Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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 This will also be useful for the day when private car ownership is obsolete and we are dropped off in our driveways by a self-driving car.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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On a recent JetBlue flight I wondered how much of the precious satellite bandwidth was being wasted by devices engaged in automatic tasks, e.g., uploading recently taken photos, downloading updates to software that could certainly wait for another few hours, etc.

Why not have a standard interface to connect a device to “limited WiFi”? When on a WiFi networked marked “limited,” a phone would use the same settings as for mobile data. Operating systems such as Windows and Unix (including MacOS), would need to be augmented to recognize that, for example, the next huge update to Windows 10 can wait.

It is true that the operator of a limited network can block services one by one. But what if the operator is you? Suppose that you hook up your laptop to a phone tether and discover that the laptop has downloaded a multi-gigabyte update to Windows 10?

This idea can’t be new. Why don’t we have it already, at least for the phone tether situation?

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Timothy Taylor, one of the nation’s most influential teachers of economics (e.g., through his Teaching Company lectures), offered an interesting high-level perspective (in an interview) on how Americans currently think about economics:

“… when people talk about growth, the first thing they talk about is not the role of the private sector or firms. They talk about how the government can give us growth, through tax cuts or spending increases or the Federal Reserve. When they talk about fairness and justice, they don’t talk about the government doing that. They talk about how companies ought to provide fairness and justice in wages and health care and benefits and all sorts of things.”

Readers: Is he basically right?

Evidence for: here in Massachusetts, the state government preaches to businesses about how they should provide better benefits but meanwhile tries to hire as many as possible of its new workers as consultants so as to avoid having to pay for health insurance, pension, etc., and so as to avoid providing a lifetime employment guarantee. Instead of the government building houses to allocate to people whom the government selects, commercial property developers are required to give away a percentage of what they build (though the actual identification and selection of the recipients of the newly built apartments, etc., is done by a government worker). “The Eviction Epidemic” (New Yorker):

When tenants have legal representation, their chances of keeping their homes increase dramatically. A program that ran in the South Bronx from 2005 to 2008, for example, provided legal assistance to more than thirteen hundred families and prevented eviction in more than eighty-five per cent of the cases, saving New York City hundreds of thousands of dollars in estimated shelter costs.

Having a greater percentage of the GDP devoted to lawyers representing people who aren’t paying commercial landlords is considered by the writer as a way to “save” costs and there is no discussion of the fact that costs for providing free housing have to some extent simply been shifted from the government to commercial landlords (it might be true that a commercial landlord can provide a free house at a lower cost than a government-run “shelter”).

Evidence against: people who say that they’re interested in “social justice” spend a lot of time advocating for more taxpayer-funded government hand-outs, either by making benefits more generous or available to a broader group of residents.

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President Obama is against states taxing tampons (TIME):

“I have to tell you, I have no idea why states would tax these as luxury items,” Obama said Friday. “I suspect it’s because men were making the laws when those taxes were passed.”

[Planned Parenthood is using some of the tax dollars that they receive to argue against tampon purchases generating tax dollars.]

Leaving aside the question of whether or not paying a state’s ordinary sales tax rate on a purchase makes that purchase a “luxury,” I asked a divorce litigator what she thought of the tampon tax controversy:

“A smart woman who is the right age for purchasing tampons would spend her time looking for the right man to get pregnant with, not lobbying against sales tax. She won’t be using tampons during her pregnancy and, following the birth, she’ll have 18 years of child support to buy all the tampons and pretty much everything else that she could ever want.”

[Note that the cashflow duration varies by state; it would be 21 years in New York, 23 years in Massachusetts, potentially longer in tampon-tax-free Canada, etc.]

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The media is full of articles about the mechanics of replacing the late Justice Scalia on the Supreme Court. I haven’t seen any discussion of the kind of person that should be appointed, however, beyond “liberal lawyer/judge” or “conservative lawyer/judge.”

I wonder if the right answer isn’t “not a lawyer or judge.” The Court already has eight lawyers, all of whom were previously judges (list of past justices who were not). That gives rise to the potential for groupthink on issues such as “should we encourage people to come down to the courthouse and litigate this kind of thing?” (if you’re a lawyer, generally litigation seems like a productive activity!)

A lot of the Supreme Court cases that have recently been in the news aren’t technical questions of law. Should parts of the government, e.g., state universities, treat people with different skin color differently? Should states be required to offer two men or two women a civil marriage?

Why not a philosopher to replace Scalia, for example? He or she can still have plenty of clerks with law school degrees.

Readers: What kind of person would you like to see on the Supreme Court?

Related:

• “What Would Scalia Want in His Successor? A Dissent Offers Clues” (nytimes), which Scalia pointed out the lack of intellectual diversity on the Supreme Court (but did not go so far as to advocate for a non-lawyer)

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Happy Valentine’s Day to all of my readers!

In prep for this holiday, I invested $9 in a 70-gram bar of Mast Brothers “milk chocolate.” I assembled a panel of three tasters, all of whom had grown up in the Soviet Union. The unanimous conclusion was that the Mast Brothers product was greatly inferior to anything produced during the Soviet era (a 100-gram bar sold for about 1 ruble, slightly more than $1 at official exchange rates). A glaring fault of the Mast Brothers chocolate was its tendency to separate in one’s mouth into component pieces, e.g., cocoa butter.

I then tossed some industrial Callebaut out (sadly I did not get the full 11 lb. slab, available for about $5/lb.). This was universally praised as far superior to the Mast Brothers product.

Separately, I’m wondering if this explains our inability to control illegal immigration. Whatever people might say about the Soviets, there seems to be no dispute that they were able to control their borders. Despite the Soviets managing a vastly larger territory than the U.S., few people got in or out without authorization. Perhaps, despite our fancier uniforms, computers, helicopters, etc., we are as bad at border patrol as we are at making chocolate?

Readers: What chocolate-related items have you purchased for Valentine’s Day?

Related:

• Mast Brothers chocolate?

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Overheard in Beaver Creek:

Customer goes into a bookstore next to a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan. He asks the proprietor if he stocks the latest book by Donald Trump. The proprietor responds “Get the fuck out of here and stay out.” The customer says “That’s the one. Do you have it in paperback?”

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“It’s Been 10 Years. Would Clarence Thomas Like to Add Anything?” is a New York Times article from February 1. The 1000+ comments are interesting due to the confidence with which NYT denounce the Supreme Court judge as incompetent and/or stupid. Clarence Thomas also comes in for criticism from readers who believe that he lets his clerks do the hard work while he skates.

As it happens, my life as an expert witness brought me into contact with one of Thomas’s former clerks. This attorney was tops in his class at a first-ranked law school and is now one of the top patent litigators in the United States (i.e., he leads cases where fees on both sides may exceed $30 million and hundreds of millions of dollars may be at stake). His portrayal of Thomas was more or less the opposite of the readers’ comments. Thomas was brilliant, funny, collegial, and a good manager of the clerks. Thomas did most of the legal analysis and relied on the clerks to fill in details. In other words, at least according to one expert who had an entire year to see what was going on, Thomas excelled at the portion of the job where the law is actually made (though of course the other justices don’t necessarily agree with him).

Why would Times readers assume that, simply because Thomas disagrees with them regarding the interpretation of the Constitution, Thomas is therefore stupid, lazy, and incompetent?

Related:

• my review of a book on Supreme Court cases, which mentions Thomas
• remarks regarding Thomas-the-jurist from a federal appeals court judge (“too often … disparaged by people who have known little or nothing” and “one of the great jurists of his generation”)

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… when one of your favorite computer applications is simply killed by the manufacturer: “Google Is Finally Killing Picasa”

Adobe Bridge and Adobe Lightroom are the closest competitors, as far as I know, but neither of them are as efficient at the task of sorting through hundreds of photos that come out of a digital SLR, picking favorites, doing minor editing such as cropping, and pushing those favorites up to the Web for sharing. I guess this is a lesson that, for creative professionals, leaving the safety of the Adobe mothership will result in down-the-road agony.

Google hasn’t announced any plans to open-source the Picasa desktop app, so it looks as though users are simply being thrown to the wolves.

Readers who use Picasa: What is next for you?

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