Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“Anti-Abortion Groups Join Battles Over Frozen Embryos” (nytimes, January 19, 2016) has an interesting financial planning angle that the newspaper didn’t explore.

A properly planned career of collecting child support pays better than going to college and working at the median college graduate wage (see Real World Divorce, e.g., the California, Massachusetts, Utah, or Wisconsin chapters). It can provide earnings over a long period of time, e.g., if a plaintiff has the first child at age 18 and the last child at age 40, in Massachusetts the cash will flow until age 63. However, with human lifespan increasing, a plaintiff might want to assemble a portfolio of cashflow-positive children that will pay dividends beyond age 63. Enter the New York Times to show how it can be done!

What if embryos are frozen when a plaintiff is age 30? They can be incubated either by the plaintiff (if female) or via a surrogate at any later date, e.g., when the plaintiff is 60 years old, thus providing a stream of tax-free cash through age 78, 81, or 83 depending on the state. What if the defendant parent has died in the intervening years? Many states allow for a plaintiff to collect child support from the estate of a dead parent.

An advantage of this approach is that, due to the spread in birth years, the amounts of the payments can be roughly double than if children from the same defendant had been born in the same year (e.g., see New York or Wisconsin where the formula is very simple; one child pays 17% of a defendant’s pre-tax income while three children yield only 29% of the defendant’s pre-tax income (remember that the money is tax-free to the defendant, though, so this corresponds to roughly half of the defendant’s after-tax income)). A disadvantage is that the future cashflow needs to be discounted. Given a sufficiently high discount rate it might make more sense to incubate the embryo to term today and invest the child support proceeds in a Vanguard index fund.

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One of the users of our household desktop Windows 10 box is two years old. His approach to the keyboard can best be described as “all-encompassing”. When I want to log in, Microsoft’s software rejects my password and then reminds me that “CAPS LOCK is on.” Instead of taking the trouble to display that message, assuming that the CAPS LOCK key actually has been pressed, why not simply re-try whatever was typed as though the CAPS LOCK key had not been on? How hard would that be? Presumably Windows sees every key press event. How hard would it be to flip the case of whatever was typed in and try again? (And perhaps turn CAPS LOCK off automatically if it had been turned on while the machine was on the login screen?)

Apple fanboys: Is this something that Steve Jobs figured out or does Mac OS exhibit the same behavior?

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I’ve been noticing that stuff that I could have built in three days by myself (SQL data model, HTML templates, some scripts to bridge the two) now takes a team of multiple programmers weeks or months. The result is far prettier than the clunky rendered-by-Mosaic-or-Netscape sites of the 1990s but the function is about the same.

“The Sad State of Web Development” by Drew Hamlett is a fun read (I learned about it from Dave Winer’s comment on the article). It seems that the same forces that led the world of computer nerdism down the J2EE path in the 1990s are still at work:

The web (specifically the Javascript/Node community) has created some of the most complicated, convoluted, over engineered tools ever conceived.

At times, I think where web development is at this point is some cruel joke played on us by Ryan Dahl. You see, to get into why web development is so terrible, you have to start at Node.

You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server. Combine that with all the magpies that were using Ruby at the time, and you have the perfect fucking storm. Lets take everything that was great in Ruby and re write it in Javascript, I think was the official motto.

Most of the smart magpies have moved on to Go at this point, but the people who have stayed in the Node community have undoubtedly created the most over engineered eco system that has ever appeared. No one can create a library that does anything. Every project that creeps up is even more ambitious than the next. It all starts with a core module and 400 plugins for this module. No one will build something that actually does anything. I just don’t understand. The only thing I can think, is people are just constantly re writing Node.js apps over and over.

React: Facebook couldn’t create a notification indicator on Facebook.com, so they create this over engineered dump pile to solve that problem. Now they can tell you how many unread posts you have while downloading 15 terabytes of Javascript.

How does rewriting your interface in the latest framework get you to the next customer? Or the next 50 customers. Does it actually make your customers happier?

A [single-page application] will lock you into a framework that has the shelf life of a hamster dump. When you think you need a SPA, just stop thinking. Just don’t. Your users just don’t fucking care.

The code examples in my 1990s book on web development still run! So does the open-source software that we distributed starting in the mid-1990s. This code doesn’t respond differently to a request from a tablet or a mobile phone, but the browser software on those devices is smart enough to make all of the pages usable. I wouldn’t advise a developer building something new today to use Perl scripts linked to the Oracle C library as I did in 1994 for the Boston Children’s Hospital web-based electronic medical record system (see JAMIA paper that I co-authored unknowingly). But on the other hand I haven’t seen any new development tools that are obviously more productive.

Readers: Are tools for building straightforward web-database applications getting worse or better?

Separately, a youngish programmer friend was telling me that he thinks discriminating against older programmers is rational because programmers usually learn about new tools during evenings or while doing uncompensated side projects. He thinks that older programmers, e.g., due to family responsibilities or reduced energy levels, are less likely to build stuff without being paid and thus employers assume that they won’t know about Node.js and the other frameworks mentioned above.

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A friend’s son will be celebrating his bar mitzvah soon. His parents have told him that he must give 50 percent of any monetary gifts to charity. He says that he wouldn’t give any of his money away if it were up to him. One of the boy’s current passions is computer gaming. I asked him if there was an option in Grand Theft Auto to give away half of your winnings to charity. Apparently there is not.

What do readers think? Will making a 13-year-old give up his dream of Alienware in favor of choosing a 501(c)(3) make him a better person in the long run? And, if so, what is a charity that a 13-year-old might donate to? (let’s first check the Form 990 at guidestar.org to make sure that the executives don’t earn over $1 million/year)

Could the teenager reduce his tax rate a little by asking guests to give him physical things instead of money? What if he spreads his dream gaming computer across an Amazon wishlist or similar and asks people to buy him one component at a time?

Finally, can we argue that this is important preparation for becoming an adult American? He will have to learn to hand over approximately 50 percent of his income (or up to 90 percent, depending on the state and the judge’s mood, if he has an encounter with the U.S. family law system) going forward. So maybe he needs to learn how to do that cheerfully?

[One of my MIT 1982 classmates had this to say: “My son and I just took care of his donations from his bar mitzvah. We had settled on a more standard 10%. While it’s true that most of our children want for nothing and could easily donate 50% or the whole amount for that matter without missing anything, our practice has been to instill in them the responsibility of always giving 10% per our tradition. We talk about it as a family, they see us do it personally, and he had the benefit of seeing his sisters do the same before him. I would hope that the tzedakah (charity) would be a positive thing and reinforce the notion of a bar mitzvah as joining the ranks of Jewish adults, which of course entails additional responsibilities. And if the 13 year old is set on a gaming laptop, what’s wrong with using some of the gift money and, if that’s insufficient after making the requisite donations, earning the rest through baby-sitting or other age appropriate jobs? I know we struggle with teaching our kids the value of money simply because they’ve never had to learn the hard way.]

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I am trying to convert a batch of WordPerfect files to PDF, ideally with the filename of each file displayed in a header. As Corel is the publisher of WordPerfect, I decided to download a trial version of their “PDF Fusion”. Dragging a WordPerfect file into the PDF Fusion app, however, produced an error of “-1”. Digging into the user guide, published on the “wordperfect.com” site, I discover that WordPerfect (WPD) is not one of the supported formats (you can start with Microsoft Word, Open Office, or WordPad files, however).

I think this deserves to be on the cover of Why you need a product manager magazine.

File under: Proud to be part of the software industry.

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The digital age has not been kind to Leica, especially with the killjoys at DxOMark showing the technical inferiority of their products to Sony’s and Nikon DSLRs equipped with Sony sensors.

The new Leica X-U may be an exception, however. It seems to be the first purpose-built underwater point-and-shoot camera with an APS-C sensor (same size as the popular Canon Rebel). The lens is a fixed 35mm equivalent, where “fixed” means that there won’t be any water leaking in through the lens mount. The cost is no worse than taking the family for a week at Club Med: $3000. The big missing feature is image stabilization.

The closest competitor is the Nikon 1 AW1, which has a smaller 1″ sensor and interchangeable lenses at a tiny fraction of the price. Customer reviews on the Amazon and B&H Photo mention problems with the water-sealing, which is not a great thing in an underwater camera…

Let’s hope that Olympus, which has a tremendous track record in rugged cameras, makes a four-thirds competitor to this Leica with image stabilization and a price under $1000!

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Well, I know that I’m stupid, but I’m wondering if I should feel a little dumber for not tracking the stock market regularly. The S&P 500 (chart) is back to where it was in April 2014 (about 1800). It was about 1500 in 2007. If we adjust that 1500 for inflation we get 1715 in 2015 dollars. The U.S. economy is growing at about 2 percent per year (WSJ). If we start with 1715 and apply 8 years of growth at 2 percent we get 2009. So the market is down only about 10 percent from where we would expect it to be if the 2007 price was right. A 10 percent decline is no fun for investors but it doesn’t seem like a good reason to start digging a bunker. Maybe the 2007 price wasn’t right after all!

What about the stock market good times of 2015? We didn’t earn them with economic growth so we shouldn’t be surprised that they were taken away from us.

Readers: What do you think? Is there any reason to think this is going to another 2008-style bloodbath?

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Here’s an idea for home decor: a wall of digital picture frames, each slightly recessed into the wall. Why not just a single big TV showing a collage? That doesn’t seem as visually interesting or attractive as a collage of picture frames in a variety of sizes.

If people can walk right up to the wall we ideally want at least 200 dpi resolution (standard “photo quality” for prints). Thus for a display that is 20 inches on the long dimension we would want a 4K resolution; a display that was just 10 inches wide could be 1080p.

What would one use for actual displays, though? A bunch of computer monitors? A 4K monitor marketed as “24 inches” is about 20 inches in width and costs a semi-reasonable $345 (Acer at Newegg). What if you have a cluster of such monitors, though? Do you need to have a PC buried in a closet that is crammed full of graphics cards and then run DisplayPort cables out of it (an AMD card that can drive six 4K monitors; an equivalent from Matrox)? Given the low-bandwidth communication that is required (one new image every 5 minutes?) it would be a lot better if the monitor could grab images via WiFi.

What about a bunch of TVs? The smallest TVs out there seem to be 22-24 inches in size and are 1080p resolution maximum (example from Vizio). Perhaps that will change over the next year or two. TVs do typically have WiFi and USB ports, but how to drive them without going crazy?

How about a cluster of digital picture frames (Amazon’s current collection)? They are a little on the small side, 15 inches maximum, and tend to be low resolution (1024×768 for example). It is not obvious how to drive a typical digital photo frame, even one with WiFi, from a personal computer.

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“After 7 Years of Slow Growth, U.S. Now Sees More of Same” is a WSJ article on how the U.S. economy refuses to grow much faster than the population growth rate (i.e., it barely grows on a per-capita, inflation-adjusted basis).

Since 2009 I have been having an intermittent argument with a friend’s relative, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. His assumption is that growth was and is the natural condition of an economy in general, as people figure out new and better ways to do things, and that growth was and is the natural condition of the U.S. economy.

My argument was that an economy with a large percentage of GDP spent by the government could stagnate given sufficiently inefficient execution of centrally planned activities, such as road-building. Casey Mulligan, the University of Chicago economist, weighed in with the argument that if you pay Americans on condition that they not work, a lot of them will not work (see “Book Review: The Redistribution Recession“).

Based on the WSJ analysis, it seems that my friend’s relative is more typical of mainstream economists. They have consistently over-predicted growth for the U.S. economy. What can we learn from this? Maybe as investors not to believe these kinds of predictions!

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Who else loves Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt? If you liked Ellie Kemper as Erin on the Office and haven’t seen this show you definitely need to subscribe to Netflix! (Yes, I know that I am late to the party but maybe one of the readers of this weblog has been stationed in Antarctica for a year and hasn’t heard about the show.)

The show captures the inequality Zeitgeist well. Schmidt is mocked for thinking that a “millionaire” is wealthy or “looking like a million dollars” is a compliment. Even the cheap shots at the South are funny. When Schmidt asks her roommate to tutor her in math, he says “I went to school in Mississippi; we learned that the dinosaurs went extinct because a meteor impact turned them gay.”

The spoiled helpless Manhattan lifestyle is on display here, as Schmidt gets a job assisting a rich stay-at-home mom. In a flashback she tells her parents that she is “Dating a rich older [married] man and lying about my birth control.” She advises Schmidt to bring “a condom and a pin” on a date with a wealthy young man (consistent with the New York chapter of Real World Divorce, describing that child support profits above $2 million can be challenging to obtain, the goal of the accidental-on-purpose pregnancy seems to be marriage). A therapist is on call to collect a share of the family’s income for allowing the parents to “talk to the shame puppet.” Consistent with the attorney’s comment in that chapter, “A person’s decision to divorce is primarily financial. Of course there are people who are concerned about the kids, but they are not very common. Sad to say it is all about money here in the U.S.,” when a divorce is contemplated on the show the only consideration is the plaintiff’s potential post-divorce spending power. Neither she nor any other character expresses concern for the possible impact on the children.

For a series set in Manhattan there isn’t much of Manhattan on display. Nearly all of the scenes are indoors.

Readers: What do you think/like about this show?

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