Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“What Happens if the Tax Bill Is a Revenue Disaster?” (nytimes) is a piece by Nobel laurate Paul Krugman. He uses his macro-sized brain to predict how Americans and American enterprises will react to this bill and thus what the likely impact on revenue is.

My comment:

Thanks, Professor Krugman, Your last prediction about the markets and the economy that I can recall was in November 2016: “It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. … If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.”

I don’t follow the stock market closely. Was there, in fact, ever any kind of recovery for the S&P 500?

On a more serious note, why do we think it would be possible to come up with an accurate prediction? For individuals there has been a lot of research on the tendency of people to work more as rates are lowered or work fewer hours as tax rates are increased. But do we have any data or experience with corporations? Given the complexity of the tax code for business it doesn’t seem as though a simple “look at the rates” approach would work.

Was there any economist who predicted that U2 would move its songs to an offshore Netherlands trust or use corporate shells in Malta and Guernsey for property investments? (The Sun) Since it has never previously been tried, how can anyone know what would happen if it were possible to pay the IRS a straight 20 percent instead of paying armies of lawyers and accountants and offshore functionaries?

Full post, including comments

One of the things that drives children, especially teenagers, crazy about adults is our poor memories, which lead to us repeating ourselves. The problem gets worse as we get older. Since our phones are always listening (and sending the audio back to Vladimir Putin’s office?), why not have our phones keep track of everything that we’ve ever said to everyone. The phone can then vibrate if we’re advising a younger person of something that we’ve already noted. For the fifth repetition and beyond, perhaps a Bluetooth shock band can zap us. This could reduce embarrassment for adults and improve relations between adults and teenagers.

Readers: What do you think? Useful?

Full post, including comments

The haters (i.e., the Republicans) on the FCC voted today (nytimes) to kill off the net neutrality enforcement rules.

Let’s assume that the government can’t fire anyone. What do readers want to see the bureaucrats who were enforcing net neutrality doing?

My personal suggestion: find a way to stop spam phone calls (see Set a minimum price for phone calls?)

Better ideas?

Full post, including comments

At a party on Sunday, an anesthesiologist friend told me that she was happy to be earning real money, finally, after ten years of training. Other folks were talking about bitcoin. Now these two scenarios can be compared with an online calculator: Bitcoin v. Medical School.

Please test it out and let us know what you think!

(Also, any HTML or design ideas would be welcome. The OG markup for Facebook sharing links to this photo of a bitcoin investor hard at work and it would be nice to work the photo into the design somehow. Maybe add one of a doctor studying?)

Full post, including comments

https://philip.greenspun.com/flying/ is a web page from about 15 years ago. It is barely readable with Chrome on the iPhone. The HTML is super simple: a table with two cells and a hint to the browser to give 50 percent of the screen width to the first column. The phone can do voice recognition (well, sort of). Why can’t Chrome figure out a reasonable way to render this? (There were actually a bunch of research papers back in the 1990s about how to adapt web pages to the mobile devices of the day; nobody ever said “one day we’ll be able to get SXGA resolution into a postage stamp-sized area on the screen, so let’s just scale the thing down dimensionally”.)

Full post, including comments

For years I have dreamed that U.S. state and local governments can escape their pension-commitment and healthcare-commitment insolvency while simultaneously freeing Americans from the agony of traffic jams. It seems that my dream of congestion pricing for driving is coming true in Virginia: “A $40 Toll to Drive 10 Miles? It Happened on Virginia’s I-66” (nytimes).

One glitch from my point of view: the toll is $0 for a car containing two people, which will generate just as much congestion as a car containing one person. (Do carpool lanes actually encourage significant numbers of people to carpool? I myself end up in them sometimes, but invariably because my passenger is someone with whom I would be sharing the trip anyway.)

Full post, including comments

Why I love Corporate America #472: A sign outside our local Five Guys proclaims “hand-spun milkshakes.”

We walked in and found… an apparently conventional milkshake machine. We asked one of the crew what it all meant. “It’s exactly the same as a milkshake at McDonald’s,” he explained.

Full post, including comments

A neighbor has a boisterous young adult 80-lb. Golden-Poodle mix who is kept confined to the kitchen (so that he doesn’t mess up the house/shed) and walked for about one hour per day. I ran into her in the woods the other day. Her dog was beyond excited to see and play with Mindy the Crippler and, of course, knocked over our 2-year-old a couple of times (he also tried to pull down said 2-year-old by his hood). She said that the beast was barking at night and she was going to put him on Prozac, at the vet’s recommendation, to calm him down at home and also for an upcoming kennel stay while the family goes to Europe.

This got me wondering if Medication Nation has reached our canines. Kids that are energetic and don’t want to sit still for six hours per day in school are put on meds, right? Now we’re doing the same thing to dogs? I wonder if this dog would be fine if he had 2-3 hours of daily exercise and full access to the house/family.

Full post, including comments

Harvard puts up signs in the Yard apparently welcoming anyone who can pay $73,600/year:

[“Wherever you are from… You are home.” — lifted from Burning Man?]

Actually the offer is more generous than initially apparent because Harvard promises free tuition, room, and board for children from any family earning less than $65,000 year (source).

Is there a clear path for almost anyone to get a free ride through Harvard? Harvard doesn’t ask for a birth certificate, right? There is no public record of who has a U.S. passport, right? So anyone who is admitted to Harvard can say “I am an undocumented immigrant.” At that point Harvard cannot ask for any authoritative financial forms. The applicant can simply say “I don’t know what my parents’ immigration status is and I would feel uncomfortable asking for their IRS 1040 returns.”

https://college.harvard.edu/i-am-undocumented-am-i-still-eligible-financial-aid says

If you are undocumented you are eligible for financial aid from Harvard. Harvard makes no distinction based on citizenship in the financial aid process or in the amount of aid for which students are eligible. Undocumented students do not need to file a FAFSA since they are not eligible to apply for federal aid.

Readers: What do you think? There are procedures for proving that one is documented, e.g., producing a passport. But there is no procedure for proving that someone is undocumented. Is there then a clear path to free tuition, room, and board?

Related:

• “Stanford’s elite business school caught cheating — by one of its own MBA students” (Mercury News blog): “Stanford had routinely granted fellowship money to students without regard to their financial needs, often favoring admits who were female…” (i.e., it should be straightforward to get a discount on business school by identifying as female or as someone in a sought-after racial or ethnic category; “The school has offered additional fellowship awards to candidates whose biographies make them particularly compelling and competitive in trying to attract a diverse class,” said the dean)
• Should college students from upper-middle income families fly to Las Vegas this weekend and get married?

 

 

Full post, including comments

The Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock, described in the “Sites that are really programs” chapter of my 1990s book on web development, is broken because the attempt to grab a price from Yahoo Finance now results in “It has come to our attention that this service is being used in violation of the Yahoo Terms of Service. As such, the service is being discontinued. For all future markets and equities data research, please refer to finance.yahoo.com.” (they paid Marissa Mayer that they couldn’t afford to respond to a few quote requests per day anymore?)

What’s a good source for getting stock quotes in a simple format designed to be read by a computer program? I would want at least MSFT and BTC-USD.

Full post, including comments