Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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.

Full post, including comments

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?

Full post, including comments

Folks:

My favorite whole-house music system is Sonos. They used to make a handy controller that cost $400, but discontinued it because the same functions can theoretically be accomplished from a standard Android or iOS device running the Sonos app. Consumers did not want to pay $400 when an Android tablet can be had for as little as $50. Unfortunately, the standard Android or iOS tablet turns out not to be nearly as convenient as the Sonos dedicated controller.

The Sonos controller would wake up if it sensed motion, i.e., if a human picked it up. Is there any tablet on the market that will do this? Or is there an app for iOS or Android that will make it happen?

The Sonos controller always woke up in “Sonos control” mode because that’s all that it could do. An iOS or Android tablet will typically wake up or boot up on its home screen, presenting a bewildering array of options and necessitating extra steps to get to the Sonos app.

Is there an easy way to have an Android or iOS device automatically start the Sonos app when the operating system boots? And then present that app on wake-up?

[Separately, I will note that it is amazing how easy it is to become lazy. I used to take LP records out of their jackets, clean them, and put them on a turntable, then flip the LP over after 20 minutes. Now it bothers me that I have to press an extra button or two!]

Full post, including comments

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/nyregion/large-poor-families-are-left-out-of-new-yorks-housing-plans-officials-say.html is one of my favorite New York Times articles in a long time. The best minds of government and non-profit organizations (and journalism, since the NYT saw fit to run the story on the front page) have discovered that it is challenge to support and house a family of eight (two parents plus six children) in New York City on an income of $1700/month (roughly my stipend as a single graduate student at MIT in the early 1990s!).

Full post, including comments

For the early part of my career as a computer nerd, “legacy software” was something to be deprecated and rewritten by me and my heroic colleagues. Increasingly, however, I am encountering people for whom software that I wrote back in 1995 is the “legacy system”. On a summer beach picnic with Greta, I randomly talked to an online course developer at the Berklee School of Music, for example, who said that the school had used the .LRN system for about 10 years and it had “served us well” but had recently migrated to something new. As I was the reviewer of the SQL data model and page flow for this module of the ArsDigita Community System (described in this book chapter), I felt a surge of pride at the fact that it had worked so well for so long. I felt even better hearing that Zipcar was still relying on the ArsDigita Community System, despite having hired programmers and attempting to write something newer and fancier. It probably is a character flaw that it makes me feel good to hear that a group of new programmers with much better tools and much more money and time have thus far utterly failed to get to where Eve, Jin, Tracy, Aure, and I got back in 1995-1999… (we had four years, of course, which is a long time, but we and the folks who joined us built about 200 different applications during those four years)

Perhaps the way to make a COBOL programmer feel good on her deathbed is to find some customers who have never been able to migrate off the mainframe…

Full post, including comments

I’ve always liked all-in-one PCs, having bought my first back in 2000 from Gateway. I’m considering getting a Dell XPS 27 with the touch screen so that I can try out Windows 8 (don’t worry, I am prepared for Windows 8 to suck! Frankly I haven’t found any new Microsoft features since Windows XP that I thought were useful). Dell seems to make a pretty good product for around $2000 (includes 8 GB of RAM and a 2 TB hard drive for video editing/storage). What I can’t figure out is why there is no SSD cache or accelerator available from Dell or indeed why this isn’t standard. I bought a $1000 17″ laptop from HP last summer and, due to its 32 GB SSD accelerator, it boots just about as fast as a fully SSD-based machine yet has a huge capacity for storing video and the accelerator was only about a $50 option (based on SSD accelerators on amazon.comthe price seems to be about the same today).

If everyone hates computers that are slow to boot, why hasn’t the SSD accelerator idea caught on as a standard feature?

[Anticipating that the Apple fan club would chime in with some derision… I priced a similar configuration over at Apple and found that $2549  is the price for a 27″ all-in-one with similar CPU, memory, and hard drive capacity. But the Apple product does not have a touch screen so really there is no direct comparison. Anyway, it would be good if people could confine comments to the question of why this $50 item is not in every personal computer rather than the question of how anyone could be stupid enough to buy a non-Apple product.]

Update 10/20/2012: Dell just added a $2500 “monster” config for the XPS 27. It has a 32 GB SSD accelerator (in front of a 2 TB conventional hard drive), 16 GB of RAM, and a Blu-ray drive.  That still does leave the question of why don’t they offer this as an option on their $1000+ PCs. Almost every magazine review seems to indicate that the SSD accelerator improves system performance more than anything comparably priced.

Full post, including comments

As individual parents, we want our children to live better than we have lived and to take advantage of whatever we have built for ourselves. As voters, however, it seems that we have been stealing from our children, such a shameful act that very few parents would be willing to admit to wanting to do it, yet somehow collectively we are able to justify it. The Economist’s September 29, 2012 issue carries an article titled “Sponging Boomers” that describes how “each American born in 1945 can expect nearly $2.2m in lifetime net transfers from the state–more than any previous cohort.” (most of the data for the article comes from the International Monetary Fund)

Must we as today’s parents therefore leave our children a trust fund of a certain amount just so that they can break even on all of the transfer payments that they will be forced by the state to pay back to us?

Let’s consider a few ways in which we might let ourselves off the hook. If the population grows enough, especially through immigration, we can tell ourselves that it isn’t our own children from whom we are stealing but rather from immigrants and the children of immigrants. The U.S. population was just 140 million in 1945 (source), less than half of what it is today. The sponging boomer born in 1945 is arguably being paid back not by a single young person but by at least two.

Another way that we could let ourselves off the hook is by imagining that our own children will emigrate to a country where they won’t have to transfer a large percentage of their earnings to an older generation via taxes. For example, they might emigrate to Holland where pensions are fully funded in advance or to Australia or Singapore.

Finally we could argue that today’s child will somehow be able to kick the can down the road to his or her own children via (1) massive borrowing at today’s very low interest rates, (2) massive immigration of highly skilled workers who will grow both the population and the economy.

If we can’t let ourselves off the hook, roughly how much do we have to give each child in 2012 so that he or she can ultimately pay the taxes that will cover our Medicare, Social Security, and pensions (for those of us who are public employees)?

[This question is timely due to the pending expiration of estate tax exemptions. After 2012, “leaving money to children” will translate to “giving money to the federal government”.]

Full post, including comments

Having predicted Obama’s reelection (December 2011 posting), I have not been following politics. However, last night I attended a friend’s debate-watching party in Cambridge and ended up watching the entire televised event.

If Romney is going to lose, he could go out with integrity, e.g., telling the woman who asked about tax breaks to be eliminated “Yes I will get rid of mortgage interest deduction because it is a huge subsidy to an industry that we should not be subsidizing.” Yet he does not appear to be heading down this path, preferring instead to pander to voters and tell them what they want to hear. Everyone is going to better off under Romney. The military will get more funding, citizens will pay lower taxes, the health care industry will continue to be showered with Medicare funds, nobody will have to work harder (except for the 20+ million unemployed or discouraged), etc. It sounds too good to be true.

When repeatedly attacked for his personal finances, Romney could have pointed out that his apparently low personal tax rate from investment income is due to the fact that it comes from corporations that already pay the world’s highest tax rates. Instead, he remained silent.

Incumbency has been a huge advantage in a country that is fearful of change. But as I watched Romney score point after point against Obama for having been associated with Americans for four years, it occurred to me that incumbency in a sclerotic country freighted down with entitlements, pension obligations, and special interest lobbyists is a liability in a debate. It really isn’t Obama’s fault that Congress won’t do anything without permission from lobbyists or that a huge number of American workers cannot be employed economically, if for no other reason than a lot of the stuff that makes the U.S. such a bad place to do business is happening at the state level. But Obama promised hope and change four years ago and now he looks bad for not delivering.

Romney kept referring back to Ronald Reagan, which struck me as naive. Reagan was able to foster growth, but the country was not smothered with debt and other problems. Public employee unions were relatively new. There weren’t huge numbers of retired state workers on $100,000+/year pensions that needed to be carried by current workers, for example. Reagan’s U.S. economy did not have to compete with China and India.

Speaking of China, the China bashing made me ashamed. Obama talked about his heroic success in preventing Americans from buying inexpensive tires from China. Obama is proud of the fact that America’s millions of unemployed people must pay higher tire prices because 1000 union jobs were preserved (we don’t know how many jobs were lost due to China blocking our imports in retaliation). Romney, meanwhile, talked several times about doing something aggressive to China because they are competing unfairly somehow. Apparently no politician is willing to stand up and say “China is full of people who worked hard in school and now work hard at their jobs, which is why their economy is growing so fast.”

My strongest impression was that our political system is not equipped to deal with reality.

Full post, including comments

One of Mitt Romney’s big ideas is a dramatic increase in funding for the U.S. military. As a taxpayer this reminds me of watching $1 billion Navy ships confronting a few Somalis in a rubber boat with an outboard motor and wondering “How could we possibly afford to sort through these guys one at a time?”

A friend of mine is a retired Air National Guard officer. I asked him whether he thought that his corner of the military was spending money efficiently. He said “My entire branch of the Air Force should not have existed. State governors don’t need fighter jets at their command. The Air National Guard should be merged with the Air Force Reserve.”

How would that save money?

“There are about 6000 officers and civilians in the Air National Guard headquarters at Andrews Air Force base. We call it the ‘crystal palace’. Every person there has a job that duplicates a job in the Air Force Reserve, which usually duplicates a job in the mainline Air Force. For example, there are F-16s, KC-135s, and C-130s in all three of these branches. Each branch therefore has a group of program managers who are responsible for buying spare parts for, say, the F-16. Each branch has ‘career field managers’ for every possible job within the branch, e.g., maintenance or finance.”

How much would that save? If we figure $300,000 per year per person, including real estate and pension and health care benefits, 6000 people costs about $1.8 billion per year (admittedly less than 1/500th of an Obama annual deficit).

My friend said “Don’t forget that the same thing can be done in reverse for the Army. Give the Army Reserve to the governors to be part of the National Guard.” He finished by pointing out that Congress and the military seldom truly save money because they are seldom willing to shut anything down completely. Instead of closing a base, they will cut operations to 10 percent of what they had been, but this leaves the taxpayer still with about 75 percent of the cost.

At first glance it would appear that Mitt Romney, having noticed that the country is spending way beyond its means, has decided to give one of the world’s least efficient organizations a whole lot more money. Has Romney articulated how our society will benefit by putting extra money into the military?

Full post, including comments

A distressing trend in American museums and public aquariums is the substitute of touch screens or, in the case of San Francisco’s aquarium, non-touch screens, for paper signs or backlit transparencies. In theory it sounds good to replace a 1 cent piece of paper with a $500 touch screen, but in practice it is now possible to learn about just one animal at a time where in the past it was possible to learn about all of the animals in a tank at once. Below is a rather clumsy touch screen from the Dallas aquarium. It was not nearly as responsive as an Android or iOS tablet and most patrons simply gave up on using these devices. It would have taken 5 minutes or so to associate names with photos for 10 or 12 fish within a tank. Maybe Edward Tufte needs to write a new book just for people who design museum exhibits, explaining that it is better to be able to see 20 things without any interface.

Full post, including comments