Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Massachusetts has raised its minimum wage for 2017 to $11/hour, up from $8/hour. This won’t have much effect in the Boston area but it should cut down on employment in the already-blighted central and western portions of the state. With benefits and taxes a full-time minimum wage worker will cost $30,000/year or more, right? Plainly there are plenty of American workers who don’t generate an extra $30,000 per year in additional revenue for a business and there are plenty of businesses for which it would be tough to find any workers that can generate $30,000 per year in additional revenue.

We can cry about America’s declining labor force participation rate or we can optimize our portfolio to adjust to reality.

With more people excluded by law from the labor force there will be more entitlement to public housing, so cities and states will have to build more. Is there a public company that builds free houses for lower-income Americans? How about buying stock in cable TV companies? Fewer people in the workforce means more are watching TV, right? People who don’t have jobs can drink more beer, right? What are the publicly traded companies that sell the most beer to low-income or no-income Americans?

Fast food chains and big retailers have lower labor costs, as a percentage of sales, than quaint local businesses (one source). If we assume that two local coffee shops die and are replaced by one Dunkin Donuts, that should be good for Dunkin’s, right? The company will have lower real estate costs due to less competition from independent shops and higher sales. Local retail is already under pressure and higher minimum wage laws should further tip the scales in favor of Walmart, Costco, and Amazon. Buy these stocks?

What about betting against commercial real estate? If businesses that can’t afford higher labor costs shut down there will be less demand for space and rents won’t grow as rapidly as previously planned. This seems risky due to immigration-driven population growth. With a forecast population of 441 million in 2065 and the same amount of land it is tough to see how owners of land zoned for retail are going to suffer.

Readers: any better ideas for investors in this new labor market landscape?

Related:

• MIT professor studies high-wage retailers
• Serfs in the Age of Catherine the Great and Minimum Wage Today
• Call for a higher federal minimum wage is a war on low-cost areas by crowded high-cost parts of the U.S.?
• The strip club owner’s opinion of the $15/hour minimum wage
• Where do immigrants fit into a country with a declining labor force participation rate and a rising minimum wage?

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A couple of weeks ago, Bell got its new 5-seat Jet Ranger 505 certified (press release; product page). The machine will be built in Quebec, rather than the originally planned factory in Louisiana. Otherwise the development seems to have gone as scheduled, a remarkable achievement.

With air conditioning and other non-optional options, the out-the-door price seems to be roughly $1.3 million. Presumably due to the collapse of the worldwide helicopter market, occasioned by the stagnation in oil prices that limits offshore production, Bell has not raised the price from what it was offering back in 2014 at Heli-Expo. That means a used steam-gauge Bell 407, which can seat 7, is now available for less than the cost of a new Jet Ranger.

Aviation-oriented readers: What do you think? When a used old-style Jet Ranger can be had for $400,000 (example), is there going to be a strong market for this new design? The new design has many improvements, but are they sufficient to justify the extra cost? (the old Jet Ranger will need more maintenance, of course, but perhaps the extra cost will be roughly the same as the difference in cost of capital and insurance)

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Israel’s behavior is an evergreen source of interest to the United Nations and lately the two organizations have been in the news. My Hillary-supporting Facebook friends have been out in front of this, praising Obama and criticizing Israel for building houses on land won during the 68-year war that has followed the Arab rejection of the UN’s proposed 1947 borders. I respond with “Let me know to which Indian tribe you’re going to be giving your house, and please do send me your new address in Manhattan, which I understand was legally purchased.”

How did we actually behave in our own Occupied Territories when the occupation was fresh? The Pulitzer Prize-winning Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People answers this question to some extent:

Ancestral Mandans appeared in what is now South Dakota around 1000 C.E.17 Their arrival in the Missouri River valley coincided with a major climatic shift: a trend toward warmer, wetter conditions in the years from 900 to 1250. The trend extended far beyond the grasslands of North America. In Europe, these centuries coincide with the Medieval Warm Period, an era in which painters depicted bountiful harvest feasts, Norse settlers built colonies in Greenland and America, and peasants expanded their fields onto lands formerly too cold, high, or dry to plant crops.

CROW CREEK VILLAGE, SOUTH DAKOTA, MID-1400s The site of this ancient village overlooks the Missouri River in south-central South Dakota, eleven miles north of the modern town of Chamberlain. The land today belongs to the Crow Creek Sioux, but during much of the 1300s and 1400s its occupants were Caddoan-speaking newcomers—refugees or descendants of refugees from the drought on the central plains. And at some point in the mid-fifteenth century, something terrible happened here.* The community was fortified by location and design. Naturally protected by the river and two smaller waterways, the town also had defenses constructed by its residents. Keen eyes still can discern the low-lying trace of two dry moats the townspeople dug for protection. The inner moat was bastioned and backed up with a palisade. The outer moat may not have had a palisade, but its ten bastions are still visible if you follow its course across the ground. At one time, this trench was six feet deep and twelve or more feet wide.27 These concentric fortifications indicate that the community went through a period of growth. Archaeologists think the settlers created the inner ditch and its palisade first. But twelve house sites in the gap between the two trenches suggest that the population eventually became too big to fit inside the first ditch. When this happened, residents dug the second one beyond it, enlarging the fortified area of their village. One calculation puts the town’s population at 831. The defense system clearly indicates that Crow Creek’s residents felt threatened from outside. And indeed they must have been, because at some point their town came under attack. The identity of the assailants is not known, but their actions were ferocious. In 1978, archaeologists unearthed at least 486 jumbled sets of human remains from the northwest end of the outer fortification ditch. If the ancient town’s population was 831, those bones represented the remains of nearly 60 percent of its residents. The end has to have been gruesome. Mutilated craniums indicate that the attackers scalped 90 percent of their victims and dealt skull-fracturing blows to 40 percent. They decapitated nearly one-quarter. A number of townspeople had limbs hacked off. Cut marks on jawbones indicate that some had their tongues cut from their mouths.

… warfare and hunting took a toll on Mandan men. When the anthropologist Alfred Bowers polled the Mandans in 1870–72, he found that women outnumbered men nearly two to one. The painter-ethnographer George Catlin estimated “two and sometimes three women to a man” when he visited the upper Missouri in 1832.

Life was kind of tough before the White Man showed up, but we brought rats to eat their corn supplies and smallpox:

The rats multiplied at a rate hard for human beings to comprehend. Some wild rats live as long as three years, but one year is average. Brief though it may be, that twelve-month life span is sufficient for a female brown rat to accomplish impressive reproductive feats. She reaches sexual maturity at three to four months and then is virtually sure to conceive each time she is fertile, for during a single six-hour fertile period she might mate as many as five hundred times. After she has mated successfully, pregnancy lasts about twenty-three days, and she can breed again less than twenty-four hours after delivering. A normal litter yields six to eight pups, and a typical female has seven litters a year, or roughly fifty offspring.

For the Mandans, the proportion of losses [from smallpox] was highest of all. Chardon estimated seven-eighths of them were dead. Joshua Pilcher reported that just 31 of 1,600 survived. The Jesuit father Pierre-Jean de Smet, who traveled to Council Bluffs in 1838 and then to the Rockies in 1840, heard that the scourge had reduced the Mandans “to thirty-two, others say to nineteen only!”

Lack of recent exposure [to smallpox] was not the only reason that Mandans were so vulnerable. When Catlin had taken the Yellow Stone upriver to the Mandans five years earlier, two physicians—participants in a new federal effort to vaccinate Native Americans against smallpox—had joined the passengers at Fort Leavenworth. With the help of military personnel, they immunized many of the nations below the Arikaras. Some individuals chose not to submit to the strange procedure, developed in England by Edward Jenner in 1796. But those who were vaccinated included 2,081 Omahas, Otoes, Sioux, and Pawnees. By February 1833, more than seventeen thousand had been vaccinated nationwide. The Mandans and Hidatsas were not among them, nor were the Crows, Blackfeet, Crees, or Assiniboines. Why? The immunization effort had gotten off to a late start in 1832, with winter closing in while the vaccinators were still in South Dakota. “Many individuals were not vaccinated owing to lack of time,” writes the historian Michael Trimble. The physicians asked to continue their work among the more northerly nations the next year, but the commissioner of Indian affairs turned them down. In fact, federal authorities intentionally excluded the northern tribes from the vaccination campaign. They deemed the villagers peripheral, and expendable as well. “Under any circumstances, no effort will be made to send a Surgeon higher up the Missouri than the Mandans, and I think not higher than the Arikaras,” wrote Secretary of War Lewis Cass to the Indian agent John Dougherty on May 9, 1832. The Mandans had lost their economic clout. The fur trade was fading, and their association with the Arikaras had tainted the Mandans as hostile. In an observation shaped by these changes in circumstance and perception, Cass proclaimed that the Indians of the upper Missouri were now “far beyond the operation of any causes, primary or secondary, which can be traced to civilised man.”

The Mandans do survive today (Wikipedia), with roughly 365 “full-blood” members.

More: read Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People.

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Here’s why I still need to check Facebook… “Dog attacks family trying to dress it in sweater, 3 hurt” (Miami Herald):

Police in Florida say an angry dog sent three people to the hospital after one tried to put a sweater on it.

Tampa police say the pit bull mix named Scarface bit a 52-year-old woman who was trying to dress him on Friday and her husband was attacked while trying to pull the dog off of her. Police say the couple’s 22-year-old son was attacked while trying to stop the dog by stabbing it in the neck and head.

(Thanks, Tara!)

Let’s hope that Mindy the Cripper forgets this tale prior to Halloween 2017…

Related:

• Carl Hiaasen should be the official novelist for the Presidential Election?

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It’s a new year so maybe it is a time for a new group.

Following Hillary Clinton’s defeat, one of my white male programmer friends (mid-50s now and therefore in the sunset of his career in this young person’s field) posted the following on Facebook:

I would really hate to be gay, or a woman, or a minority, or an American right now.

Of course I couldn’t resist suggesting that he visit Abigail Johnson “to comfort her on the coming tough times?” (Johnson is the richest person in Boston.) I pointed out that “if you want to feel sorry for someone who identifies as ‘gay’, Peter Thiel could perhaps use a hug.” I ended with “This black American also merits your sympathy: http://www.forbes.com/profile/robert-smith/ ”

A few days later, Facebook friends signaled their intention to join the “Million Women March” on Washington, D.C.: “ALL women, femme, trans, gender non-conforming and feminist others are invited to march on Washington DC the day following the inauguration of the President elect. ”

What did the Facebookers who plan to participate in the Million Women March have in common? None of them were “women.” As with the above exchange, the passionate Hillary supporters were white males.

In their 50-60 years on the planet, none of these folks had ever written anything about Jews except to criticize the Jews of Israel for being the world’s most horrible and pernicious people. Ever since Trump’s election, however, they’d devoted themselves with passion to protecting American Jewry from Manhattan/LA/South Florida-based Jew-haters (i.e., Trump and Steve Bannon):

Steve Bannon is a known antisemite, as well as an abuser. Wake the fuck up, this is NOT okay!!

URGENT. RED ALARM. This is an EMERGENCY. (I do not use those words lightly.) Donald Trump just appointed an anti-Semitic white supremacist bigot as his chief advisor and strategist.

Steve Bannon, our nation’s foremost antisemite, is now WH senior council.

If you believe that an antisemite, woman-abuser, white supremacist dirtbag like Steve Bannon has no place in the White House, then I suggest calling these representatives and telling them directly.

White supremacist and antisemite Steve Bannon will serve as chief strategist and senior counselor in the Trump White House. This is only the beginning.

[Note that the “abuser” stuff comes out of a lawsuit for custody and child support profits filed against Bannon by a former wife. The allegation reported by newspapers was based on an affidavit from the cash-seeking plaintiff, a not atypical situation in the American family courts.]

A couple of weeks later these same folks had rallied around the idea of creating sanctuaries for undocumented immigrants (it turns out that almost every place in the U.S. is a suitable sanctuary except for their own houses). They had also pledged to register as Muslim in what they said was “Donald Trump’s proposed database of Muslim-Americans.”

I’m thinking that I could harness the power of these good-hearted Facebook friends who want to use their elite educations, $150,000/year incomes, and spare time to help the female, the gay, the non-white, and even the persecuted Jews. My new group will be called “White Man’s Burden.”

Structure: No dues or actions required beyond some virtuous-sounding postings on Facebook.

Thoughts?

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Happy New Year to everyone.

What’s your resolution this year?

Mine is to travel more. Travel is where my brain picks up new ideas.

First trip: Big Island of Hawaii (visit Mauna Loa Helicopters) and then Maui, February 1-10. Would anyone like to meet and talk about helicopters?

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It is 8th-night candle-lighting time here in Boston. Happy Hanukkah to those who are “practicing Jew-craft” as Trump administration appointees would presumably say.

Speaking of hate, check out the pictures below where some haters broke into the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and installed an 8′-high menorah “artwork” intended to make Judaism seem incredibly lame by comparison with Christianity (see the museum’s magnificent tree). To add insult to injury, the menorah was fully lit prior to the holiday’s beginning.

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Two MIT pioneers in computer science died in 2016. Jay Forrester pushed forward big computers for Big Government, including the military, and core memory.  Bob Fano started the computer science lab at MIT. Both were 98.

I knew Fano and attended his memorial service, organized by pedagogical superhero (at least to me) Hal Abelson. Consistent with The Son Also Rises, Fano was born to a successful Jewish family in Italy: dad was a “prominent mathematician and pioneer of finite geometry” while his brother Ugo and cousin Giulio Racah were “established physicists.” Fano escaped anti-Jewish policies in 1939 by emigrating to the U.S. where he got a bachelor’s degree in 1941 and then worked for the Radiation Laboratory, which worked on military technologies such as RADAR and LORAN.

Check out this video, likely from 1964, where Fano talks about the potential for time-sharing computing. He opens by saying that a computer terminal could aid people in almost any cognitive area. He anticipates the open-source movement at 4:30. At 8:30 he talks about “hundreds” of people using a single mainframe. Is it fair to say that Fano anticipated our modern world of desktop PCs? In 1990 the answer would have been “no.” The mainframe had been miniaturized to desktop size and the number of terminals was 1. Today, however, I think that we are pretty much doing what Fano expected. The desktop PC is a higher-quality terminal than what Fano is shown using, but essentially it is a terminal to Amazon’s, Google’s, or Facebook’s “mainframe.” (See also this comparatively recent video where Fano shares his memories.)

The memorial gathering is available as a video. Bob Kahn, co-developer of TCP/IP, speaks in the middle, Fernando Corbato, co-developer of the modern operating system (MULTICS was the spiritual ancestor of today’s ubiquitous (unfortunately!) Unix/GNU/Linux). Ed Fredkin said that the idea of time-sharing originated with John McCarthy, also the developer of the One True Religion. MIT pushed him out. Caltech wouldn’t taken him in. Stanford apparently saw the merits of his idea and gave him a full professorship.

The best tribute is towards the end of the gathering. David Liu, a professor from Taiwan, gave the speech that anyone would wish to hear as a post-death fly-on-the-wall. If you need to talk about a departed colleague I recommend using Liu’s talk as a model.

Nearly all of the older crowd were super-nice folks and certainly Fano was one of the nicest people that I ever met in Academia. I’m wondering if it is partly because of the infinite funding for the lab that was described. These researchers didn’t have to compete with each other for research grants.

In an era where women are ostentatiously celebrated for trivial achievements in STEM, speakers recalled Mildred Dresselhaus, who became head of the EE side of MIT’s EECS department in 1971. (Dresselhaus, in the 1960s, laid the foundations for everything that is hyped today under the “nanotechnology” rubric.) Fano had three daughters. Dismayed by the pointless exercises put forward by the Massachusetts public schools, Fano taught the girls math in the context of physics.  All three of them ended up having technical careers, e.g., one of them recently retired from an engineering job at General Motors.

Management tip from Corbato: Fano wouldn’t allow anyone to get money from the computer science lab and work remotely (i.e., across the street on the main MIT campus). You had to have a primary office in the rented 545 Technology Square office building to receive funding. Al Vezza attributed the physical combination of mathematicians and computer nerds for advances such as RSA cryptography.

What happens when MIT PhDs in computer science try to use an Apple Macintosh computer to play a video? You get unrelated music simultaneously layered on the video soundtrack until a quorum of 8 nerds is assembled in front of the Mac.

How has the world changed since Fano’s day? Academic computer science is much more dispersed, with high-quality departments all over the country and the world.  Industrial computer science, however, seems more concentrated. At least in the U.S., if you’re not in Silicon Valley you’re probably not part of the big trend.

I’m not sure if it is massive population growth, economic growth, or a fall in the cost of transportation, but the cost of beachfront property has apparently gone up quite a bit. Fano’s daughter Linda talked about the family purchasing land in Chatham (Cape Cod), right on the beach and with a dock for the 31′ power boat, and then building a house. That’s a $2.5-4 million project today, not likely to be affordable on an MIT salary, even full professor pay (about $186,000 per year in 2014).

Any good life lessons here? Fano stayed fit by exercising. We saw photos of him skiing at age 80+ on Mt. Wachusett. When he wasn’t coming into MIT anymore, Fano stopped paying Massachusetts state income tax by moving to Naples, Florida.  Watching the speakers struggle with memory issues was sobering. We don’t have a lot of time so we should probably be careful about how we use it.

That said… Happy New Year’s Eve to all readers and I hope that 2016 contained more gains than losses.

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“Obama Strikes Back at Russia for Election Hacking” (nytimes) says that the U.S. government is taking action against the Russian government because we think that the Russians broke into the Democratic National Committee’s email.

First, how does this qualify as “election hacking”? Is there any evidence that the release of DNC emails influenced voters?

More importantly, why is it the U.S. government’s job to deal with one party’s loss of email confidentiality? If the Russians break into Joe Citizen’s email account, does the federal government retaliate? What if the Russians break into a corporation’s email? Is that the taxpayers’ problem? How about if the clever Russians break into Jill Stein’s email or the Libertarian party’s email? Would President Obama be taking action then?

If the answer to the above is “no” then what is special about the Democratic National Committee that it becomes the government’s (i.e., our) problem when they can’t keep their emails secret?

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“I’m Terrified of Raising a Boy in Trump’s America” (Elle) is kind of interesting. From the pregnant author:

Perhaps caught up in the momentum of the potentially ceiling-shattering election, I imagined the pea-size embryo was a girl and enjoyed a certain camaraderie as I cast my ballot, pleased about the stories I’d later tire her with about how she and I voted together for the first woman president. … I’d been sure I’d be raising a small woman during a new age of feminism, one where we didn’t even need to call it feminism anymore, one where it was normal for a woman to be the leader of the free world. But that was no longer the case.

It’s not the stereotypical boy things that worry me. … What terrifies me is the idea of raising a boy with good values when a man who represents the male stereotypes we’ve been fighting for generations is in the White House. A man who bullies both men and women in person and on Twitter. This man could dominate our news cycle for the next eight years. I can’t hide his bad behavior from our son.

How can I explain to a little boy that the year he was born, the President of the United States was an admitted sexual predator… How do I explain that grabbing a woman by her genitals is not an acceptable salutation when the man in charge of the country normalized it?

We can talk to him about the man who was in office when he was conceived, a self-declared feminist who made the world a better place for men and women of all colors and stripes.

I’ll start on January 21. I’ll be nearly five months pregnant when I travel to Washington, D.C., to march with thousands of other women who want to show our new president that there will be consequences for bad behavior.

According to Pew Research, “College graduates backed Clinton by a 9-point margin (52%-43%)”. If the author of this piece is typical of the thinking of Hillary supporters, could it be that there will be a further decline in fertility among America’s college-educated citizens?

[Separately, I kind of like the way she spins her personal loss (of the beloved President Obama) and disappointment (about not being ruled by Hillary Clinton) into altruistic concern regarding an unborn child (whose life can be terminated, legally, in Massachusetts for another two months, potentially for cash compensation). It reminds me of that meeting here in the Boston suburbs where adults were supposed to learn how to talk to their children about the election result but instead kept turning the focus onto themselves. Her son won’t even be 8 years old before King Donald I is history. Which of Donald Trump’s points of view did she think might interest a 6- or 7-year-old child?]

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