Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“Airline Consolidation Hits Smaller Cities Hardest” is a Wall Street Journal article about the recent wave of airline mergers has resulted in cuts to service and increases in fares in smaller American cities. “Rising house prices may be chiefly responsible for rising inequality” is an Economist story about research by Matthew Rognlie who found that owning desirable real estate was the principal driver of the wealth inequality statistics that are motivating our current politics of envy (and who among is not envious of those who bought Brooklyn brownstones 30 years ago?).

Everything that airlines do is a result of government regulation, starting from the fact that there is a U.S. airline industry at all (foreign competitors, e.g., Ryanair, who are more efficient, are excluded from the U.S. domestic market). Now it seems that airline regulation is exacerbating the disparity in real estate values. In a globalized world, being stuck three airline legs away from London or Shanghai makes a house or an office building worth a lot less. Letting a handful of U.S. airlines enjoy an oligopoly also exacerbates wealth inequality due to the fact that airline shareholders, executives, and many employees earn more the median.

Presumably this won’t change. The U.S. government is not going to disappoint its cronies by allowing Ryanair to fly from Boston to Detroit for $40 (see this page for just how little Europeans may pay). But at the same time we shouldn’t express surprise that the long-term trend for Detroit real estate is downward.

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“The ‘Golden Age for Women in TV’ Is Actually a Rerun” is a NYT op-ed by Nell Scovell, the professional writer who created Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. According to Scovell, there are a lot of women writers behind today’s TV shows, but this might not last:

In this sense, gender inequality resembles a bacterial infection two days into a 10-day course of antibiotics. The patient’s temperature may be down, but the Mayo Clinic’s website warns: “It is tempting to stop taking an antibiotic as soon as you feel better. But the full treatment is necessary to kill the disease-causing bacteria. Failure to do so can result in the need to resume treatment later.”

Gender inequality is still in our bloodstream, and when we stop fighting it, the bacteria multiply. We need aggressive treatment that leads to more than incremental progress.

I fantasize about the networks’ making a rule that each show’s writing staff needs to reflect the gender and racial makeup of its audience.

[See this posting on antibiotic duration for why you shouldn’t take medical advice from the NYT Op-Ed section]

I’m wondering why gender is the most important factor. If we are entitled to watch TV shows written by people “like us” aren’t there other important dimensions? Should there be a channel for 52-year-olds that runs TV shows written by 52-year-olds? How about immigrants from Laos? There is plenty of cable bandwidth. Why can’t they have comedies written by fellow immigrants from Laos?

[Readers would be disappointed if I didn’t point out that, to the extent Scovell is concerned that women in the future will not have the opportunity to earn the income of a TV writer, Real World Divorce shows how a woman who has sex with three TV writers will have, via a thoughtfully chosen state’s child support formula (equally applicable to one-night encounters), roughly the same spending power as if she had gone to college and worked as a TV writer.]

It will be interesting to see if the New York Times follows its own scolding. A 60-year-old is a typical American newspaper reader (Pew data; Wikipedia). Is the Times eager to hire and retain 60-year-old writers? (as of a year ago, the Times was doing the opposite, encouraging older workers to take buyout packages (source))

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I bought a plane ticket for a friend via Orbitz. I mis-typed on letter in her last name and that resulted in a multi-week, multi-hour series of phone calls to correct the single letter (want to know why the U.S. economy isn’t growing? look no further than our obsession with correct paperwork that exceeds anything from 19th century Germany). During one of these interactions the agent asked, regarding a traveler named “Gloria,” if the gender was “still female.” I replied “Well, it is still two months before the flight so there is really no way to know.”

It got me thinking… if gender is not an inherent physical trait, does it make sense for airlines and/or TSA to be asking for a passenger’s gender?

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Since no evil billionaire has adopted my idea of building Latin American-style towns in the U.S. (see “non-profit ideas”), the nice places to live (Manhattan, San Francisco, Northwest D.C., etc.) keep getting nicer, more crowded, and more expensive. The crummy places (Detroit, Baltimore, etc.) keep getting crummier, less populated, and less expensive (free houses in some neighborhoods!).

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on a federal “EB-5” visa program for foreign nationals who loan $500,000 to a real estate developer building in a poor area or $1 million to a developer building in a rich area. It seems that state governments get to draw lines around “areas” and, with a bit of creative drafting, even parts of Manhattan where an apartment costs $4,000+/month can be officially “poor”:

The neighborhood immediately around Hudson Yards includes Manhattan’s tony West Chelsea. Unemployment in the local Census tract was just 4.9% in 2012—below the national rate—according to a letter sent in May 2013 from a New York state labor official to Empire State Development Corp., a state economic-development agency.

“The current minimum threshold to qualify as a Targeted Employment Area is 12.2%,” said the 2013 letter, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. “For your consideration, we developed an alternative area.”

State labor officials added four additional Census tracts—three along the banks of the Hudson plus one that reaches into West Harlem. The unemployment rate of the combined five tracts, said the letter: 18.1%.

State governments—eager for economic development and with little stake in federal immigration policy—tend to side with developers who want their projects to qualify as easily as possible for financing.

I.e., we’ve voted to take a natural trend and pour Chinese rocket fuel on it.

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The May 2014 crash of a Gulfstream G-IV at our home airport, Hanscom Field, has now been thoroughly studied by the NTSB. It seems that there was a design flaw in the mechanical interlock intended to prevent advancing the thrust levers when the flight control gust lock was engaged. From the public meeting:

A mechanical interlock between the gust lock handle and the throttle levers restricts the movement of the throttle levers when the gust lock handle is in the ON position. According to Gulfstream, the interlock mechanism was intended to limit throttle lever movement to a throttle lever angle (TLA) of no greater than 6° during operation with the gust lock on. However, postaccident testing on nine in-service G-IV airplanes found that, with the gust lock handle in the ON position, the forward throttle lever movement that could be achieved on the G-IV was 3 to 4 times greater than the intended TLA of 6°.

Plenty of blame to go around on this accident, of course, but it is sad that this design flaw wasn’t caught earlier.

 

 

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Tablet has a piece today on Danny Lewin, one of my graduate school classmates (and Akamai co-founder) who died on 9/11.

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Today is the 14th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Our newspapers are filled with articles proposing that the U.S. take in refugees from various conflicts around the world. Yet our track record in handling newcomers from the places that generate most modern-day refugees seems to be poor. The 9/11 hijackers were all here in the U.S. legally, their visa applications having been scrutinized and approved by federal employees. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, recently sentenced to death for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings, had been granted fast-track U.S. citizenship. Our economy has probably shrunk by 5-10 percent due to fear of terrorism (money spent on TSA, time wasted in security lines at airports, public events, office buildings, etc.).

How would it ever be possible for Americans to take in refugees from a part of the world where (a) we don’t speak the language or understand the culture, (b) at least a portion of those refugees have a goal of killing Americans, and (c) we have a demonstrated track record of being unable to sort out those who want to kill Americans from those who do not?

Related:

• New York Times article on the Justice Department and FBI going after a Chinese professor for emailing schematics that they didn’t understand

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The killjoys at the Cato Institute have released a new summary of the effects of U.S. borrowing: “Washington’s Largest Monument: Government Debt.” If we assume that there won’t be any political change in the U.S., i.e., that taxing, borrowing, and spending will remain the path to reelection, this serves as a good reminder to keep one’s portfolio balanced with investments in countries that spend and borrow less (e.g., Switzerland). Here are some choice passages:

Economists estimate that the deadweight
losses from each one dollar increase in federal income
taxes is roughly 50 cents, including about 10 cents for
the added compliance or paperwork costs.

Suppose that the government spends $10 billion on a
new subsidy program financed by income taxes. The
program will cost the private economy about $15 billion
when the deadweight losses of the higher taxes are
included. If this new program creates distortions, or is
poorly executed, it may produce benefits of perhaps just $5
billion. That would create an overall ratio of costs to
benefits of 3-to-1.

It is true that the future net burden of federal debt
would be reduced if government borrowing was used for
high-value capital investments. But that is usually not the
case: federal investments are often mismanaged by the
bureaucracy and misallocated by the politicians. In June,
for example, the Government Accountability Office
reported on the government’s $80 billion annual
investment in information technology (IT), and found that
“investments frequently fail, incur cost overruns and
schedule slippages, or contribute little to mission-related
outcomes.”

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Engadget has a table comparing the latest iPhone 6s Plus with the previous generation iPhone 6 Plus. It looks at first glance as though the new camera is actually worse for most practical purposes.

• Old: 8MP iSight, f/2.2, 1.5µm pixel size, Optical Image Stabilization [OIS]
• New: 12MP iSight, f/2.2, 1.22µm pixel size

For low-light photography, the lack of OIS is crippling (an important reason for anyone serious about photography to get the Plus rather than the Zoolander-sized iPhone).

The official Apple page, however, makes it clear that this important feature has not been removed in the latest generation of the big phones.

I do wonder about the low-light performance of this latest-and-greatest device. The pixel size of 1.22µm compares unfavorably to 6.25µm in the Canon 5D Mark III, sort of a standard for good low-light performance. A Sony A7R II has a pixel size of about4.5µm. Apple seems to have better camera software than anyone else but they can’t rewrite the laws of physics/CMOS.

The new phones will do 4K video, but should still photographers be camping out in line for this latest Apple device?

[Gratuitous Golden Retriever image from what is now my legacy iPhone 6 Plus:

]

 

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We recently visited a large avionics shop at an exurban Midwest airport. In business for many decades, they now employ 12 full-time technicians, for whom starting salary is $20/hour (median home price in the area is about $150,000; a brand-new 4BR house biking distance from the airport can be purchased for $250,000; so a person earning $20/hour could afford the median house and a two-income couple could afford the new 4BR house (source)). “It is getting harder every year to hire people who can do this work,” said the manager. What does a beginner avionics technician need to be able to do? Read a wiring diagram, cut wires to the correct length, crimp connectors onto wires, etc. The work must be done diligently and with attention to detail, but no college or engineering education is necessary.

Separately, painting aircraft is very labor-intensive (prepping/sanding) and also requires attention to detail. It can easily cost $50,000 to $100,000 to paint a light jet. One would think that there would be a thriving industry in Mexico to paint U.S.-based planes, but it doesn’t seem to be the case. The Wall Street Journal in 2010 described airlines getting some paint work done in Monterey, Mexico by Saltillo Jet Center, but most of the shops in the article were in the U.S. With labor costs rising in the U.S. could this be a business opportunity for an entrepreneur down there? The typical U.S. paint shop seems to have one or two real experts supervising a bunch of junior folks.

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