Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I visited a 55-year-old friend who is politically involved and considers himself extremely well informed. He spent today canvassing for Elizabeth Warren in Waltham, Massachusetts. Armed with a clipboard and data sheets on 50 solid Democrats and/or undecided voters, he was somewhat surprised by the shabbiness of the houses that he visited, all inhabited by people getting various amounts and kinds of government assistance. He said that the stories of how the native-born folks had ended up in poverty often started with a health problem. Thus he was hoping that one thing Warren will do is make health care available to poor Americans. “What about Medicaid?” I asked. He was not aware of the existence of this program. I said “I think it might be the fourth largest federal program, after Social Security, the military, and Medicare”. That did not help. He did not know about any government program to pay for routine medical care for any American under age 65.

[http://www.hhs.gov/budget/budget-brief-fy2013.pdf shows that Medicaid will consume about 30 percent of DHHS’s $941 billion budget or about $282 billion, but this does not count spending by the states. Page 66 of the document explains that this $282 billion is 58 percent of the total for the 57 million Americans enrolled in Medicaid. That means the total spending is about $486 billion.]

My friend could not understand how people in red states could be so stupid as to attempt to reduce the size of the federal government. “I think people in Texas get back 15 times the money that they spend in federal taxes. It is people in the blue states who pay to run the country.”

[http://taxfoundation.org/article/federal-spending-received-dollar-taxes-paid-state-2005 shows that Texas gets 94 cents of federal spending for every $1 that the state’s residents pay in taxes. Of course, this does not mean that the average Texan gets back 94 cents in value for every $1 spent. Most of the spending is presumably military and health care-related. So a hospital and doctor might get $50,000 for performing a procedure, but that doesn’t mean the patient experiences $50,000 in value (especially since the procedure might have been obtained for $8,000 in France or Israel). See this New Yorker article regarding Medicare spending in Texas.]

Separately, I had dinner with some foreigners on Friday evening. A couple from Canada who lives here in Massachusetts said “Is Scott Brown a Republican? I thought that he was an independent.” Conclusion: political advertising works remarkably well!

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Folks: Seven months ago I posted a question about Carbonite. It seems that the secret to their “unlimited” backup is that they throttle upload speed to about 1 GB per day so that it will take 5.5 years for a standard 2 TB hard drive to get backed up. A person who creates a modest amount of digital content every week, e.g., by photographing and videotaping a child, will find that his or her data are never backed up completely. In the comments to that posting, a lot of people recommended Backblaze. Is that still everyone’s favorite? They say that they offer “Unthrottled backups”, which means potentially as fast as 20-80 GB per day on a standard home Internet connection (cable modem or FiOS).

I can’t find any fine print on the Backblaze site that makes the service useless. In addition to their secret upload throttling, Carbonite has some fine print that excludes video files, such as MPEGs (e.g., the ones a parent might make of a child!), by default but Backblaze does not seem to.

[Separately, Carbonite never did manage to fix their software to stop growing 25+GB log files on my C: drive, a small SSD.]

[Update 11/15/2012: Based on the comments below, I installed CrashPlan. It is uploading 2.2 Mbps currently, maxing out the admittedly feeble Comcast cable modem upload capacity. So this makes it 22 times faster than Carbonite, throttled to 100 kbps.]

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My neighbors here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was only barely touched by Hurricane Sandy, are taking the post-storm cleanup as an occasion to celebrate how prescient they were in supporting ever-bigger government. “Imagine where we would have been without FEMA” is the refrain. “Look how helpful President Obama has been”. “This shows the value of insurance,” they add.

I’m a little confused as to why folks think that this could not have been handled without the federal government or why a state with millions of people would need insurance. To hear them talk, if not for President Obama and the gifts that he has bestowed upon us, we would not have electric power, roads clear of fallen trees, etc. Yet U.S. state and local governments have tax revenues, in the aggregate, roughly comparable to those of the federal government. And the populations and GDPs of U.S. states are similar to those of many standalone countries around the world. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_GDP shows that New York State, for example, has 19.4 million residents and a GDP of nearly $1.2 trillion (was $1.156 in 2010). New Jersey has a GDP of $0.5 trillion. The total damage from Sandy, in all U.S. states, is estimated at approximately $20 billion. If all of that cost were borne by the 28 million folks who live in New York and New Jersey (nearly the population of Canada), it would amount to 1 percent of their annual income. That would be equivalent to a $500 loss for a person earning $50,000 per year, i.e., more comparable to an insurance deductible than the face value of an insurance policy.

It would certainly seem to make sense for governors to use their national guard resources and to call on nearby active duty military personnel (if they are not all in Afghanistan!), but beyond that I am at a loss to understand why the federal government has unique powers to clean up after a storm such as Sandy. How does it save money to send dollars down to Washington, D.C. and then have a portion of them sent back when there is a storm? Isn’t New York State’s population of 19+ million already a big enough group for spreading risk? If a group of 19 million isn’t a big enough pool, does that means that 80 percent of the world’s countries (table) are too small to handle the risk of being alive? Should those countries tax themselves an additional 20 percent and send the money to Washington, D.C. so that they too can fall under the FEMA umbrella?

If this trend toward calling in FEMA continues… how many years before the U.S. President and FEMA start coming over to shovel out our driveways after every snowstorm?

[Separately, I would like to express my gratitude to all of the folks who kept things humming in Cambridge and Lincoln, Massachusetts during the storm. That especially includes Nstar, my electric utility, which brought crews in from the Midwest in preparation for the storm. Also to the police and fire department in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where every road, powerline, and house is under constant assault from trees.]

[Finally.. you might ask what it was like here in Massachusetts. Private businesses stayed open, in many cases for their standard hours. You could get your dog groomed at Petsmart during the height of the storm and then pick up a free range carrot at Whole Foods. Logan Airport was open the whole time, with jumbo jets from Asia landing on Monday morning. Desk-job government workers and public school teachers enjoyed either one or two days off. A lot of suburban roads were closed on the day after the storm so that trees could be cut up and chipped.]

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I’m using a Sony DSC-RX100 right now. The image quality is surprisingly good, even indoors, for a small camera. The controls, on the other hand, are more complex and far more confusing than on a Canon 5D Mark III semi-professional single lens reflex. This has gotten me thinking about what controls I would want in a compact camera like the RX100. How about the following:

1. “make it lighter” shift button to press while holding shutter release (or call it “expose for shadows”)
2. “make it darker” shift button (or “expose for highlights”)
3. flash wheel: auto, off, weak, strong
4. single/continous capture (“motor drive” on/off)
5. movie start/movie stop
6. playback mode button
7. traditional menu control for playback mode

? That’s a camera with just 5 still photography controls beyond the required shutter release and zoom, yet I think it would cover most photographic situations reasonably well.

I’ll be accumulating some example photos in this album on Google+ (Picasa/Google+ seems to be having a horrible time with syncing from a folder on my computer, actually. I copy the example photos into a folder on my hard drive and then ask Picasa to push them up to the Web. If the photos have previously been sync’d into a Web album they won’t sync again.)

[Aside from the One of the real problems that I have with the camera so far is that the fill flash blows out the subjects. One of the good things about point and shoot cameras was that they used the measured distance to the subject and the known flash output capability to set flash output and/or aperture and achieve correct flash exposure. The RX100 seems to be more like an SLR and puts out flash power until sensors in the camera see sufficient light. This results in massive overexposure if the subjects aren’t in the middle of the frame (as with some SLRs).]

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This posting is addressed to my fellow Massachusetts citizens who vote in the 5th Congressional District. The competition is between Ed Markey, a traditional incumbent Democrat (in office since 1976 and the administration of Gerald Ford) who earns 93 percent of his contributions from outside his district (Wikipedia) and 75 percent from out of state. The challenger is Tom Tierney, an actuary running as a Republican. In this 2011 posting, I suggested that our country needed to be advised by accountants rather than economists. However, it may be the case that actuaries are better suited to analyzing public policy challenges.

Politicians at local, state, and federal levels seemingly cannot get elected without making promises to support people with money or services (such as health care) until those people are dead. This tends to lead us toward bankruptcy because politicians have no expertise in figuring out how long people will live or how much money needs to be set aside today to insure an income stream of, say, $20,000 per year starting 50 years from now. This is precisely what actuaries are good at. (Unfortunately his policy ideas include raising taxes, good evidence for why actuaries have not previously been successful as politicians!)

Regardless of whether or not one agrees with the policy ideas on his web site, an actuary such as Tierney would be a good resource for other Representatives and a constant reminder that making commitments based on life expectancy only makes financial sense for enterprises, such as life insurers, whose other costs are reduced if life spans turn out to be longer than originally calculated.

[Note: Markey was last in the tech world news in 2006 for advocating the arrest of a computer science graduate student who showed the ease with which airline boarding passes could be faked.]

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I’ve been spending more time back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After being in Lincoln, served with Internet by Verizon FiOS, the most painful thing is using Internet from a Comcast cable modem. Maybe it is the slow Comcast name servers, but there is a painful 1-second lag prior to visiting Web sites. Nobody at Comcast seems to have any idea what products they offer here in Cambridge. The Web site says the standard Internet speeds are 20/4 Mbps, 6/1 Mbps, and 50/10 Mbps (in that order and with the 6 Mbps service priced higher than the 20 Mbps service; this is with me signed in so that it knows the location). The customer service agents talk about a totally different range of speeds being available, e.g., 12/2 and 16/3. The discrepancy may be due to some marketing fraud by Comcast where they talk about “PowerBoost” for the first 10 MB of upload (e.g., the first out of 100 digital photos being uploaded). The “chat analysts” have no explanation for why their numbers are different from the advertised numbers.

The technician who showed up to install the service was well informed and efficient. He took one look at my Cisco/Linksys router, a 3-month-old E1200 that has to be rebooted every few days despite firmware upgrades, and said “You should throw out anything from Cisco/Linksys. They never work. Netgear is what you want.”

So let me take this opportunity to thank Verizon for, thus far, four years of high quality service. Another plus for Verizon is that they seem to be able to state what it is that they are selling!

[While Obama and Romney never tire of talking about how the U.S. is the world’s greatest country in every possible way, it seems that 11 other countries have pulled ahead of us in average Internet speed. This article shows that South Korea is the fastest at 16 Mbps, about 2.5X what we’ve got here (6.7 Mbps).]

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For distribution to voters on Election Day: Citizens for a Planned Economy. Based on statements by both Romney and Obama, this should be popular with most American voters.

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Another debate, another party. This one concerned foreign policy, “Which, the network exec explained, is something no one cares about — unless we declare war on Lindsay Lohan.” (Washington Post) What was missing from this debate, to my mind, was an explicit admission that American power is limited. It would have been refreshing to have one of the participants say “Fidel Castro is still in power, 50 years after we first tried to get rid of him, 90 miles off the Florida coast. So we shouldn’t be too confident of our ability to influence events on the other side of the globe.”

Both candidates ducked the hard questions, e.g., are you willing to cut and run in Afghanistan if it is obvious that the puppet government won’t last beyond 2014? Obama seemed more realistic about what we are likely to be able to accomplish. Romney did not persuade me with his “throw money at the military and hostile foreigners will be awed into submission” plan.

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I’m listening to Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue Zones Way as a book on CD while sitting in often-horrific Boston traffic. What does the book say? Sitting in traffic commuting is the unhappiest time of the average person’s day (cites research by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kahneman ). A person who commutes an hour to work each day would need to get paid 40 percent more than a person who walks to work in order to achieve the same level of happiness. Thus we’ve immiserated ourselves here in the U.S. first with suburban sprawl that makes it tough to socialize the 6-7 minimum hours per day that the Thrive book says is necessary and then by our inability to agree on a mechanism for speeding up traffic.

The phenomenon of Americans not being nearly as happy as our income would predict is well known. I wonder how much of that can be explained by just three factors: (1) we move around a lot due to the lack of a central city, such as Paris or Mexico City, in which people will stay after at most one move, (2) more of us live in suburbs than do people who live in other countries (I can’t find good stats on this but it has to be true if only due to the fact that we have so many more cars), (3) we’ve choked our transportation system almost to death so that suburbanites no longer have reasonable mobility.

A few other tidbits from the book:

• Welfare State handouts make people miserable by keeping them unemployed/dependent; the smart happy country of Singapore does it better by “topping up” wages for their least capable 5-10 percent of workers so that everyone who works has a tolerable standard of living
• Government policies that foster mixed-income housing make people miserable. People are happiest when they are surrounded by folks who earn about the same as they do.
• Government regulations that make it tough to start and run your own business make people miserable. People are happiest when they are in control of their life at work. (The author does not address the apparent contradiction with increased socializing leading to more happiness; many people who run their own businesses are literally sole proprietors and spend more time alone than workers in a cubicle farm.)
• Being religious makes people happy because they are satisfied with what God has provided them. Attending church regularly makes people happy.

I’m not sure that I can recommend the book. It is somewhat rambling and anecdotal and, at least as an audiobook, it is tough to know the reliability of the studies referenced. Furthermore, the insights offered are very similar to what positive psychologists have been saying for years: (1) have a lot of friends, (2) make sure those friends are happy (i.e., the folks with PhDs in psychology recommend immediately dumping any friend who becomes depressed!), (3) live in a compact house or apartment within walking distance of those friends (I wrote about this in my non-profit ideas article under “Latin American-style Towns for the U.S.), (4) don’t work more than 40 hours/week (part-time workers are happier than full-time workers), and (5) take a lot of vacation. On the other hand, the author managed to get an interview with Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore, on the subject of why Singaporeans surveyed at the top of the Asian happiness charts.

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Since folks seem to have so many good ideas for how to make an Android or iOS tablet come up with the Sonos controller when unlocked, how about an idea for making the device serve as a digital photo frame when locked?

Is there an easy way to have the tablet be dark when idle/locked/unplugged and show rotating photos (digital picture frame) when idle/locked/plugged in?

And if the slide show application is workable, what’s the best stand for the tablet? Amazon and Walmart seem to have a few.

And my last tablet question for the night… since we’re talking about devices that never leave the house, why aren’t there a lot of 13, 14, 15, and 17″ tablets available now? These are all standard sizes for LCD screens in laptops. How hard is it to glue a battery to the back and install Android on a little CPU?

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