Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A friend was recently debating the question of whether or not the U.S. is generous with foreign aid. One of his colleagues pointed to data that show the U.S. giving less “official development assistance”, as a percentage of GDP, compared to other countries (various charts, most of which make the U.S. look stingy compared to Norway, Sweden, Denmark, et al). My friend commented that the U.S. is actually the most generous country because our enormous military efforts benefit many other nations. For example, we discourage wars and keep shipping lanes open (except off the coast of Somalia!). Our military also shows up in other nations when disaster strikes. This costs a huge percentage of our GDP but isn’t counted as foreign aid per se.

Some of the most valuable assistance that we provide to other nations is not accounted for either in military or foreign aid spending. For example, we have spent a high percentage of GDP on funding scientific research that is published and available to anyone worldwide who can afford the price of a journal subscription. We have spent our tax dollars on standards such as TCP/IP that can be used at no charge by people worldwide. A lot of free Web services, such as Wikipedia, Hotmail, Yahoo!, and Gmail, were built and are run by Americans. A foreigner who learns from Wikipedia and uses Gmail has received very useful aid.

Why not come up with an accounting measure for how our military, scientific research, and Internet offerings benefit people in other nations? Then we can feel good about ourselves without spending (i.e., borrowing) more money.

[I guess we’d have to make sure that we didn’t ask unhappy Iraqis or Afghanis contribute to this project because they would be likely to put in a negative column for a lot of the stuff that our military does!]

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After a few years of using Android, I received an iPhone 4S (Verizon network) to use for a consulting project. I’m experimenting with using it as my primary phone.

One of the things that I have liked best about Android is how easy it is to set up a new phone by typing in one’s Gmail account name and password (just once). This automatically syncs calendar, contacts, email, etc.

For a Gmail user such as myself, the process of setting up the iPhone is not simple and involves Googling for a variety of tutorials. The first step is to set up the phone with one’s Apple ID. In addition to entering the username and password on the phone, I had to respond to an email message from Apple asking me to verify my Apple ID and password. Thus did I have to type in Apple ID and password twice.

Next step was trying to use Gmail and sync contacts and calendar. I downloaded the Gmail app from the App Store and typed in my Gmail account name and password. This populated the Gmail app with mail but did not sync calendar or contacts. So I went to the Settings -> Mail control panel and selected “Gmail” as an account to add. At the cost of typing in my name, Gmail username, and password, this synced mail, calendars, and notes, but not contacts. The Google help page on the subject says that to sync Gmail contacts one tells the iPhone that one is using Microsoft Exchange and then follows a series of instructions with server names to type in.

Back in 2008, I started picking out “Favorites” on a series of Android phones. Google puts these into a “Starred in Android” group. You would hope that these would be automatically mapped into the “Favorites” contact group on a new iPhone, but they aren’t. The Favorites group remains empty even after all of one’s contacts have been sync’d.

By the end of the set up process I think that I’d typed in my Apple ID and password at least twice and my Gmail username and password three or more times. Typing passwords on the virtual keyboard was much more difficult than on the Droid 2 physical keyboard.

One good thing about Android phones is that they don’t further clutter my house with cables. I keep micro-USB and mini-USB cables permanently attached to my desktop computer and use them to charge a variety of devices from different manufacturers. Neither cable works with the iPhone, which requires a custom cable.

Siri works better than expected as far as speech-to-text is concerned, but has a way to go in common sense reasoning. For example, I asked “Will the weather be nice on Thursday?” Siri correctly recognized the words but said “no”. The forecast was for sunny skies and 50 degree temperatures. That’s pretty nice for December 1 as far as most folks in Massachusets are concerned, but Siri apparently differs.

Question: What do folks like to use for turn-by-turn navigation (voice prompts) on the iPhone? I haven’t yet figured out how to get that out of the built-in Maps application.

[Oh yes, how does it work as a phone? So far, not so great in an area of weak coverage that I call “my house”. With the Droid 2 I could make and receive calls inside the house, though the sound quality was better stepping outside. With the iPhone, the phone will ring but the call drops after a minute or two unless I walk outside. This could become an issue in January…]

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I popped into the Harvard Square Verizon store today and got a glimpse of the American worker’s interaction with ever more advanced technology.

• Customer: “Is the iPhone 4G?”
• VZ Employee: “Yes.”

[ iPhones run on the obsolete 3G network, not the current 4G LTE system; note that in July, 34 percent of existing iPhone customers thought that they already had 4G.]

• Customer: “I want to return this prepaid smartphone because the sales guy said it was 3G but the data is really slow and the phone says ‘1X’ at the top” [1X stands for 1xRTT, a slow and ancient standard]
• Omar, VZ Employee: “All of our phones are 3G. This is definitely a 3G phone. We don’t support any older networks.”
• Jamie Albanese, VZ Store Manager: (standing next to Omar) “This is definitely not a 3G phone. Who told you that the prepaid phone was 3G? None of my employees would have told you that this phone is 3G.”
• Customer: “You mean none of your employees aside from Omar, who just now said that it was 3G?”

Curious to know how far up the management chain the ignorance would persist, I called and talked to Kirsten Lyall, another VZ Store Manager. She said “1X is 3G.”

Separately, a friend went into Starbucks and ordered a latte. The employee working the register asked “Do you want milk in that?”

Remember that there are approximately 15 million Americans who are less skilled than these folks.

[The truly sad discovery from this excursion was that the Galaxy Nexus “Google phone” is not yet available.]

Related: my phone call to the T-Mobile store asking whether it was on the north or south side of a major highway

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I was on the phone with a friend from graduate school. It must be a sign of aging, but this guy is now legitimately an “eminent” scientist. He was in the car while his wife drove the family to his father’s house. We talked about the things for which we are grateful. We hadn’t gotten very far into it when he said “Gotta go. Noa’s barfing. She’s car sick.” [Noa is 5.]

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I have been getting spammed by a Google+ user. He seems to be some sort of political activist. As a Massachusetts resident, my vote counts for almost nothing on national issues so I would like to unsubscribe. Yet my only options are to unsubscribe from all Google+ email notifications (some of which might be useful or interesting) or none. In the 1980s USENET days it was possible to establish a “bozo filter” to screen out messages from posters with a track record of being uninteresting. Yet somehow we’ve lost this feature in Google+.

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A friend pointed me to this Boston Globe story about Barack Obama’s uncle, who apparently lives in Framingham, Massachusetts despite having been ordered deported in 1992. Mr. Obama made the news after his arrest for drunk driving. With http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeituni_Onyango (also previously deported), that makes at least two Obama relatives who have chosen Massachusetts as their home.

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Harvard Yard was closed today, with campus police trying to inconvenience the Occupy Harvard tent city that is set up in the Yard. Certainly the closure inconvenienced Ollie the (border) Collie, who had to try to pick his way through a crowded sidewalk en route to the Verizon store (clogged with iPhone customers needing assistance in transferring the contacts from their old phones to their fancy new ones; apparently the iPhone is at its simplest when being advertised).

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/11/11/matthews-occupy-harvard/ explains the goals of the Occupy Harvard movement, including “We want Harvard to pay its workers a living wage” and a complaint that too many Harvard kids (about 30 percent) are from semi-rich families (who constitute just 5 percent of the U.S. population).

https://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/the-state-of-young-college-grads-2011/ meanwhile shows that the wages of U.S. college graduates are trending steadily downward while Generation Debt is accumulating ever larger student loans (plus of course their federal and state governments are borrowing trillions of dollars on their behalf). Could it be that these folks should be studying Mandarin rather than perfecting their camping skills?

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The latest New Yorker carries an article on Steve Jobs by Malcolm Gladwell. There are some interesting highlights lifted from the recent 656-page biography of Mr. Jobs so if you’re not willing to invest a rainy day in reading the book this could be a useful shortcut.

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My friends here in the Northeast are all running out to buy backup generators now (i.e., closing the barn doors after the horses are gone). The cheapest that I’ve heard for an installation is about $7,000, complete with electrician’s efforts (I was quoted over $20,000 at my house, partly due to there not being a great location or it near the house). The resulting machine will need to be maintained, run every week for a few minutes (very noisy), and will never recoup any of its costs.

It occurs to me that rooftop solar systems are in the same price ballpark ($7,000 to $30,000?). Supplemented by a snow broom, I would think that a rooftop solar system would make a good backup and, for the 99 percent of the time that the grid was working, could help defray its cost by generating useful electricity.

Obviously the solar panels wouldn’t work at night, but it isn’t usually a big deal to go overnight without power. If the well pump and heating system can be operated during the daylight hours that should be enough to keep pipes from freezing and allow the residents to enjoy a modicum of civilized existence.

Here are some questions for the solar pioneers:

• why isn’t rooftop solar a more common backup power solution?
• what happens when the grid power fails and there isn’t a massive battery pack? Does the inverter trip off when the voltage to the house drops below 105 or so? And then you run around the house turning off appliances and try to bring the inverter back up? Or there is automatic load-shedding somehow?
• how much power does it take to run a forced hot water heating system (ignition for the oil burner plus pumps to move water around the house)?
• what about the roof underneath a rooftop solar system? How would you ever repair shingles? Is it typical to put in a new 30-year roof at the same time that you put in a 30-year solar panel system?
• how big a system does one need in New England to run the essentials within a house? (essential = heat, well pump, fridge, Verizon FiOS box, router, desktop PC)
• how many square feet would that system occupy on the roof?
• is this stuff getting a lot cheaper? Supposedly Solyndra died because conventional panel prices were dropping. Has the price of panels dropped enough to make the overall system substantially cheaper than three years ago?
• what about all of the tax breaks whereby one used to be able to get one’s fellow citizens to pay most of the bill? Are those still in place? [I think government subsidies are bad, except ones that involve mailing a check to my house.]

I’m wary about solar because it seems like too advanced a technology for a U.S. home. It is so painful to get simple stuff fixed that I can’t imagine what would happen with a technician up on the roof with a Fluke voltmeter.

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My dumb economics question for the day is regarding Greece. The country has a population that isn’t much larger than the Chicago metropolitan area. Greece, like Chicago, is part of a currency union. Greece, like Chicago and surrounding suburbs, has borrowed a lot of money via issuing bonds. Suppose that the citizens of Chicago decided that they didn’t want to work very hard and then retire at age 50 and probably weren’t going to bother paying back their creditors. Would that be a crisis for the entire U.S.? For the dollar? For worldwide stock markets?

If the U.S. could suffer the, well, relaxation of Chicago, why can’t Europe handle one country whose citizens take a more relaxed view of work than their creditors would like?

[Separately, events in Europe seem to reward caveman-style investing. Italians and Greeks have a wonderful lifestyle that doesn’t include too much hard work. England has a set of entrenched interest groups (see Mancur Olson) that would appear to make sustained economic growth impossible. Absent a lot of fancy data from investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, an investor would run away from any opportunity presented in these countries in favor of investments in Germany, Korea, China, etc. In the last year or two we find out that England is in fact more or less broke and that the numbers the investment banks and Greece put forward were simply false. Japan, I suppose, is the best counterexample to this caveman-style investing approach. People there are highly skilled and work very hard, but investors haven’t done well in the past couple of decades.]

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