Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks identifies “Second System Syndrome” as a problem that can doom projects to multi-year delays and huge cost overruns (though not enough to sink a near-monopoly like IBM was in the 1960s). Software companies that have a successful “first system” out on the market write down a comprehensive list of everything that could be improved, then promise to fix all of those identified problems with a “second system”.

Terrafugia, the MIT spinoff company that has been struggling to get a flying car (a.k.a. “roadable aircraft” a.k.a. “do you want to get a door ding at Walmart in your $280,000 airplane”?) into the market has now announced the TF-X, which will solve all known problems with light airplanes, four-seat automobiles, and light helicopters. So the “second system” has been announced some years before the “first system” is likely to get into the hands of customers.

[I’m a little bit skeptical of the value of a flying car versus legacy airplanes. I flew a Cirrus SR20 to Indiana, Pennsylvania last weekend. At 150 knots the trip seemed endless, nearly three hours of flight time on the way back due to a 15-knot headwind. The purpose of the trip was to visit my cousin Olivia, who was performing (fantastically I might add!) in an Indiana University of Pennsylvania production of Lysistrata. Olivia is just a freshman and does not have a car. But guess what her best friend has… a car! So they picked me up at the airport, a five-minute drive from campus. Later in the afternoon Olivia’s mom, my cousin Lynn, showed up in… a car. So I now had two chauffeur-driven cars in which to ride. Lynn happily drove me to the airport the next morning. My ground experience would have been worse if I’d had to drive the Cirrus, alone, to the university and then the Comfort Inn. And the experience of going back to Boston at 75 knots of ground speed in a Terrafugia would have been horrific. The 2005 Cirrus that I flew, with its Avidyne glass panel and slightly crummy autopilot, is worth about $120,000, less than half the cost of a new Terrafugia and therefore insurable at a much lower annual rate.]

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I was talking to a friend today who would describe himself as a “California liberal”, “snob”, and “much smarter and better-informed than the average American.” He lives in a $2 million house in Berkeley and is most passionate about the idea that state and federal tax rates should be roughly doubled so that we can carry out important social programs and pay higher salaries and pensions to government employees, who are doing a great job. He is angry about the persistence California’s Proposition 13, which he believes has kept the state from realizing its potential greatness through increased taxation and has enabled posthumous Republicans to ruin California despite the fact that Democrats in California now hold a “super majority” and can pass any legislation that they wish (In 2010 California collected only 11.2 percent of its residents’ GDP (source)). He had followed the Boston Marathon bombings obsessively, but exclusively in media outlets, such as the New York Times, with a liberal perspective. Here are some of the topics that we discussed:

• Teacher salaries. As we walked by the Cambridge Public High School he estimated that a teacher there would earn $30,000 per year. General media/Google info: the school web site shows that in 2010, a 33-year-old teacher with an online doctorate could earn as much as $86,000 for working nine months/year, plus health care and defined benefit pension; neighboring Boston pays about $93,500 for nine months of work by a 31-year-old with an online PhD (chart). (He could have learned about teacher salaries from this 2009 New York Times article.)
• U.S. corporations pay close to zero percent of their income in tax, which is one reason no American company would ever seek to move to another country for financial reasons. General media/Google info: This Tax Foundation meta survey reports that the effective tax rate is close to 30 percent. A representative study is this one from Price Waterhouse Coopers, which found that the U.S. ranked 6th out of 59 countries in corporate taxes actually collected.
• Tsarnaev brothers versus the police. My liberal friend thought the Tsarnaev brothers had been heavily armed with an arsenal of guns and rifles and the heroic police and FBI shooting at them were generally outgunned. General media/Google info: the Guardian says that the “brothers had a single gun between them, a Ruger 9mm semi-automatic handgun”; the final “shoot-out” at the boat was in fact more like target practice since the remaining Tsarnaev was entirely unarmed (New York Magazine)),
• The police had never had any occasion to investigate the Tsarnaev brothers, who had been model citizens/residents ever since being invited to live in the U.S. by our wise Department of Homeland Security (immigration division). General media/Google info: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested for violence against a girlfriend in 2009 (CNN); Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a close associate of three men who had their throats slit in Waltham, Massachusetts on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (ABC; my friend had never seen any mention of these murders, now widely linked to the Tsarnaev family).

Given the facts of which my friend was aware, I don’t think it is surprising that he comes to the conclusions that he does. We need to borrow trillions of dollars immediately and give it to our underfunded schools and government agencies. We should collect additional trillions in tax from U.S.-based corporations, who are currently paying nothing. We should yield more of our civil liberties to the police and FBI, who are infinitely wise. We need to restrict gun ownership so that future angry young men cannot build up a massive arsenal of assault rifles like the Tsarnaev brothers had and use that arsenal to mount a serious challenge to our combined local, state, and federal law enforcement forces. It is no wonder that he states flatly that Republicans and anyone who would vote for them are stupid because indeed one would have to be stupid not to see things his way if one were informed by the above facts.

I’m wondering if a lot of the supposed polarization of American political debate is simply due to the fact that we have more media outlets than formerly. Instead of everyone in one city reading the same newspaper and watching the evening news on one of three networks, a liberal can follow a huge story like the Boston Marathon bombings and learn completely different facts than a person who uses Google News.

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I’m halfway through The Dinner, a Dutch novel with some darkly funny yet restrained humor. The protagonist is an unbalanced high-school history teacher fired for reminding students that not all of the victims of wars and other catastrophes will be missed: “I let them do some simple arithmetic. In a group of one hundred people, how many assholes are there? … How many hopeless cases who go on complaining all their lives about the nonexistent injustices they’ve had to suffer. … How many of your classmates would you be pleased not to see return to their desks tomorrow morning?”

The book is written as though it were a realistic non-fiction first-person account and the author is trying to keep some stuff private:

“I don’t feel like going into detail about everything that went wrong at the hospital. I would only like to urgently advise those who attach any value to life–their own, or that of their family and loved ones–to never let themselves be admitted there. That, by the same token, is my dilemma: it’s nobody’s business which hospital Claire [narrator’s wife] was in, but at the same time I want to warn everyone to stay as far away from it as possible.”

[Update: I finished the book. I don’t love it as much anymore after reading the ending, which is too Hollywood for my taste. Still, I admire the author for setting up the characters and for the prose style.]

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As Google hires all of the world’s good software engineers and my friends with startup companies fight over the scraps I am left to wonder how everyone could have been so wrong in predicting that the world would be glutted with good programmers and sysadmins by now.

In the early days of programming there was not considered to be a limit on how many people could be trained to do the job. IBM would hire graduates from all kinds of college majors, e.g., music, and train them (there were hardly any computer science programs at universities back in the 1950s). A popular idea among corporate managers is that this could be a good job for women, who were readily available at reasonable rates.

With the rise of the worldwide Internet, open-source, and inexpensive microprocessors, it seemed inevitable that the world would be glutted with technically skilled people. Programming is easier to learn than a foreign language (a friend who has a PhD in physics and is an expert hardware and software developer says that learning Mandarin and to read Chinese was by far the hardest thing that he ever did). Getting hired as a programmer does not require a specific degree or training course. Programming or system administration can be learned by anyone worldwide who has access to a $300 personal computer and an Internet connection. Why wouldn’t the millions of unemployed Americans train themselves to code? Why wouldn’t middle class people in China, India, and Africa?

Admittedly in the U.S. folks with an organized mind, the grit to get through technical subjects, and the drive to go to work every day can find higher paying jobs that involve more social interaction (e.g., medical doctor, Wall Street banker, etc.). But that doesn’t explain why people in the Philippines or China aren’t training themselves en masse to be able to soak up the $30-100/hour jobs that would be readily available to them if they could demonstrate the ability to turn a customer request into working code. Why are the Greeks, Portuguese, and Spaniards going bankrupt instead of learning to administer Cisco and Linux?

Any good futurist circa 1990 would have predicted that by now most of the world’s programming would be happening in low-to-medium-wage countries and that customers wouldn’t have to pay a lot for high quality software. But it hasn’t happened (e.g., see my posting about California’s state government spending $327 million on a straightforward ecommerce site (I visited http://www.coveredca.com just now and it seems to be a work in progress)). Why instead do we have catfights over mediocre talent in Kendall Square and Silicon Valley?

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One thing that is great about the Internet is that it makes it possible to connect simultaneously with all of the world’s criminals. I am trying to get rid of a batch of kitchen appliances and posted a Craigslist ad. “Kathy White” responded with the following:

Hi,
Thanks for the mail.. i will be paying you via PayPal, don’t worry
about the pick up, the pick up agent will be coming to pick it up
immediately your account is credited…..send me your PayPal invoice
to cgredstores@gmail.com so that i can pay in.

Thanks

Plainly this is not someone who learned English in the U.S. And plainly a non-criminal would not want offer to pay $1000 into a PayPal account based on viewing an anonymous Craigslist ad. How would the payer even know that these appliances exist?

So let’s assume that this email is from Nigeria and that “Kathy White” is not going to be coming to pick up my stylish-but-hated Bosch dishwasher and its GE brethren. How then can she possibly profit from putting $1000 into my PayPal account? She won’t get the appliances. If she arranges a refund from PayPal it will be for the $1000 that she sent me.

Related:

• if Kathy White wants U.S. dollars so badly, why doesn’t she come over here, get pregnant, and go back to Nigeria to collect $50,000 per year in child support? (realworlddivorce.com explains how it is done)

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Folks: (warning: boring domestic question!)

I want to buy a dishwasher. I want it to be quiet and to wash dishes as well as the (sort-of-noisy) Whirlpool that I bought in 1996 (the Whirlpool, with triple-level sprayers, could blast melted cheese off baking dishes). I bought the top-of-the-line Bosch about five years ago and it proved to be a service nightmare (see March 2008 posting; even after lots of service it still doesn’t wash very well), so I don’t want to go down that road again.

Consumer Reports top-rates a Kenmore Elite 12783 dishwasher but it isn’t clear who makes it. Could it be a dreaded Bosch (this posting says it might be)? They also like a KitchenAid model KDFE454CSS and say that it is very quiet, but other KitchenAids, which are just as quiet or quieter according to the KitchenAid Web site, are rated as vastly noisier. This is going into a pretty small apartment and the dishwasher needs to run during parties and not interfere with conversation.

Consumer Reports steered me very badly wrong with the Bosch so I’m not sure if I should give them too much credit, though I would expect them to be able to read a sound pressure level meter in the same room as a dishwasher. CR was the source for the beloved Whirlpool years ago and they correctly point out that Viking dishwashers are crap.

Related:

• realworlddivorce.com is a state-by-state guide to who gets the broken dishwasher

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At the cherry blossom festival in D.C., children could write on the Japanese American Friendship Mural. It turned out that The Tale of Genji was not their favorite thing: “Thank you for all of the cool Japanese stuff like video games.”

 

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A lot of what we do here in the U.S. seems to be predicated on the idea that we are smarter than Russians. We are well on our way to a fully planned economy (see my pre-election posting on how this is apparently what voters from both major political parties want). The Russians, under the Soviet system, had trouble getting their planned economy to grow robustly. We are now scratching our heads wondering why our planned economy isn’t growing much beyond the population growth rate.

The Russians have had difficulty fighting Chechens, but we welcomed the Tsarnaev family into the U.S., confident that they would not present us with any difficulty. The Russian security services warned us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Instead of relying on their warning and simply deporting Mr. Tsarnaev (his asylum-seeking parents had already voluntarily returned to the country where they were supposedly being persecuted badly enough to warrant asylum, so he would have had a place to stay back in his original home country), we decided that our own security services would conduct their own investigation using American brains instead of Russian brains. (And the FBI’s American staff concluded that Mr. Tsarnaev was unlikely to be a threat.)

In our helicopter ground school foreigners with a general education often outperform Americans with a bachelor’s in a technical subject (see this April 2010 posting). I remember one middle-aged Russian woman who offered a great physics-based explanation for nearly every question posed. It turned out that she worked at a finance job here. I asked her where she had studied physics. She replied “In Russia. In high school.”

We did beat Russia in the Cold War, of course, but that was a different generation of Americans. What evidence do we have that today’s working-age Americans are smarter than today’s working-age Russians?

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My posting about a Russian tourist in Washington, D.C. occasioned some debate about the USDA in the comment section. The normally sleepy agency made the news today, though, with a New York Times story about $4.4 billion in new handouts. How much is $4.4 billion? The World Food Program estimates that $3.2 billion would eliminate hunger among school-age children worldwide (source).

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I started and finished Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness last night. It is a very tightly written personal history by a woman who endured the disintegration of her mind, a month of flailing about by confused doctors, and then a seven-month recovery.

Susannah Cahalan, a New York Post reporter, was suffering from a rare autoimmune disorder that caused inflammation on one side of her brain. A variety of expert neurologists and psychologists, however, confidently diagnosed her as (a) normal, (b) suffering the effects of heavy alcohol consumption (despite no evidence that she had been a heavy drinker), or (c) a garden-variety mentally ill person. These misdiagnoses cause delays in appropriate treatment that result in her condition deteriorating to the point that she was probably just a few days from dying.

First, you’ll feel better about your own life after reading this book, unless you are suffering from a tough-to-diagnose and extremely rare medical condition. Second, you’ll learn just how random are the outcomes in the American medical system when the patient does not fit into a common box. Probably tens of thousands of folks with Cahalan’s problem have wasted away in mental institutions and/or died due to improper treatment. Certainly plenty of doctors with big reputations and enormous reserves of self-confidence worked on Cahalan’s case and failed to get any closer to the source of her problem. What’s worse, the doctors she consulted did not do any follow-up to find out whether or not their apparently-not-so-educated guesses were right. A famous New York neurologist, Dr. Saul Bailey, whom Cahalan had seen early in her journey through the world of medicine, did not keep sufficient track of the case to learn that his initial diagnosis of alcoholism was wrong. Because of that, when Cahalan followed up with him in the course of researching the book she discovered that Bailey remained ignorant of the disorder that had nearly killed Cahalan, despite the fact that her particular case had at that point been in lots of medical journals as well as the New York Times. With no feedback, how will Bailey ever improve?

Third, if you’re a blood donor you’ll feel better about your donation (email me if you want to meet at the Children’s Hospital donation center here in Boston; I’ll buy you lunch afterward and lunch for anyone else that you bring). Cahalan went through a lot of bags of immunoglobulin infusions, each of which costs $20,000 and requires 1000 blood donations.

Separately, the book contains some interesting father-daughter and men-women relationship angles. After corresponding with hundreds of patients and relatives of patients who’d suffered from the same “anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis”, Cahalan concludes that “Paranoia, esepcially about the men in their lives, was also a common thread. A middle-aged woman believed that her husband had fathered a baby with a neighbor; a young teenager was convinced that her dad was cheating on her mother.” Cahalan herself suffered from similar paranoia but subsequently learned that the men in her life had in fact stepped up to the challenge.

Reading between the lines it sounds as though Cahalan’s mother triumphed over Cahalan’s father in a divorce lawsuit approximately a decade before the illness. The mother ended up getting the fancy suburban NJ house, the kids, and the river of child support money that courts can assign to the parent who wins the kids. This had resulted in some distance between Cahalan and her father, who moved to Brooklyn. The illness brought her dad to his daughter’s side every day: “Sensing that attitudes toward me improved and the level of care [at the NYU hospital] rose when company arrived, my dad … started to arrive first thing every morning. Alone, I could not fight this battle.” Dad, a successful financial industry worker of some sort, learns to respect Cahalan’s musician boyfriend, who showed up at 7 pm every day to take the night shift. The father wrote in his journal, which Cahalan mined for the book, “The one friend who did come everyday was Stephen. He was terrific. I wasn’t that sold on him when I first met him, but he grew in my respect and regard with every day that passed.” In the same journal Cahalan discovered an entry in which her father prays that “God would take him instead of me.”

More: read the book

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