Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“First he trashed Iraq and I didn’t complain because I wasn’t an Iraqi…”

The Bush Administration has turned its attention to the Federal Aviation Administration and changing the funding mechanisms to involve “user fees” collected from individual pilots in individual airplanes.

Currently the FAA is funded with taxes on a relatively small handful of vendors, each of whom pays a substantial amount.  The airlines are the main reason that Air Traffic Control exists and they impose the biggest burden on the system since they like to bunch themselves up in a handful of cities and a handful of airports.  The airlines, of which there aren’t very many, pay the lion’s share through a tax on tickets.  Another big source of revenue is a tax on fuel sold to privately operated airplanes.  This is collected from the handful of companies that sell aviation fuel (I think at the wholesale level).  Finally, some money comes from general tax revenues.

The airlines complain that they pay too much and private planes should pay more.  The FAA says “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could set our own prices instead of asking Congress for money from the general fund?”

The idea is that when John Old Geezer gets into his 30-year-old Cessna to practice instrument approaches, he should pay $50 per approach for his use of the assistance of air traffic control and maybe $20 for each touch-and-go landing.  The FAA will keep track of tail numbers and send airplane owners bills for the use of their facilities.  If a flight school gets a bill, it will go back through its rental records for the last month or two and figure out which student or renter was responsible for which charges and try to get the money from them.

What could be wrong with this system, which is already in place to some extent in Australia, Canada, and Europe?  It assumes that the costs of collection are low and that the costs to flight schools of sorting out whose charges are whose are minimal.  It assumes that people don’t have alternative forms of transportation and recreation.

Private pilots are an aging crowd, shrinking every year as they get too old and infirm to pass FAA medical standards.  As prices for fuel, hangar, and maintenance continue to climb, many pilots decide to give up their hobby or switch to using an automobile for transportation.  User fees in Australia caused so many to switch to ultralight aircraft or give up flying that the amounts collected were far less than predicted.  If you went out to a local airport and looked at the tired old planes on the ramp and the tired old guys flying them, you would not say to yourself “Wow, here are a bunch of folks that we could really tax.”

The deeper problem is that when you expand the number of people who are paying taxes and fees from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand, the administrative costs skyrocket.  When I take a short trip to Canada, I find that my mailbox fills up 2-3 months later with paper invoices from a dozen different authorities and airports.  The fees requested, via hardcopy mail sent internationally, range from $5-75.  They are supposed to be paid in Canadian dollars.  If I ignore an invoice, someone back in Canada will send me a reminder.  In most cases, I would estimate that their costs of invoicing and collection exceed the amount of the bill.

The FAA could adjust for higher-than-expected costs of collection by adding $100 to every fee to pay their costs of generating paper invoices and processing checks.  Then they would find, however, that the higher fees had reduced demand, thus cutting down the total amount collected, and necessitating a further increase in the fees…

In theory, the FAA could become more efficient about collecting fees, but this is the organization that estimated it would cost $100 million to add photos to pilot certificates, the organization that indulged in the most expensive civilian software development project (roughly $10 billion) in history and then scrapped it after 15 years of futile efforts, and the organization that takes weeks or months to answer simple questions.

I thought about this a bit as the British Airways 747 touched down in London from Cape Town the other day.  Pilots in Europe don’t tend to practice takeoffs and landings much because it is so costly and consequently the low-time guys at regional airlines tend to lack the feeling for the runway that enables a soft touchdown.  How did the British Airways pilot do?  It was a beautiful VFR morning with light winds and high clouds.  The plane came down harder than I can remember any U.S. airline landing at Logan Airport, even in 35-knot wind gusts.

[If you are a pilot and want to tilt at the windmills, call up your senators and representative and ask them to limit the FAA to collecting money at only a handful of points in the system, so that the costs of administration don’t end up being more than 50 percent of the revenue.  If they want more money from people who fly little airplanes, let them raise the fuel tax, not fill our mailboxes with paper invoices.  We can’t stop the government from making us poor, but maybe we can stop it from making us miserable.]

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One of Africa’s main economic disadvantages has been its distance from the world’s centers of economic activity.  This has reduced Africa to the kinds of industries that don’t depend strongly on transportation or communication, e.g., land-based industries such as farming, mining, and high-end tourism based on air taxis.

Internet and the modern jetliner would seem to offer the potential for Africa to weave itself into the global economy.  What are African governments doing in this area?  Their very best to prevent Internet and air travel from reaching the average citizen.

It is too difficult and expensive to build highways and railroads in most African countries, which makes air travel much more critical than it is to people in rich nations.  Taking all costs into account, including capital and infrastructure, airliner travel should be by far the cheapest per passenger mile.  African governments, however, have imposed so many restrictions aimed at protecting their local carriers, that air travel costs about 2-4X as much as it does in the rest of the world.  The result is a somewhat hobbled tourism industry, since only rich people can afford to get around Africa, there aren’t many flights, and those flights tend to book up long in advance.  The deeper result is slower economic growth, since the flights are completely unaffordable for middle class Africans.

African Internet has already been discussed in these pages.  Basically, it doesn’t exist and, where it does, the costs are 10-100X higher than in the rest of the world.  A handful of insiders make some good money from the telecom monopoly, but the effect on business is devastating.

Until these issues are resolved, it is hard to see how foreign aid to Africa will lead to sustainable growth.  Currently, it would be much cheaper to bring skilled Africans to Kansas than trying to do business in Africa.  Housing costs in Kansas are about the same as in Africa.  Security is free in Kansas.  Telecommunications are basically free.  Getting around by airline to see customers will cost 25-50% of what it would cost from Africa.  If capital investment is required, the cost of capital will be much lower in Kansas since investors won’t fear a Zimbabwean-style expropriation or disintegration.

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Zimbabwe was very much on folks’ minds throughout the three weeks that I spent in Africa.  One Zimbabwean gave me a ride in Cape Town.  His family had spent about 200 years building up a beef farm in Zimbabwe, the business being worth close to $10 million before a crony of Robert Mugabe dispossessed them.  The farm is producing almost nothing now and the transfer of land from white to black ownership resulted in only perhaps $100,000 of value being realized by the “war veteran”.  The former owner is, in middle age, starting over in South Afirca as an agricultural consultant.  I asked him why he couldn’t have gotten a lot of money out over the years, simply by having his European customers pay him in Europe and leaving the money there.  “There were currency controls and it was against the law to do it this way,” he replied.  “A lot of people used double invoices and managed to circumvent the law, but we never wanted to do that.”

The tourist industry functions remarkably well in Zimbabwe.  The classic Victoria Falls Hotel has maintained its standard of service and the helicopter tour company has plenty of Jet-A fuel for their well-maintained Jet Rangers.  By contrast, life for the average citizen is bizarre.  The gas stations haven’t had gas for a year or two.  To fill up your car, you drive to Zambia or Botswana or buy gas on the black market (still cheaper than buying gas in Europe).  Coke is still available in every store.  Payment in hard currency is preferred, the Zim dollar having fallen roughly to the level of wallpaper.

People complain about Robert Mugabe, but they hated the old (white) government too.  It is unclear why Zimbabwe should be an independent country.  The GDP is only about $3 billion per year.  The country is only about the size of Montana and it is landlocked.  The population is 12 million and falling as people depart for jobs in neighboring nations.  Without something like the old Common Market in Europe, having all of these independent nations adds impediments to commerce that are unaffordable for the locals.

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South Africa is a country where Democrats would feel right at home.  They celebrate gay marriage.  Applicants for a job are sorted by skin color before their skills are evaluated, in affirmative action programs that favor the dark.  When you ask folks why there are so many carjackings and armed robberies, they say “the criminals didn’t get enough love during apartheid” or “we need to create more jobs”.  National parks are accessible by paved roads and open to all for a modest fee.

Botswana, on the other hand, is for Republicans.  Areas of natural beauty and abundant wildlife are leased to private tour companies who are allowed to build lodges with no more than 7 or 8 rooms (“tents”).  The result is that only people who can afford $1000 or $2000 per night per room will see the lions, leopards, and rhinos.  Affirmative action is unknown and job applicants, white or black, are evaluated on the basis of their ability to work.  Thieves are imprisoned, often after being beaten unconscious by enraged citizens.  Finally, the Botswanans love diamonds, discovered in 1967, one year after independence, and are now the world’s leading producer of gem-quality stones.

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Read the May 5 issue of The Economist on the plane and discovered this item (page 44) about Saudi Arabia:  “Some former radicals, including 65 released from American custody in Guantanamo Bay, have benefited from $30 million in state aid, including monthly stipends, cars, dowry payments and wedding presents.”

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If you’re going to a college reunion this year (my 25th is in early June!), prepare by reading Alan Lightman’s deftly elegant novel Reunion.

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I arrived home from Africa today.  The Namibia/Botswana/Vic Falls portion turned out to be the easiest trip that I ever did, far easier than planning a weekend in Los Angeles.  James Weis at http://www.eyesonafrica.net/ organized everything to the point that I never had to think or plan.  I was taking malaria pills and covered from head to toe in insect-repelling clothing.  The locals all said “we don’t have malaria here” and, in fact, I can’t remember seeing a mosquito.  My conclusion is that, at least during the dry season, the most serious health hazard of visiting game lodges is obesity.

In the old days, the tourist would walk from sunrise to sunset carrying a heavy large-caliber rifle.  The lodge would prepare a hearty breakfast, a snack with mid-morning coffee, a big lunch, sandwiches with tea, a sundowner drink with snacks, and then a big dinner.  The lodges still provide five meals a day, but the tourists now mostly sit in Land Rovers or relax in their bungalows.

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In an earlier posting, “Africa and the Information Age”, I wrote that IT offered a lot of opportunity for Africa.  Now that I’ve been here, I think that there is more reason to hope than before.

Africa has been nearly invisible in the open-source community, but a graph that adjusts for open-source contributors as a percentage of Internet connections shows that people here are much more adept than the raw numbers would suggest.

It is hard for an outsider to understand how badly South Africa has been hobbled by their telecom monopoly and government.  Even at the universities, Internet is expensive, slow, and unreliable.  The situation is so bad that it is hard to know what these folks could do if they had the kind of Internet access that people in rich countries have taken for granted since the 1990s.

Bringing high-speed Internet to South Africa would be ridiculously cheap compared to other development initiatives and therefore, presumably, it will eventually happen.  When it does, we should see huge growth in industries that are enabled by IT.

[And if the demographers’ darkest predictions come true, and life expectancy falls to 35, getting more people into computer programming will be a great idea.  Computer nerds require only a few years of training, often reach high productivity in their teenage years, and tend to have be shunned by members of the opposite sex (thus reducing the spread of HIV).]

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The Digital Freedom Expo conference opened with a video clip from Archibishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.  He talked about the evils of software patents and the companies set up specifically to litigate them.  He praised Richard Stallman, Jimmy Wales, and Larry Lessig.

From the rector (president) of UWC, we learned that South Africa now has a 20-25 percent HIV infection rate and that education is the key to fighting the spread of the virus.  [My personal view is that it is not the job of computer nerds to keep people free of disease.  We build interesting Web sites and other services to make life interesting and worth living as long as the biologists and doctors are able to keep folks alive.  Even if human life expectancy were reduced to 30 years, we shouldn’t abandon our keyboards and move into the medical labs since even a 30-year life can be significantly enriched with Google and Wikipedia.]

The premier of the Western Cape Province (equivalent to a U.S. state governor, presumably) talked about how to make Internet access more widespread in Africa.  For Internet you need stable electricity.  For stable electricity, you need peace, because one of the first things that rebels do is cut powerlines.  The premier went on to talk about how ensuring widespread Internet access would combat Islamic fundamentalism and the terrorism associated with it, which he argued are reactions to uncertainty created by the digital/information revolution.

A bureacrat from the department of education here noted that only 2 percent of South African schools have an Internet connection.

Peter Gabriel, via video, introduced Larry Lessig.  Gabriel talked about a non-profit trying to help women in Somalia.  More than food, shelter, or other seeming essentials, they wanted Internet access, starting with an Internet cafe for women in the capital (under the Islamic regime, only men were allowed to visit Internet cafes).

Larry Lessig gave an inspiring and thought-provoking talk.  He started on a down note, with the 1995 Clinton Administration recommendations to expand copyright on an unprecedented scale, extending regulation for the first time into the homes of the average American.  Clinton’s Commerce Deptartment’s ideas became law in 1998 when Congress passed the DMCA, which has turned a generation of Americans into daily violators of the law.  The transformation of a “read-write” 19th Century culture into a “read-only” 20th Century culture was complete, with cultural output and creativity thoroughly professionalized.  Lessig expressed hope for the 21st Century, however, that, despite the efforts of governments, technology was enabling us to return to a “read-write” culture.  He showed examples of remix videos.  He suggested visiting http://www.freedomdefined.org and learning about the Pirate Party, a reaction by ordinary Scandinavians to having their fair use rights revoked.

Heather Ford of iCommons talked about the South African organizations and individuals who have begun to license their work under Creative Commons.  One was the Johannesburg Philharmonic.  It occurred to me that all symphony orchestras had better start giving away all of their audio recordings for free if they hope to attract some new audience members before their current subscribers become too frail to get from their nursing homes to the concert hall.

Jimmy Wales gave an inspiring talk about Wikipedia and how it has been gathering momentum in many world languages.  The goal is to have at least 250,000 articles in every language spoken by at least one million people.  There are 347 such languages.  1000 articles is the point at which Wales believes that a Wikipedia has achieved critical mass and can be self-sustaining.  Wikipedia is the 9th most popular site on the Internet, attesting to the fact that the human desire to learn should not be underestimated.  Vandalism becomes less of a problem as the site grows more popular, because bad people tend to be early adopters.  As more ordinary people start using/editing a service, the rate of problems goes down.

Wales’s latest initiative is a free open-source search engine system whose rankings would be transparent.  It does seem as though there is room for improvement on Google, which often delivers domain squatters and search engine spammers as #1 links.  (Google’s business of selling ads puts them in a difficult position; the domain squatters are some of their best advertising customers since if you land on a vacant domain there is nothing to do except click on an ad.)

Brian Behlendorf, the Apache and Subversion guy, gave a great practical talk on coordinating open-source software projects.

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In an opening talk at the conference here in Cape Town, we learned the history of the University of the Western Cape.  It was started by the apartheid government in order to create a class of colored intellectuals who would support the idea of racial separation.  Instead, the faculty at the university became “implacable foes” of the apartheid government, which continued to fund the university on the basis of the number of students graduated.

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