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Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time, a new O’Reilly book, arrived in last week’s mail. I have reviewed in http://philip.greenspun.com/book-reviews/web-operations

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I’m helping a friend get to Boeing Field on Wednesday, departing for a return trip to Boston on Friday morning. He’ll be enduring some meetings in the exurbs, which puts me in Seattle for two nights and 1.5 days with very little to do. I would appreciate suggestions for where to stay (neighborhood or specific hotel) and what to do (museums, concerts (anything from Bach to Stravinsky), etc.).

Also, please email if you’re interested in meeting up. I’m thinking that a coffee shop on Thursday late afternoon would be good.

Update: I’m staying at the Mayflower Park Hotel (the FBO has a good rate with them) and it is just for one night. That means the meeting-up time needs to be breakfast/coffee on Thursday morning. I was thinking 8-10 am so that people who need to be at work by 9 can show up and also people who like to sleep in can show up at 9 or 9:30. Suggested places? A quick search of Google Maps and Yelp reveals… librarybistro.com, eatatlowells.com, andaluca.com (in my hotel), cherryst.com (which location has the best seating and quietest acoustics?).

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On average, Americans who work in the private sector are struggling financially. Millions are unemployed and the rest may be looking at an additional decade of toil before they can retire (since their houses and 401ks are worth so much less). Should we feel sorry for these folks in the same way that we might feel sympathy for Zimbabweans or other victims of an incompetent government?

Arguing in favor of sympathy is the basic fact that these folks are suffering, albeit not as badly as a lot of Africans.

Arguing against sympathy is that we Americans voted for politicians who promised to (1) continue fighting two very expensive wars, (2) ladle out fantastic raises and pensions to public employees, and (3) spend most of society’s wealth on the world’s most expensive health care system. The politicians delivered exactly what they promised. If the economy isn’t growing and public employees must be continually enriched, that necessarily means that folks in the private sector must be gradually impoverished. We got what we voted for, so how can any of us aged 30 or older be deserving of sympathy? [younger folks didn’t have a chance to vote for the current batch of politicians so they arguably deserve sympathy for having to share a country with so many shortsighted old folks]

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A very smart friend was visiting from Manhattan this weekend. His proximity to Wall Street gives him a window into the world of finance. His tendency to be out of sync with the average American protects him from the herd instinct. Despite having a demanding academic science job, he has been a successful individual investor for a couple of decades. In the spring of 2008, with the Dow at 13,000, he moved all of his family’s investments into bonds.

When conversation turned to the latest sag in the stock market, he opined that much worse was yet to come and that the Dow might get back down toward 7000. He cited the moribund U.S. economy and the profligate U.S. government (people who argue for stimulus spending tend to underestimate the government’s ability to waste money, e.g., putting a 6-year-old girl on the no-fly list (story)).

I have trouble letting go of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. If the Dow is at 9700 right now then that is the best estimate of where it will be a few years from now (plus whatever the yield on a TIPS bond is, i.e., 1-2% per year). With the U.S. state and federal governments amping up taxes and handing out the money to the retired, the world’s least efficient health care system, and political cronies, and 15 million Americans unemployed, how can the S&P 500 not be dragged down? My argument is that most of the companies in the S&P 500 aren’t dependent on the continued prosperity of working Americans. General Electric can build factories in and sell products to customers in any part of the world that is thriving economically. Intel can sell processors to families in Turkey, Brazil, and India. Walt Disney can welcome visitors to its Shanghai theme park. Admittedly many of the companies in the S&P 500 would appear to be dependent on American consumers, e.g., Southwest Airlines or various insurers. But even these should still produce good profits. The U.S. economy may end up with big shifts in wealth, e.g., from workers to retirees, from the private sector to government employees, and from competitive industries to government-sponsored industries. The per capita income of the U.S. may fall, as the population increases and the GDP remains constant. But as long as GDP does not fall, the same amount of money is there circulating for a company to collect as profit. [In January 2009, I wrote a posting about how the U.S. economy does not need to crash or boom; it can simply slide sideways as England’s did for decades.]

What do readers think? What plausible scenario causes the multinational companies in the S&P 500 to become worth significantly less than they are now?

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At dinner this evening folks were discussing why the tens of thousands of deaths on U.S. roads every year don’t get people more upset. I said that I was surprised that cars didn’t have transponders and a warning system. For example, a lot of accidents occur as people make left turns or pull out of driveways or side streets onto busy undivided highways. In those cases, a car that was aware of the position and velocity of other cars would be able to suggest “wait” and/or flash a red light in a heads-up display. Airliners have TCAS; why can’t cars have something similar?

[One friend objected that adding advanced electronics of this type would simply enable drivers to pay even less attention than they do currently, thus bringing the accident risk back to where it was (“risk compensation”).]

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Camera nerds: I have updated/tested the Photoshop script that I use to convert camera RAW files to multiple sizes of JPEG (adding EXIF and visible copyright information in the process) for Web publication. These are now tested with Adobe Photoshop CS5, which itself seems to be a very stable product on my 4-year-old Dell Windows XP machine.

All of the necessary scripts are free and open-source; download from http://photo.net/learn/photoshop/

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My friend Diane is an avid serious reader and told me about The English Major, the latest novel from Jim Harrison. I associate Harrison with macho fishing and hunting backwoods stories, so the fact that a woman enjoyed the book was a strong recommendation. The book concerns a 60-year-old Michigan farmer whose wife divorces him (“he bores the tits off me”), prompting a road trip. Now that people are living so much longer, our built-up stock of midlife crisis/adjustment literature may be losing some of its relevance. There are plenty of novels about people who confront big changes in their 40s, but not about those who are 60 and have to plan out the next 20 or 30 years without some of the resources that they had planned on.

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A reader was kind enough to send me “How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late” by Andy Grove, CEO of Intel during its 1987-2005 ascendancy to world dominance. The article contains some interesting points, including statistics on how much it cost to create jobs at Intel and National Semiconductor ($3600 and $2000 in today’s dollars; compare to estimates of $100,000 to $1 million per job created by the latest government stimulus spending (example; official report)).

The article contains the familiar list of woes that have beset the American worker, as manufacturing industries have migrated to Asia. I rather expected the article to end with an inspiring call to make the U.S. a more attractive place to do business. The wise Andy Grove, an immigrant from the planned economy of Hungary, would advocate for better educated workers, a tax and regulatory environment that encouraged business formation, a government that did not spend all of our money on retired public employees, the world’s dumbest health care system, etc. Instead I was shocked to read that his big solution is a massive tax on imported goods and then recycle that tax into expansion capital for growing companies.

Now that so many of our manufacturing industries are well and truly dead, I don’t see how taxing Chinese-made goods helps American firms. There aren’t any U.S. companies making mobile phones or PC components here, are there? As for the tax revenues being recycled into capital funds, the entire world is already awash in capital. Have we seen news stories about U.S. manufacturing firms eager to expand but constrained due to a lack of capital? If we were to implement Andy Grove’s idea, wouldn’t the government-run capital fund simply displace existing private capital sources? The U.S. private economy isn’t growing, which means that it doesn’t need much capital. If all the capital needs of those U.S. companies that are expanding (taking the place of the shrinking ones) were supplied by a government fund, the private sources of capital would have to lend all of their money in Asia, Latin America, etc.

I’m surprised at how many people think that we can cheat our way out of the economic doldrums, i.e., doing something other than making the U.S. a more attractive place to do business (as I suggest in my economic recovery plan). If it were that easy, why would poor African nations still be poor?

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The Social Security Administration was kind enough to send a statement that arrived in today’s mail. It listed my taxed earnings in every year since 1978 (33 years of paying in). If I continue to pay Social Security taxes until I’m aged 70, I’ll be entitled to collect $2,113 per month starting in the year 2033. That’s the good news.

The bad news came towards the end of the letter: “… by 2037, the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted …”

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A friend of mine has her own medical practice. She has two office staffers and I casually mentioned that they must be busy negotiating with insurance companies and Medicare. The doctor replied “They could never do that. The people who do that have degrees in medical billing. I pay a service to do all of my billing.” How much does that cost? “They take seven percent of whatever they can collect.”

Young people: http://www.medicalbillingandcoding.org/ has some information about how to get an Associates or Bachelors degree in this growing field.

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