Private versus Government infrastructure costs

by philg

I was chatting with the owner of a small public-use (but privately-owned) airport. He’d gotten $3 million in state funding to repave the sub-3000′ runway and a parallel taxiway.

I said “That’s nuts. How do the airparks afford to maintain their runways when they might have only 30 houses?” (It would make a lot more sense to build the hangar homes next to a quiet publicly owned airport that is eligible for federal and state funds, but the regulations around “through-the-fence” access are complex.)

He said, “Oh, if you did it with private money it would be $1 million. When the state runs a project, the costs are a lot higher.”

He went on to explain that he had recently installed a Siemens-manufactured VASI next to the runway (these are the red/white lights that tell pilots whether they are above or below the standard glide slope for landing). With a bit of pitching in by based aircraft owners, the cost was $8,000. A nearby publicly owned airport installed the same Siemens-built equipment with federal money. The cost was $120,000 (15X).

Related:

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Percentage of public school teachers who are “excellent”

by philg

I was chatting with a dyslexia specialist at a public middle school in a wealthy Northeast U.S. district. The union pay scale for teachers reaches $100,000 per year for those with a bit of experience. The specialist interacts with nearly all of the roughly 70 teachers in the school.

  • me: How many of the teachers would you say are excellent?
  • her: About 2 percent. But another 50 percent are “good”.
  • me: So 48 percent of the students aren’t getting the curriculum delivered as designed?
  • her: True. But you have to remember that it is all about the school leadership. They’re not investing enough in teacher training. The administrators send one teacher to a class and then expect the teacher to come back and teach other teachers. That’s not what they’re qualified to do.
  • me: Suppose that the district had infinite budget and time for training teachers. How many would then work hard enough to become “excellent”?
  • her: Maybe 10 percent.
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What’s a good online backup service? (Crashplan can do only 10 GB per day)

by philg

I used to back up my computer with Crashplan, but the service failed after I parked some big videos from our MIT Ground School class on a secondary drive. I was able to get it started again by beefing up its RAM allocation to 8 GB (it seems to use 3-5 GB; this is why I want every computer to have 64 GB of RAM minimum!) and cutting the backup interval to once/day (attempt to prevent a new backup starting from causing an in-progress upload to file).

The backup is unbelievably slow. Windows says Crashplan uses 0.1 Mbps most of the time, i.e., about 1/10,000th of the provisioned Verizon FiOS 1 Gbps symmetric link. My information will be at risk of drive failure for the next 83 days (about 830 GB of stuff that Crashplan missed during its failed period).

I pinged the Crashplan folks for support. It turns out that their goal is 10 GB per day:

Looking at your recent history, I’m seeing that you’re getting above-average upload speeds to us. CrashPlan users can expect to back up about 10 GB of information per day on average if their computer is powered on and not in standby mode.

In other words, the consumer who buys a $360 laptop at Amazon with a 1 TB hard drive, fills it up with family photos and videos, and then subscribes to the service will not have a complete backup until 3.5 months of being continuously connected (maybe not for a year if the laptop is turned on only when in use). The consumer who captures or modifies 1 hour of video every day will never get a complete backup, I don’t think.

[Update 5/6: Since the bandwidth used, according to Windows, is the same 24/7, I’m 99 percent sure that Crashplan is throttling to 100 kbps. The customer support emails use some careful language: “We do not apply throttling based on the size of your backup. We also do not limit upload speed based [on?] file sizes or types.”]

I started with Crashplan in 2012, according to this post on the topic:

[Update 11/15/2012: Based on the comments below, I installed CrashPlan. It is uploading 2.2 Mbps currently, maxing out the admittedly feeble Comcast cable modem upload capacity. So this makes it 22 times faster than Carbonite, throttled to 100 kbps.]

Given that it is only 1/20th of its former speed, I wonder if Crashplan has now discovered the miracle of throttling while charging customers for “unlimited” service.

“Why I Switched to Backblaze from CrashPlan” (February 2017):

I failed to get CrashPlan to complete a single successful backup on my new machine for a full month. … After I cranked up Backblaze to the fastest possible, I was shown a transfer speed of 208.14Mbps. Remember CrashPlan? That was at 2.4mbps. So 100x the speed. But could Backblaze really do this in an actual upload? … .it only took Backblaze 18 hours to upload 641GB of data. 735 thousand files. … I’m switching over to Backblaze because of the nice interface, and because of the speed, and well, mostly because they actually can back up my computer.

How about following this guy with a switch to Backblaze? It is $60/year., half the price of Crashplan at $120/year for a single computer, but I think Backblaze adds fees for persistent storage of older versions (6 cents per GB per year, so a 6 TB hard drive could run up a $360/year bill?). This memory usage comparison showed that Backblaze required only 1/25th as much RAM as Crashplan.

Or maybe it makes sense to subscribe to both? Use Backblaze to make sure that you actually can restore your computer if it fails within one of the multi-month windows in which Crashplan is hundreds of GB behind. Use Crashplan to restore an ancient version of a file.

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Jacksonville Boeing 737 crash shows value of grooved runways?

by philg

Friends have been asking me about the Boeing 737 that ran off the runway approximately 9:40 pm last night at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. Here’s the METAR:

KNIP 040153Z 13003KT 2SM +TSRA BR SCT010 BKN021CB OVC035 23/21 A2998 RMK AO2 TSB04 SLP149 FRQ LTGIC OHD TS OHD MOV E T1 SET P0074 T02280206

That’s May 4 at 01:53 GMT. Subtract four hours and we get to 9:53 pm local time, roughly when the crash occurred.

The rain wasn’t all that heavy because the visibility was still 2 statute miles. There was essentially no wind (13003KT = 3 knots from 130, favoring runway 10, which is what was being used). The notes are definitely scary, e.g., “frequent lightning overhead thunderstorm overhead,” but perhaps a Florida-based crew has become inured to this.

The 9000′ runway length is a little longer than standard for a 737.

What wasn’t standard? Unlike almost any U.S. civilian airport that receives commercial jet traffic, the runway wasn’t grooved (compare KNIP to nearby KJAX, for example, or even our flight school’s home airport KBED). A truly flat paved surface makes hydroplaning much more likely. In fact, at our Delta Airlines regional jet subsidiary we didn’t adjust landing distance for rain on a grooved runway. A grooved runway was always considered “dry”.

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Is it true that the electric car companies can’t agree on a connector?

by philg

We need to have an electrician do some work at our house and I thought it might be fun to have an electric car charger installed. Of course, we don’t have an electric car, but maybe one day we will? We can’t fit a car into our garage (packed with junk due to brilliant architect’s 1960s decision to build this house with no basement) so the charger needs to be outdoors.

At first I was thinking “Shouldn’t this just be an outdoor 240V outlet?” Then I discovered that there are “charging stations” for sale. Is there anything more to them than an extension cord on a reel? It is the car that decides when to start and stop charging, right, not the charger?

Finally, even if we wanted to buy one of these cord reels, which one should we get? Some web pages imply that there has been a VHS v. Betamax situation. Is that all sorted out now by the Combined Charging System?

(Despite the fact that it is fun to ridicule the Tesla fan club, I think that if we did get an electric car it probably would be a Tesla due to the “dog mode”. See“Car/Kennel” for what I wrote about this in 2003.)

[Update based on comments below and further research: A hard-wired system seems to be required for reliability. J1772 is the standard connector except for Tesla, which requires a dongle adapter (i.e., there is no standard connector in the U.S., since the volume leader uses a different connector from everyone else). Total “Charlie-Foxtrot” as we say in aviation! Progress means that, unless you want to have huge amounts of power going through a dongle that is exposed to rain, every time you buy a new car you have to hire an electrician. If the family has two electric cars, it may need to have two different charging stations installed.]

Small parking lot in our suburb during lunch today included three levels of sanctimony: basic, plug-in, complete.

Related:

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Brave/Crazy French helicopter pilots planning around-the-world flight

by philg

“Two pilots to fly around the globe in Cabri G2” (Vertical) is about a two-seat trainer helicopter that seldom gets farther than 5 nm from its home airport and two French guys who will take it all the way around the world.

(The Robinson R22, despite its challenging low-inertia rotor system and not being designed for training, is a more popular trainer due to its low cost and high reliability. The Cabri costs about the same as a four-seat Robinson R44.)

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Elderly Democrats Discuss Joe Biden’s Candidacy

by philg

I tend to visit the gym at hours when the only other patrons are less than 5 or over 65. The other day, two Medicare-eligible gentlemen were discussing (in moderately strong Boston accents) the 2020 Presidential campaign.

  • Democrat 1: “Joe Biden has to keep his hands off the young women if he wants to stay in the race.”
  • Democrat 2: “I thought that was the whole point of being a politician.”
  • Democrat 1: “What is he? 77? He’ll never be able to keep up with the young ones.” [Biden is actually only 76]
  • Democrat 2: “You’ve got to hand it to Donald Trump [72]. The guy has a lot of energy.”

Readers: Why would voters want to elect Biden? He was born in November 1942 so he’d turn 79 during his first year in office, right? And be 82 when running for reelection?

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Tesla free supercharging for the life of the car will discourage upgrades?

by philg

A friend owns a Tesla X (see my review) that came with “free supercharging for life.” The company periodically pings him to try to get him to trade in the current car on a new and improved Tesla X. He can easily afford this, but if he does it he says that he loses the free supercharging, which is attached to the “life of the car,” not the “life of the buyer.” Having purchased the car for its novelty value, he enjoys the experience of getting free electricity.

I wonder if Tesla has made a huge strategic mistake. Doesn’t the typical car company make much of its profits off loyal repeat buyers who trade up every 2-4 years? How can it be smart to set up a structure in which the earliest and most enthusiastic buyers are discouraged from trading in and buying a new car?

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Cremo versus Edge shaving creme

by philg

During the Gillette versus Dorco razor tests (Dorco Pace 7 came out ahead), a reader suggested trying Cremo shave cream.

Result: Chemical engineers today are not smarter than chemical engineers of the 1970s. Conventional Edge gel, essentially unchanged since its 1970 introduction (patented by S.C. Johnson), seems to work better. With Cremo, using both Dorco and Schick blades (the latest test; I think Schick may actually be sharper, but Dorco works better because it is easier to feel the blades working), it became necessary to re-shave various spots. With Edge, if the gel/foam has been wiped away with the razor then the stubble is gone as well.

Some of this might be user error in applying more Cremo than necessary.

Related:

  • New Yorker article with some shaving history: “Ever since the Wilkinson Sword company started mass-producing stainless-steel blades, in 1961, every man with whiskers to cut has had no trouble cutting off his whiskers without cutting himself.” (i.e., the last significant innovations in shaving were accomplished nearly 60 years by engineers in England and 50 years ago in the U.S. by S.C. Johnson)
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NYT: Feminist is a woman who gets married to a man and quits her job

by philg

“The Bill-Melinda Gates Romance Started With a Rejection; She recounts her evolution to feminist in her new memoir.” (nytimes).

Turns out “feminist” in 2019 means “Woman who married a high-income man, then quit her job to ‘focus on starting and raising a family.’ [Wikipedia]”

[See also, the Rationale chapter of Real World Divorce:

Legislators and attorneys told us that women’s groups and people identifying themselves as “feminists” were proponents of laws favoring the award of sole custody of children to mothers and more profitable child support guidelines. Is that a recognizably feminist goal? For a woman to be at home with children living off a man’s income? Here’s how one attorney summarized 50 years of feminist progress: “In the 1960s a father might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then marry him’ while in the 2010s a mother might tell a daughter ‘Get pregnant with a rich guy and then collect child support.'” Why is that superior from the perspective of feminism? A professor of English at Harvard said “Because the woman collecting child support is not subject to the power and control of the man.”

We interviewed Janice Fiamengo, a literature professor at the University of Ottawa and a scholar of modern feminism, about the apparent contradiction of feminists promoting stay-at-home motherhood. “It is a contradiction if you define feminism as being about equality and women’s autonomy,” she responded. “But feminism today can be instead about women having power and getting state support.”

Why isn’t there a rift in the sisterhood, with women who work full-time expressing resentment that women who met dermatologists in bars are relaxing at home with 2-4X the income? “[Child support profiteering] is kind of an underground economy. Most people just don’t know what is possible. We hear a lot from the media about deadbeat dads who don’t pay any child support and the poverty of single mothers. The media doesn’t cover women who are profiting from the system. The average person assumes that equal shared parenting is the norm and that, in cases where a man is ordered to pay child support, it will be a reasonable amount.”

How did we get to the divorce, custody, and child support system that prevails in Canada and in most U.S. states? “This is because of the amazing success of feminism,” answered Professor Fiamengo. “The movement has totally changed the sexual mores of society but held onto the basic perceptions that had always advantaged women, e.g., that a woman was purified through motherhood. Feminism did not throw out the foundations of the old order that it pretended to reject.”

Note: Professor Fiamengo had some interesting comments on the Christine Blasey Ford situation]

Related:

  • “Melinda Gates: Capitalism needs work, but it beats socialism and the US is ‘lucky’ to have it” (CNBC), in which we learn that the woman who married a multi-billionaire is brave enough to say “she’d rather live in a capitalistic society than under socialism.”
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