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Given that the SSD or hybrid disk drive (e.g., Seagate Momentus) would seem to be ideal for laptop computers, why aren’t they more popular? To research this posting, I visited the HP and Dell sites and looked at their high-end 17″ laptops. Neither was available with a hybrid drive (Seagate says that 1 million have been shipped, which sounds great but that’s a negligible market share), despite the fact that these retail for as little as $108 at Amazon.com (see Seagate Momentus XT 250 GB). HP and Dell charge approximately $600 extra for an SSD over a conventional hard drive, despite the fact 256 GB hard drives retail for as little as $365 at Amazon (e.g., Crucial 256GB m4 SSD). Why wouldn’t a notebook computer maker want to encourage SSD sales so that they can (1) have consumers talk about how fast their new Brand X laptop is, (2) reduce failure and return rates, and (3) cut down on build time (presumably it is faster to load an OS onto an SSD-based laptop)? So one would naively think that Dell and HP would not mark up an SSD more than a retailer such as Amazon or Newegg.

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A reader sent me this article on how farmers in Alabama can’t find Americans willing to take farm jobs formerly filled by eager illegal immigrants. One big objection to the work is that it is physically demanding, yet millions of Americans voluntarily pay for gym membership and/or boot camp-style fitness programs. Maybe the farm jobs should be advertised as “lose weight working out in the sun”.

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I was listening to an NPR program about a year ago about the fuel efficiency of different kinds of travel (the sample trip, was, I think New York City to Chicago). A regular car packed with four people was pretty good. A commercial airliner wasn’t so bad. A passenger train was terrible. It surprised me because freight trains are so efficient, but then I reflected that the total weight of an AMTRAK car is huge compared to the payload of people inside. The following article is interesting because it talks about why passenger rail cars in the U.S. are so heavy: http://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html (also has some stuff about why Acela is such an unreliable service, despite the fact that it is so much slower than anything in Europe or Japan).

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Among the achievements of Steve Jobs, the elevation of user experience design to the point that we might almost call this the Age of User Experience. Let’s consider the iPhone. Here are the technologies that went into making it a practical consumer item:

• plastic molding (Leo Baekeland)
• stored-program computer (Turing, von Neumann)
• transistor (Bell Labs)
• integrated circuit (Fairchild)
• LCD screen (RCA, Westinghouse)
• cell phone network (Bell Labs, Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, Ericsson)
• Global Positioning System (U.S. military and The Aerospace Corporation)
• pocket computer (Sharp, Palm, Apple Newton, others?)
• multi-tasking operating system (MIT)
• Unix (Bell Labs)
• graphical user interface (Xerox PARC)
• MP3 player (various)
• app phone (Danger (became T-Mobile Sidekick))

Aside from the pocket computer, neither Apple nor Steve Jobs had anything to do with the development of any of these technologies, yet details that an engineer would regard as tiny turned out to make a huge difference in market acceptance and profitability. Business managers can no longer ignore such details.

Anyone today who has a job in user experience should therefore thank Steve Jobs.

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I talked at lunch today with a Nobel laureate in Economics (name withheld because he is a friend’s relative; let’s call him “Bob”). Bob is an expert on macro-economics and we talked about unemployment in the U.S. and the high cost of health care, especially government-funded health care such as Medicare.

Like other economists, Bob impressed me with his ability to ignore the details and texture of real life. I reminded him that two years ago I suggested that a lot of the 15 million unemployed folks simply did not have the skills and/or work ethic to be worth hiring in today’s economy, e.g., one where a sloppy worker can ruin a $10 million batch of goods or download a virus and cost the IT department $50,000. I had also suggested that the cost of health care was too high to make it worth hiring Americans in any job where providing health insurance was customary (see this posting). At the time Bob had castigated me for my pessimism and assured me that growth was just around the corner due to the upcoming fiscal stimulus spending.

Two years and about $3 trillion of deficit spending later, the U.S. economy has not responded the way that Bob predicted. I tried to engage him on the skills and education question and he responded that we don’t know how to fix K-12 education so we shouldn’t put more money into it (a fair point, perhaps). Better to spend on physical infrastructure such as roads, airports, dams, etc. He cited a report that showed America’s airports to be in “Grade D” condition. This was a surprise because most U.S. airports (the runways and taxiways, not the terminals) strike me as being in excellent shape. Mostly I was impressed by Bob’s lack of interest in what goes on at the individual level. For example, he hadn’t thought about what it would take for an individual business person to hire a new worker here in the U.S.

The debate over Medicare is very abstract when politicians and economists talk about it. Nobody can quite figure out how we spend twice as large a slice of GDP on health care as other countries. Yet a single conversation with a doctor would add a lot to an understanding of the problem. A friend of mine (“Joe”) is a pulmonary/critical care doctor. An elderly patient comes into the hospital. Dr. Joe tells them “Your father is going to die within two weeks. To keep him alive beyond tonight will require a lot of machines and about $300,000 of Medicare expense. What would you like to do?” The response was “Everything.” Dr. Joe says “It didn’t make a lot of medical sense, but I get paid by Medicare either way so we did everything.”

Reasoning and making decisions from anecdotes is obviously not very sound. On the other hand, it seems that economists are led to a lot of unsound conclusions by ignoring the anecdotes.

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Folks:

I’m looking for good Columbus Day weekend ideas for here in New England. Apple picking does not count. Hiking and biking are too obvious.

If someone asked me what to do I would tend to say “helicopter tour over the foliage”. A friend is going to stay in a lighthouse (now bed and breakfast) on an island off the coast of Maine (see http://whiteheadlightstation.org ; click top of page for Columbus Day package). If the weather is bad, maybe the Ellsworth Kelly show at the MFA (open on Mondays, unlike a lot of museums)?

Who has better ideas?

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According to Bloomberg, the Obama administration has proposed a new $100/flight tax on turbine-powered aircraft. Such airplanes are already subject to a tax on every gallon of fuel used and, if chartered, a 7.5 percent excise tax on the ticket price. The existing taxes tend to favor efficiency. Al Gore’s Gulfstream will pay more than an efficient turboprop or light jet for the same trip. A charter trip in a heavy jet will pay more in tax than a charter trip in a light jet or turboprop. The new tax will do the opposite, imposing the same fee on a Gulfstream and a self-piloted Piper Meridian.

Mostly I’m confused by why anyone would want to create a new tax and associated federal bureaucracy (forms, help desk, inspectors, enforcement, appeals process) to collect it. If the goal is to raise more revenue, why not simply raise the rates on the existing taxes? Do we want our government to bleed us with paper cuts?

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Thoughtful tutorial on the art of sincere apology from New Yorker magazine: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2011/09/05/110905sh_shouts_rudnick

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Today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The most remarkable thing to me is that the U.S. has not recovered from 9/11 either psychologically or economically. We are investing trillions of dollars in security (when does the quest for security become “paranoia”?) and occupations of two hand-picked enemy countries. The occupations are conducted in such an expensive manner that we are actually funding our own enemies (see this 2009 posting) and therefore can continue indefinitely.

Bad things happen to people and countries. Parents die or divorce and children recover. Beloved girlfriends or boyfriends abandon their lovers and yet still most of them graduate from college or medical school. Cities are destroyed by natural disasters or war and people rebuild.

The U.S. has not suffered anywhere near the damage of a defeated or occupied country during World War II. Nor have we experienced anything like the violence that overwhelmed Rwanda in 1994. Yet somehow we do not seem to be able to move on. Even the rebuilding of the World Trade Center can serve as a symbol of our sluggishness. One World Trade Center is scheduled for completion in 2013, twelve years following 9/11. Twelve years is enough time for a mid-sized Chinese city to build a network of highways, a subway system, an airport from scratch, and a healthy fraction of a Manhattan worth of office and residential space (admittedly not always wisely).

So here’s hoping that the next ten post-9/11 years will be ones of true recovery.

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I went to dinner at a friend’s house and was forced to watch Barack Obama speak. Here’s what I noticed…

“These men and women grew up with faith in an America where hard work and responsibility paid off. They believed in a country where everyone gets a fair shake and does their fair share — where if you stepped up, did your job, and were loyal to your company, that loyalty would be rewarded with a decent salary and good benefits; maybe a raise once in a while. If you did the right thing, you could make it. Anybody could make it in America.”

Given the cheers that greeted this speech, it would seem that our politicians do not believe that there was ever any kind of market for labor in the U.S. Companies paid more than a market-clearing wage in the past because workers were “loyal” or “did the right thing” or because of a notion of “fair shake”. Wages for American workers have therefore not come under pressure due to the availability of educated workers in China and India because that would be a market effect and in fact wages were based on sentiment.

“Building a world-class transportation system is part of what made us a economic superpower. And now we’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads? At a time when millions of unemployed construction workers could build them right here in America? “

According to Obama, China builds new airports because they are in some sort of race with the U.S. and they are winning. The possibility that China builds airports because they have some cities with more than 5 million population and no airport at all is not considered. The return on investment to building new infrastructure in the U.S. wouldn’t be nearly as high as building it in a fast-growing underdeveloped economy such as Brazil, India, or China. It would be nice if we had congestion pricing on our roads so that transportation times were predictable (the San Francisco and Los Angeles metro areas have traffic jams uncertainty levels equal to any Third World capital), but Obama did not propose anything like that.

“And there are schools throughout this country that desperately need renovating. How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart? This is America. Every child deserves a great school — and we can give it to them, if we act now. The American Jobs Act will repair and modernize at least 35,000 schools. It will put people to work right now fixing roofs and windows, installing science labs and high-speed Internet in classrooms all across this country.”

Obama wants to spend billions of tax dollars running wires for Internet right at the same time that mobile carriers are putting the finishing touches on their 4G LTE wireless networks and right at the same time that school kids are acquiring smartphones and tablets. “Every child deserves a great school” so we’ll build palaces around the same teachers and curriculum that have produced inferior results to so many other countries?

“The plan also extends unemployment insurance for another year.”

Does that mean 99 weeks of Xbox is now 151 weeks?

“Or should we put teachers back to work so our kids can graduate ready for college and good jobs?”

The same teachers who currently are able to prepare only about 50 percent of their students adequately for college or a job are going to “go back to work” and suddenly they will do a lot better? I guess this is the one part of the speech where Obama has already delivered. As it is September, many more teachers are working this month than were working in July.

“If we provide the right incentives, the right support — and if we make sure our trading partners play by the rules — we can be the ones to build everything from fuel-efficient cars to advanced biofuels to semiconductors that we sell all around the world. That’s how America can be number one again.”

No mention of the $535 million in taxpayer money flushed down the toilet in the Solyndra bankruptcy last week (U.S. Department of Energy put the money in during 2009; Obama visited in May 2010).

“What kind of country would this be if this chamber had voted down Social Security or Medicare just because it violated some rigid idea about what government could or could not do?”

Hmmm… “solvent”?

“Let’s get to work, and let’s show the world once again why the United States of America remains the greatest nation on Earth.”

Why do we have to show the world that we’re the greatest? Are we in fact the greatest? What if China’s GDP surpasses ours, as it is forecast to? Will we then no longer be the greatest?

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