A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
A friend pointed me to this Boston Globe story about Barack Obama’s uncle, who apparently lives in Framingham, Massachusetts despite having been ordered deported in 1992. Mr. Obama made the news after his arrest for drunk driving. With http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeituni_Onyango (also previously deported), that makes at least two Obama relatives who have chosen Massachusetts as their home.
Full post, including commentsHarvard Yard was closed today, with campus police trying to inconvenience the Occupy Harvard tent city that is set up in the Yard. Certainly the closure inconvenienced Ollie the (border) Collie, who had to try to pick his way through a crowded sidewalk en route to the Verizon store (clogged with iPhone customers needing assistance in transferring the contacts from their old phones to their fancy new ones; apparently the iPhone is at its simplest when being advertised).
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/11/11/matthews-occupy-harvard/ explains the goals of the Occupy Harvard movement, including “We want Harvard to pay its workers a living wage” and a complaint that too many Harvard kids (about 30 percent) are from semi-rich families (who constitute just 5 percent of the U.S. population).
https://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/the-state-of-young-college-grads-2011/ meanwhile shows that the wages of U.S. college graduates are trending steadily downward while Generation Debt is accumulating ever larger student loans (plus of course their federal and state governments are borrowing trillions of dollars on their behalf). Could it be that these folks should be studying Mandarin rather than perfecting their camping skills?
Full post, including commentsThe latest New Yorker carries an article on Steve Jobs by Malcolm Gladwell. There are some interesting highlights lifted from the recent 656-page biography of Mr. Jobs
My friends here in the Northeast are all running out to buy backup generators now (i.e., closing the barn doors after the horses are gone). The cheapest that I’ve heard for an installation is about $7,000, complete with electrician’s efforts (I was quoted over $20,000 at my house, partly due to there not being a great location or it near the house). The resulting machine will need to be maintained, run every week for a few minutes (very noisy), and will never recoup any of its costs.
It occurs to me that rooftop solar systems are in the same price ballpark ($7,000 to $30,000?). Supplemented by a snow broom, I would think that a rooftop solar system would make a good backup and, for the 99 percent of the time that the grid was working, could help defray its cost by generating useful electricity.
Obviously the solar panels wouldn’t work at night, but it isn’t usually a big deal to go overnight without power. If the well pump and heating system can be operated during the daylight hours that should be enough to keep pipes from freezing and allow the residents to enjoy a modicum of civilized existence.
Here are some questions for the solar pioneers:
I’m wary about solar because it seems like too advanced a technology for a U.S. home. It is so painful to get simple stuff fixed that I can’t imagine what would happen with a technician up on the roof with a Fluke voltmeter.
Full post, including commentsMy dumb economics question for the day is regarding Greece. The country has a population that isn’t much larger than the Chicago metropolitan area. Greece, like Chicago, is part of a currency union. Greece, like Chicago and surrounding suburbs, has borrowed a lot of money via issuing bonds. Suppose that the citizens of Chicago decided that they didn’t want to work very hard and then retire at age 50 and probably weren’t going to bother paying back their creditors. Would that be a crisis for the entire U.S.? For the dollar? For worldwide stock markets?
If the U.S. could suffer the, well, relaxation of Chicago, why can’t Europe handle one country whose citizens take a more relaxed view of work than their creditors would like?
[Separately, events in Europe seem to reward caveman-style investing. Italians and Greeks have a wonderful lifestyle that doesn’t include too much hard work. England has a set of entrenched interest groups (see Mancur Olson) that would appear to make sustained economic growth impossible. Absent a lot of fancy data from investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, an investor would run away from any opportunity presented in these countries in favor of investments in Germany, Korea, China, etc. In the last year or two we find out that England is in fact more or less broke and that the numbers the investment banks and Greece put forward were simply false. Japan, I suppose, is the best counterexample to this caveman-style investing approach. People there are highly skilled and work very hard, but investors haven’t done well in the past couple of decades.]
Full post, including commentsThe Boston Globe offers a great example of how politicians work hard on behalf of suffering citizens:
“Amid growing public outcry over protracted power outages, Governor Deval Patrick said he had lost patience with the state’s electric companies, while the state’s leading prosecutor said her office would seek an investigation of the utilities’ performance in responding to last weekend’s snowstorm.” (full story (behind paywall))
In our Boston suburb of about 2,000 households there were at least 100 power lines knocked down by trees and tree limbs. Towns farther west were hit much harder by the recent storm. I do wonder what the government investigation will conclude. That a typical family, using ordinary household tools, cannot remove a tree from a live power line?
[Related to some earliest stories in this blog: The same issue of the Globe carries a story about how one of Massachusetts’s 200 public housing authorities pays its manager, Michael McLaughlin, $360,000 per year and will be saddling taxpayers with the obligation to pay him a $278,842 per year pension for the rest of his life. The authority, in Chelsea, has 1,415 apartments.]
Full post, including commentsA privacy/security nut asked me recently how I knew that email sent via Gmail and files shared with Dropbox.com were not being read by employees of Google or Dropbox.
https://www.dropbox.com/security is pretty clear:
We guard your privacy to the best of our ability and work hard to protect your information from unauthorized access.
Dropbox employees are prohibited from viewing the content of files you store in your Dropbox account, and are only permitted to view file metadata (e.g., file names and locations). Like most online services, we have a small number of employees who must be able to access user data for the reasons stated in our privacy policy (e.g., when legally required to do so). But that’s the rare exception, not the rule. We have strict policy and technical access controls that prohibit employee access except in these rare circumstances. In addition, we employ a number of physical and electronic security measures to protect user information from unauthorized access.
I couldn’t find anything comparable among the forest of Google documents on how important privacy is to them. Mostly Google seems to write about how they won’t share “personal information” (used in http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/privacy-policy.html; defined in http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy/faq.html#toc-terms-personal-info ), which seems to be name and email address.
https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1304609 says that the answer to “Is Google reading my mail?” is “No” but doesn’t elaborate other than to talk about some computer programs that try to read the mail in order to determine what ads to serve.
Has Google gone on record saying that they won’t read the contents of a letter stored in Google Docs? If so, where?
Full post, including commentsI have an HP Pavilion Elite desktop computer, model HPE-490t . I like it because it didn’t cost too much, boots itself from an SSD, came with 16 GB of RAM, and has 6 CPU cores for editing video and camera RAW images. It has one behavioral quirk that I cannot explain, however. The recent power interruptions here in the Northeast got the machine into a state where it could not be restarted. It would power up for a second or two, shut down, and then power up again, never being able to get to the point of showing anything on the monitor. I unplugged it for about 10 seconds and plugged it back in. Same behavior. I unplugged it and walked away for an hour, then plugged it back in and it worked perfectly.
I think something similar happened after installing a second hard disk drive into this machine.
So the question is why does the computer behave differently depending on how long it has been unplugged? Where is energy stored that affects the machine’s ability to boot? Capacitors in the power supply? Battery on the motherboard (there is one for the clock, but that wouldn’t be exhausted by being unplugged for an hour, I don’t think)?
Full post, including commentsI have discovered that there is only one thing worse than paying $5,000 per year to the electric utility and thereby accelerating global warming… not paying anything for electricity because there is none to be had. Our house lost power for about 24 hours, which meant no heat, no water (it depends on a pump from a well in the backyard), and no landline (Verizon FiOS helpfully includes a backup battery that is exhausted after 8 hours)).
Perhaps it is time to adopt a 30-year-old friend’s philosophy: “I don’t understand why people are worried about global warming; the Earth needs to last only 50 more years.”
Public mourning continues for the loss of Steve Jobs, who brought us a touch-screen interface for our phones. Perhaps those of us who live in the Northeast should set aside a moment of thanks for the minds who brought us practical electricity: Maxwell, Volta, Orsted, Ampere, Faraday, Ohm, Tesla (Mr. AC Power). Their achievements may have been minor compared to those of Jobs, but without their early work, how would we charge our iPhones?
Full post, including commentsI’m just back from a trip to Washington, D.C., where people take politics so seriously that politicians’ speeches are broadcast in full on the radio (e.g., a full half hour was devoted to a talk by Joe Biden to some Democrats in Florida; anywhere else in the U.S., a Vice-President would have to be Raptured or undergo a sex-change operation in order to merit 30 minutes of uninterrupted radio time). A handful of friends there asked me what I thought about the various “flat tax” proposals being put forward. Most of these folks have worked in Washington their entire lives and therefore have no understanding of what it might be like to work in a private company selling goods and services to private customers. So they asked “Would a flat tax make it easier to run a business?”
My reply was that most of the costs of the present system to me relate to figuring out how much my income actually is, rather than multiplying that income by one or more rates. Different capital goods must be depreciated on different schedules. Expenses must be categorized. Losses are sometimes deductible (ordinary business) but sometimes not (loss from renting out real estate, unless one is working full time in real estate). All of this costs me about $2500 per year in accounting fees and a couple of weeks that could have been spent generating additional income rather that poring over statements. The cost/hassle would be the same under a flat tax.
So I’m not motivated to advocate for a flat tax, but I do advocate that we eliminate home mortgage interest deductibility (subsidizing one of the most unproductive corners of the economy (a worker who goes home to a fancy house is no more productive than a worker who goes home to a simple house)) and allow businesses to choose whatever depreciation schedule they like for capital expenses, including immediate write-off of 100 percent (could simplify compliance by allowing a company simply to look at its checking account balance annually and infer the previous year’s income).
In general, all of the tax talk seems like a bit of a distraction. If we re-tweaked the income tax code would it then become profitable for companies to hire America’s 15 million unemployed folks? If the problem is that these workers aren’t educated or skilled enough and that they require health insurance in the world’s most expensive country for health care, a change in income tax policy isn’t going to make a big difference.
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