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The latest New Yorker magazine contains “The Grand Tour”, an article by Evan Osnos, who joins a Chinese bus tour to see Europe through the eyes of Guide Li:

“if [the bus driver gets caught working more than 12 hours/day, audited by an automated system], the fine starts at eighty-eight hundred euros, and they take away your license! That’s the way Europe is. On the surface, it appears to rely on everyone’s self-discipline, but behind it all there are strict laws.”

“We have to get used to the fact that Europeans sometimes move slowly,” he said. When shopping in China, he went on, “we’re accustomed to three of us putting our items on the counter at the same time, and then the old lady gives change to three people without making a mistake. Europeans don’t do that.” He continued, “I’m not saying that they’re stupid. If they were, they wouldn’t have developed all this technology, which requires very subtle calculations. They just deal with math in a different way. Let them do things their way, because if we’re rushing then they’ll feel rushed, and that will put them in a bad mood, and then we’ll think that they’re discriminating against us, which is not necessarily the case.”

Li made a great show of acting out a Mediterranean life style: “Wake up slowly, brush teeth, make a cup of espresso, take in the aroma.” The crowd laughed. “With a pace like that, how can their economies keep growing? It’s impossible.” He added, “In this world, only when you have diligent, hardworking people will the nation’s economy grow.”

“The European economy is in decline,” he said bluntly. “Times have changed.”

“Can a place where workers go on strike every day grow economically? Certainly not,” he said.

[Handy, a fellow tourist,] was a sanitation specialist by training, and he couldn’t help but notice Milan’s abundant graffiti and overstuffed trash bins. As Li had explained it, “The government wants to clean, but it doesn’t have enough money.” Handy tried to be polite, but he said, “If it was like this in Shanghai, old folks would be calling us all afternoon to complain.”

He pointed out the window to the highway and said that it had taken decades for Italy to build it, because of local opposition. “If this were China, it would be done in six months! And that’s the only way to keep the economy growing.”

He mentioned a Western friend who had quit his job to go backpacking and find his calling in life. “Would our parents accept that? Of course not! They’d point a finger and say, ‘You’re a waste!’ ” he said. But, in Europe, “young people are allowed to pursue what they want to pursue.”

More: Read the article.

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Friends have been asking me what the practical implications are of air traffic controllers falling asleep during late-night shifts. News reports make it seem as though the controllers’ primary job is “guiding pilots” and therefore, without a Tower controller, the two airline pilots in their state-of-the-art plane wouldn’t be able to find their way to the airport/runway.

In fact, if properly programmed, a modern airliner can more or less fly itself from runway to runway. The vast majority of airports in the U.S. don’t have control towers. Of the towered airports, most have a part-time tower, e.g., from 7 am to 11 pm at our local (very busy) Hanscom Field. If the airport is non-towered to begin with or the tower is closed, the standard procedure is for an arriving airplane to broadcast its intentions on the common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF), which is typically the same as the Tower frequency when the controllers are off-duty. A broadcast might take the form “Hanscom Traffic, Cirrus 5 miles south, entering left downwind Runway 29. Hanscom.” If an airplane were taking off, the Cirrus pilot would hear “Hanscom Traffic, Baron departing Runway 5 straight out. Hanscom” and understand that a small twin-engine plane was about to take off and fly northeast towards Maine. http://www.airnav.com/airport/KDED is an example of an airport with 213 operations per day and no tower (that is probably one of the busiest non-towered airports in the U.S. and, in fact, a tower is being put in).

If pilots can find the airport, choose a runway depending on the wind, announce their own positions, and see and avoid each other, what purpose does a Tower controller serve? At a busy airport, the controller figures out the best way to sequence and separate airplanes so that they can make maximum use of the available runways while minimizing hazards such as wake turbulence. It can be a very demanding job but, aside from helping the occasional student pilot who gets lost, has little to do with “guiding” pilots.

What if it is 3 a.m. and traffic is so light that the controller has fallen asleep? Pilots in that situation are so few and far between that they should not have any difficulty in separating themselves. What if the weather is cloudy and the airplanes are flying on instruments? This is a very common situation and it is handled by the Approach controllers issuing only one instrument approach clearance at a time. Until they hear that the cleared airplane is on the ground or has “gone missed” (elected to climb out and try again at that airport or elsewhere; a standard procedure if the weather does not meet minimum requirements or if anything unusual occurs during the approach), any other airplane that wishes to use the airport will be forced to wait (vectors or holding up in the sky; parked short of the runway on the ground).

The main challenge in the reported situations is that the pilots expected the controllers be on duty and did not expect to have to follow the established procedures for non-towered airports. At the end of a four-day trip sleeping 5-6 hours/night in Hilton Garden Inns, the last thing that an airline crew needs is to be confronted with the unexpected (i.e., not everyone can be Captain Sully!). The government has decided to address the situation by adding more personnel (at an average cost to taxpayers of at least $250,000 per year per controller, including pension and health care benefits; not clear why the “keep the first person awake” person needs to be a fully trained controller, but apparently the plan is to use the highest cost and qualified people available) but it could also have been addressed by changing the overnight procedures so that pilots would more readily revert to the non-towered procedures if unable to contact the Tower. The only existing procedure that currently applies is “loss of radio communications” in which case a pilot in instrument conditions is expected to continue the flight and land at approximately the time expected.

How would I solve the problem? Start by purchasing a treadmill for the overnight controller so that he or she could be moving at a slow walking pace rather than sitting/slumping at a desk. Maybe add some productive work that the controller could do while waiting 15-30 minutes between radio calls. Finally hire an $8/hour intern who wanted to learn about air traffic control to assist with the overnight shift (an intern would ask a lot more questions than a fully trained controller and therefore be a greater aid to staying awake). Hiring a second controller to handle a situation that arises because there is only enough work to keep 1/10th of a person busy does not seem like a wise use of taxpayer funds.

[I have some personal experience with this. For example, I landed a regional jet at the Burlington, Vermont airport after the Tower was closed as scheduled. I don’t think that our flight was late; it was simply that our schedule and the Tower’s schedule did not overlap. It felt a little strange that we were clicking the microphone 5 times (to turn on the runway and taxiway lights for 10 minutes) and making calls to “Burlington Traffic” while traveling at 230 mph with 50 passengers in the back, but we managed to land and find our way to the gate nonetheless. A corporate jet was about 3 minutes ahead of us. I don’t think anyone landed between the time that we touched down and the time that we shut off the radios.]

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Folks: I’ve completed a review of Higher Education? and would appreciate comments/corrections.

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We’re getting into roughly the 15th year of Internet digital photo sharing. Back when I was teaching one-day courses in Internet applications to broad audiences, e.g., in 1999, folks would ask me “What will cameras look like in the future?” I confidently predicted that the typical point and shoot camera would have an 802.11 transceiver and, whenever it came within range of a wireless network, would upload all of the recently captured images to an Internet photo sharing site.

It looks as though this prediction has been dead wrong, but I can’t figure out why. I still think it would be useful for the average photographer to have a camera that trickled all of the pictures up to Picasa, Flickr, or similar. Can this even be purchased? http://www.eye.fi/ seems to do most of what I envisioned, but it isn’t part of the camera itself. The latest Canon and Nikon compact digital cameras don’t offer this capability, though they can cost over $300 and you’d think the cost of a WiFi radio would be negligible.

Why would the average consumer want to monkey with USB cables, memory cards, etc. in order to get the photos up to where they can be viewed by friends and family?

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News accounts on the latest federal budget deal gave the numbers in a vacuum, e.g., “The deal cuts $38 billion from last year’s budget. It’s being called the largest domestic spending cut in U.S. history” (source). How can an individual voter make sense of quantities that are ordinarily written in scientific notation? I think the easiest way is to divide everything by 100,000,000 (10^8).

Let’s start with federal spending. The FY 2011 federal budget is approximately $3.82 trillion (3.82×10^12). Of that, approximately $2.17 trillion will be paid for by taxes collected and the remaining $1.65 trillion will be borrowed from our grandchildren. If we divide everything by 100 million, the numbers begin to make more sense.

We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

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I have just cracked open Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It and would be delighted if readers of this Weblog also pick up a copy and start reading. I’ll try to do a review later.

As inspiration, the very first chapter has some awesome calculations. A professor at Kenyon College earns $242 per hour (based on actual classroom and office hours); his or her counterpart at Yale? $820 per hour. “We readily acknowledge that [professors] do something outside their classroom and office hours. But the great bulk of it is less real than contrived: committees, department meetings, faculty senates, and yes, what they call their research, the utility of which we question in a later chapter.”

The authors point out that professors often aren’t on campus at all: “At Harvard, even untenured asssistant professors get a fully paid year to complete a promotion-worthy book. Thus in a recent year, of its history department’s six assistant professors, only two were on hand to teach classes. In Harvard’s department of philosophy that same year, almost half of its full-time faculty were away on sabbaticals. Of course it was the students who paid. Many of their undergraduate courses were canceled or given by one-year visitors unfamiliar with the byways of the university.”

“At the end of the day, this strange little world [of academia] often alienates the genuinely smart and idealistic. Many of the best people find it intolerable, clearing the path for careerists.”

Combined with Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the legacy higher ed system has never been under more serious attack, even as it has never enjoyed more generous federal funding (the Department of Education did not exist until May 1980 and in 2011 will spend $71 billion of future taxpayer’s dollars).

Update: I’ve completed my review at http://philip.greenspun.com/book-reviews/higher-education

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I attended a Bat Mitzvah today. As is conventional for the Jewish tradition, the 13-year-old girl was encouraged to dedicate a major part of her life to helping the less fortunate and was in the middle of a project to assist some needy folks (collecting supplies for a local women’s shelter).

A variety of sources show that today’s 13-year-old will be, whether she wants to or not, spending her working years taking care of a lot more non-workers than her parents did. Here are some sources for the dependency ratio:

• http://aging.senate.gov/crs/ss4.pdf
• http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/aging_population/cb10-72.html
• http://www.investmentu.com/2010/January/the-dependency-ratio.html

Furthermore, public employee pensions were not nearly as generous nor did public employees retire as early or live as long during her parents’ career-building years. Retiree health care costs were insignificant for governments.

If the girl is inevitably going to be paying heavy taxes to support retired public employees, interest on money borrowed for government deficit spending before she was born, interest on money borrowed to pay for wars that she wasn’t old enough to vote “yes” or “no” for (she’ll be paying for our Libya war, for example), etc., should we also try to guilt her into working extra hours to indulge in private charity? Suppose that she ends up paying 60 percent of her lifetime income in sales tax, property tax, income tax, gasoline tax, excise taxes, etc. And much of that will go so that others need not work. Can we say that she has done her share and the Jewish/Biblical obligations of charity have been fulfilled? If not, what if the government takes 70 percent of the fruits of her labor? Is there any amount that would relieve her of the obligation to engage in private charity?

[Separately, one of the guests at the event illustrated how challenging it might be for the young woman to carry her parents and grandparents, financially, on her shoulders. “We produce sheets for American retailers,” said the gray-haired New Yorker in a blue suit. “Everything was in South Carolina until about 15 years ago, but the unions made it impossible to deliver at the prices demanded by consumers. We were lucky because we were one of the first to move overseas, first to China, then Pakistan, and four years ago, when Pakistan became too chaotic, to India.” How many people did his operation employ in India? “We started working with a small company, with about 2400 people, but because of our orders they’ve grown to 27,000.” How many folks does his enterprise employ here in the U.S.? “Just one. You’re talking to him.”]

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My flight instructor certificate was expiring this month (unlike a pilot’s license, the instructor certificate must be renewed every two years), so I rushed over to the FAA’s Boston FSDO to have an Aviation Safety Inspector bless my paperwork and issue me a temporary certificate. He said “You didn’t have to rush; we’ll all be here during any shutdown.” What about the mailing of the permanent certificate? Wasn’t there a risk of that being delayed? “It’s done by a contractor, so you should have it within a week regardless.”

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Congress and President Obama are fighting over whether the federal government should spend $40 trillion (Republicans) over the next ten years or $46 trillion (Democrats). Either way, the government will spend more money than it takes in and future generations will be burdened with additional debt. Either way, the states will continue to have enormous pension and retiree health care obligations that they have set aside no money to pay.

In the midst of this question of how best to impoverish our grandchildren, there is a risk that the “non-essential” federal government will shut down. To me, the most senseless part of a shutdown is the closure of the National Parks. A principal reason that the U.S. is so wealthy is that we stole such a great piece of land from the Indians. We’ve been reaping a return on that stolen investment for 400 years. The National Parks yield some of the highest return of any of the land. Foreigners come here to see the parks and pay at least the following taxes: airfare taxes, airport facility fees (mostly to government agencies), rental car tax, gasoline tax, hotel tax, restaurant tax, sales tax on anything that they buy, payroll tax (indirectly through the workers whose jobs at hotels, restaurants, etc. they support), property tax (indirectly through the landlords of the hotels and restaurants, etc.), and income tax (again through workers).

If, as a society, we’re running out of money, shouldn’t we at least keep the profit centers open?

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As a taxpayer, my only comfort in our newest war is that it provokes some thought on the nature of international organizations. A Nobel Peace Laureate is killing people who recently chaired the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Why? Because the United Nations Security Council has decided that the former chair of the Human Rights Commission doesn’t provide enough human rights. Truth is truly stranger than fiction.

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