Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Voting in Massachusetts is generally an uninteresting activity where the Democrat always wins and spending always ratchets upward. This year there is one interesting technical proposition on the ballot, a proposal to repeal an obscure “affordable housing” law that has yielded billions of dollars in subsidies and profits for developers. The folks behind this have a Web site at http://www.affordablehousingnow.org/. I surveyed the Millionaires for Obama in my neighborhood and they were generally in favor of repealing the law (“yes” on 2), which keeps towns perpetually in fear of falling below a state threshold for the percentage of units that are “affordable”. Once a town falls below this threshold, a developer can apparently buy a 5-acre lot and put up a 200-unit condo without regard to local zoning laws. The developer can apparently draw on taxpayer funds to finance his 200-unit condo as long as a small fraction of the units are sold relatively cheap (apparently a high percentage of the folks who get to buy the cheap units turn out to be friends and in-laws of the developer). If the project fails, the taxpayers are stuck with the loss. If the project succeeds, the developer collects the profit.

One bizarre aspect of the law as it has stood for some years is that the counting is done separately in each of the approximately 350 towns and cities (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Massachusetts ) of the state. Instead of putting a pin in the map on top of an employer and asking “What’s the chance that a person could find an affordable place to live within a reasonable commuting distance of this employer?” the question is asked “What if someone really wants to live in Acushnet or Tyringham?” If a formerly compliant town were to split into two separate entities, it is quite likely that the law would kick into action because one of the two new towns would have a surplus and one would have a deficit of affordable housing. Despite the fact that nothing had changed from the perspective of an individual, millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies and lucrative zoning exemptions would begin to flow automatically.

Discussing the proposition made me reflect on whether affordable housing is an achievable goal independent of economic prosperity. Much of the cost of building a house is in materials whose prices are set on the world market by demand from successful growing economies, such as China and Brazil. If a country has a growing population and a shrinking or stagnant economy, inevitably housing is going to become less affordable for the average worker. A job that formerly was sufficient to afford a two-bedroom apartment will now be sufficient only to pay for a studio apartment or perhaps to share the two-bedroom apartment with another worker. What purpose is served by funneling hundreds of billions of dollars (nationwide) into subsidizing housing? Wouldn’t an American be better off in the long run with a smaller simpler house and a larger set of skills and better education? If so, why not put the money that we’re currently spending on affordable housing into free educational materials for the Web and into subsidized educational programs? (Assuming that returning the money to taxpayers is too radical an idea for any politician to propose.)

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This 2006 scientific biography of Andre Geim, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics this year, is interesting partly because of Geim’s refusal to stick to his Ph.D. topic in an attempt to get tenure. In the U.S. at least, universities generally restrict tenure to those who are “leaders in their field”, which is tough to achieve if you’ve only worked in a field for a few years. American universities thus tend to penalize the most creative professors since only the plodders are willing to stick with the same narrow topic for 6 years of Ph.D., 2 years of post-doc, and 6 years of assistance professorship.

[Geim’s success in Europe and England does not necessarily show that their systems are necessarily more congenial to the creative than ours, of course. More likely is that he was simply recognized as exceptional.]

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I’m heading out to Las Vegas for a few days in the middle of this month, moving on to Seattle afterwards. It would seem that a certain Border Collie has not made enough friends in his 15 weeks on the planet to find a congenial berth in the Boston area, so the beast is going to get an introduction to desert life.

Some questions for readers…

• good dog-friendly hotel in Las Vegas? I don’t want something on the Strip due to its concrete wasteland aspect and the fact that it can take 15 minutes to get from one’s room to the outdoors (one option: Lake Las Vegas)
• good activities to do with a dog? Dog parks? Trails?
• good options for pet-sitting in Vegas in case I want to park Ollie the Collie for a few hours?
• and all of the same questions about Seattle.

Thanks in advance.

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I just finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen and am putting some notes here so that I can refer to them at a neighbor’s book club meeting.

The writing deftly captures the spirit of several different decades and when a scene is set in the 1970s or 1980s it seems realistic. Most novelists, e.g., Tolstoy, seem to love their characters. One of the reasons the typical novelist spends so much time writing a book is that he or she is enjoying spending time with the characters. With Franzen one gets the opposite impression. He seems to have contempt for his characters, despite any virtues they might have. If he spent time with them scribbling out 576 pages it is perhaps because he enjoyed feeling superior to all of them.

The novel has a couple of unconventional features. One is that two sections are supposedly diary excerpts by a female character. This is not convincing because the female character writes exactly like… Jonathan Franzen. The second unconventional feature is that Franzen introduces some characters within the last 1/6th of the book. They feel like afterthoughts and why do we want to invest time learning about them when the book is about to end?

One aspect of modern-day American life that Franzen captures is the pervasiveness of government regulation and war in our economy.  None of the characters make money by working in a widget factory. One guy is involved in a very lucrative deal that hinges on obtaining government approval to do mountain-top removal mining. Another character is making obscene profits selling junk truck parts to the U.S. forces in Iraq; this would have seen implausible if I hadn’t read Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Others work directly for the government or for non-profit organizations.

According to Wikipedia, Franzen spent his childhood in the Midwest, his college years at an elite liberal arts college outside of Philadelphia, and his adult years in New York City and Santa Cruz, California. For some reason, the novel calls for one character to be an in-your-face racist. He approaches a Caucasian guy having dinner with an Indian-American (South Asian) girl and walks right up to the guy saying “Like the dark meat, do you?” and “I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.” Is the scene set in any of the places that are familiar to Franzen and his friends? No. It happens in a restaurant in West Virginia. The scene doesn’t seem credible to me based on my many trips through West Virginia. Maybe in a fighting bar among drunk patrons at 1 am, but not at 7 pm in an Applebee’s. Perhaps a patron might think an unkind thought about a couple with different skin colors. Perhaps a couple with different skin colors might get some unwelcome stares, but a racist walking right up and saying “nigger” is simply not part of the Applebee’s experience, even in a small town that a fancy New York/California-based writer might regard as benighted.

The book seems well-crafted rather than clever or delightful. A lot of the main characters’ motivations do not seem credible. There is a saintly middle-aged guy whose wife has been depressed for years and sleeps in a separate bedroom. Yet he resists sleeping with his willing 27-year-old beautiful assistant who happens to live in the same townhouse. Franzen and his publicists have been hyping this as the Great 21st Century American Novel, but it falls well short of the standards set in the 20th Century by An American Tragedy and Edith Wharton’s Novels. Let’s hope that the 600 million or so folks who inhabit the U.S. in 2100 can do better (see Census Bureau report for “middle series” estimate of 600 million or so and a “high series” estimate of nearly 1.2 billion).

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I’m testing out a Motorola DROID II from the good folks at Verizon Wireless PR (very rare to write a sentence that includes both “good folks” and the name of a mobile phone carrier!). By 6:30 pm the phone is squawking “plug me into a charger”, though my usage is not terribly heavy. I’m wondering why smartphones are designed with such wimpy batteries. Is it so that they will seem sleek when consumers are playing around with them in the store? And only after they’ve signed away their souls for two years do they realize that the phone cannot be used as advertised?

[An interesting peeve with this phone is that when you’re capturing a video and a new email arrives, the phone plays a loud “new email” alert over its speaker…. which is promptly picked up by the microphone and added to the video for all time. I would have expected that a low-priority alert such as this could be held by the phone for the typical minute or two that a customer might be spending making a video clip. Are the iPhone and Blackberry OSes smarter about this than Android?]

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A must-see for Bostonians, especially since it has a lot of good aerial helicopter footage, is The Town, which I enjoyed last night. The portrait of some criminals trapped in their hometown (Charlestown) and family business (i.e., crime) is believable. The one off note is the FBI agent, whose energy and dedication cannot be squared with the bureaucracy-first FBI that we’ve come to know post-9/11 (see Washington Post, for example, and Reason). Some great cinematography, but the violence can be hard to watch and a friend who took her 13-year-old son to the movie said “It is very awkward to be sitting next to your boy while people are fucking on screen”.

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I’m an occasional Facebook user (mostly to communicate with cousins and former co-workers) and yesterday wanted to tell a fairly simple story about what it is like to spend one’s birthday with a Border Collie:

1. drive to Costco
2. put Ollie (15 weeks old) in a fabric crate in my car and roll the windows mostly down
3. while shopping, receive call from the Costco tire shop saying that Ollie was with them (he’d managed to escape the crate, apparently, and then jump from a height of about 4′ out the car window and onto the pavement)
4. once safely back home, turn around to observe Ollie throwing up a bunch of ugly-looking orange stuff on carpet (apparently there were some edibles in the Costco parking lot)
5. use SpotBot robot to clean up hurl

This simple story exceeded the Facebook limit on characters by about 25 percent. How are people using Facebook to tell stories then?

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A woman who was afraid of flying on commercial airliners spent some weeks working with a therapist to get over this paralyzing fear. The therapy culminated with a flight, about a week ago, in an 11-year-old Piper Warrior with our flight school’s most mild-mannered instructor. After an hour of ground instruction, the instructor, fearful person, and therapist were all on the ramp getting ready to sit down in the Warrior. Meanwhile, a  60-hour Private pilot had rented an identical Warrior from the school. Using his new noise-canceling headset, he thought that the engine was making an unfamiliar sound. He then removed the headset and heard a terrifying cacophony of sounds from the engine. He looked at the gauges, all of which were normal except for the fuel pressure, hovering almost at zero. Expecting imminent engine failure, he declared an emergency. The airport fire department raced out to the runway with two trucks. The pilot of the emergency aircraft made an uneventful landing and taxied the still-running plane to the ramp, with two fire trucks trailing behind, their lights flashing. The emergency pilot then parked the Warrior right next to the folks preparing to embark on the therapy flight.

[The minimum fuel pressure in a Warrior is 0.5 psi and it registers on an old analog gauge, which is accurate to perhaps +/- 2 psi. As it is a low-wing design, if the engine is running by definition there is sufficient fuel pressure to pull fuel up from the wings into the carburetor or fuel injection system. The owner of the flight school needed to go to New Hampshire later that afternoon and he took the emergency Warrior up there and back without incident.]

This reminded me of a woman I worked with about ten years ago. Her fear of flying prevented her from going to Los Angeles to see relatives. She spent months in therapy and had finally gotten over her fear to the point that she purchased a Boston to LAX ticket… for September 12, 2001.

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After digesting all of the helpful reader suggestions in a recent posting about a compact PC, I decided to forge ahead and buy an HP and an extended warranty for when the heat build-up causes it to fail. The HP site offers “50% off 1GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 graphic card upgrade ($65 savings)”. I tried to configure a machine with that graphics card, but it wasn’t available (so you get 50% off a card that you can’t buy). I tried the Live Assistance button and was helpfully connected to “Irene G”. The form to request Live Assistance asks for one’s name, email address, and question. One of Irene’s first questions back to me was for my name, email address, and phone number. She needed this for “security and verification purposes”. I had used “Philip Greenspun” in the initial form, but experimented wth “Barack Obama, 202-456-1111, and president@whitehouse.gov”. Irene had no trouble verifying that I was indeed Barack Obama and helpfully answered that the GT 220 graphics card was out of stock. I called the phone number that HP lists for PC sales and punched a few buttons through the phone tree after which the automated system disconnected me.

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I’m a shareholder in a handful of public companies and packages periodically arrive in the mail encouraging me to vote for boards of directors that are ladling out billions of dollars in money and stock that otherwise would have been retained by shareholders. I’m surprised to see that stock options are still mentioned in these proxy statements rather than restricted stock. This 2003 article discusses how restricted stock would be the next big thing for corporate looters because the stock market was then perceived as too risky for managers. This survey says that options are still the most popular way to transfer ownership of a company from public investors to insiders, but that restricted stock is making a comeback.

Corporate executive stock options were almost never tied to the overall stock market. If a company’s stock underperformed the index and competitors, an executive could still cash in with options simply because the market had gone up. What can make the market go up? Inflation, for one thing. So options were an almost guaranteed winner from 1970 through 2007 (and they got repriced in the cases when the options proved not to be winners). Now that inflation is low enough that the S&P 500 could be stuck indefinitely below its value of 1550 reached in March 2000 (the index is 1147 today, which means an investor at the peak has suffered a 26 percent loss of value after holding for more than 10 years), I’m wondering why we haven’t seen even more popularity for restricted stock. Perhaps it is because it is not tax-efficient compared to options.

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