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This month marks the one-year anniversary of the stimulus act of 2009. How has it worked out for the U.S.? Beyond the explicit stimulus package, government at local, state, and federal levels have been acting in a stimulus-like fashion, continuing to grow as though the private economy had not contracted.

One element of stimulus that I think might not work as planned is infrastructure investment. Let’s look at the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis and was rebuilt in 2007-8. According to Wikipedia, the original bridge cost $5.2 million to build in 1964-7, which is roughly $35 million in today’s dollars (admittedly not a bargain, given that it collapsed, but the collapse was due to a design flaw, not faulty construction or shoddy materials). The replacement cost $234 million. Public infrastructure, employing as it does an army of civil servants (and their pension obligations), union labor, and drawers full of lawyers, turns out to be one of the most expensive things in the world to buy. A sensible consumer, faced with a 7X increase in the real price of a good, would purchase less of that good rather than more. China is managing to grow quite nicely with a much smaller amount of public infrastructure per person (admittedly the country has been famous for its bridges since the time of Marco Polo (example; history)).

So… are we better or worse off than if the government had not kept spending for the last year? (The federal deficit alone is approximately 10% of GDP and state/local governments are probably adding another 2% via underfunded pension commitments, bond issues, and clever accounting, which brings up right up to parity with Greece, a country that supposedly is in tough shape due to its 12 percent deficit.)

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The editors of boston.com asked me to judge a photo contest involving nearly 200 mostly macro images. My thoughts are posted in two places:

• introducing the Top 40
• selecting the Top 10

Let me know what I should have chosen and what I should have said!

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We visited three car dealers today: Mazda, Honda, and Subaru. All three of the manufacturers have priced their factory navigation systems at $2000. Selling a $100 product for $2000 should be yielding tremendous profits for these guys… except that none of the dealers was interested in selling it. “I tell all of my customers to go to BestBuy instead of spending $2000,” the Mazda sales guy noted. Among all three dealers there might have been two or three cars in inventory with factory nav.

We saw no cars with an RFID key; all of the cars had mechanical keys that you turn. We saw no cars with navigation, and certainly none that had replaced the dashboard real estate consumed by the tach and speedo with a flexible LCD screen including nav. We saw no cars with remote start. We saw no cars with any ability to use WiFi or a 3G Internet connection. We saw no cars that could accept a music input via Bluetooth.

I’m wondering now if the inability of mainstream car manufacturers to take advantage of modern electronics is harming their profitability. Since the cars themselves mechanically are not very different from a 5-year-old car, and the electronics are the same as those on a 5-year-old car (unless the consumer wants to spend $5000 extra), a lot of potential customers will decide to keep their 5-year-old car. Since all of companies seem equally unable to do anything interesting with electronics, it might seem that incompetence with electronics/software is not a competitive disadvantage. But the car companies still have to compete with the cars that they made five years ago. And the Chinese and Indian new entrants to the market might prove more innovative.

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I’ve started using Google Buzz. I was never a Twitter user, except that someone created a Twitter account that is linked to this Weblog and I have no control over it. I can’t figure out how Google Buzz is better than Twitter.

As I understand it, Twitter can be easily updated and viewed via SMS from a mobile phone. I can’t find any of that in Buzz. Buzz seems to offer a richer environment to present content, hyperlinks, in-line media…. just like a Weblog. But I already have a Weblog. Google Buzz does give me a private Weblog, I guess, but it says that photos are uploaded to a Picasa album. Is that a private album or can anyone then view it?

I’m following most of my friends. Almost none of them have anything interesting to say, it turns out (except you, Andrew; thanks for linking me to this video).

Since I’m already a Gmail user, Google Buzz is convenient and I don’t have to log in separately.

The lack of context-sensitive help is aggravating now that Google offers so many services. If I’m in Buzz and click top right for “Help” I get a generic screen that offers help mostly with Gmail. They have tacked in a link to a video (sounds like it was narrated by one of the South Park creators), but the video is promotional rather than instructional.

I have no idea where I’m going with Buzz. You can follow me in this aimless voyage by searching for “pgreenspun”.

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Folks:

I’ve drafted a review of the 2011 Toyota Sienna minivan and would appreciate comments/corrections. The debut of the latest Sienna is interesting because it was almost entirely designed in the U.S. as well as built in the U.S. and the result is almost exactly like something that G.M. would have built. I fear for Toyota shareholders when the new Honda Odyssey is released in the fall.

Thanks in advance.

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Cessna announced today that it is planning to move some airplane production jobs to Mexico. Aerospace manufacturing has been one of the toughest things to move out of the U.S. due to regulatory hurdles, but it seems that a motivated company can overcome these.

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If you thought that career opportunities for women in science were unappealing, you’ll love the prospects for folks with humanities PhDs (described in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education).

The writer’s thesis is a bit similar to my explanation for why so many men stick with an academic career in science:

Some professors tell students to go to graduate school “only if you can’t imagine doing anything else.” But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor.

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A Public TV “Frontline” episode this evening was devoted to the crash of Colgan 3407. After my one-year FiOS deal ran out and they presented me with a shocking monthly bill, I canceled cable but the program is available streaming online.

The TV show was notable mostly for how much time it is possible to waste by watching TV. In a full hour of human life, one learns that it sucks to get paid $20,000 per year and work 16-hour days. We don’t learn anything about why the airplane crashed, except that the hero Captain Sully would not have crashed it.

Who crashed Colgan 3407? Actually the autopilot did. The crew told the autopilot to level the plane, but left the throttles back near idle. This caused a gradual speed decay. Then the pilots extended flaps and gear, resulting in a big increase in drag. They should have added power at this point, but did not. Acting less competently than the typical person on his very first flight lesson, the autopilot kept pulling the nose up in an attempt to hold altitude. Eventually it pulled the airplane past the “maximum lift/drag” speed in which it would hold the most altitude for a given power. And then it kept pulling until the airplane was just about stalled. And then it disconnected, dumping the trimmed-to-crash airplane into the laps of the sick and tired human pilots. Seconds later, everyone was doomed. See the NTSB animation of the flight.

The airplane had all of the information necessary to prevent this crash. The airspeed was available in digital form. The power setting was available in digital form. The status of the landing gear was available in digital form. The airplane had the ability to put synthetic voice announcements into the pilots’ headsets. Here’s what you’d expect to happen:

• autopilot is set to descend and then level off and hold altitude at 2300′
• human pilots neglect to push throttles forward
• after a few seconds, autopilot annunciates “leveled off but throttles are still at idle”
• pilots put landing gear down; speed decays very quickly
• autopilot annunciates “more power required to hold altitude and airspeed”
• speed decays below 1.3 times the stall speed
• autopilot stops trimming back and says, this time in a very sharp and loud voice “holding 160 knots, descending out of 2300′ due to inadequate power”

How come the autopilot software on this $27 million airplane wasn’t smart enough to fly basically sensible attitudes and airspeeds? Partly because FAA certification requirements make it prohibitively expensive to develop software or electronics that go into certified aircraft. It can literally cost $1 million to make a minor change. Sometimes the government protecting us from small risks exposes us to much bigger ones.

As many bricks as people are hurling at the memories of the crew of Colgan 3407, they probably would have landed safely in Buffalo if no autopilot had been installed in that airplane. Sometimes a really stupid autopilot is worse than none.

[As far as I know, Airbuses are the only airplanes that are any smarter than the Bombardier Dash 8 flown by the Colgan crew (see my Fly by Wire review). There is a glimmer of hope in the small airplane world, however. The new Avidyne autopilots incorporate “flight envelope protection”, which will put these $10,000 machines many years ahead of the competition (if the FAA ever certifies them).]

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My friend Kasim and I went out to have lunch with one of my MIT classmates (Class of 1928) and look at his business plan and pitch to investors. As the startup company is located right next to an airport, we decided to fly there in a helicopter. Kasim took off from Bedford, put on a hood, flew an ILS 5 at Lawrence, glide slope out of service, simulated GPS failure, on the missed got vectors to the VOR 23 (asked ATC to identify the final approach fix, continuing our simulated GPS failure), and on the missed from that got a full approach into our destination airport. I had Kasim maintain the approach altitude and initiate an autorotation while still under the hood (pretty simple if you simply maintain attitude). We burned up just 2 hours of helicopter time for what would have been an agonizingly uncomfortable 30 minutes of round-trip driving (plus another hour to preflight, push out, shut down, push back into the hangar).

I found that the 40 or so pages of plan/pitch documents did not answer any of the questions that I had about the business, which is centered around an Internet application. Most had been written by a VP at a Fortune 100 company (and had the errors in grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation to prove it).

This got me thinking about how I’d like to see a business plan targeted at investors to read. I said “Why can’t you show me all of the ways that your product creates value for people. Then, for each value that is generated, show me how you can turn some of that into revenue. Obviously you can’t capture 100 percent of the value that you generate because there would be no consumer surplus, but you can probably capture some. And if you’re not generating value to begin with, you won’t be able to get any revenue at all.”

What do folks think? Is this a good way to organize a business plan/pitch for a startup company? Until I’ve seen the value generation and potential revenue story, I’m not really interested in the details, such as who is going to be hired and at what salary and in what role. Nor am I interested in multi-year projections because if I liked fantasy I could mug a child coming out of the public library and steal his Harry Potter books. Let’s say the value/revenue summary takes up 7-10 pages. If an investor likes that, he or she might ask for a more traditional plan.

[Update: I discovered this useful business plan methodology, written by Cesar Brea, who used to be a management consultant at Bain.]

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It has been nearly a year since Alex died. I have been thinking about adopting a puppy. I told a woman who knows me well that I was considering getting a Border Collie so that “there would be one female in the house who listens to me.” She said “Border Collies are too high energy and they bark and they’ll run after small children, thinking that they are sheep, and nip them. You don’t have enough physical strength and energy to keep up with a Border Collie.”

A friend said “Go visit my friend Betty; she has a lot of experience with the breed.” So we went over today to see the woman on a 20-acre sheep farm. Three Border Collies approached the car but did not bark. Before we walked out to a field with Betty, she put some cramp-ons on her boots. “I had polio and still have some weakness in my legs,” she explained while walking over the solid sheet of ice leading to the gate. Once inside the pasture, she demonstrated using a whistle and a few voice commands to have the 11-year-old dog work four sheep. Then it was the turn of a 6-year-old bitch. Finally she showed us how she was training an 8-month-old puppy.

At least three times during the meeting I asked questions and she sharply reminded me that she’d already answered it during a phone conversation over the weekend.

As it happens, we’re friends with Robin, one of Betty’s neighbors, so we dropped by to see how her greenhouse was doing. We mentioned that we’d seen Betty and her Border Collies. Robin said “That’s really a lot of farm for an 82-year-old woman to run by herself.”

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