Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Tasked with a shopping list for a Mexican dish, I went to the supermarket to look for some dried pinto beans. I couldn’t find them, so I asked the 17-year-old girl working the information desk where they might be found. “Dry beans?” she asked. “Do you mean canned beans?” I replied that canned beans are typically pretty wet. “Is it a new product?” I replied that I thought dry beans had been available in the Americas for roughly 5000 years (Wikipedia says 6000). She said “We have some soup beans, but I’ve never heard of dry or dried beans.”

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This aero-news.net report says that intra-Asia air travel, with 647 million passengers in 2009, has surpassed the North American market, which carried 638 million people. Can Asian airlines celebrate? Maybe not; they collectively lost $3.4 billion last year.

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A friend who is originally from India is coming by this weekend for a farewell-to-the-U.S. visit. He has a Ph.D. from an American university. He has a good job on Wall Street. He owns a condo in the NYC area. He owns a car. He has no wife or kids. His U.S. visa has run out and he and his employer and all of their lawyers can’t figure out how to get it extended. He’s moving to London and will continue his work for this bank from there.

So… even as we welcome uneducated refugees from the world’s trouble spots, we’re deporting a person who consumes virtually no government services. The guy is not in school, is not old enough for Medicare, has no kids to dump off on the state for 6 hours a day, has never been convicted of a crime or imprisoned, and has never collected unemployment insurance. Meanwhile he pays federal income tax, city income tax, state income tax, social security tax, medicare tax, unemployment insurance (tax), tolls, car sales tax, gas tax, car registration fees, property tax on his condo, sales tax, meals tax (those Wall St. guys eat pretty lavishly).

How do we do stuff like this without eventually running out of money?

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Tomorrow is going to be one of the nicest days to fly during this entire Boston winter. The weather will be sunny and the winds calm. It should be a perfect day for flying, collecting some money from students and renters, and paying taxes to the Commonwealth so that Obama’s Aunt Zeituni can continue to live in state-funded housing (at least until February 4, when her next deportation hearing is scheduled (source)). Except that we won’t be flying because Barack Obama has decided to spend the whole afternoon in Manchester and Nashua, New Hampshire (story). Hanscom Field falls within the 30-nautical-mile “no flight training” zone (TFR).

The cost to the taxpayers and economy of this speech would probably be sufficient to build several hospitals in Haiti. Aside from whatever productivity is lost from having the president not working at his desk and local businesses shut down, we’re looking at getting a Boeing 747 to and from the Manchester airport. Then there are helicopters, limos, and SUVs to take the president and his Praetorian Guard from Manchester to a high school in Nashua (Nashua has its own airport, completely with instrument landing system, control tower, and 6,000′ runway suitable for corporate looters in their monster Gulfstreams, but it isn’t big enough for a Boeing 747 plus whatever other aircraft come up from Washington, D.C.).

What could he be telling these folks that they didn’t hear in the state of the union speech last week?

[Perhaps we should adopt a “glass is half full” outlook. Nancy Pelosi isn’t joining Mr. Obama. According to this aero-news.net piece, Pelosi and her entourage consumed $101,000 in food and alcohol while using U.S. Air Force planes to commute home, visit foreign countries, etc.]

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A friend asked today how to make sense of Barack Obama’s proposed plan to have the federal government spend $3.8 trillion per year (nytimes). The traditional way to look at this is divide it by U.S. GDP of $14 trillion and come up with 27 percent of GDP. Today, though, I wondered if it made more sense to look at it as a percentage of the private economy, which is the primary tax source. Ignoring state and local government spending, the federal government would need to collect 37 percent of private GDP in taxes. But if we add in state and local government spending, total government spending is trending towards 50 percent of GDP. If private GDP is truly the source of U.S. wealth, the government would have to tax nearly 100 percent of it in order to feed itself. As taxes are plainly not 100 percent, this way of looking at the numbers can’t be right.

So we have to circle back and look at government itself as a source of GDP. If the government redistributes money to Social Security recipients, for example, that cash is spent pretty much in the same way as it would have been by the people from whom it was taxed (though obviously they might have preferred to keep it and spend it themselves!). If the government pays interest on debt to U.S. bondholders, does that contribute to GDP? What if the government pays interest to a Chinese bondholder?

I’m wondering if it will get ever more challenging to compute GDP as the government grows. Certainly we had a tough time figuring out the Soviet Union’s GDP and even the Soviet economists couldn’t quite figure it out due to a lack of market prices for many goods.

Circling back to the $3.8 trillion… how do we make sense of that number?

I’ll start: the Haitians have asked for $3 billion to rebuild their wrecked city of 2 million souls. So the U.S. government proposes to spend enough in one year to build new cities, complete with infrastructure, for 2.5 billion people.

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The piece of computer hardware that I would most like to buy right now is a 30″ touch screen computer monitor. I find it difficult to use the mouse while walking on a treadmill desk. Lifting up a hand to press a link on the screen would work well, I think, and I believe that Windows 7 already includes support for a touch screen. I’ve grown accustomed to the Dell 30″ monitor on my desktop. It cost about $1300 back in 2006. Surely an innovative industry would have the same thing now, for about the same price, but with touch sensitivity. A quick look at the Dell site reveals that thanks to four years of innovation by engineers, hard work by Americans to boost the value of our currency, and the manufacturing learning curve… a slightly improved version of my monitor is selling for $1700. It is not touch-sensitive.

How come I can’t buy at least a 24″ touch-sensitive monitor to plug into a standard PC? The technology has been around since the 1960s (Wikipedia) and was widely available in the 1980s.

Separately, Apple has announced its latest contribution to the touch-screen world. I’m more enthusiastic about the iPad than I was about the iPhone (my ideal phone would be a flip-phone with a real keyboard). If they deliver on the 10-hour battery life it could be a nice electronic book reader, though not a perfect substitute for a Kindle, which can be taken on a one-week trip without a charger. An on-screen keyboard should work reasonably well on the iPad’s 9″ screen. The fact that Apple is mass-producing the iPad should make it a good value.

Things that I like about the iPad:

• reasonably large screen size; computers have gotten orders of magnitude more powerful since 1976 when I started programming, but the screens have not grown much
• dedicated volume up/down buttons; I have never liked the traditional iPods because it is possible to get them into a user interface state from which it requires numerous twists and clicks to get back to a state in which it is possible to adjust the volume
• presumably fairly rugged (the iPhones seem to survive a lot of abuse anyway)

How would a family use it? Maybe park it on a bookshelf as a digital photo frame and for charging. Take it out of the stand for use as a book or magazine reader. Use it to adjust a Sonos music system (though for most people, probably the iPad will be the music system, docked into a stand that includes speakers). Hand it to a child who wants to watch a TV program that nobody else wants to watch. Take it into the car for back seat entertainment.

I haven’t quite figured out why the iPad is useful for business. Most people with desk jobs already have a laptop computer with full keyboard. The iPad is a little too big to be carried around by people who actually work for a living (i.e., it can’t replace the handheld computers used by UPS drivers and its screen would become unreadable if used by a mechanic with greasy hands).

When you see a product like this you realize why the car industry is in so much trouble. I am considering becoming a recidivist minivan owner. I priced a Toyota Sienna the other day, the only minivan that comes with AWD for our hellish driveway and which has been supposedly completely redesigned for “2011”. One might have expected the kind of radical re-thinking of the dashboard that Tata did for the Nano (on track to sell 100,000 cars by March), but no. The tachometer is right in front of the driver, hogging real estate. When was the last time a minivan driver wondered whether the engine was turning 1800 rpm or 2500 rpm? The navigation screen is way off to the right and lower, necessitating a much longer diversion of the driver’s eyes from the road.

Since electronics have gotten ridiculously cheap, did Toyota throw them all in as standard? Let’s consider what we’re talking about here: a Bluetooth speakerphone ($50?), a GPS ($100), and a back seat DVD player ($150). In fact, none of these are standard. You can buy these $300 of electronics in a bundle for $6000 (which will really sting a few years down the road when DVDs have gone extinct in favor of digital files and Blu-Ray). Does the car offer a “keep my dog cool” mode that runs the existing fans when parked? No. Does the car offer a “call me if I’ve left a baby in the car” mode that uses the existing microphones, alarm, and temperature sensors to detect that someone is in a parked car while the temperature is climbing? No. [This article explains that the nanny state required parents to move kids to the back seat to save them from the big bad airbag (a previous mandate from the government). Due to consumers not exhibiting the perfect memories that government bureaucrats depended on, now “vehicle-related heat deaths far outnumber fatalities caused by airbag injuries” (car ride tends to put baby to sleep; parent forgets that out-of-sight baby is in the car).]

My neighbor sold an older Chrysler minivan in perfect condition for $2000. Someone who bought his minivan could buy a Motorola Droid phone ($2000 over three years, including service), a car dock ($30), and enjoy a far superior GPS experience from Google Maps (which includes free traffic information; with the Toyota system you have to pay for a subscription). Then he could add two Apple iPads for the kids to use in the back ($1000). He wouldn’t need the bluetooth speakerphone because the Droid already is a speakerphone. So… for the price of just the basic electronics options in the Toyota, a consumer could have a minivan, free phone service, and $1000 left over.

Is it any wonder that car sales in the U.S. are stagnant?

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If you thought a stuck gas pedal in a Toyota was bad, check out this story about a pilot’s first taxi in a homebuilt airplane.

In another driver versus pilot comparison, check this story on a Cessna 152 landing on the New Jersey Turnpike. My favorite part is the quote from the NJTP spokesman: “The plane landed, he taxied it over to the shoulder. We can’t even get motorists to do that when they break down.”

[Separately, I’m wondering whether the Toyota accidents would have been avoided if the driver had switched the transmission into neutral (airplanes don’t generally have a transmission so this is not an option for the pilot (some airplanes have a gearbox, but it can’t be disengaged)).]

Update: I found an interesting Car and Driver test of stopping distances when the brakes are fighting the engine.]

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Folks:

I’ve drafted a book review of It Takes a Pillage and would appreciated comments/corrections.

Thanks.

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Most of my knowledge about child care comes from watching Hollywood films. The darling child gets sleepy at the end of the day. The adult reads the child a bedtime story and the kid gradually gets sleepier and sleepier, dozing off halfway through.

The other night I was visiting a friend. She was in bed with her 2-year-old daughter at around 8:30 pm, reading her a story, just like in the movies. Then the hospital called and mom, a medical doctor, had to drive in. “Do you mind taking over?” she asked. “No problem,” I replied, thinking about the warm glow around bedtime from all of those movies. I grabbed a copy of Peter Rabbit, took off my shoes, and got on the bed. The girl lost interest after two pages, stood up, and put out her arms to be hoisted down off the bed. I pulled her closer to me and started reading again. She wriggled away and went to the foot of the bed. I told her that it was sleepy time and she needed to stay in bed. She was insistent. There was crying. I asked if she needed to go pee-pee, but could not get an intelligible answer. Based on my experience with dogs, I figured I would put her on the floor and see if she walked to the bathroom. She walked to her toys in the living room. I tried to play with her, but she wasn’t responding. I started typing on the computer. Eventually she came over and fell asleep, face-down, on my feet.

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This would be a good general knowledge job interview question. Give folks these facts: Canon introduced the EF mount in 1987 with the first EOS bodies; there are 6.7 billion people on the planet; Canon is the market leader in camera systems with interchangeable lenses, but Nikon is a close second; every user of a complex camera has at least one lens (and typically bodies are sold in a kit with one (crummy) lens); the cost of a body and one lens has ranged from $300 in the primitive old film days, but thanks to advances in modern technology, prices start at around $500 these days. Even from a person with no photography experience, I think it is reasonable to expect an answer that is within one order of magnitude to the question “How many lenses has Canon produced for the EOS cameras?”

For the answer… check out this Canon press release.

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