Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

At dinner this evening with some friends, the question of how to define the function of a marketing department came up. I related a story from the 1990s. A (very profitable) division of Hewlett-Packard asked for assistance with building an online community for several hundred marketing employees who wanted to share documents. “Most of these are PowerPoints,” it was explained to me. I was proud of being a quick study and said “Oh, I get it. People trade these PowerPoint presentations back and forth and then, when the final version is approved you want it to be accessible to customers from the server.” Everyone in the conference room blanched with horror. “We would never allow customers to see these presentations,” they exclaimed, “they are only for internal use.”

I thought for a moment and then asked “You mean that you pay several hundred people to sit in their cubicles and create PowerPoint presentations to show to each other?” The answer turned out to be “yes”.

So that’s my definition of marketing: A group of employees paid to show PowerPoint presentations to each other.

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Friends have recently been asking me whether I thought the choice of Paul Ryan would help or hurt Mitt Romney’s presidential chances. I haven’t been following the election closely because I already predicted Barack Obama’s reelection and I stand by that prediction from December 2011.

My response was that I think Ryan will hurt Romney. Let’s consider the worst possible presidential candidate. Mr. You’re Not Special would stand up in front of the American people and say the following:

• You’re not as smart, educated, or hard-working as people in Singapore.
• That’s why Singapore, despite having no natural resources, has a per-capita GDP that is 20 percent higher than the U.S.’s.
• That’s why Singapore can fulfill all required government functions by spending 17 percent of GDP (source) while the U.S. local, state, and federal governments spend a total of 42 percent of GDP (source).
• Which is why Singapore can have lower tax rates than the U.S.
• And because we are comparatively fat, dumb, and lazy, we can no longer afford all of the things that we want our government to do.
• Therefore we will have to cut back on health care, wars, public employee pensions, payments to the unemployed, etc.

The closer a candidate is to Mr. You’re Not Special, the worse he or she will do. That was the basis for my prediction that Barack Obama would beat Hillary Clinton in 2008 despite Clinton’s superior objective qualifications.

The only reasonable explanation for why government would have to be scaled back is that Americans aren’t smart and productive enough to afford the government that they want. What voter wants to hear that he or she is not smart and productive?

Let’s dig into some of the specifics of Ryanism. He wants to preserve the unlimited flow of government money to Medicare providers as long as the victims of this care (heart surgery for everyone!) are currently 55 years old or older. The median age of a voter is about 44 (source). The life expectancy for a 55-year-old is about 26 years. So Medicare costs will be ruinous for about 26 more years, necessitating savage payroll taxes. Those 26 years will carry the median age voter from age 44 through age 70, i.e., the rest of his or her likely working life. So Ryan promises “If you’re a typical voter, you will pay ridiculously high taxes for the rest of your working life in order the subsidize the world’s most inefficient health care system. But as soon as you do retire, you’ll get a voucher for minimal HMO care instead of the unlimited gold-plated care that you paid for others to enjoy.”

Did I miss something? What has Ryan said or done that would actually appeal to a voter who wants to think of himself or herself as exceptionally smart and living in a country poised for additional greatness?

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In August 2010, I wrote about the Icon A5 Seaplane. This was originally supposed to be delivered at the end of 2010. The company’s latest press release says that Cirrus (now Chinese-owned) is going to make most of the airframe components and that deliveries will start in mid-2013. My review predicted that weight was going to be a serious problem with the plane and now the company has asked for a 250 lb. gross weight increase from the FAA. This is on top of the 110 lb. increase that Light Sport airplanes already get for being seaplanes. A typical Light Sport Aircraft weighs 1320 lbs. fully loaded with people and fuel and has a 100 HP engine for rolling down a paved runway and taking off. Icon is asking to go up to 1680 lbs. with that same engine, but this time dragging the aircraft through the water. Time to get some longer lakes…

[I want to own a 1/4 share in an Icon, by the way. With a 7000′ runway at Hanscom Field, I am confident that I can get the thing up into the air. East Coast Aero Club’s Charlie Wright, in addition to being a great instructor and having a seaplane rating, actually knows how to operate a seaplane. So it could be a safe and fun airplane to take to long, sea-level lakes.]

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A friend of mine wants to deliver some one-on-one online teaching via video chat. It seems like a good idea, except for the fact that I can almost never get a Skype video session to work reliably or smoothly with a friend or relative, even when both ends are served by broadband and reasonably new devices. Given that there will be a range of students and they will have differing hardware, software, and connectivity situations, what are some good choices?

And let’s maybe renew the discussion that I started in February asking why Skype was so bad. The companies offering video chat, e.g., Skype (Microsoft), Yahoo!, Google, and Apple, have near-infinite money. So there should not be any constraint on programmers or fancy algorithms. As the software runs peer-to-peer, there should not be any constraint on how much CPU and bandwidth can be consumed. Yet a comment on the previous posting stated, quite credibly, that the Polycom system worked far better than PC-based systems. Is there a non-free system that would be reasonable for students and teachers to install that would work a lot better than the standard free ones?

[Update: I forgot to ask… why don’t these systems allow recording for later review? Isn’t it just as easy for the software to write to the hard drive at the same time that it is writing to the display?]

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At a dinner party the other night in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was asked if I was looking forward to November 7, 2012, when the U.S. presidential election would be over. I responded that I hadn’t been following the election because (a) I assume the Barack Obama will be reelected, and (b) there wouldn’t be any dramatic changes if Mitt Romney were elected. The host, who’d grown up in a wealthy New York family, and is a passionate Obama supporter, questioned me regarding this. I said “Well, under Bush we were embroiled in foreign wars, subsidizing government cronies with tax dollars, watching states bankrupt themselves with public employee pension commitments, and watching our children walk into some of the world’s most expensively funded and least effective schools. Obama is about as different from Bush as a U.S. politician could be and yet nothing substantive has changed. Why would we expect huge changes from Romney? And if we don’t expect huge changes, why it is worth spending a lot of time and energy following the election?”

This segued into a discussion regarding Obama’s achievements in office. It turned out that, for the host, Obama’s most important achievement was “standing up to Netanyahu”. The host regarded Israel’s 7.5 million people as the greatest reservoir of wrongdoers on the planet, apparently, and was impressed by the Commander in Chief of the world’s largest military “standing up” to the leader of a country whose $243 billion GDP is comparable to the combined GDP of Baltimore and Cincinnati.

What do the readers think? Perhaps we can fill up the comment section with what folks think are Obama’s biggest achievements over the past 3.5 years. For comparison, here’s the semi-official list for Eisenhower.

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In this interview with Niall Ferguson, he says that China is more like mid-1970s South Korea (i.e., poised for a lot more growth) than it is like late-1980s Japan.

[Coincidentally, right now I’m reading Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by the same author.]

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Technology Review, the MIT alumni magazine, has two recent articles that should depress publishers everywhere:

• why publishers can’t make money with iPad, etc., apps
• why publishers, including Facebook, can’t make money with Web advertising

Don’t let your kids grow up to work in the publishing industry!

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jul/19/olympic-games-g4s-bill is sort of a fun article if you do some arithmetic on what the British are spending on one facet of security at the London Olympics. There were supposed to be 10,000 guards and the cost of their uniforms was 65 million pounds or roughly $10,200 per guard. In the best tradition of an ossified bureaucratic moribund society, more money is allocated to management (125 million pounds) than labor (83 million pounds). Overall, had things worked out as planned/hoped, the British would have spent $446 million (enough to have financed 15 Googles) to have 10,000 minimally trained security guards work for the 17-day event. That works out to $44,600 per guard or $2,623 per guard per day. As it happens, though, the contractor wasn’t able to supply the 10,000 guards, many of them could not speak English, and many were unable to stay awake during their minimal training. So the cost per actual guard may be closer to $100,000.

[The guards themselves don’t receive this $100,000, of course.  They receive roughly $13.30 per hour, according to this article.]

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A friend of a friend runs a small HMO for a university (students, faculty, staff). Part of his job is negotiating with vendors for procedures and hospital care. “[A local academic-affiliated hospital] charges $2800 for a colonoscopy. I got a deal with a colonoscopy center, though, for $900. Same doctors. Same procedure. Same anesthesia.” Was there anything else that affects the price? “On top of these charges, the centers encourage patients to ask for Propofol as an anesthetic. That’s the Michael Jackson drug. It doesn’t work any better, but it has to be administered by an anesthesiologist and the centers and hospitals are able to tack on another $1000 in charges. Insurance companies will pay for it so the providers try to convince patients that it is better so they will ask for it. We tell them that we won’t pay for it!”

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The Supreme Court has ruled that the federal government can try to coerce Americans into buying health insurance. What I haven’t seen in the news articles covering this event is a comparison to other things that the government tries to get Americans to do. The government tries to get teenagers to graduate from high school, but about 20 percent fail to do so. The government tries to get Americans to stop smoking marijuana, but about 20 percent light up periodically, despite the criminal penalties that attach to this activity. The government tries to get Americans to drive more fuel-efficient cars, and has various tax penalties associated with gas guzzlers, but SUVs and pickups clog our highways (I parked next to a monster one yesterday that had an “Eco Boost” badge on the side!).

The penalty for those who don’t buy health insurance is an extra tax, but http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/04/taxes_schmaxes.html notes that roughly 7 million Americans (out of about 150 million civilians in the labor force)  don’t bother to file tax returns.

Was it really worth two years of drama to turn America from a country in which millions of people lack health insurance into a country in which millions of people lack health insurance?

I’m still a fan of my own health care reform plan, which provides universal coverage, not just a nagging scolding nanny state that has proven itself to be incapable in the past of nagging and scolding with sufficient effect.

What will happen in 5-10 years when we discover that America still has a huge population of uninsured folks? The currently approved law does not seem to be a great stepping stone to universal coverage.

[Separately, if I were not a taxpayer, I would have been amused to see that each state got $8 million to do planning, but not actual programming, for a Web site to serve as a health insurance exchange. In other words, the federal government spent $400 million (50 states times $8 million) to do planning for the kind of Web service that a private start-up would build with five young people sharing an apartment and coding for three months.]

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