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Coincidentally, at the same time that the Chicago teacher’s union was going out on strike, my own union job came to an end (official termination letter). In 2008, I accepted a job at Comair, a regional airline that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta and that flies passengers as “Delta Connection”. My job included a membership in the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), one of the most successful unions other than those representing government workers (see “Unions and Airlines” for why).

Comair’s union agreement was more favorable to workers than the contracts at regional airline competitors, to the point that it cost Delta less to pay independent regional airlines to fly Delta Connection flights than to use its own in-house regional airline. Most of the airplanes themselves are owned either by Delta or by a leasing company, so the assets of a regional airline are its FAA air carrier certificate and a group of employees.

Due to the fact that Comair had shrunk so much since the Collapse of 2008, coupled with union agreements that the newest workers be laid off first (I was furloughed in the fall of 2008) and that the newest workers be paid the least, Comair had a much higher than average cost workforce. The company was in the middle of contract negotiations with pilots when a decision was made to shut the whole thing down.

The effect of the shutdown is that pilots who had formerly been on 10-year pay at Comair, perhaps earning $40,000 per year, will now be applying for jobs at 1-year pay ($20,000 per year) at another regional airline. Unlike the Chicago teachers, Comair pilots were not entitled to a defined benefit pension and therefore the airline industry will not realize any pension savings by sending all of these folks to another carrier with their 401k plans intact. It would have been a lot less turmoil if the airline and pilots could have agreed that the pay scale could be revamped so that Comair’s labor costs were about the same as competitors, but psychologically it was apparently easier for all to pretend that somehow there was a defect in the Comair corporate shell and that the world would be a better place if everyone moved to work for a different corporation with a different FAA air carrier certificate. Unfortunately, this means that a lot of people will have to move from their northern Kentucky homes in order to find work (Comair headquarters is at the Cincinnati airport and no other airlines are based at CVG).

So I am bidding farewell to this job and my life as a union worker. I am grateful to the Comair dispatch and scheduling team. Pilots are expected to live as nomads but these folks reasonably expected to go to work every day in Comair’s glass corporate headquarters (“the Kremlin” and home to those with “ten pound heads” according to my “basic indoctrination” trainer, Mark Martin). It is not pleasant to get a phone call at 4:45 am in a Hilton Garden Inn near the Baltimore airport, but the schedulers did their best when asking me to adapt to the absurd lifestyle of a junior pilot. The dispatchers did a great job calculating our fuel requirements and keeping us informed regarding the weather. I’m also grateful to the Comair simulator training team and the check airmen that flew with me during my “initial operating experience” (IOE). It takes a lot of courage to watch someone who has previously flown slow four-seat airplanes and helicopters try to land, for the first time and with 50 passengers in back, a jet weighing 47,000 lbs. It did not help that the Canadair Regional Jets we flew had no leading-edge devices (“slats”) and therefore had to be pointed nose-down at the runway for a blistering final approach speed of 170 mph (substantially faster than a Boeing 737 for example). Finally, I am grateful to the flight attendants with whom I flew. The toughest job at the airline is definitely to be alone in the inadequately air conditioned back with 50 passengers complaining about their kids’ peanut allergies and wondering why we were parked on a taxiway for two or three hours at JFK or DCA.

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As measured by student test scores and adjusted for budget ($13,000 per student (source)), Chicago has some of the world’s least effective schools. The teachers earn an average of $76,000 per year, but with health care, retirement, and other benefits, the true cost is probably closer to $150,000 per year (more than $200,000 per year for a teacher working a standard full-year schedule rather than just for nine months). A Teach for America graduate can be hired for as little as $25,500 per year (source) and will do at least as good a job (see this Stanford study). It would appear that Chicago thus has a golden opportunity to shed crushing pension and health care obligations by spinning off and decentralizing its public school system.

Chicago could simply create a non-profit organization for each school, give the administrative jobs within that school to existing administrators (presumably they are not on strike), fund those new non-profit organizations with $13,000 per student, and let the administrators hire whatever teachers they can find (including hiring from among the currently striking teachers) at market-clearing salaries and with a standard defined contribution retirement plan (rather than the defined benefit plan that has led to the Chicago Public School’s billion-dollar deficit). Now that Obamacare is available, give employees higher salaries and let them purchase health insurance from the Obamarkets.

For students in the Chicago schools, obviously the biggest problem is that they aren’t learning much. For childless taxpayers, however, the biggest problem is that an aging workforce is owed health care and pension benefits that could only be affordable in an economy with real per-capita GDP growth of 5 percent annually (instead of the 0-1 percent that we have). It would seem as though there is no better time to declare the experiment of a centralized school system run by the Chicago city government to be a failed one and, in doing so, spare the taxpayers from future ruin. A decentralized system of publicly-funded non-profit schools would provide at least as good an education, in the very same buildings, at a fraction of the current cost. After that it would be possible to try to do something for the kids, i.e., attempt to ensure that they are receiving an actual education.

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Harvest season is upon us in New England and with it the opportunity to buy organic locally farmed produce for 2-4X what Costco charges to drag the same vegetable or fruit up from Mexico and dump it into your minivan in Waltham.

A variety of analyses on whether or not locally produced food is truly good for the environment have been made, e.g., http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/14/the-inefficiency-of-local-food/

I wonder if a simpler analysis would not apply. Let’s assume that every dollar we spend does a relatively constant amount of damage to the earth. If I give a person or a business an extra dollar, a fraction of that will be spent to buy gasoline, buy new manufactured products and discard old ones, buy electricity that will result in fossil fuels being burned, etc. There are some minor variations in how much damage will be done depending on the person or business that I give the dollar to, but in nearly all cases the more money spent the more damage will be done to the planet.

Thus if I buy local food for 4X the cost of food produced in Mexico, I am paying for New Englanders to drive around in cars, heat their houses with oil, purchase new smart phones and tablet computers, etc. Had I instead bought the produce from Mexico, I would have supported Mexicans who walk to work, heat just one room of their house and only when necessary, and make do with devices that they already own.

This analysis seems simplistic, but I am not sure that it is wrong. What do readers think? Is someone who buys local food at high prices hastening the destruction of the earth?

[Obviously there are other reasons to buy local food, such as taste, but this posting is purely about environmental damage.]

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I had dinner last night with a 28-year-old Spanish computer science researcher who is visiting a lab here in Boston for two months. He said that the economic situation in Spain is terrible. I asked what the root of the problem was, in his opinion. “We are a country of 47 million people but we’re broken up into 17 states, each of which has its own parliament. So there are a total of 18 parliaments. There are a huge number of politicians and each politician has a large collection of advisers. When construction was booming there was enough tax revenue to support all of this government, but now construction is finished and there isn’t enough money. The government has raised the value-added tax on everything to 21 percent. Previously it had been anywhere from 5 to 18 percent. This has driven a large portion of the economy underground and people will accept only cash in order to escape the 21 percent tax. People with university degrees are leaving to take jobs in the U.K. and Germany, which is a huge loss to Spain because their education was massively subsidized. I paid only 600 euro per year for my university education. You can fly back to Spain from Germany once per month for 50 euro each way.”

I thought that the conversation was interesting because it highlights the fact that the European Community coupled with airline deregulation has made it much easier for skilled workers to move around. A country that got in trouble in the old days could count on the fact that most of its young educated people would stay around to help dig out of the mess. Today those young people can scatter very quickly, each one taking a $200,000+ state investment in education with him or her.

[http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/05/spain-very-different-fiscal-crisis.html has an interesting chart.]

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I loved this New Yorker story about a Michigan dentist who managed a surprising meteoric rise in marathon performance. Web server IP address analysis plays a role, a detail that I appreciated. The article has become more timely now due to the fact that Paul Ryan apparently claimed to have run a three-hour marathon (story).

It is tough to feel proud of one’s achievements in a country where politicians and government workers claim credit for everything! (e.g., Al Gore invented the Internet, President Obama tells business founders that they owe everything to infrastructure built 100 years ago, and now Ryan turns out to be a running superhero)

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http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_stillman?currentPage=all is a worthwhile New Yorker magazine article on how the government coerces young people accused of minor drug crimes into serving as police informants, sometimes at the cost of their lives. To me this is an illustration of why the excitement around the current presidential election is misplaced. When there is something truly going wrong with our society, generally both parties support it.

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Harvard is complaining that 125 students cheated by collaborating on a take-home exam in a course called “Introduction to Congress” (syllabus), part of their Government department. As this was the final exam, however, could it be that the students simply had absorbed the lessons of the class? It is unclear whether or not the career of Ted Kennedy was covered, for example, but he was surely one of the most successful members of Congress and, in 1951, he sent a friend to take a final exam in Spanish for him (Harvard suspended Kennedy for two years following this infraction).

Cheating does not work well in a competitive marketplace. Customers eventually figure out that a product does not do what was promised or that an alternative vendor has a superior product. But cheating can be very effective for government workers and politicians. My old home of Montgomery County, Maryland has close to the lowest crime rate in the state (source), yet 77 percent of the police officers retire with a service-related disability (source). Members of Congress can make money via insider trading (see this article on Peter Schweizer’s book) Voters expect politicians to lie to them, promising stuff that cannot possibly be delivered.

After learning all of this, is it reasonable to expect students to take the high/difficult road?

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If you’re in Manhattan this week, don’t miss a 29-minute sound installation work running continuously at the Park Avenue Armory (at 67th). The building itself is worth a trip if you haven’t been inside. The “sound art” consists of roughly 100 B&W speakers placed in various locations within a cavernous darkened space. With so many speakers, some of them well above the audience, it is possible to create very realistic illusions of, for example, birds flying overhead. The piece, by Cardiff and Miller, ends on Sunday, September 9th. Note that the work is marred by a woman reciting what is supposedly a dream. This is reminiscent of Sarah Silverman’s routine about having a dream of a shark coming out a swimming pool wearing braces and that therefore Martin Luther King’s dream was nothing special. Except that Silverman was funny.

In the evening, don’t miss Harrison, Texas, a Horton Foote play, at 59 E. 59th Street, an intimate theater. Closes September 15.

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Apropos of the question of whether 20-hour pilots can fly an amphibious seaplane, such as the Icon A5, safely, here’s a sad video of what happens when a 4000-hour pilot forgets to retract the gear prior to landing: http://www.aopa.org/asf/video/no-greater-burden.html

[Update January 2018: link seems to have rotted; these AOPA guys are going to make American aviation great, but they can’t preserve functional links on their own web site? The video seems to be on YouTube.]

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At dinner this evening with some friends, the question of how to define the function of a marketing department came up. I related a story from the 1990s. A (very profitable) division of Hewlett-Packard asked for assistance with building an online community for several hundred marketing employees who wanted to share documents. “Most of these are PowerPoints,” it was explained to me. I was proud of being a quick study and said “Oh, I get it. People trade these PowerPoint presentations back and forth and then, when the final version is approved you want it to be accessible to customers from the server.” Everyone in the conference room blanched with horror. “We would never allow customers to see these presentations,” they exclaimed, “they are only for internal use.”

I thought for a moment and then asked “You mean that you pay several hundred people to sit in their cubicles and create PowerPoint presentations to show to each other?” The answer turned out to be “yes”.

So that’s my definition of marketing: A group of employees paid to show PowerPoint presentations to each other.

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