Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

It was a perfect day for helicopter intro lessons today, but some of the Groupon customers will have to wait a bit longer before taking the controls of an East Coast Aero Club Robinson R44. Barack Obama came to our city to attend two fundraising events. Having been shut down by the temporary flight restriction put in place, I became interested in what Obama had to say. In this video, Obama talks about how the Massachusetts flood shows the value of Big Government. Without Big Government, he says, we wouldn’t be able to handle Nature’s wrath. This struck me as odd because, though we are new to our suburban neighborhood, we’ve gotten so many offers of help from neighbors (they’re aware that our house is right next to a pond and, indeed, the pond has expanded to cover parts of the driveway). Had our house been flooded, we would not need to go to a government-run shelter because at least four or five of our neighbors would be willing to take us in until the waters subside.

I’ll be the first to admit that we need Big Government if we are to bring democracy to 31 million Iraqis (there were a lot fewer when we invaded, but the Iraqis have been prolific (older posting)). But isn’t it kind of insulting to suggest that Americans wouldn’t be willing to help their neighbors and therefore the government must step in to deal with heavy rains that seriously affect perhaps 1 in 100 households?

[I might add that approximately one percent of the people I know in Massachusetts had a serious problem, e.g., a flooded basement that destroyed their furnace and/or hot water heater. In no case did they get any help from a government worker. In no case did they get any help from an insurance company (there is some fine print in the standard contract that excludes flood damage). They got help pumping out from neighbors, family, and friends.]

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Excited because the dealership was able to vacuum most of the water out from the interior of my Infiniti M35x (due to a leak in the sunroof drain system, which took two Infiniti dealers three years to debug, it used to smell like mildew; now it smells like mildew and the alcohol that they used, a month ago, to try to remove the mildew), I decided to splurge on an updated Navteq 7.5 map and point of interest DVD. It cost $120 including tax and delivery, i.e., about the same as a portable Garmin or Droid phone. The Navteq DVD was released in 2009, so I figured maybe it would have a better database than the 2006 DVD included with the car. I popped the new DVD in and tried searching for my friendly local hardware store. This is a small neighborhood place that we call “The Natick Home Depot”. It hadn’t been in the old database. Nor was it on the new disk, which did have directions to some Home Depots, but not the one in Natick, MA. Perhaps the store was fairly new. I called them up and asked when it was established. The woman who answered the phone said “I’ve worked here for 9 years, but the store has been here for about 15.”

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It costs between $25,000 and $50,000 to build a tennis court. The extra cost for a few webcams and a bullhorn should be less than $1000. There are a lot of great tennis players and coaches in India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. Instead of hiring an American teacher for $40-80 per hour, why wouldn’t someone hire an overseas tennis teacher for $5 per hour? The teacher could watch both players and give instructions through the bullhorn, e.g., “follow through”, “watch the ball”, “step with the other foot”.

Bonus: the overseas teachers could also serve as impartial line judges and scorekeepers. At a lot of tennis clubs, people are paying $20 per hour for court time so the $5 extra cost of the teacher/judge would not be significant.

You would think that this idea would be popular for almost any sport in which players stand in predictable locations, e.g., near golf tees, yet I don’t think that the service exists.

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Friends have been asking lately what I think of the health care bill, now that it has passed (and bears no resemblance to my own health care reform plan). Of course, like the legislators who voted it into law, I have not read the 1000 pages and truly have no idea what the intended and unintended implications might be. But I do get the main point: as a society we will be spending an extra $1 trillion on health care that we wouldn’t have spent previously. This is the part that strikes me as a non sequitur to the debate.

For the past few years we’ve been hearing about how inefficient and ineffective the American health care industry is. We spend ten times as much per capita as Mexico, for example, and achieve a similar life expectancy. We spend two or three times as much per capita as a lot of industrialized nations, are less healthy, and are tortured by paperwork and bureaucracy. If you heard about an industry that was this uncompetitive internationally, the next thing that you’d expect to hear would be “and this is how it is moving offshore” or “and that is why people are choosing to spend less money on this service.”

The logical punchline to the health care discussion should have been “The U.S. health care industry has not been able to deliver most services in an affordable way, so it is going to concentrate on emergency care and simple checkups and screening tests. Ambulatory patients who require surgery will walk into their local airport instead of their local hospital. A Boeing 747 [a product that we are pretty good at making] will take them to a country where they’ve figured out how to take care of people without bankrupting them.”

It is odd that Americans seem intent on believing that we can somehow “fix” our health care industry through clever command-and-control bureaucracy sitting at desks in Washington, D.C., and that this question is worthy of national debate. Imagine if we were buying flat-screen televisions, PCs, and mobile phones made in the U.S. by government and insurance company contractors. An average family’s consumer electronics budget would now be $100,000. Would it be worth debating why these companies needed to charge $100,000 for something that could be purchased from overseas for $2,000? Or would it be more productive simply to import those goods and concentrate on doing other things in the U.S.?

So… for those who have asked. My reaction to the health care bill is bewilderment. We heard all about how much money the U.S. health care industry was wasting. Then our political leaders decided to give the industry an extra $1 trillion. The money is coming from tax increases, so presumably it is being diverted from products and services that American consumers would willingly purchase from efficient and competitive suppliers.

[There does seem to be precedent for this. We heard about how Wall Street and Fannie Mae executives exposed their shareholders to enormous risks so that they could have a chance at earning billions of dollars in bonuses. The industry was fully exposed as a means of transferring shareholder wealth into employee pockets. Plainly shareholders would have been better off investing in German and Chinese financial services firms. The seemingly logical response to the situation would have been to let the insolvent Wall Street banks disappear and be replaced by prudently managed American and foreign banks (this would have required no government intervention). What did Congress and the Federal Reserve Bank do instead? Toss trillions of tax dollars onto the Wall Street bonfire (see my review of It Takes a Pillage).]

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Living on a hillside, with a lot of hydraulic pressure from the uphill slope against the concrete foundation, I am feeling very grateful to the engineers and concrete workers who built the walls and the slab of our 1968 classic Deck House. A flooded basement is truly bad news in a house like ours, where half of the living space is in what most folks would regard as the basement. We have a lot of new materials and knowledge, but it seems as though hard work and intelligence forty years ago counted for something.

So far, despite the heaviest rains in approximately 100 years, I can’t find a drop of water up against the foundation. The 1968 septic system has not overflowed either.

So… to those unknown concrete technicians: thank you.

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Today was the first ground school for the 2600 introductory helicopter lessons that we sold through Groupon. Fifteen students showed up somewhat bleary-eyed at 9 am. Contrary to dire predictions at the instructors’ meeting last night, nobody fell asleep and in fact people seemed enthusiastic about learning all of the new material. A young motorcycle-riding kid was overheard to say “It was pretty technical, but I found the explanations very interesting, even the physics.”

Our 25-question graduation exam turned out to be a good screening tool. Three students got more than 7 questions wrong and we sat down with them for an additional 45 minutes to address their points of confusion (two of them were non-native English speakers). After that everyone was signed off and all but two were able to fly this afternoon (the weather happens to be perfect today).

The instructors in the helicopters report that these are among the best-briefed intro students that they’ve flown with. The customers, debriefed after the flight said it was “awesome” or they were “addicted” or they wanted to continue all the way to a career as a helicopter pilot (admittedly that guy came in with the idea in the back of his head).

We are, of course, right now seeing the eager beavers who did the reading and immediately registered for ground school. But so far I am encouraged.

Videos:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0cKHXxm9vM
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_O9KnncjdCY
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0UVdsMvmBI

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It seems as though the 1000-page health care bill is soon to become law. A friend of mine suggested the following strategy:

Consider a family in Massachusetts that earns $100,000 per year. They decide not to pay $20,000 per year for health insurance in 2013 when the bill takes effect (we already have the highest rates in the U.S. (source)). They get fined 2 percent of their income by the IRS, which costs $2,000 per year, plus pay a bit out of pocket for routine checkups. When a family member is diagnosed with cancer and needs treatment, they sign up for health insurance at $20,000 per year. The insurance company cannot deny them coverage based on the preexisting condition that was diagnosed a week before. After the cancer has been treated, they drop the insurance.

What’s the flaw in this strategy?

[Update: An April 4, 2010 article in the Boston Globe, “Short-term customers boosting health costs”, indicates that precisely this strategy was being used here in Massachusetts during 2009 (we implemented the proposed federal system here on a statewide level). Additional rules and bureaucracy are being layered onto the system to discourage people going forward.]

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Consider a boring training video, such as this one on how to brief an instrument approach. At various times in this video, an FAA approach plate appears on screen. It would be nice if, during those periods, parts of the player became active for mouse clicks. Clicking near a fix would bring up the airnav.com page about that fix in a separate window, for example. So there might be three or four buttons hidden in the frame and those buttons would be active only as long as the plate remained on the screen (i.e., 5 or 10 seconds out of the total video).

I’m assuming that the best way to do this is in Flash, since that is the main way that people seem to be embedding videos these days and I believe that there are some open-source Flash video players. But I would be open to other ideas that will still work in a standard browser.

How tough would this be for someone who actually knew how to program in Flash?

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The latest New Yorker magazine has a fun article on marriage therapy and one of its early promoters, who also was an advocate of eugenics. Jill Lepore, one of my favorite New Yorker writers, picks out some choice quotes from Paul Popenoe:

“Many a college girl of the finest innate qualities, who sincerely desires to enter matrimony, is unable to find a husband of her own class, simply because she has been rendered so cold and unattractive, so overstuffed intellectually and starved emotionally, that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company.” (Popenoe was, at the time, unmarried. Two years later, at the age of thirty-two, he married a nineteen-year-old dancer.)

Marriage therapy does seem to be premised on the questionable assumption that it is possible to live with another human being, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, decade after decade, without them getting on one’s nerves.

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We’re expecting up to 2600 Groupon customers to come into East Coast Aero Club for ground school over the next calendar year. We’d like to avoid darkening the room and boring people to death with PowerPoint-style slides (illustration). That means a hand-out of about 10 pages, at least 70 percent color, that could be printed double-sided. So… now we’re talking about printing 2000+ copies (students should be able to take these course notes home with them). If done at Fedex/Kinko’s, this costs more than $5000. The latest generations of color laser printers don’t cost that much per page (Xerox claims down around 3 cents for some of theirs). So where to find a service bureau, ideally in the Boston area, that can take a PDF file and make us some stapled handouts at lower price than Kinko’s?

[I guess an alternative would be to have a traditional printer print this on a standard press, but we don’t want to print all 2600 copies at once because we may refine our ground school outline.]

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