Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Today I flew with a friend across the Appalachian Mountains. We climbed up to 41,000′ in a six-seat jet and landed three hours later at a small airport where we picked up two children, aged 8 and 11. They’d been visiting their mother, who is stationed at a nearby military base. We brought them back to a military airport in New England where they were picked up by their father. The mother, a warm person in her 30s, is suffering from a serious form of cancer. She’s going into a West Coast hospital soon for an experimental operation that might prolong her life, but it also might kill her. So we found ourselves, at a small FBO, witnesses to what might be the children’s last visit with their mom.

What made the scene even sadder for me was learning that the mom had previously been sent to Iraq for 17 months. In some abstract sense it might be nice to protect Iraqis from each other, but it is painful when you see the cost to America’s children who lose time with their parents. Our lives on this Earth are short. Is it really necessary that we spend any significant part of them in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Note that I am not arguing for pacifism. We live in a sometimes-unfriendly world and I can accept that sometimes we find it necessary to drop bombs on people who don’t like us. Flying enough bombing missions to destroy a hostile nation’s military, industrial, and transportation capabilities (after which point it is tough to see how they could be a significant threat to anyone) is a fairly straightforward project and one to which our military is well-suited. “Moving into a country on the other side of the globe and trying to turn it into a 51st state” seems to be a better description of what we’ve been trying to do and the cost just makes me weep.]

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In February, I sent letters to the three Representatives whose Congressional districts include towns bordering Hanscom Field. I also sent letters to our senators, John Kerry and Scott Brown (the new guy). The letters asked for assistance with getting approval for East Coast Aero Club to take in foreign students, who constitute the best market for helicopter flight training. Though our school has been established for 25 years and has a very similar curriculum to other FAA-approved Part 141 flight schools, our application has become lost in a bureaucratic black hole. We explained that if we could get approval to bring in foreign students we could hire additional instructors and mechanics here in Massachusetts, thus growing the tax base. We figured that maybe a phone call from a Representative or Senator might cause a government worker to dig up and act on our application.

Today we got a call back from a staffer in Senator Brown’s office. She apologized for the delay, but the letter had gotten routed from Washington to Boston and disappeared in a big stack while they were getting organized. She is going to try to help us.

How about the other Massachusetts politicians, whose salaries we have been paying for decades with our tax dollars? No answer.

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to participate in the harlequinade that we Americans choose to call “health care”. A woman with top-of-the-line insurance had an infection and, before prescribing an antibiotic, her doctor wanted an ultrasound to rule out a 1 in 1000 chance that there was an abscess. The doctor suggested that she visit the emergency room at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts, though in practice any clinic with a machine and a radiologist on-site or connected via the Internet could have done the scan. She arrived at the E.R. at 2:00 pm, was seen about 7:00 pm, and was discharged around 8:00 pm (I delivered emergency supplies of food at 5:30 and stayed until 7:30). Had she gone to a veterinarian, her odyssey in the health care system would have been complete, but hospitals and doctors aren’t generally able to send patients home with the required medications. So our exhausted patient had to make a trip to a separate pharmacy a few miles away.

One complicating factor yesterday was Patriot’s Day, a holiday for some folks in Massachusetts. Most personal service industries add staff during holidays. If a customer came into a restaurant on a weekend or holiday, he or she would not likely have to wait 5 hours for service “because it is a holiday and our waiters and cooks wanted to stay home with their families”.

The most painful knowledge for me was that there was almost surely an ultrasound machine and radiologist waiting idle somewhere in eastern Massachusetts but there is no Web-based system for finding facilities with short waiting times. This is presumably because customers’ time has no value in our health care system, but I reflected that even the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles took mercy on its victims and posted facility waiting times on the Web starting in the 1990s.

So… by spending a greater percentage of working hours paying for health care than any group of humans in the history of the world we Americans have managed to create an industry that is less customer-friendly than the DMV.

One exciting positive: Thanks to the heroic efforts of Barack Obama, a gay couple can pay the same $17,000 per year and wait the same 6 hours for a 20-minute procedure as a straight couple. Egalitarianism seems already to have been implemented at Emerson. I was not asked to explain my sexual orientation (if any) when visiting.

More: my own health care reform plan

[How would this have played out in countries that spend less than our $8500/year per person on health care? She would have gone to a pharmacist rather than a doctor, described her symptoms, and been handed the antibiotic 5 minutes later at a cost of between $5 and $50. Had there been an abscess she would have gone to a doctor a couple of weeks later.]

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The Spring 2010 issue of City Journal carries an article on the history of California public employee unions, their political influence, and the cost of pension obligations to the unions: “The Beholden State.”

Related earlier postings:

• History of Public Employee Unions
• The bankrupting of San Diego by Republicans
• California’s $500 billion in unfunded pension obligations

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Folks:

I’m helping a friend with a trip to Orlando, Florida this coming weekend. We would like to find a good hotel with the following characteristics:

• within a 25-minute drive of MCO
• in a neighborhood where it is possible to walk to restaurants, shops, entertainment, etc.

The last time we visited Orlando we stayed near International Drive and were forced to use the rental car all the time.

Separately, is there a good place to take tennis lessons near the recommended hotel?

Thanks in advance for the advice.

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The volcanic ash shutdown of transatlantic air travel  makes me wonder why videoconferencing hasn’t been more popular over the last few years. The typical company still does not have a high quality videoconference capability built into every conference room, which may make sense given that the cost of a 1000′ conference room is about $30,000 per year and high quality hardware/software can be comparable in cost to a year of rent. I’m confused as to why schools that teach foreign languages don’t have a videoconference wall built into every language classroom. A Spanish language class, for example, could have a wall that opens into a classroom in Argentina or Mexico. The cost of a public school teacher in the U.S., including pension and health care obligations, can exceed $200,000 for a 4.5 day workweek over 9 months. The videoconference hardware/software cost would be insignificant compared to the cost of the teacher and one would expect learning to be greatly accelerated if the kids could be bridged to native speakers in a comfortable and natural manner. Even if the American school had to pay for the hardware/software on both ends it would still cost less than paying a teacher to stick around for one summer school.

So how come school trips to Europe have become steadily more popular and videoconference systems in our wired-up schools are uncommon?

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I’ve drafted a review of a new book, The Design of Design. Comments/corrections would be appreciated.

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In the past couple of weeks, we’ve put about 70 people through helicopter ground school (outline of topics), followed by a 25-question multiple choice exam. The goals of the ground school include developing a student’s understanding of qualitative physics such as the Bernoulli effect (through conservation of energy), of basic aerodynamics (no equations), and of the practical requirements that lead to the helicopter being constructed the way it is (e.g., Why is there a tail rotor?). The class is conducted as a discussion around a conference table with about one third of the time devoted to students answering questions from the teacher (me so far!). Some reading is assigned prior to the class, but mostly the oral questions can be answered based on material presented in the class and with commonsense physics reasoning.

In looking over the 70 exam scores, what has surprised me the most is the lack of predictive value of a bachelor’s degree in science or engineering from an American university. One customer showed up wearing a Boston University Engineering sweatshirt, confirmed that a bachelor’s degree in engineering ($150,000?) had been obtained two years ago, and proceeded to score 6/25 correct on the exam (the all-time low score and worse than picking answers at random).

People who’ve done the best in the class and on the exam:

• certificated airplane pilots
• foreigners with science or engineering degrees from universities in India, Germany, and Israel
• Americans with advanced degrees in science or engineering

Some Americans who held bachelor’s degrees in science/tech did reasonably well, but no better than those who’d majored in Art.

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It’s official: East Coast Aero Club is looking to hire at least one helicopter CFI.

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Art: In Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, Kumar lights up in airplane bathroom and is handcuffed by federal air marshals. Harold and Kumar are deported to a foreign country (Cuba).

Life: Qatari diplomat lights up in airplane bathroom and is handcuffed by federal air marshals (full story). The young diplomat is deported to a foreign country (Qatar).

I did a quick search on Google News, but could not find any journalist who noticed the parallel.

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