Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A reader emailed me “Obama Cracks Down on Airplane Emissions, Buys Massive New Air force One”. The most interesting item is the hourly operating cost: $206,337 (compare to about $25,000 per flight hour to charter (source)). If American Airlines spent this much during the 7-hour flight from London to Boston it would cost $1.44 million for the trip in operating cost (i.e., not including the capital cost of the aircraft) or about $3500 per passenger (i.e., a round-trip coach ticket couldn’t be sold for less than about $7000 plus taxes and fees).

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“As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights” is a New York Times story with some numbers to quantify the drone wars from the pilots’ side. It seems that taxpayers are funding 1,200 Air Force drone pilots. They handle about 65 flights per day (nearly 24,000 per year or about 20 flights per year per pilot; given the minimum of 14 hours of endurance for a drone it may be the case that more than one pilot is needed to handle a typical flight). Based on these demographics it seems that drone pilots are roughly 10 percent of all Air Force pilots.

[The drone-flying job is probably one of the best in the Air Force from the perspective of keeping a marriage together or reducing the damage from a divorce lawsuit. As noted in the “Practical Tips” chapter, serving in the military invites disaster in family court:

Attorneys described active-duty military personnel as “sitting ducks” for divorce, custody, and child support plaintiffs. “If you were serving in Iraq for the last year,” noted one lawyer, “how could you possibly show that you were the historical primary caregiver?” Forum shopping is easy for a patient military spouse. If sole custody of children is desired, for example, the future plaintiff can wait for the family to be moved from Arizona (50/50 custody presumption) to Massachusetts or California. If alimony is desired, the future plaintiff can wait for the family to be moved from Texas to Florida. If profitable child support is sought, the future plaintiff can wait for the family to be moved from Nevada to Wisconsin or New York.

“Military divorce rate at highest level since 1999” (December 13, 2011; USA Today) says that the military divorce rate is slightly higher than the U.S. civilian divorce rate.

Drone pilots are most likely to be stationed in Nevada, a state where a higher-income spouse is statistically much less likely to be sued for divorce due to the limited profitability of obtaining custody of children. As explained in the Nevada chapter, child support revenue in Nevada is capped at $13,000 per year per child. That’s still comfortably above the $4300/year in increased spending incurred by the typical American couple (see the summary of UCLA Economist Bill Comanor’s presentation) and above the $6,000 per year that could be collected in Germany, but only a fraction of the cash obtainable in neighboring California, for example. As noted in the Rationale chapter, statistical research shows that there are more divorces when the cash rewards are larger:

Brinig and Allen (Family Law Quarterly, v. 45(2), Summer 2011, pp. 140-151): “Not counting custody as a gain in the calculation of child support means that guidelines will tend to ‘double count’ the award for custody. Within a [state that uses a simple percentage of the loser parent’s income], the custodial parent of a wealthy noncustodial parent gets the utility from custody, plus a high cash transfer to fund the child expenses. … Prior to the introduction of support guidelines [mandated by the Federal Family Support Act of 1988], child support awards were considered inappropriately low in many policy circles. However, the lower amounts may well have reflected the courts’ awareness that the custodial parent obtained custody over one of the most valuable assets of the marriage: the children.” In the same article, titled “Child Support Guidelines, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Brinig and Allen note that this has given parents who expect custody a “large” incentive to file divorce lawsuits and found that divorce rates went up as predicted by these incentives.

]

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In 2010 I posted an article about how a lot of Americans probably could not be profitably hired as W-2 workers at the then-prevailing minimum wage (but not so many that SSDI and other welfare programs couldn’t take up the slack). BLS data on labor force participation seems to confirm that 2010 hypothesis. Last month I posted an article about how employment litigation could be a great career path for young people because the new minimum wages would create more W-2 unemployment than SSDI and other welfare programs could handle and a lot of Americans would be driven to take 1099 jobs where the net income was lower than the statutory minimum wage. It turns out that the litigation was already happening! “California Says Uber Driver Is Employee, Not a Contractor” is a New York Times story regarding a Uber driver who boosted her earnings by roughly 60 percent via an ex-post facto examination of her job. (If the $4152 she was reimbursed was for expenses, she earned $6848 before suing and about $11,000 on top of expenses after suing.)

[Separately, I am still waiting to meet an Uber driver who knows how to press the “Auto” button on a car’s climate control system and set the temperature within 5 degrees of 70. If it is cold out it is typical to find that the driver has set the temperature to 90 degrees and the fan to “high” while perhaps leaving one or more zones entirely off. If hot, the driver has set the temperature to 60 degrees but with the fan blowing unconditionally on “high” regardless of the interior temperature. I am convinced that if the automakers allowed Uber drivers to set -15 or +130 there would be a massive die-off of Uber drivers due to hypothermia and heat stroke.]

Related:

• April 2014 article on income inequality and Uber drivers

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The media are excited about Rachel Dolezal, who identifies as black despite apparently having at least some Caucasian heritage. This reminded me of a 1988 situation here in Boston. Here are some excerpts from a New York Times story:

Philip and Paul Malone are fair-haired, fair-complexioned identical twins who worked for the Boston Fire Department for 10 years. Last month both were dismissed when a state agency ruled that they had lied on their job applications: They had contended they were black.

In 1975, the Malone twins, now 33 years old, took the Civil Service test for firefighters and failed. But in 1976, according to their lawyer, Nicholas Foundas, their mother found a sepia-tinted photograph of their great-grandmother, who, she told them, was black. In 1977, they reapplied to take the test, contending they were black.

Philip Malone scored 69 percent and Paul Malone 57 percent, below the 82 percent standard minimum for white applicants, … The twins won appointments in 1978.

[Note that the litigation surrounding this dismissal seems to have lasted at least through 1995 (seven years), according to this appeals court decision. It would truly be an all-American story if the litigation had lasted for the same 10 years as their employment!]

I think the Rachel Dolezal situation raises the same issues as gay marriage. As I noted in this May 2015 posting, how can America be a land of equal economic opportunity if someone is denied the opportunity to profit from a divorce lawsuit merely because of sex? Much of the income that Rachel Dolezal earned was from jobs restricted to Americans who identify as “black.” Can we say that we have equal economic opportunity if not everyone who wants to be black can be black?

What do readers think? Is it unfair for Rachel Dolezal to call herself “black”? If so, is there “percentage of ancestry” test that would be an agreed-upon threshold for an American’s right to claim “black” status? How could such a law be written so as to exclude people descended from, for example, white South Africans?

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At a charity dinner on Saturday night I saw with a couple who had recently come to a rich suburb of Boston from Shanghai. The father had been home-schooled in upstate New York. He explained that he did whatever he wanted all year, including a lot of reading, and then spent two weeks each year cramming for an exam based on California standards that would show he’d learned everything necessary for his grade level (via these two weeks of work he was able to keep pace with students who physically attended public school in California for nine months). In Shanghai the children, age 5 and 11, had attended an international school that was so demanding the parents had to stay up tutoring until 11 pm some nights. Public school in the Boston suburbs, by contrast, is so easy that the children don’t need any after-school help. However, the mother now has to spend nearly all of her time managing household affairs. “We had three people to help us in Shanghai,” said the father, “but here just weekly cleaners.”

[How is it possible for an adult American to need to spend full-time maintaining a 20-year-old house? I got some insight into this the other day. The contractor’s favorite HVAC subcontractors installed a new A/C-heat pump system in our house last fall. Last week was the first hot/humid weather for Boston this year. Immediately there was a flood of water coming through the ceiling. I brought in my old HVAC contractor who explained that there are four drains on an air handler. One task for the installer is determining which drain is at the lowest point and hooking up the drain line to that one. Our unit had its highest drain hole connected to the line. There is a safety pan underneath the air handler that is supposed to catch any water that drips and, via a float switch, shut down the air handler. In some installations, however, there is a second drain line connected to a hole in the safety pan. If you intend to rely on the float switch you plug up this hole so that the water will actually trigger the float switch instead of spilling out into the attic. This hole was not plugged. Finally it is important to have a float switch compatible with the air handler. Flipping the float switch upside down did not actually shut down the system. So the original contractors did not do any of the three steps related to drainage correctly, nor did they test their own work.]

[Update: Here’s a photo from a fairly new luxury hotel in Cambridge (Le Meridien) showing the quality of local labor:

]

 

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Greece is in the news due to its imminent insolvency (can something be “imminent” and yet drag on for many years?). There is talk of money that Greece is supposed to pay creditors but also talk about bailout funds that the IMF and other countries are supposed to be giving to the Greek government. But what is the cashflow in this heavily indebted country? Is the Greek government still spending more than they collect in tax revenue, in which case presumably there must be a net inflow of cash? (let’s assume that Greeks themselves are smart enough not to lend money to their own government) Or is the Greek government no longer engaging in deficit spending and therefore they are paying down their sovereign debt, but just not as fast as creditors were promised?

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Check out Boston.com for an article about trying to take a Tesla on a day trip to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire (340 miles round-trip). They spent most of the trip worry about range and more than three hours of the trip shut down for charging. What about doing all of the recharging with renewable energy? WSJ has an article about a $2.2 billion solar-thermal electricity generating plant whose input of cash ($1.6 billion from taxpayers) was presumably at least as much as budgeting but whose output of electricity is only 40 percent of the expectation.

Good reminder for engineers that sometimes the TED talk works better than the final system…

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Aviation readers: Our two full-time helicopter instructors reached 1000 hours and were able to get jobs flying jet-powered helicopters. We filled one opening with one of our own graduates but need to hire a second full-time instructor (about 600 hours per year in the Robinson R44 per CFI) at East Coast Aero Club. Please email resume if interested.

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Today’s Investor’s Business Daily has an interesting chart in an article on U.S. economic freedom compared to what prevails in other nations worldwide. If you’re not diversified into foreign stocks, this chart should provide some motivation…

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Michael Sandel is a Harvard professor famous for teaching thousands of undergraduates, mostly from rich families, about “justice.” Semyon Dukach, one of our Boston-based software entrepreneurs, was recently tapped to be opposite Sandel on a public radio talk show (link; the amazing novelist Marilynne Robinson is also on the show (I recommend Gilead)). Sandel decries the use of market ideas in U.S. society, an extension of the course where he encourages Harvard undergraduates to aspire to make millions of dollars by working at the Clinton Foundation instead of tens of millions of dollars by working for J.P. Morgan.

Of what value is this philosophy to someone who doesn’t have a Harvard degree or come from at least an upper-middle-class family? Most people who work in a local Walmart, McDonald’s, or Department of Motor Vehicles rather than at J.P. Morgan did not make that choice affirmatively. What can people who live and work in a town without a global non-profit organization do after learning that the righteous path is to work for a global non-profit organization? Or consider Angelika Graswald, the Latvian immigrant who had to decide whether to sabotage her fiance’s kayak and collect $250,000 in tax-free life insurance immediately or instead to get pregnant and collect $872,796 in tax-free child support over a 21-year period from the guy. How are Sandel’s philosophical musings relevant to her?

Is it fair to say that Sandel is a philosopher only for the rich? And, if so, can a philosopher for the rich be considered an important philosopher?

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