Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

My MIT School of Science newsletter arrived in the mail recently (I was a math major undergrad, laboring under a mistaken teenage impression of personal intelligence). Nearly all of the news was positive, with various awards and honors received by MIT faculty and important scientific discoveries achieved. The one disappointment was in the area of recruiting professors and graduate students of desired races:

In 2004, the MIT faculty unanimously passed a resolution to double the percentage of under-represented minority (URM) faculty and triple the percentage of URM graduate students at MIT by 2014. … overall progress has been slow. One important reason for this is the very low rate of URM PhD production in some fields. In Physics, only 2 percent of the PhDs awarded in America go to URMs. Under the leadership of Ed Bertschinger [photo of a very white professor included], the Physics Department is working to change this.

[under the headline Empowerment] … the Physics Department invited [some black and Hispanic physicists] to attend a one-day “Physics Diversity Summit” workshop at MIT. … “In learning about MIT’s student efforts in Africa and the diversity efforts initiated by the University of Washington graduate students,” Bertschinger says, “I felt reinvigorated in my own efforts to champion diversity and inclusion at MIT.”

No mention was made of my 2006 proposal in “Women in Science” (Appendix C) that salaries be raised for members of desired groups, e.g., women or blacks. If a professor of a particular sex or race has more value to the school, why shouldn’t he or she be paid more than a white or Asian male? After six years of failure, on top of decades of failure of earlier programs to change the skin color balance at MIT, why not try a more direct approach to recruiting and retaining desired employees?

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I spent today in Montreal. On almost every block I was asked for money by a beggar. When stopped at traffic lights in the Starlink crew car (an unprepossessing white compact), I was asked for money by a beggar standing in between lanes. It was a remarkable density of beggars for a city that freezes over in the winter and all of the guys with hats in hand looked pretty healthy.

How can we explain the greater number of beggars in Montreal compared to Boston? Here are some theories:

• the Canadian health care system is superior to that of the U.S. and it keeps jobless people alive and vigorous so that they can beg on the streets of even the coldest city; the U.S. counterparts of these panhandlers are dead due to our callous and ineffective health are system
• the average Montrealer is more generous than the average Bostonian, which makes begging a more attractive career choice (and perhaps a good enough one that they can afford to take the winters off)
• the higher minimum wage in Quebec ($9.50) compared to Massachusetts ($8.00) means that those with poor skills are unable to find work other than begging

Other ideas?

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Last week I talked to a 25-year-old who is passionate about gay rights. She was very pleased with the recent federal district court ruling that the U.S. Constitution’s anti-slavery amendments guarantee a right to gay marriage. Was she now satisfied with the legal status of homosexuals? “Absolutely not,” she replied. “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people can be fired by their employers.” Apparently the next peak to scale for gay rights activists is a statutory right for fired workers to sue companies.

I asked her how it would work. “If I fire a helicopter instructor and he sues me, how is the jury going to sort out whether I fired him because he crashed a helicopter or because I saw him using an iPhone?” She didn’t have an answer. “What if my employer has been unhappy with my performance and I’m afraid of being fired. Though I have no girlfriend or boyfriend, I show up every day driving a Miata and carrying a MacBook. Can I sue the company for firing me because they thought I was gay?” Finally I asked how I was supposed to know if my workers were gay. After all, sexual activity is conventionally conducted in private. Was it okay for me to ask them with whom they were having sex and what specifically they did with those partners? “They might bring their partner to a company social event.” I explained that helicopter flight schools did not typically host lavish social functions.

Some work in Congress has been done on this (link), but not successfully so far. A fatal flaw in the campaign seems to be the fact that there will not be any quotas for gay employees or other specific requirements for employers to hire gay workers. In the absence of quotas, a company would be better off hiring straight workers (assuming it could identify them) because such workers, unless they invested in Miatas and Apple products, would not have a statistical chance of imposing this new litigation cost on the company. Typically where the government has added new legal rights for a particular class of worker it has also imposed hiring quotas on employers, at least government employers and government contractors (i.e., on nearly 50 percent of the economy).

Separately she noted that gay workers were underpaid compared to equally skilled and hardworking straight employees, part of a theory that “companies always exploit vulnerable workers”. Thus there is an opportunity for a company with an all-gay workforce to make supranormal profits due to its low labor costs. She herself will not be taking advantage of this no-risk approach to making millions as she intends to spend her life working for the government or in non-profit organizations.

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This was an important week for folks in Massachusetts planning their budgets. A big health insurance company settled its premium dispute with regulators. The result will be an 8-15 percent increase in costs compared to the previous year (source). The Boston Globe reports that insurers covering 7 percent of the market are still holding out for permission to charge higher prices.

I can’t figure out how this dovetails with the official inflation numbers. Health insurance is a big component of spending and these kinds of increases would seemingly guarantee an unsettling overall inflation number. Yet supposedly enough other stuff is getting cheaper that we’re at risk of deflation?

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An engineer in his early 30s recently asked me for some career advice. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science plus a few years of work experience. He has broad skills in both EE and CS. He wanted to know whether or not it was best to move to Silicon Valley or remain in the Boston area. My answer was that both regions have a large pool of skilled workers like himself, but that Silicon Valley has vastly more money being invested in EECS-type stuff. He should therefore be more in demand in Silicon Valley. Secondly, the broadness of his skills would be of more value to a small company rather than a large one. A big company, for example, may have an entire group of engineers who do nothing but X. The fact that one engineer also has skills in area Y is of no interest to the big company because they have a team of 20 people who are experts in Y.

Finally I argued that he should try to work on big well-funded projects. A project funded with $100 million is more likely to yield an impressive result than one funded with $1 million. Nobody who looks at the widget will ask what it cost to develop. (The best example of this is General Motors. People are excited that the company is turning a profit this quarter, at least by whatever exotic accounting system the cleverest minds of Deloitte & Touche have conjured. Few journalists, newspaper readers, or taxpayers will stop to ask “We invested almost $100 billion in public money in Detroit automakers, enough to have funded 5000 Googles. Shouldn’t we expect to see some return on that $100 billion?” (And in any case GM may yet still be insolvent, depending on its ultimate pension costs, according to this TIME Magazine story.)

What do the Silicon Valley readers have to say? Did I give this guy good advice? Or should he stay in Boston?

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The SIM card in my T-Mobile phone has apparently failed due to some sort of lifecycle limit on the number of connections that it can make to the network (given T-Mobile’s coverage in the areas where I hang out, the phone goes in and out of coverage multiple times per day). A nearby T-Mobile store is on Rt. 9 in Framingham. This is a major east-west highway. I called the store to find out which side of Rt. 9 they were on.

• “Are you on the north or south side of the highway?” I asked the first clerk, a man.
• “There is no north or south. We’re in the same shopping plaza as Bertucci’s,” was the reply.
• “If Rt. 9 is oriented east and west, doesn’t that mean that there would have to be north and south sides of the road?” was my follow-up.
• “I don’t know anything about north or south,” came the reply.
• “Boston is to your east,” was my next attempt to orient the guy, “as is the Atlantic Ocean and Europe.”
• “Now you’re being rude to me,” sulked the clerk. I asked to speak to his supervisor.
• “Are you on the north or south side of Route 9?” I asked the manager, a woman with a Massachusetts accent.
• “I don’t know,” she responded.
• “If I pulled out of your parking lot, would I be going towards Boston or towards Worcester [a city to the west]?” I asked.
• “You’d be going eastbound toward Boston,” she said.
• “Doesn’t that mean that you’re on the south side of the highway?” I asked.
• “I have no idea.”

Keep in mind that these folks represent the relative cream of the American labor force, i.e., the ones whom a big company has chosen to retain.

Related: “America: Let’s stop investing in our kids” and “Some Firms Struggle to Hire Despite High Unemployment” (Wall Street Journal) as well as my unemployed = draft horse? comparison.

Update: Not trusting the folks who couldn’t tell north from south to manage the SIM card replacement process, I went to the Burlington Mall this evening and visited the T-Mobile store there. It is right above the Verizon store, which had about 10 employees and 40 customers. T-Mobile had just two clerks and three customers. The clerk refused to replace my SIM card unless I paid a $21.25 fee (including tax). I objected that it wasn’t reasonable for me to have to pay for a SIM card repair since as far as I knew the old SIM card was T-Mobile’s property under the original Voicestream contract (I started with Voicestream back in 2001 because they were the only U.S. GSM service and my job required frequent trips to Europe). I asked how long it would take to get my old number on a Verizon Droid 2 phone. The clerk helpfully replied “about two hours”. The clerk had me call the T-Mobile 800-number. I requested that they cancel my service, since it seemed like all of the cool people were on Verizon (I’m not on a contract with T-Mobile since I got my G1 phone from a friend). The 800-number folks agreed to waive the $20 SIM card fee and the clerk went off in search of a “price override” code. Before walking out, I feigned ignorance and said “I’m not sure if Google Maps will work yet with this new SIM card. Can you tell me if we’re north or south of Route 128?” [This is the major ring highway around Boston, about 1/2 mile south of the Burlington Mall.] The clerk confidently said “It’s east.”

Upside of the trip to the T-Mobile store: While waiting for this harlequinade to play out, I read Best Android Apps, which they had on the counter. It’s bizarre that the easiest way to navigate among the tens of thousands of Android apps is to leaf through a book, but such is life…

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One of the world’s slowest airplanes, a Cessna 180 on floats, was intercepted by two of the world’s fastest yesterday. The F-15s created a sonic boom heard all over Washington State (story). The floatplane pilot was unaware that Barack Obama was in Seattle for a $10,000/seat political fundraising event (this story notes “No event in the visit was open to the public.”).

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I flew JetBlue back from Puerto Rico today. Just as at Logan Airport on Monday, the line to check a bag or check in with a human were epic and would not have been out of place in Lagos or Nairobi. A passenger with carry-on baggage might have gotten away without waiting too long except that half of the automated check-in kiosks were out of service. JetBlue says that they are implementing some new software. In the meantime, I would heartily suggest JetBlue customers plan carry-on baggage only and print boarding passes at home. Don’t ask friends to meet you at the scheduled arrival time; the flight to San Juan left an hour late and the flight back to Boston was late as well.

Once on the plane I asked the flight attendants if they were going to brief us on the use of the emergency slide. Apparently I was not the first to come up with this joke. All three of the flight attendants had worked with Steven Slater, who was finally released from jail on Tuesday evening, and described him as a great worker and “way more tolerant than we are”. How about the slide exit? “That’s been my dream for years,” one said.

[How was Puerto Rico? I stayed in a charming family-run hotel called the “Hilton” and ate authentic local cuisine at Morton’s and Chili’s. It was somewhat challenging being plunged into an exotic foreign culture in this manner, but I believe that it broadened my perspective. Adapting to life back on the mainland was difficult; dinner this evening included some broccoli and the presence of anything green on the plate was unfamiliar.]

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One of the great things about Puerto Rico is that you get to do business at the Caribe Hilton’s swim-up bar. This is the hotel where the pina colada drink was invented, supposedly, back in 1954. My companion is a true man’s man, who was probably using a chainsaw and a backhoe as soon as he escaped from his Snap-On crib. Let’s call him “Aaron”. I ordered a pina colada. “What’s in that?” he asked. I explained the pineapple juice, rum, and coconut cream concept. Had he never had one? Indeed no. He ordered his own, took three sips and set it aside.

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I enjoyed a JetBlue flight Boston to Puerto Rico yesterday, saving approximately one week compared to my last trip down here (see “flying the Caribbean”). While we were in the air, Steven Slater quit his flight attendant job with the airline and made a dramatic exit from JFK (boring nytimes story; lurid NY Post story), activating the Embraer E190’s emergency slide as part of his escape from two decades of dealing with the general public. The flight was over. The plane was at the gate. Slater did not interfere with any other airline employees trying to do their jobs. Slater did not cause anyone to be injured or suffer a financial loss (unlike half of the employees on Wall Street!). Yet the guy is now in jail and charged with a criminal offense (nytimes).

I can’t figure out the rationale for criminal charges. Perhaps Slater owes JetBlue the cost of repacking the slide (though they probably also owe him a paycheck and could deduct the cost from that). Aside from the fact that the incident occurred at an airport, where is the crime?

[Update: I was talking about this with some friends at dinner last night and comparisons to Mark Hurd of Hewlett-Packard came up. Hurd was the CEO and accused of stealing the shareholders’ funds via false expense reports. Instead of the police coming to his door and arresting Hurd for stealing, he was sent an additional $28 million of the shareholders’ money (more).]

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