Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I won first prize in a United Airlines contest: a Christmas week in Sacramento (second prize was two weeks in Sacramento). The succession of televised basketball and football games on the television here has been interrupted with news of Mr. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of a Northwest Airlines Airbus bound from Amsterdam to Detroit. The incident has brought the U.S. government’s “no-fly” list into the news. When Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father dropped a dime on his son and told the Feds that young Umar was preparing to wage jihad, this was not sufficient to add his name to the list (due to fears that many frequent flyers with the same name would be inconvenienced?).

This prompted our host to note that he himself was on the “no-fly” list for four years. Whenever the 65-year-old U.S. Army colonel, with a Top Secret security clearance, showed up at the airport, the Tray Stacking Agency (TSA) would detain him for about an hour to call Washington and make sure that he was not the guy on the list. What were the clues available to TSA? Our colonel is black. The guy in the database was listed as white. Our colonel was 65 years old; the guy in the database was 40. Eventually the young white guy was dropped from the database and our colonel was able to fly commercial with only the usual amount of hassle.

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This Christmas season has prompted some reflection on the phenomenon of cars simultaneously bearing Christian fish symbols and bumper stickers proclaiming that a child has been elevated to honor student status at a particular school. Is such a bumper sticker truly consistent with Jesus’s teachings on humility? I couldn’t find good statistics on what percentage of public school students are on the honor roll, but this article reports 15 percent in one school district. Let’s say the average honor student is roughly at the 93rd percentile. As the Chinese population is 1.34 billion, if we assume that the distribution of intelligence and diligence is the same in the U.S. and in China, perhaps a more humble bumper sticker would read “My child is almost as smart and hard-working as 94 million people in China”.

Anyone else have a good idea for a humble bumper sticker?

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The Collapse of 2008-? has resulted in many employers having a lot of extra office space. What to do with the cubicles of the fallen? Why not turn the aggregate vacant space, at least 15 percent in most cities, into nurseries for babies?

Currently a majority of U.S. college students are women. A significant and growing proportion of people in the U.S. with advanced degrees are women. Let’s look at the investment in a typical woman with a master’s or professional degree. Figure 12 years of public school at $15,000 per year and 7 years of university education at $80,000 per year (tuition plus the foregone income). That’s $740,000 of capital paid in from a combination of public and private sources.

Now let us suppose that our example woman gives birth to a child. At a minimum, she will want to be with her child every two or three hours to breastfeed. What are her options? She can choose career and leave the baby with a nanny or daycare center for a solid 9-hour block every day. She can choose the baby and quit her job. She can try to split the difference by working part time. In any case where the mother gives some priority to the baby, society loses some of its return on that $740,000 investment. This reduces GDP and, more critically right now, the government’s tax base.

Why should the mother have to choose? We have literally skyscrapers worth of empty office space in every major American city. Why can’t part of the average white collar workplace be set aside for an infant nursery? The mother shows up with her nanny and spends 10-11 hours at work (still being paid for a standard 8). The nanny stays with the kid in the nursery; the mother walks over when the nanny notifies her that the baby is ready to nurse or whenever the mother feels that she wants to see the baby. Thus the mother will have spent 2 or 3 hours during the course of a working day over in the nursery with her baby. She has still worked a full 8 hours but not in one stretch.

Thanks to the efforts of politicians and activists, working women have all kinds of rights that they didn’t have formerly. In many cases they have the right to be hired preferentially over a better qualified male (“affirmative action”). They have the right to sue an employer for not paying them equal wages to what men doing similar jobs are paid. They have the right to sue an employer for permitting loutish men to run around the office making lewd remarks. Seemingly every right has been secured except for the one that would matter the most to working women: the right to continue one’s career without separating from one’s cherished infant.

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The December 21/28, 2009 New Yorker carries an article (sadly not available online) on Greg Carr‘s efforts at ecosystem preservation in Mozambique. The article relates a story about a politician visiting a small village:

Politician: “I’m here to save you, and we will bring hospitals, schools, …”

A villager stood up and said “We are very happy, very touched, because you came from so far away to save us, and that reminds me of the story of the monkey and the fish.”

The city folks didn’t know the story, so the villager told it.

A monkey was walking along a river, and saw a fish in it. The monkey said, Look that animal is under water, he’ll drown, I’ll save him. He snatched up the fish, and in his hand the fish started to struggle. And the monkey said, Look how happy he is. Of course, the fish died, and the monkey said, Oh what a pity, if I had only come sooner I would have saved this guy.

Speaking of Africa, I’m enjoying listening to A Bend in the River as a book on tape. The prose is so beautifully crafted that one doesn’t mind the slow pace of an audio book compared to reading ordinary text. Based in part on the author’s visit to Zaire in 1975, the book has some themes that will be familiar to those who read newspaper accounts of present-day African life. Naipaul describes ethnic tensions based on white colonialism, Arab slave-trading, and conflicts among native tribes (not least among them the fact that some tribes were employed by Arabs to enslave other tribes). Every now and then the tensions get so strong that neighbors hack each other to death. There is a boom-and-bust economy based on a natural resource. Transportation is arduous and unreliable. There are high hopes for a bright future of sustained development and everything depends on the Big Man who is running the country.

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Reading “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes” in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers inspired me to write an article about foreign airline safety.

Corrections/comments would be appreciated.

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Today’s Zen Koan: If a man yells “YOU LIE” in a room full of politicians, how do you know to whom he’s talking?

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In my days of flying regional jets, if we pulled up to a terminal with a jet bridge (saving customers a trip down the airstair door of our CRJ), one of the more colorful captains would always say “Just like a real airline”. I’m wondering if when we hear about the way that the U.S. government does things, we should say “Just like a rich country.”

I had this reaction when I learned that we spend about $1 billion per year on occasional helicopter service for the President. Then I had it again tonight reading a New York Times article mentioning the cost of running the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay: $150 million per year. The BBC says that there are 215 inmates in the camp, so that works out to $700,000 per detainee per year. We’re spending approximately $2000 per person per day. Just like a rich country…

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Our suburban driveway is about a quarter mile long and features a steep short hill. We currently have a plowing service that does an excellent job, but the plow leaves behind compacted flat sections of snow in various places. After a day or two, especially if it gets above freezing during the day, these compacted sections turn into solid ice. So then I ask the folks who plow to come back and spread out a salt/sand mixture. This melts the snow/ice during the day and then it refreezes at night into more ice.

Would a snowblower do a better job? Suppose that it were possible to remove all of the snow from the driveway. Then there would be nothing to melt and refreeze.

A friend suggested that we get a Bobcat and a wide snowblower attachment. This would cost $12,000, would leave us with a Bobcat to store, and the driveway would be done in 15 minutes. Honda makes some pretty serious walk-behind snowblowers, e.g., this 32-inch wide model. A neighbor has a 28-inch wide Honda that we could borrow, but somehow I think it would be too painful to use on a driveway as long as ours and his has wheels rather than tracks.

From looking at the Ariens Web site, I see that they also make “snow brushes” (example). I’m not sure where the snow would go after being brushed. Wouldn’t it fall right back down on the driveway? Anyway, if the brush idea worked we could use it to clean up after the plow and skip the snowblowing step.

Any words of advice from fellow denizens of the frozen north?

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Despite the fact that President Obama did not accept my offer to pay for his Aunt Zeituni‘s transportation out of crummy Massachusetts taxpayer-funded housing to a beautiful spacious vacant and already-secured Obama family house in Chicago, I would like to make an offer of a Christmas present: unlimited helicopter transportation for him and his family, at no cost to him or the U.S. taxpayer, through the end of his reign.

Background: the U.S. military has spent the last 10 years or so trying to buy some replacement helicopters for presidential transport. They settled on a huge $30 million Eurocopter with three screaming jet engines that put out a big welcome mat for a cheap heat-seeking missile, such as the Stingers that U.S. tax dollars purchased for the Taliban during the 1980s. By the time our military and Lockheed Martin added some anti-missile defenses and some U.S. manufacturing, the cost of each 14-passenger helicopter went up to about $400 million, far in excess of what airlines pay for the 853-passenger Airbus A-380. The program was shut down, in theory, but recently Congress authorized a $100 million gift to Lockheed Martin to keep the program alive (source). Does the U.S. really need to spend $15 billion on a handful of helicopters that will be used mostly for 10-minute hops? And should we buy helicopters that are so heavy that it will require several C-5 cargo planes to get them to foreign destinations (the president of the U.S. always travels with his own helicopters rather than borrowing local ones)?

Running the existing helicopter fleet is not cheap. There are literally 800 pilots, mechanics, and administrators, all paid federal salaries and pensions that are more than double their private-sector counterparts (source). Jet fuel is purchased in prodigious quantities.

I happen to own two nearly brand-new four-seat Robinson R44 helicopters. Powered by efficient Lycoming piston engines, these burn less fuel in a 130 mph cruise than each Eurocopter engine would burn at idle. Currently we use these for flight training at East Coast Aero Club, but in the interest of sparing the taxpayer from further ruin, I would be willing to move them down to Washington, D.C. I will also move myself down and one or two additional instructor-pilots from East Coast Aero Club. All of us have more than 1000 hours of helicopter experience. All are U.S. citizens and one of us is an Army veteran (given the recent tragedy in Texas involving a continuously promoted and decorated Army officer, it may be necessary to clarify that, to the best of our knowledge, he was not simultaneously serving in the U.S. Army and waging jihad on behalf of Al-Qaeda).

Here are some advantages of the Robinson:

• low fuel burn and high efficiency means that very little waste heat is generated and the infrared signature would not be sufficient for a heat-seeking missile, all of which are designed to shoot down fire-breathing jets
• small physical size means that it will be harder to hit with rifle fire than a monster Eurocopter or Sikorsky
• small size and 1400 lb. empty weight means that it can be transported to presidential travel destinations in a much smaller and more fuel-efficient cargo plane (one Robinson is no heavier than four average visitors to Epcot)
• high efficiency results in a range of about 350 miles on one tank of gas (the current Marine One helicopters have a range of only 100 miles (source))

I will pay all costs associated with presidential helicopter transport. I have already bought the helicopters. I will buy the fuel. I will pay the pilots (not being federal employees, they earn $25 per flight hour and receive no benefits or pension). I will pay Adam, Rob, and Sam to perform the 100-hour inspections and other maintenance (about $25 per flight hour). I will pay pilot hotel and meal expenses when President Obama is relaxing on Martha’s Vineyard or Hawaii. That’s my Christmas present to the Obama family and to the U.S. taxpayer.

Should Barack Obama accept this offer, I believe that the savings to the taxpayer will be in excess of $1 billion per year, reflecting cost savings from shutting down the 800-employee Marine One division and from not having to keep shoveling $100 bills into Lockheed Martin’s fireplace.

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Today’s aero-news.net carries a story about the cost of Obama’s Hawaiian vacation to the aviation industry there. It will not be a merry Christmas for the sightseeing operators, that’s for sure. Between economic losses due to restrictions and delays and the direct cost of naval, air, and land security, Obama’s vacation should cost the U.S. economy at least $100 million.

Now that we’re shutting down our Al-Qaeda Welcome Center in Guantanamo Bay, why not turn that into a fully secured tropical vacation destination for any senior government official who is entitled to Secret Service protection? The savings to taxpayers would probably exceed $1 billion annually (see this posting about what it cost taxpayers for the attorney general to visit Martha’s Vineyard last summer). Miss Universe enjoyed her recent time at the beach there (source). If it is good enough for the most beautiful woman in the world, why isn’t it good enough for our senior bureaucrats?

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