I attended a wedding this weekend in Massachusetts (a healthy percentage of the upper-income attendees had been defendants in custody, child support, and alimony lawsuits so people were a little less sentimental than in other states (Best Man: “[the groom] said that if I did a good job today that I could be best man at the next one.”)). As it happened I was seated next to a retired U.S. military officer who had been “inspector general” for eight years on a base with about 1200 members of the military.
What were his office’s responsibilities? “The majority of the work was handling complaints about discrimination or harassment,” he responded. “Mostly women complaining about sex discrimination but also some race discrimination complaints.” What percentage had merit? “About one percent,” he said. “If these people had put half of the effort that they put into pursuing complaints into working the base would have been about twice as productive.”
I thought of that conversation today while watching television in our local airport lounge. The man who murdered Alison Parker and Adam Ward in Roanoke, Virginia (Wikipedia) was a frequent flyer in the American grievance system, having sued one employer for race discrimination and threatened a second employer with an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint.
Nightmare for flight instructors: Nasa drop-tests a Cessna 172 from 100 feet: on YouTube. Maybe a good reminder to students to maintain airspeed and keep a touch of power in for normal approaches and landings…
(The goal was to test emergency locator transmitters (a selection) that are supposed to start transmitting in response to high G forces.)
A friend arrived in Manhattan with his three children just in time for the press to erupt with stories about topless women in Times Square (e.g., nytimes, Daily News). His response to the complaints that this kind of, um, exposure would be bad for children: “It is not even in the top 100 things in NY that can harm children.”
“Petco Files IPO, Plans Return to Public Markets” is a Wall Street Journal story about Petco, which keeps going back and forth between private and public. The private equity guys last purchased the company from public shareholders in 2006 for $1.7 billion. Now they will sell it back to the public for $4 billion. So a starting theory could be that they collected $2.3 billion from the public shareholders. “8 Takeaways from Petco’s IPO Filing” is a follow-up WSJ piece noting that “Since TPG and Leonard Green took Petco private, they’ve received two dividends. The first one came in 2010, when Petco made a cash payment to its PE owners of roughly $700 million. Moody’s estimates this payment returned over 85% of the equity invested in the company by its owners. In 2012, the company made another dividend payment of roughly $589 million.” In other words, whatever the private equity guys put at risk has been completely paid back. The money that comes from this IPO and the value of their remaining holdings will be gravy.
Presumably it is successes like this that keep people excited about private equity.
Here’s an interesting use of video for education: a Burning Man airspace movie. It shows simulated airplanes arriving, departing, and in scenic traffic around the event.
[Non-pilots: I think this video still might be worth watching to see how three-dimensional information is presented.]
Readers: Have you seen similar videos? e.g., for Oshkosh?
“How Etsy Crafted a Tax Strategy in Ireland” is a Wall Street Journal article about the arts and crafts marketplace working to escape U.S., New York State, and New York City tax rates on its $200 million/year in revenue:
In Etsy’s case, it set up a subsidiary in Ireland, the location of its European headquarters, then lent the unit money to be used to buy intellectual property from the U.S. company, according to a person familiar with the situation. The details of how Etsy set up the Irish subsidiary and how it plans to use it to reduce taxes hadn’t previously been known.
Etsy’s U.S. tax bill will increase initially, because the U.S. company made money on the sale of the intellectual property. But the structure is expected to eventually reduce Etsy’s U.S. tax bill because the income associated with the intellectual property held in Dublin will be taxed at the Irish rate of 12.5%, much lower than the U.S. rate.
It turns out that the company is going to pay at least $15 million in additional taxes in the short term, but these could have been avoided if the Irish subsidiary had been set up earlier and the intellectual property transferred when it wasn’t worth so much.
In an effort to win a prize for highest ratio of technology to subject matter interest, I have directed and co-starred in a 4K video. Location: our kitchen. Camera: Sony RX100 IV. Tripod: none. Lighting: Overhead track with LED bulbs from Costco. Then I uploaded two copies to YouTube:
why doesn’t YouTube just refuse to let people upload stuff like this? Or limit them to 720p?
can you see a difference between the versions? Or does YouTube compression render the differences in the original file quality irrelevant?
can you get smooth playback at true 4K? (for me the answer is “yes” with Windows Media Player locally on this Windows 10 desktop, “no” with VLC locally, “yes” with streaming YouTube on Verizon FiOS, “no” with streaming YouTube on Comcast)
An article on a child support lawsuit in Canada may be worth watching. The plaintiff is “Alana Jung, a 25-year-old college student studying early childhood education.” She had sex with a basketball player and now, under the Canadian child support formula, a nationwide system unlike our state-by-state patchwork, she is entitled to a tax-free $1.355 million per year. As there is no fixed age for the termination of child support in Canada (see the Canada chapter of Real World Divorce), she is potentially looking at 25 years of revenue or $33.9 million total. An early childhood educator in Alberta earns about $14.50 per hour (source) pre-tax. Ignoring the tax differential and assuming 1800 hours of work per year, the plaintiff would there collect 1300 years of income under the formula.
The defendant has offered to give her $180,000 per year, which would work out to perhaps $4.5 million until the child ages out of the system. The plaintiff seeks somewhere between $600,000 per year and $1 million per year (up to $25 million in revenue). Supposedly in mid-October a judge will decide what level of profitability is appropriate.
Canadians sometimes express resentment that ownership of a child is more profitable than going to college and working, but in fact children in Canada are less lucrative than children in some U.S. states.
A lot of what I’ve written over the years here concerns the tension between the research economists and psychologists, who say that human behavior is pretty easy to change with incentives, and politicians who say that human behavior won’t be affected by incentives (e.g., Book Review: The Redistribution Recession looks at what happened when politicians offered to give Americans free houses, food, and health care on condition that they not take a W-2 job; Real World Divorce looks at the extent to which Americans will fight for custody of children who yield more cash than going to college and working).
“A Simple Fix for Drunken Driving” is a WSJ article on the same general theme. Psychologists who get paid to treat alcoholics believe that straightforward incentives (not involving paychecks to therapists) won’t affect their behavior:
Among the most enduring of these myths is the idea that no one can recover from a drinking problem without our help. Treatment professionals save many lives that would otherwise be lost to addiction, but we are not the sole pathway to recovery. National research surveys have shown repeatedly that most people who resolve a drinking problem never work with a professional.
Some members of the addiction field can also be faulted for spreading an extreme version of the theory that addiction is a “brain disease,” which rules out the possibility that rewards and penalties can change drinking behavior. Addiction is a legitimate disorder, in which the brain is centrally involved, but as Dr. Higgins notes, “it is not akin to a reflex or rigidity in a Parkinson’s patient.”
In their haste to ensure that people who suffer from substance-abuse disorders are not stigmatized, some well-meaning addiction professionals insist that their patients have no capacity for self-control. Most people with alcohol problems do indeed struggle to make good choices, but that just means they need an environment that more strongly reinforces a standard of abstinence.
This belief has persisted for roughly 25 years after a 1991 paper showing that cocaine users could be “induced to refrain from it when promised a small reward, like $10 for a negative urine test.”
I have been commuting to East Coast Aero Club, about 4 miles away, using a Trek T80+ electric bicycle. The machine was introduced in 2013 and discontinued in 2015 in favor of an improved design where the motor is in the bottom bracket. Fortunately the government assures us that there is no inflation because the new bikes cost $2800-3000 while the old one listed at $2100 (I paid $1300 for a closeout at Cycleloft in Burlington, Massachusetts). What does the beast weigh? Mine is an “XL” frame size and is about 52 lbs. using a bathroom scale. It seems to have started life as a Trek hybrid and was pimped out at a factory in Germany with the BionX hardware that is also available to enthusiastic hobbyists.
The bike comes with a 250-watt motor and a 250 watt-hour battery on the rear rack. Thus you can be a Tour de France rider for about one hour. Unfortunately this does not quite generate Tour de France speeds due to the fact that (a) I weigh 200 lbs., which I suspect is more than the typical pro cyclist, (b) the bike weighs about 35 lbs. more than a Tour de France bike (can be no lighter than 15 lbs.).
The bike is practical for commuting due to a sturdy rack on the back and a built-in lock that blocks the rear wheel from turning (so they can bend all of your spokes but not ride off with the bike). There is an included taillight on the back of the battery but no headlight, contrary to the magazine review cited below. There is a conventional Shimano 21-speed drivetrain that would be useful if the battery died but when commuting I find that the only gears I use are 4-7 on the largest chainring.
You control the motor by putting torque into the drivetrain via the pedals and setting a boost level from 0 to 4. With the boost on 4 your pushes on the pedals are magnified to the point that the bike will go 20 mph when you’re pedaling hard enough to go perhaps 8 mph. The electric boost cuts out at 20 mph by design. It also cuts out if you pull on a brake lever. Trek claims a range of up to 40 miles but that would be with flat terrain, a lightweight owner, and only partial boost. If I set the bike to max boost and go 10 miles over some slightly rolling hills the battery indicates a 50 percent charge. The charger is comparable in size and weight to a typical Windows notebook computer charger and therefore it would be quite reasonable to commute 20-30 miles to work, plug the bike in during the workday, and then ride back home on a fresh battery. The battery can be removed for charging, using the same key provided with the integrated lock, if there is no power outlet near where you park the bike.
What about exercise while watching the motor do all the work? It turns out that you will get as much exercise per minute of riding as on a regular bike. You will get only about one-third or one-half as much exercise as you would riding a regular bike to the same destination, however, because you won’t be riding for very long. The bike is so much more satisfying to ride and results in so many more destinations being accessible (e.g., 10-mile round-trip to the drugstore) that a typical owner should get more exercise than with just a regular bike. This is a substitute for a car rather than a substitute for a road or mountain bike.
Is it fun? Yes! I lent the Trek T80+ to an aircraft mechanic and he had a silly grin on his face as he said “This is what biking should be.” The bike is also nice on hot days because you are guaranteed to have a 12-20 mph breeze at all times.
What about the new stuff? It seems as though the 900-lb. gorilla of the bike world, Shimano, has entered the market with the Shimano Steps system, which is what Trek is using on their latest models. This may prove the point of Crossing the Chasm (that the innovators often don’t end up as market leaders because products that appeal to hobbyists and early adopters don’t necessarily appeal to the mainstream).
. Tripod: none. Lighting: Overhead track with LED bulbs from Costco. Then I uploaded two copies to YouTube:
(that the innovators often don’t end up as market leaders because products that appeal to hobbyists and early adopters don’t necessarily appeal to the mainstream).