Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Our Harvard Square apartment has quality Comcast Internet and TV service in a bundle (I convinced myself this was cheaper than Internet alone). The cable box sits on a shelf partly because the actual cable comes into the office, not the living room or bedroom where there are Samsung TVs (used as digital picture frames and computer displays; they are hooked up to Ethernet).

Right now we have a professor from Germany staying there. He was unhappy about the lack of TV service.

• me: What do you want to watch?
• him: CNN
• me: I will send you an email message every morning reading “Donald Trump is a rich, white, guy and the people who didn’t vote for him don’t like him.” Then you’ll have learned everything that you would have learned from watching CNN.

He still wants CNN. Is it easy to have the cable box in the office and for the TV somehow to grab the show over the CAT5 wire? Or do I have to call Comcast and have them drill holes through the exterior walls to bring in more coax feeds? (and then have a cable box right next to each TV)

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I was too busy doing a 200-piece jigsaw puzzle with a 3-year-old to join the March for Science (plus I would be afraid that someone would rat me out as a mere engineer or, far worse, flight instructor). Can readers fill me in? What happened? Who marched? What did their posters say? Were there speakers? Who were they and what did they say? Amidst the complaints about the flow of tax dollars being reduced (an “attack on science” if Americans decide to spend more of their money on other things), was there a discussion of “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”?

The web site says “Inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility are central to the mission and principles of the March for Science. Scientists and people who care about science are an intersectional group, embodying a diverse range of races, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, religions, ages, socioeconomic and immigration statuses.”

If there are actual scientists marching, can this be true? We can agree that science is one of the least diverse fields in terms of employment, right? And the people who make hiring decisions in science are scientists? So if women and certain minority groups have been excluded from science then it has to be scientists themselves who have done the excluding? Therefore we have the phenomenon of a group of demonstrated sexists and racists marching, at least in part, to denounce sexism and racism.

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Here’s part of an interview with an Air National Guard Pave Hawk helicopter search-and-rescue pilot:

What was your favorite video game while deployed in Afghanistan?

That’s easy. We were addicted to Halo. It was amazing: We had a bunch of computers linked together, and we could play capture the flag with 16 or so people. You could hear people yelling out tactical info like “Help! Johnson is sniping us from the waterfall!” and such. So much fun.

I didn’t see that one coming!

(Separately, who has read the interviewee’s book, Shoot Like a Girl? Does the pilot of a Pave Hawk actually do any shooting in real-world operations? I would have thought that was the door gunner’s job.)

Related:

• Lockheed Martin buys Sikorsky for 1.1X revenue (despite the $40 million cost (at least!) of the Pave Hawk, making them is apparently not very profitable)

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After an epic struggle with the U.S. government’s dreaded eAPIS system and two phone calls (the elaborate web-based system for advising the government of people leaving and entering the U.S. was layered on top of the old one, so you have to call the customs agents on the phone even after you’ve entered all of the information about an inbound flight into a web site), we managed to connect with the U.S. Customs agent at the Burlington, Vermont airport. The light was hitting our tired 12-year-old flight school Cirrus SR20 just right so it was time for a photo. Here is the same scene with the basic camera and with the fancy “telephoto” lens that is the big innovation of the iPhone 7 Plus:

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Because I am stupid and like to work hard while underperforming the S&P 500, I do a bit of angel investing, mostly for MIT spinoff companies. One of my portfolio companies just received seed funding from a partner (Fortune 500 company), which means that the earlier investors are having their debt converted to stock. There are more than 100 pages of documents for me to review and sign and mostly I don’t understand them. I’m wondering if we could boost the U.S. economy a little, and perhaps reverse some of the trend away from startups that Tyler Cowen has identified, if we codified this stuff. The situation with startup companies is nearly always the same. A few insiders want to sell convertible debt to a few outsiders. Then a bigger outsider comes in to buy stock and the early outsiders get converted. The people who put up cash have preferred shares and get paid first when the company invariably fizzles and is sold for less than the total invested. Why not create a way for people to say “I want to skip out on all of the legal fees and use a standard structure”? This would save taxpayers money as well. If things go south and there is litigation, the judge doesn’t need to read 100+ pages of custom contracts to figure out who had which rights and responsibilities.

Readers: What do you think? Would this make sense? Obviously it is already being done to some extent by law firms using templates, but each law firm has a slightly different template!

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Two professors take part-time jobs as activist investors in Tejon Ranch Company, which has underperformed the S&P 500 (chart) while the top managers get fatter and happier. Then the profs write about the experience: “Frank and Steven’s Excellent Corporate-Raiding Adventure” (Atlantic).

Related:

• economic recovery plan (November 2008; I suggested that one way to get the U.S. out of its economic collapse/stagnation was “corporate governance that relieves investors from worry that profits will be siphoned off by management”
• Anatomy of a Small Bank (2009 article on Brookline Bancorp)
• Brookline Bancorp Executive Compensation for 2012 (follow-up)
• chart of Brookline Bancorp compared to the indices (2007-2017)

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While down in Ft. Lauderdale I saw a beautiful cruise ship departing. The word “Fathom” was emblazoned on its side. Wikipedia says that this is a “social impact travel” product, set up in 2015. The basic idea is a one-week cruise, of which three days are spent in the Dominican Republic helping young people learn English, planting trees, etc. (web page with options) The line is operated by Carnival on the Adonia and she was built in 2001 and renovated in 2016. The monster ship is configured for only 704 passengers. This kind of “smaller ship” cruising is usually on the more expensive end of the spectrum.

How much does it cost to signal one’s virtue beyond Facebook? $399 per person, according to the Fathom site. That includes Carnival-grade hotel and 24/7 food for a week, the organization of “impact activities”, entertainment during the sea days, gym and “wellness” activities, classes, and ground transportation to the activities. It would be tough to stay home and prepare meals from ingredients bought at Whole Foods for less than this!

Given the hundreds of millions of folks on Facebook who express their deep feelings of concern for the world’s less fortunate, Fathom should be raking in the dough, right? If they want to run 40 weeks per year at 80 percent occupancy they need to get 22,500 would-be do-gooders to do more than “like” or “share” on Facebook. Let’s assume a purely American market for these cruises. Hillary Clinton got 48 percent of the popular vote in the most recent election. That represents roughly 156 million people (not all 325 million Americans can vote, of course, but any Hillary voter can bring children on this trip). Let’s assume that anyone who voted for Hillary professes concern for “the vulnerable.” Fathom thus needed to attract only 1 in 7000 of these folks every year in order to prosper.

How did they do? Wikipedia says “Fathom will discontinue operations in June 2017.”

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The 8th grader that I have been tutoring in math has been assigned to “advanced geometry” for next year. This is apparently the highest classification available in the local high school. Her father brought me a bottle of Champagne and said that all of the credit for this was due me. Of course it would have been rude to contradict him so I gratefully accepted credit for my student’s hard work.

Now that I have demonstrated the ability to claim success in this domain it is time to share what I have learned.

Basically the American K-12 math curriculum is so dull that it takes an almost inhuman effort to stay awake and focused while solving the pointless and repetitive assigned problems. As with flying, the crew concept improves performance. One crew member (the student) solves the problems while the other crew member monitors and offers reminders to (1) slow down, (2) write everything down, (3) make the smallest change to an equation at a time (e.g., don’t add 4 to both sides and divide by -3 in one step; that’s two operations and therefore one should rewrite the equation twice). The student will be trying to escape the pain and boredom by doing multiple steps in his or her head. This leads to errors that wouldn’t be made if the steps were simpler and the result of each step written down.

A lot of these problems are basically arithmetic, despite the fact that the subject is called “math”. The school expects exact answers from a calculator, but of course it is easy to be way off by pressing the wrong key. So I worked with this 8th grader on estimating techniques so that if there were a huge discrepancy between the mental or pencil/paper estimate and the calculated result it would be noticed before handing in the work.

In a competitive and lucrative marketplace for textbooks I would have thought that a great book full of real-world examples would be out there, but apparently our local school system didn’t find one. I’m wondering if the way that we’re teaching math actually is the right way. Can that be true? Just tell students “this is an abstract subject and if you want to get a good job one day you need to do everything we assign”?

Related:

• Real-world examples of systems of linear equations?
• Why I volunteer as a math tutor

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We are a nation of mall rats, according to “What in the World Is Causing the Retail Meltdown of 2017?” (Atlantic)

By one measure of consumerist plentitude—shopping center “gross leasable area”—the U.S. has 40 percent more shopping space per capita than Canada, five times more the the UK, and ten times more than Germany.

Now it is clear why our Ft. Lauderdale rental condo (more than $4,000 per week) contained a $20 set of Farberware knives:

In 2016, for the first time ever, Americans spent more money in restaurants and bars than at grocery stores.

Maybe don’t buy that commercial REIT right now…

Once autonomous vehicles are cheap, safe, and plentiful, retail and logistics companies could buy up millions, seeing that cars can be stores and streets are the ultimate real estate. In fact, self-driving cars could make shopping space nearly obsolete in some areas. CVS could have hundreds of self-driving minivans stocked with merchandise roving the suburbs all day and night, ready to be summoned to somebody’s home by smartphone. A new luxury-watch brand in 2025 might not spring for an Upper East Side storefront, but maybe its autonomous showroom vehicle could circle the neighborhood, waiting to be summoned to the doorstep of a tony apartment building. Autonomous retail will create new conveniences, and traffic headaches, require new regulations and inspire new business strategies that could take even more businesses out of commercial real estate.

Readers: What do you think? For every current robocall will there be a visit to our driveway tomorrow by a robovan? The doors will open and a loudspeaker on the roof will say “Dear Homeowner: please come out and look at the solar panels you could add to your roof”?

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As part of my tireless campaign to be defriended by every user of Facebook, I posted the following:

Less than three months into the Trump Administration and already our neighbors are stocking up on guns and threatening violence against foreigners. #BritishLivesMatter [video]

As the British are vilified locally and our wars against them celebrated as just causes, I think it is worth remembering the actual situation. In “Tea, Taxes, and the Revolution” (Foreign Policy, 2012), we learn that there were big disparities in tax rates among the colonies:

By 1714, British citizens in Great Britain were paying on a per capita basis 10 times as much in taxes as the average “American” in the 13 colonies, though some colonies had higher taxes than others. Britons, for example, paid 5.4 times as much in taxes as taxpayers in Massachusetts, 18 times as much as Connecticut Yankees, 6.3 times as much as New Yorkers, 15.5 times as much as Virginians; and 35.8 times as much as Pennsylvanians.

Tax rates were low by modern standards, but seemingly destined to be raised:

By 1775, the British government was consuming one-fifth of its citizens’ GDP, while New Englanders were only paying between 1 and 2 percent of their income in taxes. British citizens were also weighed down with a national debt piled up by years of worldwide warfare that amounted to £15 for each of the crown’s eight million subjects, while American local and colonial governments were almost debt-free. Against this backdrop, Americans watched as the British monarchy attempted to raise taxes on the colonists to pay down its war debt and pay for the 10,000 British soldiers barracked in the colonies.

Happy Patriot’s Day to American readers. Happy Traitor’s Day to those in England.

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