Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Here’s a map that explains one reason old people head south: “State Estate and Inheritance Taxes in 2014”. The cross-border differences are almost as interesting as those in the Minnesota and Wisconsin family law statutes. Why does Minnesota rely on estate tax while Wisconsin does not? I asked an estate planning lawyer once why California, given its constant struggles to find more tax dollars to spend (as a percentage of residents’ income, the state already spends more than all but 4 states). He replied “They would love to grab that, but estate taxes are prohibited by their constitution and the constitutional amendment process is extremely cumbersome.”

[Separately, if Warren Buffett stays in Omaha, Nebraska, the maps suggests that any budget problems may be resolved!]

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“Chicago Pension Nightmare” is a Wall Street Journal article that is inaptly headlined from the perspective of a government worker:

On Thursday the Illinois Supreme Court struck down the city’s pension reform, which required city workers to chip in more to their retirement plans, raised the retirement age and cut back on cost-of-living adjustments. … The ruling further limits Mr. Emanuel’s fiscal options as pension payments take an ever-growing share of city revenues.

Absent an epidemic disease killing all of their retired employees, Illinois and Chicago will run out of money, of course. The only question was who wouldn’t get paid. The courts have answered “The former workers will get paid.” That means that bondholders won’t be paid.

Politicians can’t resist promising lavish payments to be drawn from future tax revenues. Unless the U.S. makes it illegal for politicians to hand out defined-benefit pensions, in my opinion investors should avoid state and local government bonds. (The federal government is different because it has a printing press for dollars so it can pay both bonds and pensions as long as it can afford paper and/or computer memory.)

Readers: What do you think? Who wants to defend bonds from U.S. states and cities?

Related:

• “US Treasury pushes Congress to pass Puerto Rico bankruptcy plan” (Guardian), which can be translated as “people who lent money to Puerto Rico won’t get it back”

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Consider this part of the following Hillary Clinton ad (I saw it broadcast in Columbus, Ohio):

“Her life’s work has been about breaking barriers and so would her presidency, which is why for every American who’s not being paid what they’re worth, who’s being held back by student debt or a system tilted against them, and there are far too many of you, she understands that our country can’t reach its potential unless we all do,”

Could political messages from heavily-funded, consultant-advised candidates such as Hillary be the best guide to the current psychology of the American people? From the above it would seem that we can infer that American voters want the government to set wages (so that everyone can be paid “what they’re worth”), presumably as part of a planned economy. They also want the government’s welfare program for universities made explicit by turning all of that extra tuition cash that was shoveled out as loans to be converted to gifts. (If these are in fact the things that we want, why not vote for Bernie?)

Readers: What else can we learn from political ads that you’ve seen? And is looking at ads from the most popular candidates a sensible approach to understanding our country?

[Separately, the ad may show the incompatibility of traditional English grammar with current gender thinking. “for every American who’s not being paid what they’re worth” would ordinarily be “for every American who’s not being paid what he or she is worth” but that doesn’t work if there are more than two genders.]

 

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The low level of education among young Americans has been well-documented (see “Smartest Kids in the World Review”), but what happens when uneducated American young people go through college and enter the workforce? The “International Assessment for Adult Competency” data show our rank against international peers: “Americans Rank Last in Problem-Solving With Technology: New report finds U.S. workers lag behind other industrial countries in using digital skills for tasks” (WSJ). Some samples:

A new report finds U.S. workers rank dead last among 18 industrial countries when it comes to “problem solving in technology-rich environments,” or using digital technology to evaluate information and perform practical tasks.

“When you look at this data it suggests the trends we’ve discerned over the last 20 years are continuing and if anything they are gaining momentum,” said Joseph Fuller, a Harvard Business School professor who studies competitiveness. … The countries that scored the highest on the problem-solving with technology criteria were Japan, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Poland scored second to last, just above the U.S.

One stark revelation is that about four-fifths of unemployed Americans cannot figure out a rudimentary problem in which they have to spot an error when data is transferred from a two-column spreadsheet to a bar graph. And Americans are far less adept at dealing with numbers than the average of their global peers.

Data on 16- to 34-year-olds, for instance, found even workers with college degrees and graduate or professional degrees don’t stack up favorably against their international peers with similar education levels.

That a growing percentage of U.S. workers are incompetent is consistent with declining labor force participation compared to other countries (WSJ). It is also consistent with industry expanding at a higher rate in other countries where, even if the average worker is not necessarily better educated than his or her U.S. counterpart, wages and taxes are lower. So at least we can say that we are seeing the global labor market functioning in a manner consistent with Econ 101.

[Update: A few hours after this posting went live, we stopped to have an airplane refueled at one of America’s larger airports and higher-grade FBOs (ramp cluttered with $10 million bizjets and a Boeing 737 for a sports team). Here’s a photo of the right wing taken during the final preflight inspection:

When we got to our destination we rented a car. Here’s how the previous renters had the audio system set up…

I can’t figure out if the typical audio system setup in a rental car is more or less interesting than the fact that Uber drivers seem unable to find and/or use the “Auto” climate control setting.]

 

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Camera/phone experts: Who has the Samsung Galaxy S7? DxOMark says this is the phone with the best camera hardware and, at least to some extent, software. I’m skeptical due to the painful experience that I had with the camera software (unresponsive) on a Note 3.

A friend recently purchased an S7 (not an S7 Edge) and I took some photos of the same scene (indoor close-up; subdued evening light through the window) with her new Samsung and my iPhone 6 Plus. The Samsung images were plainly better in terms of detail and color balance. But I’m wondering how well the Samsung would cope with running children/dogs/etc. This where the Note 3 fell apart and the iPhone does pretty well due to Apple’s brilliant software.

Readers: What do you have to say about the latest Samsung as a practical picture-taking tool?

[Separately, the new Sony A6300 is potentially revolutionary due to its ability to focus on a subject’s eye. (Olympus tried this a few years ago in one of their Four-Thirds camera but it didn’t have a state-of-the-art sensor like the Sony’s.) I am enthusiastic about upgrading from my old A6000.]

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“She Wanted to Do Her Research. He Wanted to Talk ‘Feelings.’” is a New York Times article by a science professor, A. Hope Jahren, that describes women abandoning science:

Within my own field, physical sciences, the results of this shedding were clear. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, seven B.S. degrees are granted to women for every 10 granted to men; three M.S. degrees granted to women for every five granted to men; one Ph.D. degree granted to a woman for every two granted to men. The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent — despite more than 20 years of programs intended to encourage the participation of girls and women.

Why should this be?

My own experiences as a student, scientist and mentor lead me to believe that [sexual] harassment is widespread. Few studies exist, but in a survey of 191 female fellowship recipients published in 1995, 12 percent indicated that they had been sexually harassed as a student or early professional.

Since I started writing about women and science, my female colleagues have been moved to share their stories with me; my inbox is an inadvertent clearinghouse for unsolicited love notes. Sexual harassment in science generally starts like this: A woman (she is a student, a technician, a professor) gets an email and notices that the subject line is a bit off: “I need to tell you,” or “my feelings.” … The author goes on to tell her that she is special in some way, that his passion is an unfamiliar feeling that she has awakened in him, the important suggestion being that she has brought this upon herself. He will speak of her as an object with “shiny hair” or “sparkling eyes” — testing the waters before commenting upon the more private parts of her body.

In other words, harassment of women in science is not due to animosity towards women as scientists but rather due to their attractiveness as potential sexual partners.

If Professor Jahren is correct then shouldn’t we expect to find that female science professors are less attractive than female science graduate students who are in turn less attractive than female science undergrads?

[We also have to adjust for “Beautiful People Really Are More Intelligent” and the fact that science requires at least a moderately high IQ. It might be necessary to do this analysis on a state-by-state level. Attractive female scientists in Massachusetts, for example, might learn that having sex with a medical doctor would yield a higher after-tax cash flow under the state’s child support guidelines than working at the median salary for a science professor (see “Women in Science” for an analysis). On the other hand, a female scientist in Minnesota, Nevada, or Texas, would find it more lucrative to continue on through the Ph.D. and then work for wages. It may be the case that female scientists in states that offer unlimited child support revenue abandon the field in greater numbers than those in states where working with a Ph.D. pays better than having children.]

How about an alternative hypothesis? There are a lot of women in undergrad science because they want to go to medical school (roughly 50 percent female). Thus many of them were never on the academic science track to begin with. The observed drop-out rate from master’s to PhD occurs as women get older and more savvy about the life of a working scientist versus alternatives, some of which are almost exclusively available to females.

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“Life and Death in the App Store” chronicles the rise and fall of an app company. The programmers are skilled but the products are not always hits. Maximum annual revenue was under $1 million.

My personal theory about having a successful business is that you need to have either (1) a lower cost of capital than everyone else, (2) knowledge and skill that nobody else has, or (3) experience with customers and a market that few others have.

Way #1 works great for government cronies. They can get capital to build a factory for free. Way #2 is the path taken by a lot of MIT spinoffs. Unfortunately it carries a lot of risk, e.g., if the exciting new technology turns not to work as well as hoped. Way #3 seems to characterize most successful software companies. The founders of SAP, for example, had experience as IBM employees building accounting software for manufacturing companies.

Pixite, the company described in the article, would seem to have tremendous prospects if they were to partner with enterprises that have already identified business needs but don’t have the tech skills to implement. Healthcare.gov and associated Obamacare sites, for example, generated about $1 billion in revenue for the software industry. A company such as Pixite might be better off working together with a health insurer, health care provider, or pharma company in order to mine some of the gold in this part of the economy.

Readers: What should these guys do? Go into a business area with a partner or fold their company and get jobs at Google and Facebook?

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Friends who are parents and/or JavaScript experts: Avni Khatri, John Morgan, Isaac Reilly, and I would appreciate your feedback on an application that we’ve developed: postclipper.com (enables a parent to designate a subset of Facebook postings as an electronic baby book for a child, for example, and then share the book with Facebook friends). You can follow this test script. Feedback via email or here as a comment would be great; we are chasing some JavaScript issues that seem to be browser-dependent.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

[Note that the app, though designed for parents, can also be used to designate a subset of Facebook postings as a memory of a trip taken, for example.]

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There has been a lot of debate concerning what should be done with the iPhone that Syed Farook was using prior to his death. Gizmodo says that the phone belonged to, and therefore was presumably paid for, by his government employer. That raises the following stupid question: Why did Mr. Farook need a taxpayer-funded iPhone? The government is interested in whether this U.S. citizen used it to support waging Jihad along with Green Card-holding Tashfeen Malik, but today I’m wondering about the non-Jihad aspect of the case. Why would the taxpayers have bought him an iPhone for $600 or $1000? What job function did it serve? (And why wouldn’t a recently bankrupt city have purchased a cheaper Android device or, like some private employers, paid Farook a small amount to use his own phone? (As with everything else relating to employment in the U.S., such a policy can lead to litigation.))

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Folks:

I entered a contest with a first prize of a week in Ft. Lauderdale with some work colleagues and the entire family. I won second prize… two weeks in Ft. Lauderdale!

Is it worth the effort to bring a road bicycle down there? I don’t want to bike on traffic-choked roads, especially if the drivers are beyond their prime driving years.

Thanks in advance!

[Also, please email me at philg@mit.edu if you would like to get together in Ft. Lauderdale. I propose Sunday afternoon coffee (or drinks? Can Floridians gather in the afternoon without alcohol?) on April 3, but can be flexible.]

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