Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Friends have been asking me “How did a metal chunk of an airplane float to Réunion? Why didn’t it sink?” Or, as Monty Python might have asked, “What also floats in water?”

I talked to a former Boeing engineer. It seems that the 777 flaperon is hollow, comprising ribs and an aluminum skin. The same riveting techniques used on the pressure vessel are used on on the flaperon and therefore everything is airtight by default and therefore water-tight. He didn’t remember if there were any drain holes in the flaperon, as there are for some control surfaces, but they would have been very small and easily clogged, thus trapping air.

Trivia: The 777 was originally designed with folding wingtips so that it could fit into gates designed for the B767. This was abandoned at some point but the idea is back with the 777X (gizmodo).

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In the western suburbs of Boston I ran into a guy of about 60 who was riding a 1970s 10-speed marked “Motobecane” and “Made in France” in big letters on the frame. Motobecane went bankrupt in 1981 and no longer makes bicycles (though you can buy Taiwanese bikes with this brand name today).  No country was more enthusiastic about the early days of cycling than France (history) and it used to be possible to buy a competitively priced mainstream road bike with all-French components (Mavic or Super Champion rims, Simplex derailleurs, Christophe toe clips, Mafac brakes, TA cranks, Zefal pump, Ideale saddle, etc.).

I was reminded of this heritage once again at Verrill Farm in Concord, Massachusetts, a popular stopping point for summer road bike rides. Two very fit guys with French-made Cyfac frames parked their machines next to my Trek. One had started the ride in Jamaica Plain and the other in Foxborough, so they were both committed to 70-100-mile round trips. They said that Cyfac was a leading manufacturer of carbon fiber tandem frames for the Paralympics (a blind stoker can thus compete). Their bikes were close to $9,000 each including a lot of deluxe components. The tandem would be at least $15,000 by the time it was all done.

What do expert readers have to say about French bicycles today? Does the country make competitive products for ordinary riders? Or at least have a Trek- or Specialized-like company that is based in France and designs popular bikes that are manufactured in Asia? If not, why not?

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I recently spent two days at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge. We got a healthy baby out of the deal so I am not complaining about their operation from a consumer perspective. However, I am thinking that there is an opportunity for litigators there.

Kleiner Perkins has a workforce that is 30-percent female (20 percent of partners are women) and that made them a target for legal buccaneer Ellen Pao and as well as guilty in the eyes of the New York Times, both before and after a five-week trial.  What would the jury have made of an operation where 100 percent of the employees (that we saw, over a 53-hour period) were of a single gender?

Health care jobs are the best in the U.S. The chart linked from “Software engineering = meaningless job?” shows that being in health care offers the best combination of pay and meaning. If these jobs don’t pay as well as collecting child support in Massachusetts (see Kosow v. Shuman in this chapter, for example), they certainly pay more than the median Massachusetts hourly wage of $21.48 (BLS May 2014). There is great protection from foreign competition and virtually unlimited demand for services, especially since the government made it illegal not to purchase health insurance.

How can it not be a lucrative field for litigators when the maternity and labor/delivery departments were both 100-percent staffed by women? Let the defense argue that men don’t want to experience the joy of working around newborns and helping women realize their dreams of motherhood. The plaintiffs will argue that these departments created a hostile environment for men.

Readers: If Ellen Pao had what the New York Times thought was a great lawsuit, why isn’t there a truly superb lawsuit here?

[Sidenote 1: The value of healthcare IT was on display throughout the delivery process. Mt. Auburn has achieved all of the Obama Administration’s “meaningful use” hurdles. This was our second baby to be monitored through pregnancy by the midwives at this hospital. This was our second baby where a test from this group had informed us that we would be having a boy. Yet we were asked three times by three different people, each typing at a computer, whether we knew the sex of the baby and, if so, what it was. (Separately, at what age can gender dysphoria begin? If very young, is it medically meaningful to ask “Are you having a boy or a girl?”) While sharp labor pains tortured the mother-to-be, we were asked about mailing addresses, health insurance data, etc. (the same information collected exactly two days earlier at a checkup) While suffering labor pains severe enough to merit an epidural, the mom was asked to sign a consent form for an epidural. (Why wasn’t it signed, scanned, and in the computer weeks before?) Having been given a due date by this group within this hospital, we were asked what the expected due date was.]

[Sidenote 2: At a “meet the midwives” event and some similar gatherings of expectant mothers, all were talking about their own to-be-born babies as fully human individuals, e.g., when looking at a 2-month ultrasound. They would refer to the fetus by name in some cases, talk about the child kicking, etc. Yet, given that the hospital is in Cambridge, it is same to assume that most are supporters of the Massachusetts law permitting on-demand abortion of babies at any time through 24 weeks of pregnancy (Wikipedia says a fetus may be viable outside the womb at 23 weeks).]

[Sidenote 3: New mothers are provided with a stack of pamphlets regarding welfare programs for which she would be either newly eligible or eligible at a higher level of benefits. In theory, Cambridge provides free housing for all non-working adults, but there is a waiting list and a parent with a young child gets higher priority. Anyone with a low income is eligible for food stamps, but “Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)” is available in addition for women and young children, according to the federal site. Obamacare requires insurance companies to pay for a breast milk pump with each baby, so the mother of four children will eventually end up with a stack of Medelas in the closet.]

Related:

• Thoughts on observing a birth
• Egyptian versus U.S. health care system

 

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An article in Sports Illustrated by H.G. Bissinger follows up on six men who were high school football heroes in Odessa, Texas in 1988. If we define “football star” as “most successful male in high school society,” how does that translate to success in adult society?

Two are involved in the oil industry, one working “as a lease operator for Devon Energy, overseeing roughly 50 wells,” and the other having joined his family business of “dirt excavation and building roads and platforms in the oil fields.”  One became a criminal defense attorney and joined his family’s law firm. One became a “health-care consultant” for Protiviti.

Two of the six are black. Consistent with this chart, one is serving 10 years in prison after some encounters with the law, including “paternity suits were brought against him by women who thought he was now rich.” (He apparently lost at least one of these lawsuits because he was being pursued by the government for failure to pay at least one woman the court-ordered amount.) The other black former player workers as a trucker.

None of the players had enjoyed a significant college football career.

Perhaps worth showing to a high-school student who expresses disappointment at not making the varsity football team…

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“Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality” is a nytimes piece by an old rich guy who immigrated here from Romania in 1954 and ultimately became head of a big ad agency. Readers comment that they want inequality cured with 1954 income tax rates, e.g,. 94%. They want this to kick in for incomes above about $1 million (not sure that their favored presidential candidate will go along with this; as noted in this May 2015 post, the Clintons have been earning about $22 million per year).

The old rich guy writes about how he got into elite schools: “I was invited by the headmaster of Phillips Exeter Academy to attend his school. From there I went to Princeton and the Stanford Business School.”

Nobody seems interested in the fact that the U.S. population in 1954 was 163 million, half of the present number. Thus there was a lot less competition for getting into elite schools (this was prior to the Jet Age that opened up these schools to foreign students as well).

There was a lot less country to country competition. Romania would not have been a viable location for a new business in 1954. Today it is part of the EU and ranks higher than average on economic freedom (Heritage Foundation). Romania has a lower tax burden as a percentage of GDP than does the U.S. For at least some companies or individuals it might well be a reasonable place to do business.

What do readers think? Is this screed against income inequality really a nostalgic desire to go back to the good old days when the U.S. was more favorably situated compared to other countries and before immigrants forced native-born Americans to work for stuff that had previously been theirs by right?

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An Iran armed with ballistic missiles and atomic bombs didn’t bother anyone enough to block a recent international agreement. What could be more frightening than that? North American consumers paying market prices for trucks and cheese. From “Trans-Pacific Partnership Session Ends With Heels Dug In” (nytimes):

Tokyo was ready to extend major concessions on American truck tariffs but was blocked by Mexico, which wanted less competition for its own trucks in the United States market.

Canada held firm on protecting its politically sensitive dairy market ahead of elections in October, but for New Zealand, a tiny country with huge dairy exports, that was unacceptable.

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Can you think of anyone with top academic credentials who got fired from a job for underperformance, sued to get paid for having XX chromosomes, and who was tied to the world of nonstandard sexuality?

No, not Ellen Pao of Princeton and Harvard, Kleiner Perkins/Reddit, and (at least formerly) gay men.

Gretchen Kalonji, a 1980 graduate from the MIT materials science department, eventually became a professor at MIT. She was denied tenure in 1988, analogous to Ellen Pao’s failure to be promoted to senior partner at Kleiner. Kalonji sued MIT, eventually settling in 1995 for “an undisclosed amount” plus “MIT also agreed to spend at least $50,000 a year for 5 years on a national program encouraging women and minority grad students and postdocs to move onto university faculties.” (sciencemag.org)

Kalonji moved west and ended up in a same-sex relationship with Denice Denton, the chancellor of University of California Santa Cruz. Denton was described as “admired for overcoming gender and sexual-orientation biases and for taking a practical approach to social justice issues” and “ensnared in an investigation into unreported pay and perks in the UC system and was criticized after $600,000 in renovations were made to her university home.”

Denton arranged a $192,000/year job for Kalonji as the University of California’s “director of international strategy development” (sfgate; WSJ) . Denton subsequently committed suicide, leaving an estate worth perhaps $2 million. Kalonji then sued the estate for more than 100 percent of this value (argument: (1) if it had been legal for two women to be married then Denton would have married her; (2) had they in fact been married, Denton would have updated her will and left everything to Kalonji instead of to Denton’s blood relatives). (Santa Cruz Sentinel) Kalonji ultimately settled this lawsuit in exchange for roughly $750,000 in real estate (Santa Cruz Sentinel).

What do readers think? The New York Times gives all credit to Ellen Pao and, implicitly, Princeton and Harvard. But it would seem that an MIT graduate blazed the trail…

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Who has tried out the latest electric bikes?

A few questions:

• Does the overall concept make sense if what you like is bicycling? Most of the bikes seem to weigh about 50 lbs., which I guess makes them super light compared to a scooter or motorcycle, but very heavy if you want to pedal them uphill.
• Are they more or less fun on a 2-hour road ride than a standard road bike?
• Do you actually get any exercise when using one of these?
• Are they way better for mountain biking because you can maintain momentum even uphill?
• Why do a lot of them cost more than a used Toyota Prius? (maybe that is an unfair question since there are non-electric bikes that cost more than a new Toyota Prius) If this were a mass-market product would they need to cost much more than the $600 that you’d pay for a good hybrid/city bike?
• Why aren’t the big bike companies, such as Giant, Trek, and Specialized, leaders in this area?
• Are they amazingly great for keeping up with a friend who is in killer shape and is on a non-electric bike?
• pedal-linked or throttle control for the electric motor?
• is there any point in having more than three gears once the electric assist is available? Why not ditch the low gears in favor of software that automatically adds electric power if the cadence falls while the rider is putting a lot of torque in? (maybe they are already doing this)
• shouldn’t tandem bikes all have electric boost? Tandems are already crazy heavy and expensive.

It is sad that, at least for the weather-wimpy, we don’t have a long biking season here in Massachusetts (not long enough to justify a $3000 electric bike anyway!).

Related:

• gallium nitride (GaN) power electronics to lower the weight and/or extend the range

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In 2012 I wrote Christmas gift for someone you hate: Windows 8. Today I allowed Microsoft to upgrade my desktop computer to Windows 10, which took about 10 minutes (presumably the 1 TB SSD C: drive helped). Everything seems to work, including the Dropbox and Crashplan background processes. The Windows 8 tablet interface seems to be gone and I’m back to “just a desktop” (conspiracy theory: Microsoft secretly replaced Windows 8 with Windows 7 plus a light re-skin and just told everyone that it was a new operating system).

How are readers doing with Windows 10? What new and useful features are there? Is there anything substantially better about it than Windows XP? Google Chrome was crashing pretty frequently for me before the upgrade. Is it time to move to the new Microsoft Edge browser?

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Netflix now offers a year of paid parental leave to both mothers and fathers (Washington Post). Readers would not forgive me if I didn’t try to explore the economics of this.

Suppose that Jack and Jill are expecting their first baby and are hoping to have a family of four children as well as own their own business. Both are skilled software engineers. They both take jobs at Netflix, earning a combined $300,000 per year. The are just finding their way around the class libraries a month later, without much working code expected of either of them. Jill gives birth to Child #1. Jack and Jill then sell their expensive Silicon Valley house and move to Lake Tahoe, Nevada where they write code for their future startup company while also enjoying skiing and hiking. Child care is cheap up there so they can park the baby any time that they want (or most of the time) for minimal dollars (see the California and Nevada chapters of Real World Divorce, State Background sections, for the statewide averages).

When Child #1 is a year old, they return to work, renting a short-term stay apartment. A month into the job, however, Jill gives birth to Child #2. Back to Lake Tahoe for another year of work on the startup while collecting $300,000 per year. When they go back of course their employer needs to send them to some training programs to brush up their knowledge of the latest Java framework. (Because of course they are all so much better than straight JSP that you need to throw out your framework every year and start with a different one.) A month after they return to Netflix the second time, having done nothing but learn a new framework, Jill gives birth to Child #3, continuing the 13-month spacing. Back to Lake Tahoe for another year. They do this again with Child #4, return to work for two months and then quit to run their own company, whose product is now basically ready (about four years of development effort by two skilled programmers has gone into it). Netflix has paid them for 4.5 years, a total of $1.35 million plus benefits worth another $300,000? Netflix has received nothing in exchange for this cash. Jack and Jill have four healthy children, all of the intellectual capital investment that they needed for their startup, and perhaps $400,000 saved because they were being paid at Silicon Valley rates but spending at rural Nevada rates. Their stock option grants from 4.5 years earlier are now fully vested so, if the asset bubble continued to inflate, they might have another $1 million in stock option value.

Do readers see any reason why this wouldn’t work? I don’t see how Netflix could justify firing either Jack or Jill at any point. What kind of performance expectations could be imposed on workers who show up for just one month at a time? And how would the usual sluggish big company firing process work when people go out on parental leave before the company has time to put their on a performance improvement plan? If the goal of people who work for big Silicon Valley companies is to found or join a startup, why not let Netflix parental leave finance that goal?

Related:

• nytimes article on the idealist who established a minimum wage of $70,000 per year at his company (turns out that being an idealist in a world of realists can be challenging)

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