Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“Don’t Privatize Air Traffic Control” is a New York Times editorial from February 15, 2016. The Times argues that the FAA is actually efficient but has been starved for funds: “Congress itself is to blame for some of NextGen’s problems because it has not provided stable funding to the F.A.A. in recent years.” The Times‘s portrait of the FAA as a model of efficiency is hard to square with experience, but a system run by a government crony could surely be far worse (see Amtrak, for example). And in fact the stuff that the FAA currently farms out to contractors seems to be frozen in time (see my NBAA report for how multi-billion-dollar ADS-B weather can’t catch up to 15-year-old XM weather).

Americans are so bad at running bureaucracies that it seems almost certain that any new system for collecting fees will have administrative costs vastly higher than the current system, which at least we know how to run (taxes on airline tickets; taxes on fuel purchased by private aircraft operators).

If Congress wants to change something, I would suggest privatizing aircraft certification so that multiple competing organizations could verify manufacturers’ compliance with regulations. This works well for consumer products. See UL and TUV Rheinland. This can boost the GDP by allowing U.S. aircraft manufacturers to get new and upgraded products to market faster.

If Congress truly can’t resist monkeying with air traffic control, the idea of giving it all to one big unaccountable bureaucracy is the height of madness. The U.S. is already split up into about 20 “centers” (list). Why not split things up so that running the radar in each center (and airports within those centers’ airspace) is contracted out every five years? Separation services (the people on the radio talking to pilots, issuing routes, etc.) would also be contracted out to the lowest qualified bidder every five years within each center. (One issue with privatization is that currently the federal government engages in age-based employment discrimination that would be illegal for a private employer. A controller cannot be hired if over age 30 and must generally retire at age 56.)

I think that we have ample evidence that when there is competition Americans can run things reasonably cost-effectively. If the government takes something over we’ll pay 2-4X the competitive market price (see healthcare, for example!). If the government gives a single private company the exclusive right to do something, there is no limit on how badly taxpayers and consumers can be abused.

Related:

• The CATO Institute buys into this idea, mostly due to the fact that the Canadian monopoly hasn’t ripped off citizens up there

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It seems that some years ago Colorado set up what today can be a safe space for Yale undergraduates, Berkeley residents, and anyone else who doesn’t want to hear someone question the wisdom of bigger government:

Artist: Peter Frykholm of Precision Peaks; work on display at City on a Hill coffee in Leadville, Colorado.

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I took a 20-year break from downhill skiing and discovered that everyone is now wearing a helmet. This surprised me because all of the people I know who have been injured when skiing suffered from torn ACLs, broken legs, knee problems, etc. It also surprised me because the people I have read about being killed when skiing collided with trees and decelerated so definitively that it is tough to see how an inch-thick helmet would bring down the G forces to something survivable (this article makes the same point).

Given how warm it was in Beaver Creek, I’m wondering why it wouldn’t make just as much sense to wear a bike helmet. Is there a significant difference, other than insulation, between a bike helmet and a ski helmet? Ski helmets seem to cost a lot more and casual skiers may already own a bike helmet and not need to spend $10-12/day renting a ski helmet.

The deeper question is how these helmets are supposed to work. If your head hits the snow, won’t you be sliding and therefore will avoid a concussion? If your head hits a tree at full speed, won’t you be dead? Under what circumstance does the ski helmet make a big difference in the severity of injury? (“Ski Helmet Use Isn’t Reducing Brain Injuries” is a nytimes article from 2013 on the subject) Finally, is there a difference between snowboarding and skiing with respect to the value of helmets? To my casual eye the snowboarders seem to be more likely to hit their heads.

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Our waitress in Orlando last month was a young Venezuelan. Her father owned a business and had sent all of his children abroad to study and, he expected, ultimately to settle. One child was in London, one in Portugal, and one a student at the University of Central Florida (this state-run school is supposedly the largest university in the U.S. for undergrad enrollment, though presumably that excludes University of Phoenix) and working nights in a more or less Asian strip-mall chain restaurant.

“Sanders says exactly the same things as Hugo Chavez,” she pointed out. “Even his hand gestures are the same.”

Fortunately for Hillary, this young woman is currently ineligible to vote due to her lack of citizenship.

My liberal friends on Facebook are suggesting that woman are required to vote for Hillary because she is a woman and it would be “revolutionary” to have a woman as a political leader in the U.S. I like to cut and paste the following responses: “Maybe if we show them the way, even the U.K. and Germany might be inspired to elect female leaders” and “It would be amazing if a wealthy white American aged 60+ could be elected to the White House” and, finally, since all of them are also passionate transgender advocates, “How do you know that Hillary will still identify as a woman when he or she takes office in January 2017?”

[Could Bernie Sanders assure a victory by changing his gender identity to “female”? Then Bernice Sanders could get both votes from people who support the Sanders policies and from people who would like to see a female president in the White House.]

Readers: Especially given the common practice of former presidential wives winning elections in Latin America, Would it be interesting from a feminist point of view if Hillary becomes president? And, more seriously, in an age where we are not supposed to be making cisgender assumptions, is it even meaningful to “vote for a woman”? How does the voter know that the candidate will continue to identify as a woman?

Related:

• Piketty, Democracy, and Hugo Chavez
• Hugo Chavez: Great politician; poor administrator
• Hugo Chavez’s legacy
• Amy Alkon on women voting for women
• Venezuela’s Collapse Brings ‘Savage Suffering’ (WSJ, February 12, 2016): “Dying infants, chronic power outages and empty shelves mark the world’s worst-performing economy … Inflation in this oil-rich country is expected to hit a world’s-worst 700% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The economy shrank by 10% last year and is expected to decline another 8% this year, according to the IMF, the worst performance in the world.”

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In “Pope Francis Suggests Donald Trump Is ‘Not Christian’” we learn that a man riding the “papal airliner” (perhaps a Boeing 777; source) back to his walled immigrant-free sovereign territory equates “Christian” with “welcoming immigrants.”

This raises the question of which religion can claim the high ground when it comes to welcoming migrants. Arabs are legendary for hospitality, but perhaps that tradition predates Islam? And how can we explain the fact that few migrants have been welcomed by Arab countries? (During an early 1990s visit to Egypt I learned that an immigrant family can expect to wait a minimum of 125 years before any member is granted Egyptian citizenship.)

What about Buddhism? Hinduism? Other religions with a lot of adherents?

Finally, when can we expect the papal airliner to land in Kabul to pick up a full load of Afghanis so that they can begin their new life within the Vatican? (Wikipedia says that 550 can be welcomed on each flight.)

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Want to earn more than double the minimum wage? Studying cake decoration is apparently a good way to do that. From the supermarket in Dillon, Colorado:

 

 

(According to “the Google,” minimum wage in Colorado was $8.23/hour on the February 8, 2016 date of the photo.)

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If you never liked the idea of trying to assemble locals to build a house in your yard but also don’t like the look of a factory-built house, Goscobec is kind of interesting. They have a bunch of modern designs (all standard plans) and, per square foot, everything seems to cost about half of what building on-site does in New England. Some of their stuff seems similar to Rocio Romero’s LV Home, but houses are delivered more or less finished rather than as kit of exterior panels.

From an American point of view, the main downside of these standard models seems to be their lack of square footage. I called up Bertin Rioux, the general manager. He says that Canadians nearly always have a finished basement with the same footprint as the house. Therefore a Canadian family can live comfortably in a 1200′ or 1400′ house. Goscobec often does bigger houses, especially when delivering to the U.S., but they are always custom designed. Each box is a maximum of 70×16′.

One limitation is that the ceiling height for a flat ceiling is about 9’4″. They make modules with hinged roofs that are expanded on-site, but then someone has to do more work to close up the resulting hole in the structure. Part of the trash that architects talk about modular is that there is a one-foot deadspace between floors any time that a multi-story house is built with modules. Rioux says that this can be an advantage, however, because if this space is stuff with sound insulation, e.g., Roxul, there is almost no sound transmission between floors.

Design fees are ridiculously cheaper with Goscobec than with a local architect. The company charges $2,000 to design a house, refundable against the purchase price. Time-to-move-in is much shorter. The foundation can be built in parallel with the house, which arrives roughly two months after being ordered. With Goscobec’s own team of workers (post-9/11, no longer allowed to come down and work in the U.S.), the owner can move in about two weeks after delivery. The typical house is shipped “ready to decorate,” which means that floors, tile, paint, and light fixtures are done on site and to the customer’s taste.

I talked to a busy architect recently here in Boston. He said that the construction market was hotter than it had ever been during his 30 years in the field, i.e., hotter than during the 2006 peak. It costs $250-300/ft. to build a house with these contractors, roughly double what the modular Quebec house would cost (adding in some site work).

Readers: Who has had experience setting up a modular house on a foundation? Why isn’t this kind of construction more popular?

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“Accusation at Indiana University Triggers Review of Sexual Misconduct Cases” is a New York Times article on drunken sex between two university administrators (whose jobs, as it happens, include adjudicating disputes regarding drunken sex among students). This letter from Jill L. Creighton contains a curious passage:

Jason took advantage of me after I had had too much to drink. … I did not consent to sexual contact with Jason. A verified, contemporaneous text message to this effect was submitted by me as evidence during the impeachment process.

Apparently this was drunken texting sex.

Related:

• “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football)”
• Association for Student Conduct Administration (where university administrators interested in student drunken sex gather to drink heavily)
• “Why do Colleges Build Dormitories? And teach half-time?” (from 2003!)
• “California sex-on-campus bill shows that universities should get out of the housing business”

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Real estate is expensive. Cars are designed to be stored outdoors. Why devote precious real estate to a garage then? A parked car is not subject to the same setback restrictions as the structure of the house. So the area occupied by a conventional garage can be useful living space and the cars can be left in the driveway.

Perhaps you object that global warming is not yet complete. We will continue to suffer from occasional cold temperatures and precipitation that turns to ice on the driveway and front walk. This makes it challenging to walk from the parked car to the house.

Instead of devoting precious building envelope space to a garage, why not instead heat the driveway and front walk? Then the path from the car to the house is always ice-free. This will also be useful for the day when private car ownership is obsolete and we are dropped off in our driveways by a self-driving car.

The hardware for a heated driveway or walk seems to cost about $8 per square foot (source).  A landscaping company estimates $17-19 per square foot installed here in the Boston suburbs. It may be necessary to add a drain so that the melted snow doesn’t simply re-freeze as ice. Still, if you consider that two cars plus a walk might be 500 square feet (about $10,000 total for the electric heat), that’s not a big cost compared to what the square footage of the garage would be worth as living space (400 square feet times $200 per square foot?). Operating costs for this much heated driveway/walk seem to be roughly $500/year (“no customer has ever complained about the usage cost” says the contractor).

One would still need enough space for storing bicycles and other “garage junk” but a house with a three-car garage could become a house with a one-car garage.

Readers: What’s wrong with this theory? Why do we need garages if we can heat a portion of the driveway instead?

 

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The Boston Globe took the trouble to publish “64 City of Boston workers earn more than $250,000” yet the word “pension” does not occur in the article.

It is slightly interesting that “Police Lieutenant Timothy M. Kervin was paid $348,000, which included $163,000 in overtime.” What is a lot more interesting is that, according to the city’s official site, his pension will be paid out at 80 percent of $348,000 (assuming that he can keep up the overtime for three consecutive years), not 80 percent of what would seem to be his base salary of $185,000 per year. If he retires at 55 and lives to 90, that’s an extra $130,400 per year or roughly $5.9 million total (pension payments of $12.5 million rather than $6.66 million; inflation adjustments would make the nominal payments higher).

That one of America’s most lavishly funded newspapers can’t put this kind of arithmetic together is to me an indication that as long as we give politicians the ability to hand out pensions we are virtually guaranteed to bankrupt ourselves.

Related:

• Pensions: How states and local governments indulge in deficit-spending
• History of Public Employee Unions
• If you thought the latest economic collapse was bad…

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