Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One of the things that I learned in Seattle is that an Intel SSD drive can speed up a personal computer by 3-10X, depending on the task. An SSD boot drive is apparently becoming standard for employee desktop computers at Microsoft. The question therefore is why isn’t it easy to order a desktop PC pre-configured with the operating system and applications on an SSD drive? Neither Dell nor HP, for example, tries to sell consumers machines that boot from an SSD drive (though Dell will sell “workstations” that boot from SSD and XPS laptops that boot from SSD). Given the huge performance boost that the Microsoft experts report from using the latest fancy Intel drive, why isn’t it something that almost everyone wants? (If the answer is that people need an extra terabyte or two for storing video, the PCs in question all contain enough room in the case for a $150 traditional hard drive in addition.)

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Folks interested in a Seattle get-together: Let’s meet at www.andaluca.com any time between 8 am and 10 am tomorrow morning (Thursday). The restaurant is downtown in the Mayflower Park Hotel and features free valet parking. Stop by for a coffee at least and a conversation about any of topics discussed in this blog.

[I apologize for having to move the time from afternoon to morning, but it turns out that we must depart tomorrow afternoon for beautiful and exciting Billings, Montana. There we will overnight in a Best Western before cranking up the little airplane at first light in hopes of getting a passenger back to the East Coast in time for a 3 pm wedding.]

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I suggest reading this interesting New Yorker article on the authentication of oil paintings.

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Web Operations: Keeping the Data On Time, a new O’Reilly book, arrived in last week’s mail. I have reviewed in http://philip.greenspun.com/book-reviews/web-operations

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I’m helping a friend get to Boeing Field on Wednesday, departing for a return trip to Boston on Friday morning. He’ll be enduring some meetings in the exurbs, which puts me in Seattle for two nights and 1.5 days with very little to do. I would appreciate suggestions for where to stay (neighborhood or specific hotel) and what to do (museums, concerts (anything from Bach to Stravinsky), etc.).

Also, please email if you’re interested in meeting up. I’m thinking that a coffee shop on Thursday late afternoon would be good.

Update: I’m staying at the Mayflower Park Hotel (the FBO has a good rate with them) and it is just for one night. That means the meeting-up time needs to be breakfast/coffee on Thursday morning. I was thinking 8-10 am so that people who need to be at work by 9 can show up and also people who like to sleep in can show up at 9 or 9:30. Suggested places? A quick search of Google Maps and Yelp reveals… librarybistro.com, eatatlowells.com, andaluca.com (in my hotel), cherryst.com (which location has the best seating and quietest acoustics?).

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On average, Americans who work in the private sector are struggling financially. Millions are unemployed and the rest may be looking at an additional decade of toil before they can retire (since their houses and 401ks are worth so much less). Should we feel sorry for these folks in the same way that we might feel sympathy for Zimbabweans or other victims of an incompetent government?

Arguing in favor of sympathy is the basic fact that these folks are suffering, albeit not as badly as a lot of Africans.

Arguing against sympathy is that we Americans voted for politicians who promised to (1) continue fighting two very expensive wars, (2) ladle out fantastic raises and pensions to public employees, and (3) spend most of society’s wealth on the world’s most expensive health care system. The politicians delivered exactly what they promised. If the economy isn’t growing and public employees must be continually enriched, that necessarily means that folks in the private sector must be gradually impoverished. We got what we voted for, so how can any of us aged 30 or older be deserving of sympathy? [younger folks didn’t have a chance to vote for the current batch of politicians so they arguably deserve sympathy for having to share a country with so many shortsighted old folks]

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A very smart friend was visiting from Manhattan this weekend. His proximity to Wall Street gives him a window into the world of finance. His tendency to be out of sync with the average American protects him from the herd instinct. Despite having a demanding academic science job, he has been a successful individual investor for a couple of decades. In the spring of 2008, with the Dow at 13,000, he moved all of his family’s investments into bonds.

When conversation turned to the latest sag in the stock market, he opined that much worse was yet to come and that the Dow might get back down toward 7000. He cited the moribund U.S. economy and the profligate U.S. government (people who argue for stimulus spending tend to underestimate the government’s ability to waste money, e.g., putting a 6-year-old girl on the no-fly list (story)).

I have trouble letting go of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. If the Dow is at 9700 right now then that is the best estimate of where it will be a few years from now (plus whatever the yield on a TIPS bond is, i.e., 1-2% per year). With the U.S. state and federal governments amping up taxes and handing out the money to the retired, the world’s least efficient health care system, and political cronies, and 15 million Americans unemployed, how can the S&P 500 not be dragged down? My argument is that most of the companies in the S&P 500 aren’t dependent on the continued prosperity of working Americans. General Electric can build factories in and sell products to customers in any part of the world that is thriving economically. Intel can sell processors to families in Turkey, Brazil, and India. Walt Disney can welcome visitors to its Shanghai theme park. Admittedly many of the companies in the S&P 500 would appear to be dependent on American consumers, e.g., Southwest Airlines or various insurers. But even these should still produce good profits. The U.S. economy may end up with big shifts in wealth, e.g., from workers to retirees, from the private sector to government employees, and from competitive industries to government-sponsored industries. The per capita income of the U.S. may fall, as the population increases and the GDP remains constant. But as long as GDP does not fall, the same amount of money is there circulating for a company to collect as profit. [In January 2009, I wrote a posting about how the U.S. economy does not need to crash or boom; it can simply slide sideways as England’s did for decades.]

What do readers think? What plausible scenario causes the multinational companies in the S&P 500 to become worth significantly less than they are now?

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At dinner this evening folks were discussing why the tens of thousands of deaths on U.S. roads every year don’t get people more upset. I said that I was surprised that cars didn’t have transponders and a warning system. For example, a lot of accidents occur as people make left turns or pull out of driveways or side streets onto busy undivided highways. In those cases, a car that was aware of the position and velocity of other cars would be able to suggest “wait” and/or flash a red light in a heads-up display. Airliners have TCAS; why can’t cars have something similar?

[One friend objected that adding advanced electronics of this type would simply enable drivers to pay even less attention than they do currently, thus bringing the accident risk back to where it was (“risk compensation”).]

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Camera nerds: I have updated/tested the Photoshop script that I use to convert camera RAW files to multiple sizes of JPEG (adding EXIF and visible copyright information in the process) for Web publication. These are now tested with Adobe Photoshop CS5, which itself seems to be a very stable product on my 4-year-old Dell Windows XP machine.

All of the necessary scripts are free and open-source; download from http://photo.net/learn/photoshop/

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My friend Diane is an avid serious reader and told me about The English Major, the latest novel from Jim Harrison. I associate Harrison with macho fishing and hunting backwoods stories, so the fact that a woman enjoyed the book was a strong recommendation. The book concerns a 60-year-old Michigan farmer whose wife divorces him (“he bores the tits off me”), prompting a road trip. Now that people are living so much longer, our built-up stock of midlife crisis/adjustment literature may be losing some of its relevance. There are plenty of novels about people who confront big changes in their 40s, but not about those who are 60 and have to plan out the next 20 or 30 years without some of the resources that they had planned on.

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