Category: Uncategorized

Business question: Should you locate your next “tall clothing” store next to a phone repair shop?

Fortunately for those of us who want to do autorotations in a helicopter, the potential energy of an object goes up linearly with height. This may be unfortunate, however, for phone ownership by the tall.

The chance of a phone screen breaking seems to be highly non-linear as a function of energy or height. A phone will never break when dropped from a height of 1 inch, for example, but it will always shatter if dropped from a height of 1 mile. What if there is Silicon Valley-style hockey-stick growth in the chance of breakage starting right about 5′ above the ground. We should then expect people who are 6′ tall to have quite a few more cracked screens (phones dropped from ear height) than do people who are 5′ tall.

Readers: What do you think? Is there likely a correlation? Should Verizon and Apple try not to sell insurance to anyone tall who shows up in a store? Charge higher rates for customers identifying as “men” (taller on average)?

Full post, including comments

The best-performing elementary schools in Massachusetts were built between 1955 and 1959 and are small. Our town runs what is ranked as a second-tier K-8 school and it happens to be fairly large on a space/student basis. The current school has some portions dating to 1948, but mostly it was built and/or extensively renovated in 1994. Based on these data of top performance in 60-year-old buildings the most politically involved folks in our town have decided to bulldoze the current school and rebuild a same-size school in the same place (they couldn’t find anywhere else on the 71-acre campus to create a school for 660 kids so students will be in trailers for three years).

[Data source: niche.com. The #1 school is Maria Hastings Elementary School in Lexington, built in 1955. It is only 59,853 square feet for 423 students so it seems unlikely to contain the “hub spaces” that our proposed 150,000+ square foot school will have. #2 on the list is a school in Wellesley… built in 1957. #3 is a school in Newton, built in 1959 with 39,000 square feet for 428 students.]

The town still needs to vote to approve the $100 million in borrowing (will put us right up against the state’s statutory limit based on property value). Here’s a committee member’s attempt to sell town residents:

If you can build a new luxury home for around $300/sq ft., why
does it cost over $500/sq ft to build a school?

The main differences between our project and a single family residential project are as follows:

– Prevailing wage requirements — As a public construction project, no matter which option we select we will be subject to the Massachusetts Prevailing Wage Law which establishes minimum wage rates for works on public construction projects. In addition to the hourly wage, payments by employers to health and welfare plans, pension plans and supplemental unemployment benefit plans under collective bargaining agreements or understanding between organized labor and employers are also included in the established wage. This equates to labor costs that are likely 2 to 3 times that which you might see on a typical single-family residential project. For example, according to the Department of Labor Standards the prevailing wage for laborers working on a public project in [Happy Valley] in 2020 will be entitled to an hourly rate of approximately $77 whereas a laborer working on a single-family residence is likely earning somewhere in the $20 range. Prevailing wages for electricians, masons, and plumbers are projected to be in the $110+ per hour range come 2020 when we are anticipating construction of the school project will start.

– Filed sub trades — Massachusetts General Laws require what is known as the “filed sub-bid” system for selecting certain subcontractors on public building construction projects. There are 16 trades under the filed sub bid laws including masonry, certain types of flooring, fire protection, plumbing, mechanical and electrical. The Law requires that contractors submit construction bids in two phases. First, filed subcontractors must submit their bids to the Awarding Authority, which will compile a list of all sub-bids received. The Awarding Authority will send the list to all interested construction managers. Construction managers will then need to submit their bid including any filed sub-bidders that will be used on the work. This reduces the control the construction mangers have on who they can hire therefore requiring additional supervision and coordination.

…
– Finally, there is the differentiation of work. Work that a builder might self-perform on a home project is likely to be broken down between sometimes two or three separate trades on a public project where organized labor rules the day. The benefits of this approach include clean and safe work sites but at a cost.

Like day traders, these folks see a rising market as a reason to jump in and buy now…

construction costs and more recently material costs have been skyrocketing over the past six years and are anticipated to continue to rise in the foreseeable future, at least out until 2020. In terms of the prevailing wages that I mentioned above, based on a review of the wages carried in the 2012 report and a comparison with the DLS wages that have been set for the coming years, we are looking at an increase across the board of 36%, with some trades such as plumbers and electricians experiencing prevailing wage increases of 50% or greater over the eight-year period from 2012 to 2020.

Given these costs of building I would think that the U.S. would have to get poorer on a per-capita basis as the population grows.

Comparison: The Essex-class aircraft carriers of World War II were originally budgeted at $40 million, roughly $600 million in 2018 dollars if you start inflating from January 1943. That’s $174,014 for each of the 3,448 people on board, e.g., the Intrepid. If our town’s school comes in at its $100 million original budget and the 544 actual current students move in, it will be $183,823 per student. This is slightly rigged by the failure to include teachers and bureaucrats in the school building analysis, but certainly it seems as though inflation in government-built infrastructure has been so severe since World War II that what we used to pay for a state-of-the-art aircraft carrier is now a reasonable ballpark estimate for a school.

Related:

• How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?
• U.S. versus German infrastructure spending and results
• Americans can’t afford to live in America

Full post, including comments

“‘There’s a Perception That Canada Is Being Invaded’: Justin Trudeau’s government has started rejecting more refugee claims from migrants who cross the U.S.-Canada border on foot.” (Atlantic)

Canada has built a reputation for warmly embracing Syrians. But most of the newcomers are from elsewhere. At first, it was mostly Haitians in the U.S. who made the journey. Some said they were spooked by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and worried about losing the temporary residence status they’d been given in the U.S. following the 2010 earthquake in their native country. In recent months, Nigerians have become the most frequent border crossers. Many get visitor visas to come to the U.S., then take a bus or taxi to upstate New York, where they walk north into Quebec—straight into the arms of Canadian border guards waiting to arrest them.

The migrants are typically detained for a few hours and then bussed to an emergency shelter in Montreal, where they stay and work on their asylum applications. While they wait for their cases to be adjudicated, they can access healthcare and send their children to public school for free, just like any Canadian.

Could this be the solution to our country’s healthcare funding issues? Americans who need an expensive procedure walk across the border, ask for asylum, and then get admitted to a hospital in Montreal.

Related:

• Why accept any refugees to the U.S. if they are welcome in Canada?
• Can the refugee caravan at the U.S. border simply fly up to Canada?

Full post, including comments

“54 students are in the National Geographic Bee finals. Just 4 are girls.” (NBC News) is interesting.

First, let’s consider the cisgender-normative prejudice. How can the journalist and editors say “4 are girls”. Unless we assume that people are imprisoned in their biological genders, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say “4 currently identify as girls”? Or “4 identified as girls at the time we interviewed them”?

Leaving this hostility to transgender folk aside, the article is rich in detail regarding what Americans are willing to debate:

Fifty-four geography-loving fourth-to-eighth-graders have earned a spot in the televised, rapid-fire contest — winners of local competitions from each U.S. state and territory — but just four of them are girls. The gender gap has persisted since the competition started in 1989; of the 29 winners, only two have been girls.

The National Geographic Bee’s gender imbalance puzzles teachers, parents and students. Some say that the tournament is fair but that educators need to actively foster geographic curiosity in girls, while others think the National Geographic Society is in violation of Title IX and needs to overhaul the bee’s design to promote better results for girls.

To win this year’s New York and New Mexico State Bees, respectively, students had to know that Georgetown is the chief port city in Guyana, and that Europe’s longest ice bridge connects the island of Hiiumaa to the mainland of Estonia.

Estonia is interesting (see Estonia: Tough campaign stop for Bernie Sanders), but most Americans would visit in the summer and there be unable to use this ice road. Guyana? Google says the annual GDP is roughly $3.4 billion. That’s 1/100th the GDP of a mid-sized city in China (chart). It is supposedly a great country for bird-watching and rainforest-lovers, but Guyana last made the U.S. news in the Jim Jones era.

In the recent posting about whether open offices are bad for women, a Facebook friend commented

Journalism in 2018: Pick a situation or practice. Say that women (or minorities) are disproportionately affected. Collect thunderous applause.

This NBC article supports that with the twist that the skill described, geographic knowledge, is almost completely useless in the Internet age.

Readers: In the Google Maps and Wikipedia age, what is the value of obscure geographical knowledge?

Full post, including comments

In a spectacular example of off-topic commenting, Buf E. asked “about the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations. How would the GDPR have affected you as an entrepreneur starting a pioneering social network?” in response to “Captain Tammie is the anti-Sully”.

The GDPR (Wikipedia; 88-page PDF) certainly would seem to preclude the running of a site such as the original photo.net (described in Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing). It would have been too time-consuming to read all of the regulations and figure out how to comply. A “data protection officer” would be too expensive for a site that was started without the intention of collecting revenue. Being forced to delete stuff on user request would have been extremely burdensome for moderators and the site operator (we tried never to delete anything on photo.net if there were comments on it because then there would be cascading deletion of other users’ work).

On the other hand, the EU did not promulgate this regulation during the Great Age of Web and Internet Expansion. They promulgated it today when the trend is for 99 percent of page views to be Facebook and Google. Starting an online community in hopes of it catching on seems unrealistic when users are glued to Facebook (the way that slot machine gamblers are!).

I haven’t studied the GDPR in detail, but I don’t think it would be fair to blame the bureaucrats for making the Internet services market highly concentrated. Measured by revenue, the market was already highly concentrated as the GDPR went into effect.

Readers who are more informed: Does this make a practical difference?

Full post, including comments

On a recent business trip I flipped the CBS Morning show on. Captain Tammie Jo Shults was being interviewed… along with First Officer Darren Ellisor, and flight attendants Rachel Fernheimer, Seanique Mallory, and Kathryn Sandoval. The flight attendants actually were the stars of the show due to their more engaging personalities (ATP stands for “A Tedious Presence”?). Captain Tammie and Southwest are apparently doing a great job in educating the media and the public regarding the crew concept.

Related:

• Southwest 1380: think about the flight attendants
• Airbus A320 certified for single-pilot operation (Captain Sully heroically battling the emergency solo)

Full post, including comments

Our town held a “remembrance and celebration” for Memorial Day.

The invocation was given by the local church’s assistant minister, a long-haired mid-50s (?) woman who had formerly identified as a man (the head minister is in a same-sex marriage, but as far as I know, neither he, his husband, nor their adopted children, are transgender). Her speech was a plea for more tax dollars to be spent so that unemployment and homelessness among U.S. veterans was reduced to 0% (i.e., every veteran would have a house and, if desired, a job). Conclusion: “religion” in our town is actually primarily “politics” (but with 99% of the parishoners voting for Hillary, is this not preaching to the converted?)

[Note that existing funding (more than $180 billion) for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is roughly triple the total military budget of Russia and nearly as large as the total military budget of China (Wikipedia).]

Our national anthem was sung. Everyone stood up and placed hands over hearts. I tried to get people in my row to kneel with me, but was unsuccessful.

There was a moment of silence for the 6 total U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan in 2017 (i.e., fewer than might die in one SUV crash stateside). We also remembered the roughly 20 veteran town residents who had died since Memorial Day 2017. Quite a few had served in World War II.

Each veteran in the town was invited to come up and share a story, including of battles fought in. The Vietnam vets were laconic. A former Navy pilot said “Mostly I was a danger to myself when flying.” Everyone else talked about bureaucracy, desk jobs, and enormous sums spent on preparedness for events that never occurred.

An active-duty soldier from the Massachusetts Army National Guard delivered the keynote address. She has served for five years, lives in a suburban home, and commutes to her Transportation Company office in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Although she has never been deployed overseas, she has been decorated with five medals.

Our town’s Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts were on hand to handle various tasks. At the end I asked a Girl Scout if she wanted to join the Boy Scouts now that they were simply “Scouts” and were accepting girls. She demurred. I asked two Boy Scouts if they were enthusiastic about welcoming girls. The answer was “no” and “studies show that kids learn better in single-sex environments.” They said that they were keeping their shirts, embroidered with “Boy Scouts of America”.

Our fire and police departments grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, wrapping each one in aluminum foil to keep warm. Environmentalists in town want to spend $100 million to bulldoze the existing school, park the students in trailers for three years, and rebuild a “Net Zero” school of roughly the same size and in the same location as the current building. This will pay for itself after 454 years if the current annual utility bill of $220,000 actually does go to zero (and assuming we can borrow at 0% interest). I expected these folks to scold our first reponders for their excessive use of this energy-intensive material, but was disappointed.

Readers: What happened where you live?

Related:

• Memorial Day Thoughts (2016)
• Belated Memorial Day reflection (2010)

Full post, including comments

A Bernie-turned-Hillary-supporting friend on Facebook, over “Women accuse Morgan Freeman of inappropriate behavior, harassment” (CNN):

Sigh. The good news is that these people are being outed for their abhorrent behavior. Harvey Weinstein has been arrested and charged with rape. The bad news is that we will now be waking up to years of ‘you know that guy who you used to respect, even admire? Turns out he’s another harassing asshole’ 🙁 The unbearably horrific news is that they’ve already harassed so many women out of jobs, careers, sometimes even life itself. Let’s make sure we use this moment to teach our sons to behave.

Part of my campaign to be defriended by everyone:

Me: you’re expecting your sons, once they are old enough to receive Medicare benefits, to have the same access to attractive young women that Harvey Weinstein and Morgan Freeman had?”

Him: harassment can be inflicted by anyone on anyone, be they old, young, ugly, pretty, rich, poor, powerful or powerless. So no, I was not expressing expectations of access, but rather aspirations for behavior

Me: most people don’t have the opportunity to behave the way that Roman Emperors, billionaires, and movie stars are reported to have behaved.

Him: True, but harm is done even at much lower levels of misbehavior than that…

Me: why not use an example from an ordinary person? If you are trying to teach basic manners do you cite infamous mass murderers as examples of people who fail to follow Emily Post?

Him: the famous person made himself into an example, I did not choose him … It’s exactly this behavior of publicly narrowing the scope of a woman’s value to her sexual attractiveness that is the problem in his case, and ALL heterosexual men are capable of such behavior. What needs to be taught to our sons is that it is not acceptable to carry on this way, no matter what your station in life. A famous person being taken down for behaving this way is a perfect teaching moment, because it gets people’s attention.

Me: why wouldn’t people instead learn from the Morgan Freeman example that women do not object to the behavior you decry when it is coming from someone who is middle aged, rich, and famous? But the same behavior becomes unwelcome from a man in his 15th year of Medicare? … See “20 women slept with me to get promotion” (The Sun) for example. The 31-year-old supermarket manager engages in behavior that presumably wouldn’t have worked for a differently situated man (e.g., older or no longer a manager).

Readers: Let’s assume that Morgan Freeman hasn’t changed his behavior all that much over the last 20-30 years. Suddenly, however, the behavior is publicly condemned. Is that most likely due to a change in our society’s standards of behavior or a difference between the 50-year-old Morgan Freeman’s and the 80-year-old Morgan Freeman’s ability to advance the career of women who interviewed and/or worked with him?

Related:

• The Nurture Assumption, regarding the likely success of a parent molding a son’s personality
• Considering a bold denunciation of Harvey Weinstein (taking the personal risk of attacking a celebrity whose star has faded: “Despite the risk to my career as a helicopter instructor, only slightly reduced by the fact that Mr. Weinstein likely exceeds the 300 lb. per-seat limitation of a Robinson R44, I am now thinking about going on record to express my disapproval of this unemployed guy.”)

Full post, including comments

Surveying our pizza delivery options on a recent miserable day, we found that the Just Crust had closed. “Just Crust Pizzeria Set to Close” (Harvard Crimson) explains:

Citing rising rents, Harvard Square pizzeria The Just Crust will officially close…

“With the high rent in Harvard Square that would be going up higher, we decided not to renew the lease and closed the location,” Liss-Riordan wrote. “We have enjoyed operating The Just Crust and greatly appreciate all the support the Cambridge community has given us over these past four years.”

Other local businesses have faced similar problems with high rents—assessed property values in Harvard Square have nearly doubled over the last five years.

Liss-Riordan, who is also a graduate of Harvard Law School, decided to open The Just Crust after she represented employees of the restaurant’s predecessor, Upper Crust Pizzeria, in a labor abuse case.

The Just Crust was partially employee-owned, which Liss-Riordan said at the time was a change she wanted to make after being involved in Upper Crust’s legal battle. Her new restaurant’s name and logo—of an aproned worker—stood in “poetic juxtaposition” to the Upper Crust’s logo of a “dandy man in a top hat riding a bicycle,” according to The Just Crust’s website. The Just Crust also emphasized its “

“With the high rent in Harvard Square that would be going up higher, we decided not to renew the lease and closed the location,” Liss-Riordan wrote. “We have enjoyed operating The Just Crust and greatly appreciate all the support the Cambridge community has given us over these past four years.”

Other local businesses have faced similar problems with high rents—assessed property values in Harvard Square have nearly doubled over the last five years.

Liss-Riordan, who is also a graduate of Harvard Law School, decided to open The Just Crust after she represented employees of the restaurant’s predecessor, Upper Crust Pizzeria, in a labor abuse case.

The Just Crust was partially employee-owned, which Liss-Riordan said at the time was a change she wanted to make after being involved in Upper Crust’s legal battle. Her new restaurant’s name and logo—of an aproned worker—stood in “poetic juxtaposition” to the Upper Crust’s logo of a “dandy man in a top hat riding a bicycle,” according to The Just Crust’s website. The Just Crust also emphasized its “progressive business model” where employees received shares of the profits and ingredients were sourced from regional farmers and producers.

Is pizza-with-delivery no longer a viable business in expensive cities such as Boston/Cambridge? We still have a Domino’s, but the rest of the bunch seems to have outsourced delivery to grubhub and similar (not sure that can work given that they don’t have the fancy insulated bags of a Domino’s).

Related:

• Economic injustice is profitable? (“fair-wage pizza shop” closes)
• “Uno Leaves Pizza-Sized Hole in Harvard Square” (we lost Uno in 2016)

Full post, including comments

From this weblog in November,”Where can Harvey Weinstein go for a peaceful retirement?“:

Why would a 65-year-old with money want to stick around to spend the remaining years of his life as a defendant? As a thought-experiment, if Harvey doesn’t want to stick around, where can he go?

From the Washington Post today, “Harvey Weinstein charged with rape and other abuse charges in sexual assault cases”:

Harvey Weinstein was arrested … Weinstein, 66, was charged with rape, criminal sex act, sexual abuse and sexual misconduct for cases involving two women, according to the New York Police Department. … “for forcible sexual acts against two women in 2013 and 2004, respectively,”

Readers: Given that this turn of events seemed predictable, why did he stick around? Why did he not wire his money out and stuff himself into a Gulfstream G650 back in 2017? There are a lot of great things about the U.S., but being a civil and criminal lawsut defendant and, ultimately, one of our 2+ million prisoners, does not seem like a compelling reason to prefer the U.S. to other possible places to call home.

Related:

• “Morgan Freeman Is Accused of Sexual Harassment by Several Women” (nytimes, regarding the 80-year-old best known to my friends as a type-rated Citation Jet pilot (see the FAA Airmen Registry))

Full post, including comments