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The New York Times had a good story yesterday on the head of the Boys and Girls Club of America helping herself to a $1 million/year salary. Roxanne Spillett said that she’d worked there for 32 years (so she might have siphoned off a total of nearly $32 million!) and, most distressingly, had “never been motivated by a dime, not for a single minute”. So we know that the board should not have been paying her 40X the median American salary in order to motivate her. Could the board have decided to pay Ms. Spillett all of that money so that she wouldn’t jump to a competing non-profit organization? Apparently not, because the article notes that Ms. Spillett was “close to retiring”.

Could it be the high cost of living in Atlanta, Georgia, where the organization is based? Perhaps. The board decided to pay at least eight employees more than $200,000 per year (I grabbed the Form 990 from Guidestar.org).

Could it be that Ms. Spillett did an exceptionally good job during the 2008 fiscal year? Revenues fell about 20 percent and what had been a $30 million profit turned into a $15 million loss. Total assets fell by 25 percent. Was 2008 an unusually tough year? Revenue was about 40 percent higher in 2006 than in 2008, so the trend was down each year for which a Form 990 is available. How about Ms. Spillett’s paycheck? It was also close to $1 million in 2006.

The organization does pretty well by getting government contracts and not paying taxes, so arguably Ms. Spillett has earned her $1 million per year. But you could say the same for Lockheed-Martin and they are gracious enough not to hassle us with requests for donations.

The Politburo down on Capitol Hill seems to be in an active mood these days and passing a lot of new laws. How about one that says any non-profit organization whose executives earn more than 10X the median American wage must start all telephone and direct mail solicitations with “We’d like you to help pay our CEO $X million per year.”

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Two years ago, I wrote “A year with Windows Vista” about my experience with the much-maligned operating system. Now it has been three years. The $650 Toshiba laptop has been bumped along dusty African roads, has been dropped, has been vibrated on multiple cross-country helicopter trips, and has survived a fair amount of food and drink spillage. There have been no hardware failures, no system crashes, and no software incompatibilities. I like the fact that the machine is now worth only $100 or $200. I have no qualms about leaving it in a semi-public conference room and stepping out for lunch.

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Folks: I’m going to Oshkosh this year, courtesy of a kind friend who has organized everything. I’m wondering if readers would like to get together for a discussion, perhaps on Thursday, July 29 at noon at the seaplane base (they run a little bbq stand there and the general atmosphere is less insane than at the regular show; there is a shuttle bus from the main show over to the seaplane base).

Please email philg@mit.edu if you’re interested in meeting up on Thursday at noon. Feel free to comment if you think there is a better place to meet.

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After a slight contraction in 2009, Singapore’s economy is roaring back with GDP growth of close to 15 percent in 2010 (nytimes). How did people there manage to achieve this success? By U.S. standards, the government of Singapore is almost non-existent, consuming just 12.5 percent of GDP (source). If you scroll down to the bottom of this chart, you’ll see that the U.S. federal deficit is, at 10.5 percent of GDP, nearly equal to all government spending in Singapore. (Local, state, and federal spending combined in the U.S. is now at a non-WWII record of 44 percent (source).)

One would think that any debate about the likely effectiveness of increased government expansion here in the U.S. would include a discussion of how Singapore is succeeding, but I have not seen that in the news. Why would Americans not look to more successful economies worldwide for inspiration?

[As a side note, the CIA factbook for Singapore shows that the per-capita GDP of this once-poor country is higher than that of the U.S.: $50,300 compared to $46,400. The data have been tweaked for “purchasing power parity”, so it isn’t exactly clear who would find a Honda Accord more affordable, but it is nonetheless impressive that a country with no land and no natural resources could have surpassed the U.S., which has been gifted with (or stolen from the Indians) almost an entire continent to exploit.]

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A dermatologist friend sent me “I am Tier 1”, a story about how the insurance commission in Massachusetts ranked one doctor (Alan Rockoff).

[Note that in my health care reform article, I propose that we let consumers in a market vote with their spending as they do in the market for automobiles, for example.]

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It turns out that the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has been operating two Sikorsky S-76 helicopters mostly for “security” at a cost to taxpayers of $4 million per year (nj.com story). Most of the 258 annual flights were weekday flyovers of airports to look for unusual activity (aero-news.net; the implication is that terrorists could do whatever they liked on weekends). If we assume that each flight was for one hour (more than enough time to visit all NY-area airports) and hug the docks), that’s a cost of $15,500 per flight hour.

The S-76 was designed for flights of 200 nautical miles through clouds, e.g., getting 12 oil rig crewmembers out across the North Sea. No private company would consider using a $10+ million S-76 for flying short trips in clear weather with just one or two passengers. Aside from the crushing capital and operating costs, the S-76 is notorious for poor visibility compared to simpler cheaper helicopters.

The operation is being shut down because it turns out that the flights have no value at all. So it is kind of an academic exercise to wonder how much it would have cost if they’d used a Robinson R44, which would have offered superior visibility and more than adequate performance to carry two observers (one on either side) plus a pilot. Nonetheless, let’s run the numbers. Various local flight schools would have been delighted to rent out an R44, with pilot, for $400 per hour (East Coast Aero Club charges $379/hour). So the mission could have been accomplished for approximately 2.4 percent of the cost that the government agency actually spent, resulting in saving approximately $4 million per year in operating costs and $12 million in capital expense.

This may be part of the problem with government stimulus. The government spends 40X more than it needs to in order to accomplish a task in an inferior manner (in this case using the wrong helicopter for the job).

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One of the things that I learned in Seattle is that an Intel SSD drive can speed up a personal computer by 3-10X, depending on the task. An SSD boot drive is apparently becoming standard for employee desktop computers at Microsoft. The question therefore is why isn’t it easy to order a desktop PC pre-configured with the operating system and applications on an SSD drive? Neither Dell nor HP, for example, tries to sell consumers machines that boot from an SSD drive (though Dell will sell “workstations” that boot from SSD and XPS laptops that boot from SSD). Given the huge performance boost that the Microsoft experts report from using the latest fancy Intel drive, why isn’t it something that almost everyone wants? (If the answer is that people need an extra terabyte or two for storing video, the PCs in question all contain enough room in the case for a $150 traditional hard drive in addition.)

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Folks interested in a Seattle get-together: Let’s meet at www.andaluca.com any time between 8 am and 10 am tomorrow morning (Thursday). The restaurant is downtown in the Mayflower Park Hotel and features free valet parking. Stop by for a coffee at least and a conversation about any of topics discussed in this blog.

[I apologize for having to move the time from afternoon to morning, but it turns out that we must depart tomorrow afternoon for beautiful and exciting Billings, Montana. There we will overnight in a Best Western before cranking up the little airplane at first light in hopes of getting a passenger back to the East Coast in time for a 3 pm wedding.]

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I suggest reading this interesting New Yorker article on the authentication of oil paintings.

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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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