Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A Canadian-born friend was saying how proud he was that Justin Trudeau (video of the first planeload being welcomed) and the rest of his countrymen were welcoming Syrian refugees, in contrast to the attitude here in his adopted home, especially as expressed by Donald Trump and the Republicans whom he believes agree with everything Donald Trump says.

The audience for this Canada-is-holier-than-thou speech was a group of high-income native-born Americans and immigrants from Asia. While nobody can argue that getting through immigration in the U.S. is a warm experience, even for U.S. passport holders, we were not quick to agree that ostentatiously welcoming a handful of  Syrians was a character-defining activity (the Canadian government site at the time said that 882 refugees had arrived, about the same number as a single planeload from a one-class Airbus A380 (seats 853)).

Could we perhaps conduct a test to see if the Canadians could keep up their attitude for more than one photo/viceo opportunity? I said, “Perhaps if the Canadians asked nicely, Donald Trump would be willing to convert his Boeing 757 back to airliner configuration and bring 250 refugees every day to Halifax, Montreal, or Toronto.”  If we can agree that Donald Trump is not in fact the only person who decides how Americans feel about immigrants, what then? Given the weak market for the A380 and current low Jet-A prices we non-Trumps could get together and probably charter one for $50,000 per hour. Figure 10 hours in the air from Istanbul or Beirut to Canada and that’s about $500,000 or less than $600 per refugee. Perhaps the supposedly anti-Syrian Republicans he was complaining about would be willing to kick in for unlimited A380 charter. So the Canadians could welcome 853 refugees per day and enjoy a continuous feeling of moral superiority, all happily paid for Americans. As there are 176 A380s flying, one could add daily flights from Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and other parts of the world where there are at least 853 people who would prefer to live in Vancouver or Toronto (actually maybe there should also be some flights from Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, and other high-crime cities in the U.S.).

[The empty legs back to Turkey or Lebanon could be sold to budget travelers, at least as far as Italy, for example.]

What do readers think? This Canadian government site says that of the 19.5 million officially designated refugees worldwide, Canada will take in about 10,000 annually. That works out to excluding roughly 99.95% of the 19.5 million who would presumably love to have a daily coffee and eclair in Montreal. If Canada excludes 99.95 percent of the people who want to migrate to Canada and the U.S. excludes 99.96 percent of those who wish to migrate to the U.S., does that make Canadians as a group morally superior?

Related:

• Michael Moore delivers low-income New Yorkers to the beaches of Greenwich, Connecticut
• If helping migrants is a moral imperative, what about non-migrants from the same countries?

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Consider the costs to a society from alcohol: (a) productivity lost due to drunkenness, (b) drunk driving, (c) hangovers, (d) resources spent on legal proceedings following drunken sex on campus, and (e) time and money lost due to medical care required because of excessive alcohol consumption.

It is hard to find someone who would say that U.S. GDP is higher because of the alcohol we consume.

Wikipedia puts out a helpful “List of countries by alcohol consumption per capita.” Shouldn’t we expect that, assuming these numbers are relatively stable over decades and centuries, a rough inverse correlation between drinking and productivity?

Yet the correlation does not seem strong. The Greeks drink less than the Germans or Swiss. Italians drink about the same amount as the Japanese. Egypt is not famously productive and yet they consume minimal alcohol.

If drinking is as destructive as we are told why can’t we see it in the stats?

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If I were running Yahoo I would say “We have all of these users, most web services are pretty bad and have glaring missing features, so let’s build audience by creating more and better services.” This analysis by a hedge fund, however, shows that Yahoo was, as a percentage of revenue, a bigger spender on R&D and product development than either Google or Apple (see slide 14).

How is this possible? If you have a huge audience and competent programmers and a world full of unmet needs, shouldn’t one be able to make money through coding?

Slide 40 is also confusing to me. Instagram and tumblr were acquired for about the same price and have the same number of users. One is worth $35 billion, according to the slide, and one is worth $0. Why the difference? Presumably Instagram has a lot more revenue per user, but why?

Could the answer be that hiring programmers in Silicon Valley is not cost-effective anymore for ad-supported businesses? (Google, presumably, being an exceptional case due to its market power.) I talked to the CEO of a 400-person company involved in online publishing yesterday. He said that he had shut down the company’s California office. Web development is now being done out of Vietnam where a programmer whom he considers to be high quality costs $15,000 per year. For mobile development… Barcelona.

Finally, look at the stock compensation graph on slide 12. While Yahoo achieves nothing, except for continuing to hold onto Alibaba stock, investors pay the employees $420 million per year in dilution via stock grants. The CEO is taking $365 million from the investors (page 54; Sheryl Sandberg would no doubt point out that the CEO would be paid a lot more if she were a man), whose board members were dumb enough to tie only 3.3% of total comp to the company’s performance (see my economic recovery plan for the U.S. on why governance of public companies is so bad). The CEO is described as incompetent but slide 56 shows that personal finances are being managed brilliantly (i.e., the CEO has been selling Yahoo stock as fast as possible). The classic paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” suggests that an incompetent CEO would be unlikely to sell based on his or her own incompetence.

Readers: What do you think? How is it possible that with such a large audience, which adds tremendous leverage to even the simplest coding achievement, Yahoo is not successful?

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Checklist discipline is one of the key elements for safe flying. It is easy to achieve when there are two pilots. One pilot can read the checklist while the other makes sure that aircraft attitude and power are correct. A single pilot can juggle a paper checklist or try to use the various electronic checklist options, but the workload is too much for some people and/or some situations. Checklists in multi-function displays, such as Garmin and Avidyne, are buried a little too deeply for maximum safety. To get to the Climb checklist, for example, the pilot might have to press several buttons and take his or her attention away from aircraft attitude for 5 or 10 seconds to get through the relevant menus.

Here’s what I want, especially in an aircraft that has a lot of free panel space: a ribbon of switches, one per normal checklist, running next to the pilot’s primary flight display (PFD) or multi-function display (essentially in front of the pilot’s right hand). Pressing a switch labeled “Climb” would start the climb checklist. Each item would show up as a one-line display either above the PFD or on the PFD. If the aircraft could figure out that an item had been accomplished, e.g., gear up or flaps up, the item could be displayed with a checkmark next to it. The ribbon would have one additional button labeled “Next” that would sequence the system to the next checklist item.

A pilot could press one always-available button at any time to get to a checklist and then deal with one item at a time.

This is the kind of thing that could be built by a “maker” with perhaps $50 worth of parts, including the Arduino (massive overkill!) to drive it all and a battery for power. Certified and powered from the aircraft? Well… let’s try not to think about that! But I can dream…

Readers: What do you think of this idea? And what maker parts would you actually use if you wanted to build this as a portable device to be taped to an aircraft panel?

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Despite the lack of progress in engines, which is what typically drives progress in airframes, there are still some people crazy enough to be designing and certifying small airplanes. Here are some recent developments:

• the Italian-designed Tecnam P2010 is now FAA-certified (same Lycoming engine as a Diamond Star DA40 or Cessna 172)
• the world’s first composite airplane, a four-seater certified in 1970, is flying again, thanks to the Chinese. See AOPA on the Windecker Eagle. The Continental engine is the same as in a Beechcraft Bonanza (certified in 1947)
• Burt Rutan’s SkiGull, with its revolutionary landing gear, is flying. (article) The Rotax engine is the same as in most light sport airplanes.

Enthusiasm for light aircraft apparently won’t die, though let’s hope that none of these folks go to NBAA and discover that they could make a lot more money building some kind of tweak for Gulfstreams.

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Here’s an interesting article by Star Simpson that contains a good section on what it feels like to be arrested at age 19 in a country where prosecutors have a large range of crimes with which to charge a typical person.

Related:

• scroll to the end of this posting to see what it costs to defend a criminal case

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Young people: Read “Private Equity’s ‘Hidden’ Fees Totaled $20 Billion” (WSJ, December 13, 2015)

Boring but important if you’re planning a career. Here are some excerpts:

The “monitoring fees” and “transaction fees” are typically agreed between private equity firms and the managers of the companies they own. Investors in the private equity funds know these types of fees are charged but don’t negotiate the details.

“These fees are effectively hidden from investors,” Ludovic Phalippou, an associate professor at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, who co-authored the report, said in an interview. “Investors usually don’t see these fees and don’t know how much they are paying.”

Fees were earned even when deals failed. The $32 billion takeover of Texas-based utility Energy Future Holdings Corp. entered bankruptcy protection in 2014. Even so, the deal earned $666 million of portfolio company fees for KKR & Co., TPG and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the report said.

A disaster for investors? Perhaps. The source of your year-end bonus? For sure!

Related:

• Economist on mediocre returns from private equity

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When operating a business in one of the highest-tax jurisdictions in the world (Tax Foundation), presumably it is important to know what tax rates and regulations are. When did the rates that affect decisions made in 2015 become known? Today! Well, since President Obama hasn’t signed the bill yet, maybe next week some time. Forbes explains what’s there with “Tax Deal Makes Permanent R&D Credit, Generous Child And College Breaks”:

R&D Credit: businesses, rejoice! The biggest ticket item of all the 52 extenders has finally been made permanent, as well as bigger and better. Beginning in 2016, businesses with less than $50 million in gross receipts will be free to use the credit to offset alternative minimum tax. [See this article on alternative minimum tax for corporations and this example.]

Enhanced Section 179 deductions: In recent years, taxpayers have been entitled to immediately deduct up to $500,000 of the cost of qualifying asset acquisitions (with a phase-out beginning at $2 million). These threshold were due to plummet to $25,000 and $200,000 respectively, beginning on January 1, 2015.

100% exclusion on Section 1202 stock: as I wrote about here, changes made in 2009 and 2010 to Section 1202 — which allows a taxpayer who sells qualifying small business stock held for longer than 5 years to exclude part of the gain — increased the exclusion from 50% to 100% (subject to limitations). This 100% exclusion was made permanent for stock, bringing great relief to investors who acquired QSBS stock in 2015. [i.e., if you have a PhD in accounting you can avoid paying capital gains tax on appreciated small business stock]

Enhanced American opportunity tax credit: From 2009 through 2017, taxpayers have been entitled to a $2,500 credit for four years of post-secondary education, with phase-outs beginning at $80,000 (if single) and $160,000 (if married filing jointly). In 2017, however, the credit was slated to return to an $1,800 annual maximum with lower phase-out thresholds. This deal makes the enhanced credit a permanent fixture in the law. [more welfare for U.S. universities]

Obamacare came under fire as part of the negotiations, as the agreement would pause the 2.3% excise tax on medical devices in 2016 and 2017, while the start of the so-called Cadillac tax on high-cost employer-sponsored health insurance would be delayed from 2018 to 2020. [i.e., the only parts of Obamacare that we like, apparently, are the ones where the government is giving us money]

Because the earned income credit is a lightning rod for fraud, taxpayers will not be permitted to file amended returns claiming the credit for a year when they did not have a valid social security number. The same holds true for the child tax credit; a taxpayer may not file an amended return claiming the credit for any year in which they did not have a valid ITIN (taxpayer identification number). In addition, taxpayers convicted of fraud in claiming the earned income credit will be barred from claiming the credit for ten years, while those found to have recklessly disregarded the rules will be prohibited from claiming the credit for two years. A 20% penalty will also be applied to the refundable portion of improperly claimed credits, reversing an earlier court decision. [i.e., the dream of simplifying the American welfare system with a negative income tax doesn’t work because we are too devoted to fraud]

I look forward to paying my accountant to figure out what all of this means…

Related:

• previous Forbes article that describes the federal tax code as “about as permanent as a Kardashian marriage.”

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Spotlight is a good movie but it may end up being a great record of what we lost when the news business died (except for a few national products, such as the Wall Street Journal). Paying a team of journalists to nail down a story about child abuse by Catholic priests isn’t something that can be done without ad revenue.

The portrayal of Boston is realistic. Our city looks somewhat worn, not blessed with ideal weather, and crowded. Accessing public records in the courthouse was a lot easier in the fictional world of the movie, at least compared to the Middlesex County registry that we visited to create our analysis of the May 2011 divorce lawsuits filed there. A reporter is able to ascertain quickly, for example, that there are no cases filed by a particular lawyer against the Archdiocese. In practice that could take quite some time as only the barest minimum facts about cases are in a computer system. Once a case is pulled, the paper file is incomplete, which we found to be true of a lot of divorce lawsuits. The Boston Globe building is authentic and the interior doesn’t look that different than during my last visit there. The movie premise that there are story categories that the editors are reluctant to research or publish is consistent with what I was told (a reporter had dug around in the Massachusetts family court system and found that judges were appointing friends to serve as guardian ad litems (GALs) in custody lawsuits, contrary to the rule requiring GALs to be appointed sequentially from a list; the connected GALs were running up bills for $50,000 to be paid by the litigants despite the fact that the goal was supposed to be closer to $5,000; the story was killed by the editors and the reporter was told not to poke around in or write about the family court system).

The acting was good, though generally the movie concentrated on people doing their job. We didn’t get to learn a whole lot about these characters outside of their work. Rachel McAdams is my second favorite import from London, Ontario (first favorite), but print media journalists don’t usually look like movie stars. She seemed a little out of place.

Spotlight ends with text explaining what happens after the action of the movie, but doesn’t mention any of the financials. The lawsuits were for cash but we never found out how much was paid. Wikipedia has some numbers. Perhaps the after-movie titles should have been eliminated. The movie tells the story of investigative reporting, not the story of child abuse or pedophilia. So the logical end of the movie is the reporters getting their story out, not what happened to Cardinal Law or the Catholic church.

Readers who aren’t from Boston: What did you think of the movie?

Everyone: Will there be investigative reporting by local media going forward? How will they pay for it? Can the citizen-to-citizen communication made possible by the consumer Internet compensate for the loss of advertising revenue to enterprises that previously funded investigative reporting? Will it take more or less time in a world without profitable local newspapers for a secret like this to be uncovered?

Related:

• Boston Globe archives that are relevant
• “Why Tickets to College Games Come Easy on Capitol Hill” (WSJ, December 14, 2015), a recent example of what reporters get when they dig through public records
• Opportunity in the demise of Boston Globe (from 2009)

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I’m reading Goebbels: A Biography and it seems as though things aren’t that different, 100 years later.

Envious of the rich and feeling oppressed by them?

A series of articles by Goebbels appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter in the following weeks. On May 24 the paper published part of his attack on Reventlow from January,54 and in June the first of his essays, “Idea and Sacrifice,” a declaration of war on the “bourgeois,” whom he hated, as he openly conceded, not least because they displayed what “we have not yet conquered in ourselves, a touch of small-mindedness placed by Mother Nature in every German cradle.”55 He harped on the same subject later that month with his contribution “Sclerotic Intelligentsia,”56 and again in July with “National Community and Class War.”57 This latter article took the form of an open letter to Albrecht von Graefe, leader of the Deutschvölkische Freiheitsbewegung, in which Goebbels described the class war as the repression of the great mass of the people by a very small exploiting class. They and their bourgeois accomplices, their “shameless henchmen” (Graefe and company, in other words), were preventing the formation of a true “national community.

Paying attention to politicians who say outrageous things?

If the whole object of Goebbels’s highly robust propaganda campaign was to attract attention at any price, he certainly succeeded: “People started talking about us. We could no longer be ignored or passed over in icy contempt. However reluctant and furious they were about it, people couldn’t avoid mentioning us.” The Party was “suddenly at the center of public interest,” and “people now had to decide whether they were for or against.

Bored with your job? Having trouble getting a new one?

On January 2, 1923, Goebbels took a job in a bank. Else had strongly urged him to take this step;116 the doctor of philosophy, as he now was, seemed to have few other professional prospects. But his dislike of this new occupation set in quickly and grew steadily. … Back in the Rhineland, he received his dismissal notice from the bank. Although various literary projects were taking shape in his mind, he went looking for employment. He found none.

Looking to buy a high quality piano?

The piano manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and his wife, Helene, were fervent supporters of Hitler, who made use of their home for discreet political meetings.

Living at home and fighting with the parents?

He found the atmosphere in the family home increasingly oppressive. He wanted to get away, he confessed in late December: “If only I knew where to!” At home he was “the reprobate, […] the renegade, the apostate, the outlaw, the atheist, the revolutionary.” He was “the only one who can’t do anything, whose advice is never wanted, whose opinion isn’t worth listening to. It’s driving me crazy!”

One huge change: people didn’t waste as much time in graduate school back then:

Back in Heidelberg, Goebbels worked toward his doctorate. His reading matter, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, was not calculated to lift his mood. On the contrary, this grand attempt to situate the decline of Europe within a universal history of the rise and fall of the great cultures induced “pessimism” and “despair” in him. Beset by such dark thoughts, he plunged into work on his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote in four months in Rheydt after the end of his Heidelberg semester.

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