Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

This is a follow-up to my posting about our attempt to get some Yelp reviews. The reason that we wanted to look good on Yelp is that we were planning to market some helicopter intro lessons via Groupon. We took our standard $225 helicopter into lesson and had Groupon sell it for $69. The fraction that they share with us will cover some of the cost of spinning the helicopter; we instructors will have to volunteer our time in order to try to convert some of these folks into long-term customers. We expected to sell 200 and hoped for 500. We figured that maybe 1-3 percent of these people would sign up as regular students, so we’d put in a few weekends of sweat and come out with 2-10 new students.

Starting just after 6 am, Groupon sent out emails to its roughly 200,000 Boston subscribers. I knew that there might be a problem when I checked a few minutes after receiving my email (I am a subscriber). They’d already sold 30. By 11:00 am, they’d sold more than 2000. We finally had to beg them to shut it down at 2600 (we could have set a limit initially but didn’t think to).

I think what this shows is that we were much worse at marketing than even we could have believed. East Coast Aero Club has been training pilots since 1985 and the owner reports that people almost invariably say “I didn’t know that I could learn to fly here; I thought that Hanscom was only an Air Force base.” Because the phone very seldom rings with new customer inquiries we figured that there was almost no market for helicopter lessons in Boston and not too much for airplanes either (though ECAC is one of the nation’s larger flight schools, with about 30 airplanes). One lesson that I’ve learned from Groupon, though, is that there were probably a lot more potential customers out there than we imagined but they didn’t know we existed.

On the other hand, we probably priced this deal too low. A huge number of customers telephoned the office to ask if they could buy the $69 intro lesson deal directly from us. We tried gently to explain that we weren’t quite sure how we were going to serve 2600 customers and that adding a 2601st would not help. We then offered them the $225 standard intro lesson price, which is already discounted to some extent. Nobody was interested at that price. So unless we can figure out how to sell them 2nd, 3rd, and 4th lessons at $69, perhaps this will be the first and last flight for nearly all of these folks.

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A friend looked at my posting about the proposed sales tax on airplanes in Massachusetts, likely to send airplanes and associated jobs across the border into tax-free New Hampshire, and asked “Why should there be a sales tax on cars and not on airplanes?” My first answer was “Because it is a lot quicker to fly a $50 million Gulfstream over the border than drive a $20,000 Toyota” (though perhaps this is wrong given recent reports of sprightly performance, albeit unintended, in Toyotas). But the deeper answer was “There shouldn’t be a sales tax on cars. It doesn’t make sense to discourage people from buying new fuel-efficient low-emissions cars. If the government wants to collect money from drivers it should do it by taxing gasoline, thus discouraging people from driving inefficient and high pollution cars.”

It seemed an obvious idea, but as far as I know there aren’t any states that have dropped a car sales tax and substituted a higher gas tax. How come?

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Folks: I’d like to create a file system archive of an email account. Suppose that I have 100 messages in an email account (for concreteness sake, let’s assume they are in gmail). I can configure the email account as a POP or IMAP server. From a Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, I would like to fetch all 100 of the email messages and write each one out to a file. I would like it if the file were sensibly named, but that isn’t critical. How to do this?

I think that I’ve tried the obvious solution, which is to pull the messages down into Microsoft Outlook and then “export” a folder. The result is a .csv file containing all the messages from the folder.

A friend suggested using Thunderbird and the following extension: http://www.nic-nac-project.de/~kaosmos/mboximport-en.html

Better ideas?

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When I told a friend about East Coast Aero Club’s experience with Yelp, he pointed me to “Yelp Accused of Extortion” in WIRED magazine. Our story: We asked our customers to register with Yelp and post reviews of our airplane and helicopter flight school. About 15 of them did so and the Yelp page was filled with positive reviews. A few days later, however, we looked and 11 of them had been removed. Now it is down to just 2 reviews. Another friend said “Just wait; they are going to call you up soon and ask you to pay them a monthly fee. Then they will restore the positive reviews. Companies with a lot of negative reviews get the same call; if they pay a fee the negative reviews are removed.”

[At first I thought that, because the reviews were entered over just a few days, Yelp might have legitimately thought that they were spam. But then I reflected that they were all from legitimate and diverse email address, from diverse IP addresses (though probably nearly all in the Boston area), and pretty clearly from different pens. A human reviewer would not have concluded that these were spam.]

[Update: I got an email from a reader, who happens also to be a Yelp employee. He says that the allegations are unfounded and that whether or not reviews appear is purely algorithmic, with the main goal of the algorithm being to fight spam. He is not allowed to say much more than what’s published at http://www.yelp.com/business/common_questions on the subject, but obliquely confirmed my suspicion that the algorithm might suppress reviews from people who register, post one review, and leave. The goal of Yelp is to have a genuine community in which people return to the site regularly, so burying the contributions of people who aren’t regulars might not be unreasonable. It is kind of tough on a business like East Coast Aero Club. Apparently our young customers are too poor to eat in restaurants and our older customers are boring, married, and suburban. So none of them were regular Yelp users to begin with.]

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One of the things that kept America poor during the Great Depression was the constant fear of new laws and taxes. According to The Forgotten Man it was Adolf Hitler, not FDR, who finally put Americans back to work after about 10 years of unemployment and despair. Our governor here in Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, is apparently trying to channel the spirit of FDR. Every year he proposes to install a new sales tax on aircraft and aircraft maintenance (see this story about his attempt in 2010). Every year businesses draw up plans to move operations and employees to the adjacent tax-free state of New Hampshire (10 minutes away by jet; savings on a Gulfstream would be $3 million, which pays for a lot of 10-minute hops) or develop a more exotic legal structure that will avoid the tax. Every year, so far, the legislature fails to enact the new tax.

The Aircraft Owners and Pilot’s Association calculates that when the tax was repealed eight years ago the result was a 40 percent increase in the number of aircraft based in Massachusetts, which meant that the state was able to collect payroll, income, and property tax from the pilots and mechanics associated with those aircraft as well as fuel taxes and property taxes on new hangars that were constructed.

No doubt it would be delightful if a company bought a $50 million Gulfstream and happily wrote a $3 million check to the Commonwealth, but that is not what happened historically. Companies instead set up flight departments and built hangars in tax-free states and brought the Gulfstream down to Massachusetts when necessary. Companies would lease airplanes from owners based in tax-free states. Companies would charter planes from air carriers based on tax-free states.

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Fuji is now making cameras that can locate dog and cat faces within the frame for improved autofocus. The company has prepared a helpful guide to choosing a dog or cat breed.

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I have completed a review of Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, which includes a discussion of how we could apply the book’s principles to our helicopter business. Comments/corrections would be appreciated.

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I’ve drafted a book review of Life Without Lawyers and would appreciate comments/corrections.

Thanks in advance.

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Buried in this New York Times article is the calculation that U.S. federal government debt, including pension and health care obligations, is about 500 percent of GDP. This may explain why political debates have become acrimonious. Investors and some politically-minded folks have at least a gut feeling that we’re ridiculously overextended. Others rely on the stated fraction of GDP and think the debt is not a big deal. So each side is behaving rationally and rationally believes opponents to be insane.

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The nine-year-old children who came into work with their father at the JFK Tower (story, with audio recording) seem to have captured the public imagination. I’ve been asked my opinion on this subject at least 25 times. A lot of why people are excited seems to stem from a misunderstanding of how the air traffic control (ATC) system works. Folks seem to think that controllers make split-second decisions and pilots react instantly to commands heard on the radio. The reality is that a plane can take off from JFK, lose contact with the controllers due to radio failure, and fly all the way to Los Angeles and land, without ever talking to another controller. The route of flight clearance issued prior to departure should be sufficient to get all the way to LAX.

How about the takeoff clearances issued by the 9-year-olds? A light simple plane might start rolling immediately after receiving such a clearance. A heavy complex plane could be delayed for 15 seconds or longer as the pilots ran final checklists and waited for the engines to “spool up” (going from idle to full thrust takes about 8 seconds on the biggest planes). A controller would have several seconds after issuing the takeoff clearance to cancel it, which would cause the pilot to pull the power back and stop on the runway, possibly after rolling forward a few feet. The opportunities for miscommunication here were very few. The planes had already been told to “position and hold” on a particular runway by the father. At this point a jet is parked on an active runway. The pilots know that they can’t hang out there for very long. The only possible things that could be said to them are “continue to hold” (unnecessary but possibly something ATC would say), “cleared for takeoff”, or “exit the runway and contact Ground”. They already have their assigned departure heading, altitude, and the frequency for the next controller.

The 9-year-olds also told some of the pilots to “contact Departure”. What would have happened if they never received the instruction and stayed with the Tower? Eventually they would have realized that they shouldn’t be talking to Tower at 5,000′ above the ground and called to request a frequency change and/or simply switched to their already-assigned Departure control frequency.

Because ATC needs to train new controllers, each workstation is equipped so that both the trainee and trainer can talk on the same frequency. The trainer can break in and override the trainee. This happens all the time at Hanscom Field, our home airport. The 9-year-olds did their job perfectly, so there was never a need for their father to correct or step in over them, but he could have done so at any time.

There are several aspects to working as a tower controller. One is to figure out an overall flow and sequence that will work for a dozen or so airplanes at a time; this is pretty challenging and involves thinking in four dimensions (3D space plus time). A much simpler task is issuing instructions to make that flow and sequence happen. It seems doubtful that the 9-year-olds were involved in the puzzle solving challenge. They took on part of the instruction-issuing task. As a pilot I am much more nervous when a 25-year-old is being trained at Hanscom than I would have been at JFK talking to these 9-year-olds.

For those who thought that the 9-year-olds were truly doing the job, I was surprised that they did not also question why more than $200,000 per year of their tax dollars were going to pay salary/benefits/pension for each controller. As far as the FAA bureaucracy is concerned, this is the organization that spent $9 billion in the 1980s and 1990s on some new software that had to be thrown out, the most expensive civilian software project failure in history. By making America $9 billion poorer, surely some Americans died as a consequence (being poor is generally less safe than being rich). Yet no FAA employees were disciplined. In fact, all concerned got pay raises, promotions, etc. The same organization is now disciplining the father of the 9-year-olds and his supervisor.

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