Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

As part of my London trip, I attended a university track and field event at the Olympic Park. On the northeastern outskirts of London, this is a former industrial wasteland that has been transformed with $15 billion into a consumer/spectator wasteland (enough to fund three or four Shanghai Disney resorts).  Paths between venues are on a vast inhuman scale, with hardly any art or sculpture to break up the long walks.

Athlete housing is visible from the park and it strongly resembles the Cabrini-Green housing project. Supposedly the apartments will be turned over to local residents (who tend to be low-income immigrants from Muslim countries; this is the same area that was supposed to be home to the largest mosque in Europe) after the Olympics.

It is tough to understand how this is all going to work for spectators. With the stadium literally only about one percent full, there were long queues for coffee and snacks. It took about 10 minutes to get through an airport-style security process with complete X-ray and metal detector screening. An average of about 100,000 people per day show up at the world’s busiest airports, but they tend to arrive in a reasonably randomly distributed manner. The stadium alone holds 80,000 people and they will be arriving in tight blocks.

The English are going generally crazy spending money for security (story putting the total cost of the event at $17.6 billion). There are surface-to-air missiles being mounted on rooftops. In case the British military needs to invade its own country, while I was there they sailed their navy’s largest ship, a 22,000 ton amphibious assault vessel, up the Thames (story). If nothing else, billions spent on security has to be considered a subtraction from a nation’s wealth.

Ordinary London residents are expected to suffer miserably during the Olympics as well. The Tube is full of posters telling people to expect queues of up to one hour in length to get onto the subway system at the busier stations. They also suggest walking or riding a bicycle. Presumably much of what visitors spend in London during the Olympics will be offset by locals fleeing to Spain.

Is this all worth it? I can’t figure out what the economic effect of the games is supposed to be, even in the best case.  Tickets are about $160 per person per event. Presumably most of the spectators will be from the U.K. Even if they sold enough to break even would that be a gain for the country? How is it different than growing GDP by breaking windows and re-glazing them? A person who spends $600 to take his or her family to an Olympic event has a happy memory, presumably, but is not any more ready to be productive than a person who takes $600 in cash out to the backyard and sets it on fire. If a vibrant sports culture and a lot of interested spectators could help a country grow, wouldn’t Nigeria be rich? The Greeks are passionate enough about soccer to set their stadiums on fire (story) but that doesn’t seem to be helping them pay their debts or grow their economy.

If mass spectator sports are not helpful to an economy or to a people, why do governments keep pouring tax dollars into them? In a 2009 blog posting, I wrote that it was might be because a politician can use taxpayer funds to build his or her career. In the case of London 2012, however, it does not seem as though the politicians who committed the taxpayer funds to host the event are still in power.

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Folks:

I’ve completed a draft of my review of the Canon 5D Mark III camera. Comments/corrections would be appreciated. Given the DxO Labs results from the Nikon D800 and the 5D Mark III, I think it is time for me to admit that my prediction from roughly 2006 has proven to be spectacularly wrong. When Sony purchased Minolta’s camera business, I said that the professional SLR market was big enough for just two companies. Given that Canon and Sony were much bigger firms with more capital than Nikon, and that Nikon was reliant upon Sony to make sensors, I expected Canon and Sony to build products that Nikon could not match. Now it looks as though Nikon is crushing Canon in those aspects of sensor performance that are relevant to image quality. And the article even has an example of an iPhone 4S producing a better JPEG than the $3500 Canon body.

So… I know that I was wrong, but I still can’t understand how I could have been so wrong.

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A trip to London took me through Heathrow Terminal 5, which consumed 19 years and $6.5 billion (the Beijing airport’s Terminal 3 took 4 years to build, cost about half as much, and is larger than all five terminals at Heathrow… combined; see A Tale of Two Terminals for more). What’s Terminal 5 like? Spacious, anyway. What can you do there? The answer seems to be “the same things that you could do at Terminals 1-4”, e.g., the shops are more or less the same, with less variety in restaurants (though each one occupies a lot more space).

Let’s say that you’re stuck at LHR waiting for a delayed connection (or in one of the three-hour queues for immigration that have become common; see forthcoming blog post about that). What would you most like to do? Plug in your laptop and connect to the Internet? Do you feel that the $400-1000 in fees and taxes that you paid bundled into your economy transatlantic airfare, which include landing fees and per-passenger service charges paid to the privately-owned Heathrow Airport, should entitle you to an electric outlet and a WiFi connection? If so, you’ll be disappointed. There are no power outlets and WiFi requires an additional complicated purchase process and payment of amounts additional to what you already paid as part of your ticket.

How about the restrooms? There are no paper towel dispensers. A quick survey of one restroom found 6 out of 8 electric hand dryers were operational. All of the escalators and nearly all of the elevators seemed to be working.

On a Monday morning the lines for security were insignificant, there were no full body X-ray scanners, and passengers were not asked to remove shoes.

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Britain was one of the wellsprings of the Fair Trade movement (history). Yet the country is about to host the 2012 Olympics in which billions of dollars will be collected for television and live ticket sales and the athletes, many of whom come from poor countries, will be paid nothing. One could argue that the athletes are showing up and therefore the current terms (they get $0 in cash) are sufficiently attractive. But isn’t the whole point of Fair Trade that simply paying a market-clearing price may not be fair?

[Separately, should Olympics souvenirs be boycotted by passionate Fair Traders? The T-shirts and plastic toys are being produced in China by workers who get paid minimal wages and sold in Britain for triple or quadruple what the same item would fetch at Walmart, if not stamped with the “London 2012” logo. It seems doubtful that the Olympics organizers are sharing the extra profit with the workers who make the trinkets.]

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Attended a Marjane Satrapi lecture at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the best parts of which were cocktail party-style anecdotes and Satrapi’s visible enthusiasm for life. She displayed remarkable humility when asked about current events in Iran, saying that she hadn’t been back to Iran in 13 years and was not qualified to opine. Having started out as a talented chronicler of her personal story, with the graphic novel Persepolis, she now offers opinions on how the 7 billion other folks on Planet Earth may live in harmony. She tried to comfort the audience with the thought that only at most 18 percent of the world’s population are fanatics. The audience reacted warmly, presumably indicating that very few had reflected on the fact that 18 percent of 7 billion is 1.26 billion and that there is no evidence that the remaining 82 percent are sufficiently passionate about politics to oppose them. Satrapi talked briefly about the rise of the Nazis in Germany, attributing Hitler’s popularity to economic difficulties. She essentially argued that all cultures and religions are equally good or bad and that all people share a universal experience. She drew a parallel between Christian and Islamic fundamentalism, pointing out that the Christian who kills an abortion clinic doctor is the same as a Muslim terrorist (not sure how this squares with the obvious facts about what typical Christian fanatics do, e.g., join a monastery or spend their lives ministering to sick people in a malaria-plagued jungle). Satrapi criticized suicide bombers for irrationality, saying that humans have a natural survival instinct (she did not point out that some suicide bombers may earn economic benefits for their families (see Der Spiegel)).

If nothing else, the lecture demonstrated that one thing is universal across all cultures: when an artist acquires Hollywood fame, he or she will begin to claim special knowledge of how world peace may be attained.

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The Alex Katz show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is well worth seeing (through July 29). One of the great things about a printmaker such as Katz is that there are 50-70 copies of each work out there and it is easy for a museum to gather 100 percent of the artist’s best work for display. The prints are notable for their size and the ability of the artist to communicate economically. For those familiar with Katz’s portraits, some of the landscape work will be shocking, particularly some prints of reflections in a pond. Encountering these after looking at the portraits is kind of like watching an Olympic skater fall.

If you have kids, make sure to take them to the adjacent model ship gallery where the pull-out drawers containing curios will delight.

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Folks:

Five and a half years ago, I wrote a posting marveling that the Dell 30″ LCD monitor was selling for $1279. My HP-brand 30″ monitor seems to be flaking out, so I was considering replacing it with another Dell (my six year-old Dell monitor is still going strong). What’s the latest price from Dell? $1299! With LCD TV prices on a constant downward trend, how is it possible that the 30″ computer monitor remains stuck at over $1000? It is just that nobody wants this size? Newegg.com sells 27″ name-brand monitors (e.g., Samsung) for $300, but it would be hard to give up the extra size and resolution to which I have become accustomed.  I love being able to type a report in one window and review a source document (typically in PDF format) in another window. The 30″ monitor is ideal for that.

Maybe the right solution is to mount two 1080p 27″ monitors side-by-side vertically? I wonder if an average graphics card will drive that.

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Cover story in today’s New York Times: “Rising Fears That Recovery May Once More Be Faltering”. The article notes that oil prices are high, a sign that some folks on this planet have plenty of cash. On the other hand, growth in the U.S. and Europe is not very strong. Could it be the case that this is simply a realignment of worldwide wealth in favor of people in places other than the U.S. and Europe? E.g., the places where they build stuff (e.g., Asia) and the places where they have stuff that everyone else wants (e.g., oil-rich countries, diamond/mineral-rich countries). Obviously there is nothing that says the U.S. and Europe can’t grow their service economies, but perhaps growth in services is naturally a slower process than expanding production in a factory or drilling a new oil well (look at the lack of productivity growth in education and health care, for example, and these are ever-larger fractions of the U.S. economy).

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My stockholder’s proxy package arrived in the mail today for Brookline Bancorp (BRKL), one of my few individual stock holdings. The first page of the annual report has a smiling CEO, Paul Perrault, proudly reporting that for 2011 net income was up by 3 percent over 2010 (to a total of $27.6 million). Why was the guy smiling so broadly after turning in such a lackluster performance? Buried in the proxy materials was the fact that his own salary grew by 48 percent over 2010 (to a total of $1.56 million). I.e., if operating profits and CEO pay at BRKL keep growing as they have, the CEO’s compensation will exceed the total operating profit of the enterprise starting in 2019.

In theory the shareholders are supposed to vote on whether or not the Board of Directors have come up with a reasonable plan for 2012 executive compensation. However, the materials distributed with the proxy all relate to 2011 pay. We will have to wait until 2013 to find out exactly how much Mr. Perrault gets.

How good a job does the 60-year-old Mr. Perrault need to do in order to get paid? The standards turn out not to be that exacting. If the guy becomes disabled he gets at least a year of salary. “In the event of death, Mr. Perrault’s estate, legal representatives, or beneficiaries shall be paid his Base Salary for a period of one year form the date of his death.” So the shareholders of BRKL are unwittingly in the disability and life insurance business.

How are the shareholders doing? Going back 10 years in Google Finance shows that BRKL is down 19 percent. The Dow Jones went up 27 percent during the same period. The Nasdaq was up 71 percent.

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As the author of an article on whole-house music systems, I thought that I would be the perfect person to give advice to a friend who has recently moved into a new apartment and wants to declutter by sending her CDs off to be ripped. Normally I recommend Sonos, but to play one’s personal music library it requires a home server. My friend does not own a desktop computer, a home NAS box, or even a high-capacity MP3 player. She does everything with her laptop (running Windows XP! (but her company will presumably eventually upgrade to a newer version of Windows)), including listen to Rhapsody (subscription digital music service). My next idea was to have her CDs ripped, then push them all up to Google Music so that they could be streamed back down to the Sonos. That doesn’t work, though, because the Sonos does not support Google Music. It also seems a little wasteful of Internet bandwidth when her entire music collection could probably fit on a 64 GB USB flash drive (and I wonder if Google Music would support high quality 320 kbps streams?). So then I thought “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could plus a USB drive into the Sonos?” But you can’t.

My next idea was the Logitech Squeezebox Touch. This says that it has a USB port and can access music or photos from a USB drive. The Logitech site says that multiple Squeezeboxes can talk to each other. It seems a little more cumbersome than the Sonos because there is no built-in amplifier (and she has no legacy stereo system). On the other hand, the box itself has a display and interface, which seems better than the Sonos, which requires an external controller of some sort (dedicated remote, PC, tablet, or smartphone).

Does anyone have a better idea? I’m kind of surprised that there aren’t more options for a person who does not have a home NAS or always-on PC.

[Update: Given that the AirPlay system works only one speaker at a time if driven from an iPod and the goal of keeping listening to muic independent from a home computer, the solution turned out to be the obvious one: Sonos plus paying musicshifter.com to rip the CDs and park them on a Western Digital 1 TB NAS (about $130 extra). Control will be via a couple of older Android mobile phones, her laptop, and maybe an Android tablet. Perhaps the NAS box can be ditched if Sonos ever decides to support Google Music. I do wish that Sonos would put a little phone-sized Android tablet on the front of their boxes so that one did not have to hunt for a controller.]

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