Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I enjoyed brunch today with a family whose boys have attended the elite Cambridge Friends School (about $23,000 per year). The kids were saying that they did not enjoy a full day event celebrating Gay Pride and did not understand why a teacher was telling her coming-out story to the entire assembled school, including pre-K. I asked the 10-year-old “If I told you that I was gay and was going to marry my boyfriend and move to Greenwich Village, would that raise or lower your opinion of me?” [this is why parents usually don’t let me near their kids] He replied that it would lower his opinion. His mother, shocked at this prejudice despite so much well-intentioned indoctrination at school, said “What about Dan [a gay family friend]?” The kid said “I would like him better if he were straight.”

The older boy said that he had no interest in any teacher’s opinions about politics, sexuality, personal philosophy, tolerance, race relations, etc. “I only listen to them when it is educational,” he said. A good student, he wanted to get skills and facts from adults. But he was not influenced by the teachers’ attempts to mold him into what he called a “politically correct human being.” [He did say that the school overall had lowered his opinion of gays by harping on the subject constantly; he did not think that he’d been prejudiced to begin with, but the 1000th appeal for more tolerance was “annoying”.]

Perhaps a lot of the arguments about what should be taught in school rest on an overestimate of kids’ interest in what adults have to say. They respect us for knowing more math than they do; at least by age 10 they don’t necessarily naturally follow our lead in politics or religion.

Full post, including comments

In Edward Tufte’s books, he stresses that one should never present a number in isolation. The question that one should answer, as a writer/presenter, is “compared to what?” For the number of jobs in a country, you’d think that the relevant comparison would be to population (ideally working age population) and population growth. If Chile were to add 1 million jobs, that would be a very different experience for the population than if China were to do the same.

I just did a Google News search to see how many reporters compared the latest jobs report from the U.S. Labor Department to the U.S. population growth rate. The answer was “none”. This New York times story was typical. It reported that 20,000 jobs were lost in January, but did not say anything about how the number of Americans had changed. In less than one minute the reporter could have discovered that the U.S. population is growing at 0.98 percent (source). The population clock says that there are 308.6 million people living in the U.S. Without leaving Google, one can calculate that 252,000 people were added to the U.S. population in January. So we have 20,000 fewer workers and 252,000 more people. To me that is a much more interesting story than simply “we have 20,000 fewer workers.”

Given that Tufte’s books are perennial bestsellers, why the reluctance of journalists to present any kind of context or comparison?

Full post, including comments

http://cafehayek.com/2010/01/keynes-vs-hayek-rap-video.html

Full post, including comments

Mark Hurst, the user experience expert, has weighed in on the iPad, and included a funny video.

Separately, a friend said that he wouldn’t buy an iPad because it didn’t have a camera. He wanted to be able to use it for Skype-style video chat.

Full post, including comments

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.”

Full post, including comments

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.

Full post, including comments

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?

Full post, including comments

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.]

Full post, including comments

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.

Full post, including comments

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?

Full post, including comments