Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“U.S. Economy Grew Anemic 0.7% in Fourth Quarter” is a WSJ article on the latest GDP numbers for our country. The headline is inaccurate because the economy grew at a 0.7 percent annual rate during the fourth quarter. The actual “growth” was thus 0.175 percent.

Nowhere does the article mention the population size. If the population grew by more than 0.175 percent during the quarter, the per-capita GDP actually fell. If the popular shrank, on the other hand, then each of us is potentially significantly richer (though perhaps the evil Koch brothers can take all of the growth for themselves!).

“U.S. Economy Barely Grew Last Quarter, Stoking Concerns About Momentum in 2016” is the New York Times equivalent story and it has the same omission (though at least they don’t have the arithmetic wrong in the headline).

The CIA Factbook says that the growth rate is 0.78%. Thus, adjusted to a per-capita basis, the U.S. economy was shrinking slightly during the fourth quarter of last year. Considering the lack of cold and snow in the Northeast, which ordinarily would have given the economy a boost, the core shrinkage rate was probably higher.

Assuming that the CIA and Department of Commerce numbers are both correct, why would we be congratulating ourselves for a growing economy when in fact we have a shrinking economy from the perspective of the average resident?

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Here in Orlando I flipped the rental car radio on for a trip to Chick-fil-A. I found an NPR host interviewing Victoria Coates, a PhD art historian (LinkedIn profile) now working as an advisor to Ted Cruz. The host plainly wants to celebrate Barack Obama’s achievements in negotiating a deal with Iran. Start listening to the audio at about 6 minutes in for how Coates responds. It is interesting even if you don’t have a strong opinion on the subject.

Worth playing if your parents are questioning your decision to major in art history!

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I withdrew $400 from a Bank of America ATM here in Orlando. Instead of the stack of $20 bills I would have gotten in the Northeast, I received three $100 bills (“Manhattan food stamps”) and five twenties.

Was this a one-time fluke or has BoA figured out that Floridians want to have $100 bills in their wallets more so than people in other parts of the U.S.?

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The government in New York City is planning to cut its local helicopter tour industry’s revenue by roughly 50 percent (NY Post). All of the income from these tours was earned by people living and working in the New York metro area. Nearly all of the payments (about $50 million per year total says the article) was coming from visitors, including a lot of foreigners. #howtoshrinktheeconomy

On the other hand, it looks as though at least some money was made by lawyers and politicians off the regulatory fight:

Sources said that powerhouse lobbyist James Capalino, a longtime friend and fund-raiser of de Blasio, played a key role in the negotiations. Among the meetings he arranged was a rare face-to-face session with the mayor at City Hall last May – a day after Capalino’s firm gave de Blasio’s nonprofit fundraising arm, Campaign for One New York, a donation of $10,000, records show.

Capalino’s firm has received $120,000 in lobbying fees from the industry since de Blasio took office in 2014, including $85,000 from the Helicopter Tourism & Jobs Council.

Related:

• Political Use of Flight Restrictions (#OnelyOneAmericanCanWorkAtATime)
• Obama and New England aviation businesses start their vacation (#OnelyOneAmericanCanWorkAtATime)

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“Some Migrants in Germany Want to Go Home” is a Wall Street Journal article that includes some information on the practical economics of being a migrant in Germany.

It seems that asylum seekers get free housing, but it is not very high quality:

In October, Amer sold all his belongings in Syria and took his family to a safer life in Germany. Four months later, he wants to return to a country still at war.

Once in Germany, Amer discovered an unexpected reality: Instead of the small house he was hoping for and money to help him open a business, he was given a bare room in an old administrative building turned into an emergency shelter.

They also get a cash stipend:

Before leaving Syria, Amer said he had heard refugees in Germany got around €500 ($546) a month in benefits—a relatively accurate estimate. But he hadn’t realized everything in Germany costs far more than in Syria, he said, dressed in a black hoodie and sweatpants.

“I would probably need 10 years to reach the minimum standard of living of any normal German and the language seems impossible for me to learn,” said Amer, who worked in a snack shop in Syria and never attended university.

Having spent €15,000—everything he owned—to bring his wife, son and brother-in-law to Germany, Amer said he doesn’t yet know how he will pay for their return.

They can presumably get free health care in Germany’s health care system (not a simple single-payer one like in the UK or France).

Overall the package seems less generous than what U.S. welfare recipients collect. The total stipend is only about as much as a U.S. welfare family of three would receive in SNAP (food stamps). (Note that, perhaps coincidentally, the stipend is about the same as the maximum child support revenue obtainable in Germany, e.g., for someone who had sex with the richest person in Germany.) The housing sounds crummier than government-provided housing here.

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“Recognition” is a January 18, 2016 New Yorker story about a man convicted of rape in 1986 based on eyewitness testimony. Worth reading if you’re interested in how our criminal justice system operates.

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Down here in Orlando the art museum is running a “Women of Vision” show of works by photographers that the curators identify as “women.” How do single-gender museum shows, typically planned a year or more in advance, work in a transgender age? What if one of photographers identified as a “woman” during the planning stage comes out as a “man” just prior to the public opening? Does the show get retitled? Some works get removed? A note added that the photographer is believed to have identified as a woman at the time of the exposure?

[Museums also like to run single-race shows (except that explicitly featuring artists for being “white” or “white male” is uncommon). Does that still make sense in the Rachel Dolezal age?]

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In November 2013 I asked “Should we short Twitter?” The company was then valued at $18 billion.

Today the market cap is $12 billion (chart) and the Wall Street Journal is writing about desperate management changes (article).

At first glance it would seem that questioning Twitter’s value was a good investment idea. However, the price roughly doubled after I asked the question so a short investor would have needed capital, patience, and nerves to hang for more than two years.

Readers: What could Twitter do to earn more revenue and profit?

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Are you disappointed that the government hasn’t made it tougher to buy guns? Perhaps you’ll be pleased to know that a new layer of bureaucracy and waiting periods have been imposed on those who want to buzz around in a little trainer aircraft. “FAA finalizes rule on student certificates” explains that what used to take an hour will now take weeks.

What if you’re a terrorist? If you want to make sure that you’re legal during the flight to your terrorism destination, you’ll have to wait “up to three weeks” until your new plastic certificate comes in the mail. If you’re not too picky about the legalities of that final flight, you can, of course just open the door to an airplane and press the start button. (Heavier aircraft don’t have ignition keys.)

This will kill off a lot of business for flight schools, in the meantime. Europeans often come over here to get a pilot certificate. They get TSA clearance using a web site over in Europe. They do all of their ground school reading in the evenings. Then they show up during a three-week break from their job and hammer out all of the flying required for a license. Now they won’t be able to do this because they won’t be able to solo until they’ve been here for about three weeks.

#howtoshrinktheeconomy

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The Wall Street Journal has an article on Apple reaching a revenue plateau. It isn’t surprising that revenue is heading down, but the quote from management is disturbing:

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook said he remains optimistic, noting that he sees future gains for iPad and continued growth from services such as Apple Music and other projects.

“We don’t live in 90-day quarters, and we don’t invest in 90-day quarters,” said Mr. Cook. “I’m so convinced that the things we are doing are right and the assets we have are enormous.”

Apple Music? Even if the company got a 100-percent market share in recorded music how could that move the needle for a company with roughly $233 billion in annual sales? If this is what the company’s management is relying on, investors should be terrified. (And Apple music is a crummy me-too product.)

What are Apple’s competitive edges going forward that could lead to substantial revenue and/or profit growth? The iPhone per se doesn’t seem like one of them. My iPhone 6 Plus became unstable in its 6th month of life, with hangs and crashes roughly comparable to what one might experience with Samsung’s version of Android on an older Note device. The Apple Health app is comically sloppily programmed and its user interface is inferior to what Samsung was offering with the Note 3 two years ago. People whom I know in professional video say that Adobe Premiere is at least as good as Final Cut Pro and that Apple lost a lot of loyalty with a major user interface change to Final Cut.

What about Apple’s supposed leadership in user experience? Plainly the Apple Health programmers didn’t get the memo, but surely the core iOS has a better/cleaner user interface than any Android or (gasp!) Windows phone? I might have thought so until I visited a neighbor. She is intelligent and well-educated, but not passionate about technology. She said that she had hardly gotten any phone calls for weeks. I discovered that her phone was in “Do Not Disturb” mode. She had entered this inadvertently by mistakenly swiping up from the bottom of the screen then touching the moon symbol (a nice icon but there is no explanation of what it means). No programmer at Apple had thought to have the phone display a confirmation dialog box after a few days in DnD mode. I decided to be a hero and reconfigure her phone so that this mode couldn’t be entered inadvertently. I would remove the moon icon from the quick swipe-up menu. Then I discovered that Apple was so confident in its broken user interface that, unlike with Android devices, there was no way to customize the choices.

Readers: What does Apple have that is way better than the competition? What should they be working on going forward? (they’ve got plenty of cash to do all of the R&D that they want, at least as long as they hire all of the programmers offshore so that they don’t have to bring the money into the U.S. and pay corporate taxes on it)

(My personal vote: Camera software. Sony and Samsung have slightly higher scoring cameras on DxOMark, but my experience with a Samsung Note 3 was that its practical capabilities were far behind the test scores. Maybe Sony is better. DxOMark says “Impressive autofocus in all conditions, the best tested to date” and “Very good white balance and color rendering in most situations” regarding the Sony Xperia Z5. Perhaps the Sony is actually the photographer’s best phone choice? (And the device is actually waterproof; rated IP68!))

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