White Mountains this weekend to see the foliage and encountered some of the highs and lows of American culture.

For the high point, see the photo below of a nice-looking Swiss watch, pinned up at the Piper Trail trailhead parking lot. It has been there for a week waiting for its rightful owner. No other hiker has been tempted to appropriate it. For the low, check out the photos below of the restroom entrance at one of the most popular stops along the Kancamagus Highway. Apparently bathrooms are not an essential government service…

The September 30, 2013 New Yorker magazine carries “The Perfect Wife,” an article about the widow of a lesbian multi-millionaire who went to the Supreme Court to obtain a refund of about $640,000 in federal and state estate taxes (the inheritance would have been tax-free had it been the result of a heterosexual marriage). Thus continues a stream of intense news coverage and popular interest in the subject of gay marriage.

On the same day that I read the New Yorker article, I received an email regarding an effort by the National Parents Organization to get a shared parenting presumption enacted here in Massachusetts (see their request that people write letters to Governor Deval Patrick to weigh in on the work of a committee that may produce recommendations for new legislation regarding child custody). There is so little media and citizen interest in the topic of whether a child of divorce ends up with one parent or two parents that a Google News search for “Working Group on Child-Centered Family Law Massachusetts” produces no results. Other than this one organization, nobody seems to care what the Governor and Legislature are doing.

Why should marriage be more interesting to people than divorce? The ability to marry has very little effect on children. The children of couples, for example, who elect not to marry but stay together, have the same life experience as the children of married couples who stay together. The rights of children to inherit from their parents are similarly unaffected by whether or not the parents are married. Weddings can be costly, but it is a cost that is voluntarily incurred and controllable by the bride, groom, and families.

Divorce, by contrast, has a tremendous effect on children, who often lose access to one parent in states where sole custody awards are the norm. Divorce laws have a huge effect on adults and in fact the economists and lawyers who’ve studied the laws have found that the laws determine the likelihood that a divorce lawsuit will be filed. (See “These Boots are Made for Walking: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women” (Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen; 2000; see the PDF version of the paper or this New York Times article regarding the paper). In a more recent paper by the same team, “Child Support Guidelines: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (Family Law Quarterly, 45:2, Summer 2011; PDF is available for free) the conclusion was that the possibility of larger child support payments motivated divorce lawsuits to the point that if the potential payor’s income increased by $100,000, the probability that the potential payor would be sued for divorce and child support rose by 10 percent: “We suggest, based upon twenty years of data from the United States and Canada, that some well-intentioned child-support-guideline measures have actually encouraged divorce by compensating custodial parents beyond the amounts actually needed for their children’s support.” The divorce industry does not like to tout its revenues the way that the wedding industry does, but if the median cost of a wedding is $18,000 (source) it seems obvious that the divorce industry is much larger than the wedding industry. Given that the official end of a marriage is a lawsuit, it will take only a small percentage of divorcing couples to hire attorneys to overtake all marrying couples in spending.

Given that divorce has a larger effect on peoples’ lives, that many of the people affected are children, and that it consumes a larger share of the GDP than marriage, why is there so much more popular interest in marriage? Is it simply because people find it more pleasant to contemplate marriage than divorce?

[Oh yes, in case you’re curious about why people are writing to Governor Patrick, here’s a quick summary of how child custody works in Massachusetts…

Take everything from this posting regarding divorce in Denmark and invert it.

In Denmark cases go from an administrator who tries to get couples to resolve the divorce quickly and inexpensively, then to a single judge, then to a three-judge panel that re-hears all of the facts. In Massachusetts cases go directly to a judge (there is no jury) unless couples voluntarily elect to mediate. The most important decisions, e.g., whether a child should have two parents at the end of the process or one parent and one “visitor,” are questions of fact and therefore there is no practical right of appeal. A child’s future is determined by a single individual (the trial judge).

In Denmark children do not have a substantial cash value ($8000/year maximum) and therefore, as predicted by Brinig and Allen, custody litigation is uncommon and children of middle class parents almost always end up with a 50/50 schedule. In Massachusetts, by contrast, typically the mother would win “sole physical custody” and the child’s access to the father would be reduced to an every-other-weekend experience. A 2004 ballot referendum that would impose a joint custody presumption won approximately 85% approval (results), but was not binding on the Legislature and no action was taken. Massachusetts thus remains what one lawyer described as a “winner take all” state, in which one parent will get the kids, the house (since the kids need a place to live), and the cash. As noted by Brinig and Allen, the possibility of “winner take all” is a strong motivation for the filing of divorce lawsuits in the first place. (How much of a financial motivation could there be? The Massachusetts child support guidelines start at $40,144 per year, tax-free, if the payor has an income of at least $250,000 (prior to 2013, the amount was $47,580). In other words, a one-night encounter with a drunken radiologist will lead to a guaranteed stream of payments of $50,000 per year for 23 years, or $923,000. A second one-night encounter with a different high-income man that produces a second child will yield an additional $40,144 per year in tax-free payments, because the child support for the first child is not counted as income to the recipient. These numbers are the minimum and when a payor has substantial income or savings it is not uncommon for a child support plaintiff to seek $100,000 or $150,000 per year for a single child. If the parents had been married, the financial rewards from a lawsuit are potentially larger and can include an award of the defendant’s pre-marriage savings (Massachusetts is not a community property state) as well as alimony (until a 2011 legislative change, it was possible to be married for a day and then collect alimony for the rest of one’s life).)

Judges in Massachusetts have a variety of ways of justifying the award of the children to just one parent and, even with a shared custody presumption in the law, it is quite possible that the outcomes wouldn’t change much. For example, one current justification for an award of sole custody is if the parents have “conflict.” In other words, shared custody should be awarded only if a plaintiff and defendant have gone through two years of litigation and a trial while remaining on friendly terms. Another justification is the historical pattern of child care. If a plaintiff can show that he or she did more of the child care prior to filing the divorce lawsuit, the plaintiff can ask that the arrangement be perpetuated indefinitely. Thus only if it can be proven that the parents had an exact 50/50 split of child care tasks prior to the lawsuit being filed will a 50/50 schedule be awarded post-divorce.

A litigator explained to me how it all plays out in practice:

“The Massachusetts Legislature practically guarantees that family lawyers will bill until the family’s assets are exhausted. The Legislature gives the judges almost infinite discretion to do whatever they want. Suppose that some guy is having an affair with an office hottie. The angry wife comes into my office. I tell her ‘I can get you 100 percent of his savings and 100 percent of his income going forward. I can get you 100 percent custody and control of the children so that this guy that you hate will never see them again. Just give me $50,000 as a retainer.’ I’m not lying, but what I didn’t say is that, depending on what the judge had for breakfast, it could also be zero, zero, and zero. Meanwhile the defendant goes into a lawyer’s office and the lawyer says ‘You have to give me 100 percent of your money.’ The guy asks how come? The lawyer says ‘If you don’t give me 100 percent of your money, your wife could get it from the Probate court judge and you might never see your kids until they turn 18.’ After the house has been triple-mortgaged, the 401k accounts emptied, and the mutual funds transferred to the lawyers, the woman’s lawyer says ‘The case isn’t going as well as I thought. This judge just isn’t sympathetic to our case. Your husband doesn’t look like such a bad person. I think you should settle.’ Then there is a boring settlement that looks like every other divorce settlement or judgment. The woman stays in the fancy house. The dad turns over most of his after-tax paycheck to the woman, moves to a studio apartment, and sees the kids every other weekend. He behaves like a ‘Disney Dad’ because, realistically, why would he want to spend his limited time with the kids nagging them to do their homework? You don’t have to worry about property division at that point because there isn’t anything left. The litigating couple could have gotten the same result from a mediator for $3000 and the kids would still have had their college fund.”

]

So… what do readers think? Why has gay marriage been in the spotlight for years now while child support and custody laws elicit yawns?

Back in September 2012 I wrote a posting about California’s state government spending $327 million to build a seemingly straightforward web site where consumers could go to find health insurance plans. The web site is now up and running.

I told the site that I lived in Berkeley, earned $80,000 per year, and was a single 50-year-old who was neither pregnant nor disabled (click on image below to enlarge):

The site helpfully told me that I may qualify for free coverage through Medi-Cal, but the linked-to fact sheet says that it is for “an individual who earned less than $15,856 [per year]”. I was also offered “Access for Infants & Mothers” though it was unclear how this could apply to a household with one adult. In any case the linked-to fact sheet says that it is for “income between $3,256 – $4,884 per month for a family of 3.”

In other words, for $327 million the government purchased a computer program unable to determine that $80,000 is more than $15,856.

I taught a helicopter lesson today at the Bedford airport, a combined civilian/military field. Our helicopters live in a hangar on Hanscom Air Force Base so we often need to drive through the main gates of the base to get to our machines. After September 11, 2001, Massport invested heavily in additional security. We have fancy security gates everywhere. We have SIDA badges for which we must apply with our passports, take special training every two years, and undergo criminal background checks and fingerprinting. In recent times the SIDA badge could be printed with a special logo that entitled the pilot to drive onto the base. This summer, however, the government decided that SIDA badge holders would have to come to an office on the base every year or two to apply for a Department of Defense ID. There doesn’t seem to be any additional security as a result of this additional ID, since it is issued automatically upon presentation of one’s SIDA badge and driver’s license.

Today at the main gate I was told that they really shouldn’t let me in because I had only the SIDA badge and not the additional ID, but then I was let in. After working with an instrument-helicopter student for a bunch of approaches (Air Traffic Control is up and running as usual), I decided to go to the badge office on the base. There was a sign on the door that said “All services are suspended due to the government shutdown, except for issuing [the particular card that I wanted].” I had heard horror stories about multi-hour waits in this office and indeed there were at least 50 chairs for adults plus a substantial kids’ play area. However, due to the shutdown, I was the only customer and I got my badge very quickly from the one uniformed soldier who was actively working. In another area of the shut-down office, four additional uniformed soldiers were chatting. They were being paid to come to the office, but due to the government shutdown had nothing to do.