Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Slide Rule by Nevil Shute

January 27, 2019January 27, 2019 by philg

A reader was kind enough to give me a hardcopy(!) version of Slide Rule by Nevil Shute. It turns out that the popular novelist was an aeronautical engineer during the golden age of aviation. One of the luxuries of getting in on the early days was working with two of the greats: Geoffrey de Havilland and Barnes Wallis, of Dambusters fame.

Shute says that “the halcyon period … died with the second world war when aeroplanes had grown too costly and too complicated for individuals to build or even to operate.” Those are fighting words at Oshkosh and I think that Game Composites refutes this gloomy perspective to some extent (albeit one of the “individuals” had to be a Walmart heir!).

Shute was an airship designer at a time when a government-run operation was building the R101 (crashed and burned due to incompetence, according to Shute) in competition with the R100, a private effort. I still can’t figure out how airships ever worked. The R100 made it to Canada and back, but got kicked up 4,000 fpm in a light thunderstorm. The British airship industry was doomed by the crash of the R101 and improvements in heavier-than-air planes, but I don’t know why anyone thought that it would ever be practical given the power of Nature and the inability of an airship to outrun a storm.

Social norms were different between the Wars. Shute describes a “married woman living apart from her husband, who established herself in the village while her divorce matured.” Her sexual relationship with one of his bachelor test pilots results in an uprising by the “Wives Trades Union of Yorkshire,” upset that they might have to encounter “that woman.” (see Real World Divorce for how things have changed for the better, from a plaintiff’s perspective, in England!) Shute says that he prefers a married-with-children test pilot who will bring back a prototype at the first sign of trouble.

Airship aviation is an indoor/outdoor experience. Crew members are able to walk on top of the ship, move around outside to make repairs while the airship is flying, go to sleep in a cabin, etc. The weather has to be crazy bad before there is anything that could be called “turbulence” to disturb passengers.

The book covers topics that would be familiar today to anyone involved in startups: raising money and growing a business despite a shortage of capital. Shute co-founded an airplane manufacturer called Airspeed Ltd. in 1931 (i.e., during the Great Depression). Despite an industry that grew as fast as hoped, a war that resulted in huge demand from governments around the world, and thousands of airplanes produced and flown away by customers, the company never thrived financially and was eventually absorbed into de Havilland. A cautionary tale for those who today would try to make money on self-driving cars, electric cars, solar power, or any other obviously booming technology. Shute’s Airspeed simply couldn’t make a significant profit in the face of competition from higher-volume manufacturers that kept reducing their unit costs. The Royal Family bought an Airspeed Envoy, but that still wasn’t enough to stave off the competition.

Shute is eventually pushed out (1938), which he says in retrospect was a smart decision: “I would divide the senior executives of the engineering world into two categories, the starters and the runners, the men with a creative instinct who can start a new venture and the men who can run it to make it show a profit. They are very seldom combined in the same person. … I was a starter and useless as a runner…”

So… to Wes: thanks! to everyone else: read Slide Rule if you’re interested in aviation, engineering, or entrepreneurship.

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Gillette-compatible blades from Schick

January 26, 2019January 25, 2019 by philg

In https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/01/24/gillette-versus-dorco-shaving-test-2/ the one thing that seems to give Gillette a slight boost over the Korean-made Dorco blades is that flexible head on the Gillette handle.

What if one could buy third-party blades and put them on the Gillette handle?

Schick offers just such a product: Hydro Connect. I ordered some yesterday and will be offering a report!

(These seem to be tough to obtain from retailers, though it is easy to buy them direct from Schick. I’m wondering if retailers are afraid of getting entangled in litigation, e.g., “P&G’s Gillette sues Schick maker Edgewell over razor blade design,” which notes that “Procter & Gamble Co’s (PG.N) Gillette unit on Monday sued the maker of Schick razors for the second time in 13 months, seeking to stop its sale of razor blade cartridges designed to fit Gillette’s Fusion handles.”)

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Management lessons from Theranos

January 26, 2019January 22, 2019 by philg

I’m digging into Bad Blood, the authoritative book on the rise and fall of Theranos.

I would have thought that there were no lessons to be learned for those who toil in ordinary enterprises, but there are some!

Background: Theranos was not all-fraud, all-the-time. The founder’s vision was far too advanced for Silicon Valley engineers to achieve, at least on a non-Apple budget, but the team did try. There were some reasonably competent people from Apple, Logitech, et al., and they did doggedly build devices. Maybe the combined efforts of the best people at Siemens and Agilent (formerly HP) would have sufficed to deliver most of the vision.

One lesson for managers is that firing the disloyal is a good technique for preserving one’s job. Elizabeth Holmes wouldn’t have lasted past 2005 or 2006 if not for the fact that she axed everyone who disagreed with her. A rebellion in 2008 nearly led to a Board vote to remove her as CEO, but she survived via “contrition and charm” and then fired everyone who had exposed her overoptimism and outright lies to the Board.

Another lesson is that incompetence plus sucking up = long-term job. The head of software would reliably say “yes, we can do it” and that enabled him to survive despite a long track record of failure. Folks who were more capable and who pushed back on unrealistic goals were routinely fired.

[Sort of a “management” lesson: the book describes that Holmes had a boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani, who was two decades her senior and provided her with a roadmap to garnering personal cash without necessarily building a real business. Wikipedia says that he made $40 million personally on a company whose investors were wiped out. He used some of this money to guarantee a loan to Theranos when the company had burned through its first three rounds of seed/VC money. The company might not have lasted past about 2010 without Elizabeth Holmes’s personal connection to the rich guy.]

One weakness of the book so far is that it doesn’t explain how the company was able to hire anyone in the face of competition from Apple, Google, Facebook, et al. The author makes it sound as though many of the people had skills to get jobs at the unsinkable behemoths. How did they end up at Theranos in the first place? The magnetic personality of the founder is one explanation.

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Woman who “exceeded expectations” by earning an engineering degree

January 25, 2019January 15, 2019 by philg

The Art of Investing: Lessons from History’s Greatest Traders is a Teaching Company course by John M. Longo, a Rutgers professor who got a Bachelor’s in 1991 (so he should be 50 years old), has one lecture given over to “four women who moved financial markets” (the other 23 lectures cover investors who, at least at one time, identified as “men”).

One thing that struck me was Professor Longo’s praise of Leda Braga, born in 1967, as having “exceeded expectations.” One cited example of this was earning a Ph.D. in engineering from Imperial College London. But Professor Longo does not cite any reason for anyone to doubt this woman’s abilities other than her identifying as a woman.

(The rest of the course suggests that, except for the Renaissance folks such as James Simon, “nobody knows anything.” The successful investment strategies are all over the map. It is unclear if the folks who’ve been successful are examples of survivorship bias. They took some bold risks and succeeded. Okay, but what about the 100 other folks who took bold risks at the same time? Investor track records are presented without any adjustment for risk. So a monkey who threw darts at the WSJ in 1990 and picked Microsoft and Apple as the sole constituents of a portfolio would be celebrated as a genius investor.)

Readers: Does it actually advance the cause of gender equality to express surprise that a woman is able to do something that tens of thousands of men do annually?

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/06/12/are-women-the-new-children/

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New York Times on the financial hardship of NASA employees

January 25, 2019January 25, 2019 by philg

This is kind of interesting from a newspaper that prides itself on in-depth reporting… An article on furloughed NASA employees asserts without evidence that they could be making 2-3X more money in a private sector job:

No matter how vital high-skilled federal workers are to the functioning of government, there are usually companies willing to offer them much higher salaries — double or even triple in some cases — on top of the free lunches and stock options.

Are they doing any consulting work during their furlough? If they are valuable to private companies as employees, at least some should be worth $300 or $500/hour to consult, no?

The workers at Glenn are mostly waiting, drawing down savings, wondering about the state of their untended lab work, reading about Chinese spacecraft landing on the moon and pondering the appeal of the public good when a good chunk of the public seems to have little use for it.

They’re “mostly waiting” instead of doing consulting work for these private employers who are desperate for their services?

Yet more stranger (as we liked to say back in junior high): Drawing down savings.

A quick Google search reveals that NASA employees are eligible to borrow money at 0% from their own NASA Federal Credit Union:

Our special Furlough Relief Loan will allow you to access up to $10,000 for up to a 60-month term – interest free and payment free for 60 days.* This offer will be available through February 15, 2019.**

So these folks are geniuses who could get paid $400,000/year simply by walking into the HR department of a private employer, but they aren’t smart enough to go to the credit union web site and click “apply now” for their 0% loan?

How did the reporter and editors miss this? Neither the word “credit” nor “loan” appears in the article so they don’t address the question of how people who are able to borrow at 0% and whose entire annual salary is guaranteed to be paid (albeit with a delay for at least two paychecks) are being forced to deplete savings.

The unedited Web seems to be a lot more authoritative that the Paper of Record. Consider this 2014 exchange on bogleheads.org, “Any aerospace engineers? Pros v. cons of working for NASA v. private sector”:

This isn’t a NASA specific issue, but almost all federal employees are on the GS pay scale. That caps their pay at level IV of the executive schedule, which is now $164,200. … Most NASA employees are in the business of contract management. The real engineering gets outsourced to contractors. If he wants to do research and development, he should go work for a contractor. If he wants to become an expert in federal acquisition regulations, he should go work at NASA.
From a financial perspective, he will probably never make up the lost 4 years or so of income if he gets a PhD.
I worked at NASA for a while… NASA contains a huge amount of unmotivated government employees. They’re so expensive that they have to contract all the work out. Even then money is so badly mismanaged that there is no incentive to deliver a project on time. If you’re nearing retirement, it’s a great place to be as it’s virtually impossible to get fired. They’re just shift you from job to job.
I talked with a SpaceX recruiter. Was going to be a significant pay cut, and the recruiter kept mentioning long (70+) hour weeks. For the high cost of living area, it didn’t make much sense. It was clear they were banking on the “sexy” factor of SpaceX to make up for the hours and low pay.
I worked at Goddard Spaceflight Center… And while the raw salary was meaningfully lower than what the contractors were making at comparable position levels, the overall benefits package was WAAAAAAY better — much, much more paid time off, much better healthcare, and significantly better retirement benefits.

A message from the bogleheads exchange that STEM boosters probably won’t be sharing:

I have worked for a large aerospace company (think Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop) and currently work for a tier 1 aerospace supplier. All big companies are the same, with tons of bureaucracy, politics, mediocre raises, lots of old timers that are dead wood, etc, etc. Hopefully he is passionate about it because he probably will be living a normal middle class life and will make starting 75K/yr – 150K/yr (after 15-20+ years experience) throughout his career.

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Gillette versus Dorco Shaving Test 2

January 24, 2019January 25, 2019 by philg

Continuing research in response to the controversy over Gillette’s recent “toxic masculinity” ad campaign … (see Test 1)

Test 2:

two days of growth
shaving in the shower
Edge shaving gel
Dorco Pace 7 on right side of face
latest and greatest Gillette Fusion 5 ProShield with Flexball on left side of face
second shave for each cartridge (first shave was Test 1)

Results: Indistinguishable feel and capability of the two blade cartridges. Equal resulting smoothness of face on both sides. No nicks from either system.

Winner: Gillette by a hair(!), due to the Flexball (introduced 2014), which seems to reduce workload slightly.

[Bizarre: in their zeal to be the wokest of U.S. consumer goods companies, Gillette has neglected to be orthographically consistent with their only potential advantage over Dorco. Parts of their web site use “FlexBall” while other pages include “Flexball”.]

P&G, the conglomerate that owns Gillette, has one African American executive (see their leadership team), who happens also to be their Chief Diversity Officer. Perhaps the next video can lecture American consumers on the subject of racial diversity. (They can partner with Apple!)
Prior to Gillette’s public awakening, the company was criticized by the righteous: “Gillette’s New Razor Is Everything That’s Wrong With American Innovation” (New York, heaping scorn on the Flexball)
Gillette has a record of, at least indirectly, assisting the undocumented: “Illegal Immigrants Hired to Shovel Snow at Gillette Stadium” (NESN)

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The going rate for sex with the boss

January 24, 2019January 15, 2019 by philg

The New York Post reports a lot of stuff that would never make it into the New York Times. Within “Sarma Melngailis had a steamy affair with her married lawyer”:

“The past year I’ve gotten three insanely high settlements for consensual sex as sexual harassment,” he texted on May 4, 2017. “I think I may be some kind of savant. I get a case. And then I ask a set of lawyers who only do this kind of work what is the best settlement I could hope for. And then I triple it.”
“I made $2.9 million for a 24 year old girl who had a consensual sexual relationship with her boss,” he boasted the next day.

Assuming that the “sexual relationship” occurred in New York, the state’s child support formula would yield $2.9 million over a 21-year period if the boss earned at least $800,000 per year. If, in fact, the $2.9 million is triple the typical amount, the boss would have to earn roughly $270,000 per year to make collecting child support as lucrative as a sexual harassment lawsuit. If the lawyers are taking 40 percent, collecting child support becomes more lucrative when the boss earns at least $162,000 per year. On the third hand, there is nothing to stop a plaintiff from collecting a sexual harassment settlement on top of child support. If we assume that the boss earns $400,000 per year and the sexual harassment settlement is $1 million tax-free, revenue from sex at work would be approximately $2.4 million, completely tax-free. At New York City tax rates, a plaintiff would have to earn nearly $4.8 million pre-tax to have this kind of spending power, or $228,500 per year for 21 years.

Separately, the story shows the value of having good legal representation:

On May 10, 2017, she pleaded guilty to charges of grand larceny, criminal tax fraud and a scheme to defraud and was sentenced to only four months in prison.

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Why aren’t the payday loan companies getting rich off the shutdown?

January 23, 2019January 25, 2019 by philg

There is turmoil in our land:

“The Chart That Shows the Financial Peril Facing Federal Workers: Just like many Americans, many government workers don’t have much emergency money set aside.” (nytimes, 7 days ago)
CNBC says “Friday will mark the second paycheck missed by affected federal workers, whose household budgets have been completely upended.”

Where there is turmoil, however, there is often opportunity. Neither article includes the word “loan”. Yet the U.S. is packed with payday loan companies. Federal workers have been guaranteed to receive back pay, even for weeks or months in which they did no work, as soon as the government reopens (“Trump signs law guaranteeing back pay for federal workers”).

How much credit risk could there be in lending money to someone whose paycheck is guaranteed by an entity with a printing press for dollars?

Readers: What do you think? Shouldn’t it be possible to lend money to furloughed or working-but-not-yet-paid workers at a 1% per month interest rate (12%/year) and make a substantial profit? One-month LIBOR is roughly 0.2% (2.5%/year). That’s a slightly thinner profit margin than a bank gets on a typical credit card, I think, but federal workers should be a better-than-average risk, no?

Is the problem competition from existing credit unions to which federal workers belong? This credit union offers 0% interest for 60 days to furloughed workers. Tough to compete with 0%!

NASA employee credit union: “Our special Furlough Relief Loan will allow you to access up to $10,000 for up to a 60-month term – interest free and payment free for 60 days.”

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The art of victimhood

January 23, 2019February 11, 2019 by philg

From the Boston Museum of Fine Arts: Rich American actors take on-camera speaking jobs from poor refugees.

Around the corner, Nan Goldin, who “immersed herself in urban subcultures and the LGBTQIA community” and is “a survivor of opioid addiction”:

On the other hand, the museum will save whales from victimhood via straw-denial:

(They’ve chosen to be “part of the solution” in this liquid context, so they can’t be accused of being part of the precipitate!)

How do things look down near the southern end of the East Coast? A few images from the Cummer Museum in Jacksonville:

How about in the center of our Great Nation (TM)? Our hotel in Arkansas featured a “Future is Female” art exhibit (T-shirt available for $38). The signs below discuss “the affirmation of the self” and the use of “Equal,” “Powerful,” and “Feminist” as “positive language” that will redefine viewers’ reflections by subverting the “typical narrative”.

The presumably well-meaning folks at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art demoted one of my personal favorites Louise Nevelson from “great artist” to “great female artist” by putting one of her sculptures into a female artist ghetto room placarded with a history timeline beginning in 1963. Nevelson was recognized with solo shows beginning in 1941 and was featured on the cover of Life in 1958; a 1971 NYT article describes her as a great sculptor, without limitation to her gender ID (also, that she divorced her husband and “refused any alimony, however, on the ground that to accept it would be immoral”). Right next to Nevelson, who was considered by NYT readers, at least, to be a “great artist” as of 1971, the curators have a sign in which Linda Nochlin, a non-artist academic, asks “Why have there been no great women artists?” (also from 1971)

The museum features a photo exhibit in which, to demonstrate their autonomy, women must comply with the photographer’s instruction to pick a book by a female author (but did anyone verify that the authors of all 70ish chosen books continue to identify as “female”?).