Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Fifty years from now the Collapse of 2008-? might be looked at as primarily a fight between the old and the young. The New York Times yesterday carried a story about the city of Pittsburgh taxing college tuition to pay pensions:

“a 1 percent tuition tax on students attending college in Pittsburgh, which he says will raise $16.2 million in annual revenue that is needed to pay pensions for retired city employees.”

This is the most direct example I’ve seen of a tax on the young (the tax will be collected from universities but substantially paid by customers, as with most taxes on business) to benefit the old. An 18-year-old will pay more for college so that a 50-year-old can enjoy his retirement as though the Collapse of 2008 had not occurred. In California the pensions of those over age 50 are preserved while students at the University of California will pay 32 percent more (source).

The young start out with a lot of advantages. They have tremendous energy and physical health. But one wonders how much can be loaded onto their backs. Let’s look at what the U.S. government and state/local governments are doing to hobble young people:

• running schools with unbreakable standards for what administrators and teachers are paid and how much they will be paid decades after retiring, but no standards at all for the effectiveness of teaching (this is probably the worst because it will deprive many of America’s kids of the option to emigrate to countries where good jobs are available)
• borrowing trillions of dollars to pay for programs that primarily benefit the old, e.g., Medicare; this money to be paid back by today’s youth once they enter the workforce
• making it a legal requirement for healthy young people to pay for overpriced health insurance (Congress’s latest health care scheme includes new limits on the maximum difference that insurance companies can charge based on age)
• minimum wage laws that make young workers who would otherwise be cheap to employ unattractive to employers
• laws forcing employers to recognize unions; unions are run by older workers and they tend to organize things for the benefit of older workers at the expense of the young (which is why a 65-year-old airline pilot might earn over $200,000 annually for working ten 8-hour days per month while a 30-year-old airline pilot will earn $19,000 for working twenty-two 16-hour days per month)
• immigration policies that allow young inexperienced workers from foreign countries to flood into the U.S. and compete for low-skill jobs (a 50-year-old lawyer or doctor does not face competition from a 20-year-old coming in from Sudan, Iraq, or Latin America, but an American 20-year-old who received a poor public school education does)
• transferring hundreds of billions of future tax dollars into the pockets of Wall Street bankers, who tend to be older (we haven’t heard about too many 18-year-olds paying themselves $100 million bonuses)
• corporate governance laws for public companies that allow trillions in shareholder wealth to be transferred into the pockets of executives (I wrote about this in my economic recovery plan); senior executives at public companies tend to be older than average and the reduction in value for public company shares tends to weaken pension funds and inevitably it seems that taxes on young working people are required to bail out those funds… so that people aged 48-120 can continue to receive a pension (see GM and Chrysler)
• outlawing certain recreational drugs, which tend to be consumed disproportionately by the young, and therefore raising prices. Drug laws also result in a lot of young people being sent to prison while old people benefit from well-paid and pensioned government jobs in drug law enforcement, prison administration, etc. The drugs most preferred by old people, e.g., alcohol, tobacco, and various prescription opiates, remain legal and inexpensive.
• consuming the Earth’s resources at a rate greater than natural replenishment (a 35-year-old friend, when asked his views on global warming and pollution, replied “I don’t understand what the problem is; the Earth only needs to last another 50 years.”)

As a 46-year-old who has the right to vote, when I look at teenagers these days sometimes I wonder “What did they do to us that was so bad that we’ve decided to do all of this to them?”

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With new instrument flying students, we sit down together at a computer and obtain a weather briefing from DUATS. This is a 15-page document and one of the most important skills for an IFR pilot is to be able to pick out the important stuff and make decisions based upon that most critical information. The student sees a Web page on the screen. He or she sees a mouse cursor moving occasionally or some text being highlighted. He or she sees the Web page being scrolled down. He or she hears my voice explaining why a particular line or section is irrelevant or relevant. I went through this exercise with a group of pilots the other day and one suggested that it would be good training material to share on the Web. Now the question becomes how to do it. Here are my criteria:

1. authoring should be almost as easy as sitting down at a browser, putting on a headset, and speaking while using the computer in a natural manner
2. viewing should be sharp and crisp; the number of pixels being changed is very small and the amount of data necessary to transmit a perfect copy of the screen is small; (i.e., I would not want to stick a video camera a few feet from the screen and have the text be fuzzed up by the camera or by MPEG compression for distribution)
3. viewing should be possible in a standard Web browser with no need to install additional software
4. viewers should not have to pay a license fee for any software
5. I should not have to pay any ongoing license fees for any software (since I want to make just one recording!)

My initial thought was that this is essentially what various Web-mediated meeting programs (WebEx; Live Meeting) do. They let a bunch of people scattered around the Internet see some computer screen interaction and hear a voice. If such a program had a “record” button and a means of distributing historical meetings, that would be ideal, especially if the program could compile into Flash or something similar.

If not all of the criteria can be met, I would be willing to accept a situation in which we distribute a somewhat fuzzy YouTube video and then offer a much higher quality version to those who are willing to download and install a free Web collaboration client program.

Ideas? Suggestions?

[A totally different way to go would be annotated text. Distribute the original DUATS briefing as an HTML document tarted up with some JavaScript. When the reader moves a mouse over a particular line, a text annotation pops up. I’m not sure if there is a convenient way to author that kind of text. I’m willing to do it all in Emacs, I guess, typing tags, as long as all of it can be done with CLASS= modifiers on P and LI tags and the code remains up at the top or in a style sheet.]

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During a break in flight training I chanced upon a television showing Barack Obama speaking in Oslo, accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. One phrase struck me as unusual, i.e., “no Holy War can ever be a just war”. This is a little bit like telling a hysterical person to “calm down”; it seems very unlikely to be effective.

Suppose that a religious person has read a text that he or she believes to be the word of God. God has written that every believer must wage a holy war against infidels. Barack Obama, despite his many godlike characteristics (see this posting for an exploration of his kinglike characteristics), is not a god in the eyes of our believer. If the holy book says “kill infidels” and Barack Obama says “it is not just to kill infidels”, why should the religiously observant person be swayed?

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I’d like to get some pictures of fat people eating (example1; example2). I’m in Orlando and it seems like an ideal opportunity to combine two quintessentially American themes: obesity and theme parks. Also, a theme park is a great place to walk around with a big camera and lens without attracting attention. I would like to find a theme park where there are a lot of restaurants, a lot of fat people (aside from myself), and most of the restaurants have outdoor seating.

Recommendations?

[You might ask why I am embarking upon this project. Part of it is that my editor at Hearst Magazines back in the 1990s was ecstatic about any photo that included a fat person. Most of it is that I think that better diet pills will be developed some time within the next 100 years. Also theme parks may lose their appeal for Americans (for one thing we might become too poor/heavily taxed to afford to travel frivolously). The photos will then become a curiosity for people in the year 2100.]

Update: http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20091213-epcot/fat-people-eating has the photos from a few hours spent at Epcot. Also available as a slide show (medium-sized photos or big photos).

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My friend David and I are sharing a timeshare “villa” in Orlando at the Marriott Cypress Harbour. We have three televisions for the two of us. Every day we go over to FlightSafety to take jet-flying classes designed by guys who were inspired by the American public school system of instruction. I.e., we sit passively in lectures, bored out of our skulls, rather than being actively challenged to solve problems and think through scenarios (the teachers are experienced and dedicated, but they are constrained and crippled by the PowerPoints). If I were training myself, I would ask questions such as “What if you rotate at your calculated Vr of 94 knots and the aircraft settles back into ground effect? Assuming that there is nothing mechanically wrong with the aircraft, what are some likely causes for its reluctance to fly?” (a couple of possible answers: flaps set to UP and Vr calculated for flaps T/O; estimated weights of passengers and baggage were wrong and you’re heavier than you thought). Then I would ask “Given that you’re beyond V1, what would you do?” (a much tougher question to answer than the typical engine failure at V1 that you get in the sim; there will be no red EICAS message saying “engine failure R”; you have to make a decision almost instantly but you don’t have obvious information with which to make that decision.) Instead we get taught that trend vectors on the primary flight display for airspeed, altitude, and heading show where the airplane will be after 6 seconds. A few minutes later, a quiz slide pops up in the PowerPoint deck. “How many seconds forward do the trend vectors look?” Four choices, including “6”, are below. (Eighty percent of this material could have been taught by giving students materials and online exams prior to them showing up in person.)

After dealing with the hazards of falling asleep in the classroom or falling off the hydraulics in the sim, we come back to our timeshare. The management leaves nothing to chance. The “Vacation Experience Guide” notebook is thicker than the books that come with a twin-engine turbojet-powered airplane. The notebook cautions walkers to “stay on the sidewalk or the outer edge of the road” and, within this gated community, “please keep the doors and windows locked when you are sleeping or away from your villa”. You would not want a child to be consumed by the 4-inch-long lizards that run around the sidewalks, so there is a caution about approaching or feeding “wildlife” in this 100-percent concretized complex.

After the publication of the big notebook, a serious problem developed that required a laminated supplement to be issued to all rooms. Titled “Pizza Alert!!”, the supplement says that “the team here at Cypress Harbour are working closely with local and state law enforcement against the distribution of pizza flyers”.

What is the one hazard so small and unlikely that it need not be dealt with by the resort management? Drowning in one of the three swimming pools or an adjacent hot tub, all of which are deeper than a young child’s height. Despite the fact that the target audience for this resort is families with small children, there are no lifeguards. Instead of lifeguards, the management has helpfully put up signs that say “no lifeguard on duty.” The resort has literally hundreds of staff members for perhaps 1000 rooms (with an occupancy rate of 30 percent(?), the younger staff members are often seen congregating around televisions in the activity center). Would it have cost too much to employ a few teenagers to fish the toddlers out of the deep end? A little bit of Web surfing reveals that there are substantial liability protections under state law for hotels that post “no lifeguard on duty” signs. But if a hotel hires a lifeguard, they assume some liability for that lifeguard’s performance. As no sane parent would consider staying here without a substantial supply of the alcohol that is sold at the resort’s various bars and shops, that leaves Darwin in charge of whether the kids survive their week in Orlando.

One might ask where we would be without government regulation to protect us? Imagine a lawyer questioning a Marriott executive in front of a jury after a child drowned: “Let me get this straight… you built a 1000-room hotel, built three moderately deep swimming pools, asked families with young children to stay for a week at a time, and did not hire any lifeguards?”

[I suggested to David that we buy a week and come back here ever year for recurrent training. A quick Google search revealed that the annual maintenance fees are more than $800 per year, i.e., even if you got the timeshare for free it would cost almost as much as renting just for maintenance. Then the question came up of what happens when owners abandon their timeshares and stop paying fees. If the complex reverts to swamp, can the share owners get their money back from Marriott?]

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An article on the carbon footprint of the Copenhagen climate summit: “1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges”. My favorite quotes:

“We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” [a limo company manager] says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

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Down in Orlando for some flying lessons, I’m catching up on my New Yorker magazines. One article that I missed is “Trial by Fire” from the September 7, 2009 issue. It discusses the process of arson investigation in the context of a fire at the home of Cameron Todd Willingham. The fire killed Willingham’s three young children and he was sentenced to death for the crime. The most surprising part of the article was how the standard process of arson investigation was found to be mostly flawed in the early 1990s. An investigator decided to see whether an accused arsonist was telling the truth by reconstructing a similar house and its contents, then setting fire to a couch. The case against the arsonist was dropped when the test house burned exactly like the crime scene house (more), without benefit of the gasoline that the original experts had concluded must have been used to accelerate the fire.

More: read the article.

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I’ve drafted an article for student pilots struggling to learn how to land an airplane. I would appreciate comments here that I’ll try to work into the article (which I’ll then open up for comments on the main server).

Thanks in advance.

[p.s. This was prompted by http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000uCf.]

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Prompted by a 16-year-old friend, we’ll call her “Stacy”, I recently finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, a Tracy Kidder book that was excerpted in New Yorker magazine some years ago. Jeff Sachs and Peter Singer sit in comfort in the U.S. and say that other people really should do something to help the world’s poor. The subject of the book, Paul Farmer, is the rare American who has dedicated his life, no questions asked, to helping those in need, specifically those who are sick, regardless of how inconveniently located they are.

The book chronicles Farmer’s journey from a childhood spent in a converted bus parked in a Florida trailer park to Duke University on scholarship, to Haiti and Harvard Medical School, and eventually to a life floating among the world’s airports, clinics, and conferences. Through hard work and force of personality, Farmer has managed to build a modern clinic in a remote and desperately poor corner of Haiti. He has revolutionized the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru and Russia. The book, published in 2003, does not chronicle Farmer’s successful foray into HIV therapy for Rwandans.

Stacy was inspired by this book and other chronicles of Dr. Farmer’s achievements. I, on the other hand, could not imagine enduring the sacrifices described in the book: filthy food, Hepatitis A, all-day walks in stifling heat and humidity to reach patients in villages without road access, millions of miles of commercial airline flights, and hardly ever seeing his wife and children (who live in Paris). If this is what it takes to change the world, then don’t hold your breath waiting for change, because there probably won’t be another guy like Farmer in our lifetime.

Farmer and Kidder share a political philosophy up to a point. Farmer believes that it is immoral for someone to earn a fat salary and then spend it all on himself rather than living modestly and donating the surplus to the poor. Kidder states that Haitians are poor because it is to the advantage of powerful Americans and rich Haitians to keep them poor and illiterate. Somehow there are guys in Washington and New York who get richer as a consequence of Haitians getting poorer. Due to indifference if not hostility towards the peasantry, the government of Haiti has shirked its responsibility to build roads, educate the inhabitants, provide jobs, deliver drinking water, etc. Neither Kidder nor Farmer consider whether it would be feasible for the best-intentioned group of bureaucrats to bring prosperity to Haiti. Haiti is home to 9 million people in a country the size of Maryland, which makes it the most densely populated country in the Western Hemisphere (source). The per-capita GDP is $800 per year. Individual Haitians have cut down all of the forests and burned them or used them for building materials. If you wanted to create a case study to prove Jared Diamond’s points in Collapse, it would be hard to construct a better example than Haiti. The land supported a modest population of Taino Indians very nicely, but it could not support 9 million humans even if the natural resources were intact. If you distributed Haiti’s wealth equally among all Haitians, they would still be among the world’s poorest people.

How would a government collect tax revenues from people who are subsistence farmers? Who would want the job of running a government in Haiti? Haiti is so poor that the traditional dictatorial approach of stealing from the common people isn’t practical. It turns out that the only people who have been interested in the job recently were those who figured out that they could siphon off foreign aid dollars. Only a saint would be willing to take on the project of governing honestly and, in fact, Haiti was governed for a time by a Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Folks’ initial optimism faded when the man’s earthly nature took over. The priest succumbed to the temptations of women and took a young American wife, Mildred Trouillot. Then he allegedly started pocketing millions of dollars in foreign aid (perhaps the wife needed to return to her native New York City to shop, thus proving the old adage that “Behind every successful man is the woman who made it necessary”). Now he lives very comfortably in South Africa with Mildred and their two daughters.

Where Farmer and Kidder part intellectual company is on a trip to Cuba. Farmer thinks it might be the world’s best country because everyone has equal access to high quality medical care (Cuba has 6.4 doctors per 1000 people; the U.S. has 2.4). Farmer acknowledges that Cuba is poor, but he blames that fact on the U.S. Kidder won’t go along with Farmer’s unqualified admiration for Fidel Castro and Che Guevara (a doctor who loved to personally execute traitors to the cause), but his opposition seems mostly based on prejudice against a country labeled “Communist.” Kidder does not find anything specific about Cuba to criticize. Neither Farmer nor Kidder pointed out that Cuba might be doing better than Haiti partly because it has more than three times as much land per person, a big advantage in a primarily agricultural economy (Cuba’s population growth rate is 0.23 percent per year; Haiti’s is over 1.8 percent). Farmer relaxes in Cuba, partly because he cannot get Internet access to retrieve his hundreds of importuning emails; Kidder blames this on the U.S. trade embargo. More importantly, there aren’t a lot of sick people waiting for treatment. “I can sleep here,” Farmer said. “Everyone here has a doctor.”

As with many non-fiction works, the complete book is less powerful than the shorter New Yorker article. The magazine article followed Farmer to Haiti where he was making a huge difference in one region. The book has him bouncing around a dozen countries, each of which has seemingly intractable problems and people dying due to insufficient and/or improper medical care. Farmer in the article is the hero of thousands of Haitians; Farmer in the book is bailing out the ocean with a teacup. After reading the article one thinks “That desperately ill Haitian kid walked out of the clinic”; after reading the book one thinks “With no education or skills, how is that Haitian kid ever going to get a job?”

I thought that perhaps I was being too cynical. Stacy, after all, is ready to dedicate the 80-or-so years she has left on this planet to helping the unfortunate. Perhaps her friends and hundreds of thousands more from her generation feel the same way. I asked. “Most of them are too busy nagging their parents to buy them cars.” Cars? Aren’t her friends mostly teenagers who live in Manhattan? What kind of cars? Where would they keep them? Where would they drive? “They get Lexus convertibles. Their parents pay $550 per month for a garage space. They drive to the Hamptons on some weekends.”

[If your teenager can manage without a Lexus, you can feel confident donating money to Partners in Health, Farmer’s non-profit organization, which spends roughly 95 percent of its money on program services. PIH has been selected by Bill and Melinda Gates for some large grants, and is rated highly by GiveWell. The org’s Form 990 for 2008 reveals that Farmer himself received no salary (he gets paid separately as a Harvard Med School professor and physician). The CEO of the $52 million/year organization received less than $75,000 per year in total compensation (compare to Carnegie Hall or WGBH); the highest paid employees earn between $67,000 and $80,000 per year.]

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… than they are of the U.S. Congress. That’s the conclusion that I draw from two Wall Street Journal articles: “Crisis Spurs Migration to Israel” and “Building Peace Without Obama’s Interference”. Despite the threat of a devastating nuclear attack from Iran, which would presumably reduce the value of any investment to zero, the Israeli economy has lower unemployment than the U.S. and strong economic growth. The West Bank Palestinian economy is doing even better, with a Chinese-style growth rate estimated between 7 and 11 percent. What does it say about the regulatory and tax environment here in the U.S. that an investor would rather build a factory in a war zone?

Separately, the WSJ has an interesting opinion piece explaining why low interest rates may be hurting U.S. companies’ ability to get capital:

“the Fed is still promising near-zero interest rates for an extended period and buying over $3 billion per day of expensive mortgage securities as part of a $1.25 trillion purchase plan. Capital is being rationed not on price but on availability and connections. The government gets the most, foreigners second, Wall Street and big companies third, with not much left over.”

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