Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Please comment on the following ad, suggesting changes that would make it more specific/appealing.

Director of Community

photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for a part-time Director of
Community.  If you like the site and the community, this is an
opportunity to help out and get paid.

The Director of Community is responsible to recruit and supervise a
network of volunteer moderators for the portions of the site that
consist of reader-contributed content.  Note that we already have a
substantial group of volunteers on staff.  You will report to the Editor
in Chief.

You will be responsible for maintaining a productive tone and
constructive environment at photo.net.  Everything that readers post
should be a sincere attempt to help other readers.  You will be drafting
policies and procedures as well as training new moderators.

Excellent written communications skills are required as well as the
ability to use Web forms for administration.  No programming skills are
required, though it would be good if you were able to specify new
features so that our programmers can implement them.

We anticipate that this job should require 10-20 hours per week.

Please email a writing sample, a cover letter stating salary
requirements and your resume (in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is
acceptable, Microsoft Word we can’t read reliably) to philg@mit.edu,
with a subject line of “photo.net director of community application”.

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I’m planning on running the following advertisement for a database administrator for photo.net.  Comments on how to make the ad better would be appreciated.

Oracle Database Administrator

photo.net, established in 1993, is looking for a part-time Oracle
database administrator.  If you like the site and the community, this is
an opportunity to help out and get paid.

photo.net runs a 50 GB database on a dual-CPU Linux server running
Oracle 9i.  Over the next few months, we would like to upgrade to a
slightly more powerful physical server and Oracle 10g.  We also face
day-to-day challenges of improving performance and adding services for
readers.

Experience maintaining the Oracle RDBMS in a production environment is
required.  We would prefer to hire someone who is currently
maintaining multiple Oracle servers and would simply be adding ours to
his or her work rotation.  Unix/Linux experience is required.

Given that we are a distributed organization, we like to see clear
documentation and prefer to work with folks who write a page or two
before starting to code or type at the shell.

Experience with RDBMS-backed Web sites is a plus.  It would be nice if
you were able to write Web scripts to test out and/or create reports
from the database.  We primarily use AOLserver Tcl scripts, which
shouldn’t take more than a few hours to learn if you have experience
with Perl, PHP, ASP, or any other Web scripting environment.

We anticipate that this job should require 4-8 hours per week for
someone experienced with Oracle on Linux.

Please email a cover letter stating salary requirements and your resume
(in plain text or HTML preferred, PDF is acceptable, Microsoft Word we
can’t read reliably) to philg@mit.edu, with a subject line of “photo.net
database administrator application”.

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Brian Glidewell and Lev Popov, two students in 6.171 last semester, have open-sourced the system that they wrote for East Coast Aero Club. Their system is an online community and online scheduler for a group of about 500 pilots and 30 aircraft. Details on how to download are available at http://www.eastcoastaeroclub.com.

It was almost unusable right after launch, an illustration of the unavoidable hazards of software development.  In response to user feedback, Brian and Lev changed less than one percent of the code and now it seems to do most of the things that we need.  The whole thing is Ruby on Rails/PostgreSQL and should be easy for other flight schools to adopt.

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My summer reading list includes two books by highly non-prolific authors.  The first is the Pulitzer-Prize winning Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s second novel, following her first by 22 years.  Who among us has enough ideas to fill up more than one novel?  One thing I liked about Gilead is that it was short and flowed naturally, as though it had been easy to write.  It didn’t feel as though Robinson struggled for 22 years with a massive manuscript.

I’ve just started the second book, Mating, by Norman Rush, which won the National Book Award.  Rush is an old guy who hasn’t written that much.

Disturbingly, if the best novelists are only allowed one book every decade or two, what does that say about the quality to be expected from a Weblog?

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I don’t generally follow news from the Middle East because so little truly new happens there. The Lebanese/Israeli conflict of recent weeks has caught my attention, however. I’m pretty sure that it is the first time in more than 1000 years that a non-governmental group of non-Jews has attacked a group of Jews and suffered in any way. For more than 1000 years in Europe and the Arab world, mob violence against Jews was a harmless diversion, at least for the Christians and Muslims. Oftentimes, the non-Jews would profit handsomely from their efforts, at least in the short run, by being able to occupy houses vacated by Jews, taking Jewish property, and confiscating Jewish bank accounts. The closest that non-Jews ever came to suffering any negative consequence from a pogrom was Kristallnacht in Germany, November 9, 1938. The Christian Germans on the rampage had a lot of fun, but the Christian-owned insurance companies afterwards complained that they would have to pay for the thousands of shops destroyed. Fortunately, the German government ordered the Jews themselves to pay for the damage.  (A recent book on Jews who survived Auschwitz but were killed by their Polish neighbors upon returning home shows that even after WWII there were essentially no negative consequences for mob violence by European Christians against Jews.)

One might argue that the Palestinians have suffered for their attacks on Jews, but they never did suffer significantly for the mob violence that they inflicted on Jews before 1948. Any suffering of the Palestinians since 1948 has been primarily due to their being caught in the middle of a pan-Arab war that they had little part in starting. The Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies have also had difficulties at the hands of the Israelis, but these were professional soldiers sent by their governments and the average citizens of Amman, Cairo, or Damascus have not been displaced from their homes at any time during the 60-year war.

Lebanon 2006 offers a completely different experience of Jew-hatred and violence against Jews. A substantial subset of Lebanese citizens decides that they would like to kill Jews and that therefore it would be fun to launch some rockets into the residential neighborhoods of Israel. They expect to enjoy this activity for many months or years. Most of what they’ve read about Jews in school and in newspapers comes from old educational materials translated from the German. Jews are weak. Jews operate in secret committees behind the scenes. Certainly if they have studied history they’ve learned that when a Muslim mob attacks a community of Jews, it is invariably the Jews who end up having to flee Baghdad. Tehran, or Morocco or wherever, leaving their homes and property behind.

What happened this time? The Jews, armed to the teeth, came over to where the rockets were being fired and made the place unlivable. The Lebanese who thought they would be sitting in their living rooms watching Jews die on their television sets were forced to flee to the north or to Cyprus. This is a truly unprecedented situation.

[Of course, many Lebanese who never fired a rocket are suffering the consequences of their fellow citizens’ actions, but military conflict hasn’t gotten a whole lot more precise since King George III observed to Parliament on October 27, 1775, that he was “anxious to prevent, if it had been possible, the effusion of the blood of my subjects; and the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war”]

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One of my helicopter pilot friends owns a car dealership. He is selling a fairly new, but out of warranty, convertible Ferrari on behalf of a customer. He drove said Ferrari to Hanscom Air Force Base, the airport where we do our flying, a few weeks ago. After we landed, he tried to move the power seat backward. It wouldn’t budge. He drove the car back to his dealership with his knees against his chest. The other day I asked him if he’d sold the Ferrari. “I didn’t get it back from the shop yet; they are still fixing the seat.” The problem turned out to be a broken switch, the kind of thing that the standard automakers buy in China for $1 and that seldom fails. How much did Ferrari charge for a replacement switch? $2200. With labor, it was $5000 to fix the “seat is stuck” problem.

Josh and I flew the Cirrus down to Teterboro, NJ today to pick up a friend. We told him the story. He said “Oh yeah, my old business partner Will spend $300,000 on a new Ferrari 360. It had a fancy pushbutton F1 transmission. You had to press a button to go into reverse, but the button was always failing and he would have to take it back to the dealership over and over again.”

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Rich guys sometimes ask me “What’s a good way to give money to my kids without spoiling them?” My idea: For every dollar they earn, give them $N. That way they have to work, but they don’t have to work a repulsive yuppie job to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.  The main objection to this approach is that it is tax-inefficient.  If the kid earns $50,000 per year doing something he finds rewarding and you give him $150,000 that year, you have to pay a big gift tax.  Some sort of trust fund and/or life insurance policy that the kid can claim after you die would be more efficient.

Is an increased tax liability so bad?  Not for the truly rich.  These guys intend to give most of their wealth away to non-profit organizations.  The federal government funds roads and airports that we all enjoy using.  The feds pay for health care for the poor and the old.  Our tax dollars pay for intrepid military personnel who go out and kill angry foreigners (in most cases) before they can arrive on U.S. soil and kill Americans here at home.  For a non-profit organization of its size, the federal government is surprisingly efficient.  Most federal employees work in big box-like office buildings, not in $300 million monuments to some architect’s ego.  George W. Bush gets paid only $400,000 per year, less than half of what a lot of university presidents earn.

Can we tweak the $N bonus idea at all?  What if a kid becomes a repulsive yuppie despite the lack of financial necessity?  Won’t his siblings become envious when Chad, Jr. gets a $3 million check from Chad, Sr. to supplement his $1 million/year earnings at J.P. Morgan?  Perhaps there should be a sliding scale for the bonus where the first $100,000/year is muliplied by 4, the next $100,000 by 3, the next $100,000 by 2, and the rest of the kid’s income is not subject to a parental bonus.  Or there could be a lifetime cap of $10-20 million per kid (no Gulfstream for Johnny 🙁 ).

How about tweaking the tax liability?  Perhaps the money could go first into an irrevocable trust, but only paid out by the trustee as a multiple of income.  I’m not sure if this escapes gift/estate tax.

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I visit Las Vegas every 5-10 years and there is always something interesting to photograph (some of my old photos).  The sprawl and the traffic get worse on every trip, but the city doesn’t seem to have any difficulty attracting newcomers.  One thing that I love about Las Vegas is how democratic the place is.  To succeed in New York society you need to be from the right family, be intelligent, and know something about culture.  To succeed in Washington, D.C., you need to have connections to power.  To be admired in Boston you need to be well-educated.  To be cool in Los Angeles, you need to know the right movie industry people.  In Las Vegas, they don’t care about your family, race, intelligence, education, criminal background, knowledge, power, etc.  All you need is money and a willingness to spend it conspicuously.  If you drive an expensive car and wear designer clothes (available in every casino), any girl in town is going to be happy to meet you.  They won’t ask where you went to college or what you do for a living.  They’ll ask where you’re taking them for dinner and entertainment and what you’re going to buy them.

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What do a couple of pilots do when overnighting in Lincoln, Nebraska?  Go to the Grand Theater downtown to see Miami Vice.  The movie isn’t as sunny as the TV series.  As pilots we enjoyed the helicopter scenes but couldn’t decide whether or not to feel insulted by the fact that Detective Tubbs seems to have become a qualified business jet pilot.  Tubbs flies a bizjet to Haiti for a meeting with a bad guy.  Then he talks about filling up his turbine-powered machine with “avgas” (you actually can do this for a few hours, but Jet-A is preferred).  There is also a scene with the Adam A500 centerline thrust twin-engine plane, an almost mythical beast (Adam promised to deliver lots of these, but they couldn’t get FAA certification for anything more than the kinds of altitudes and conditions in which you’d fly a 1956 Cessna 172 with busted gyros (retails for $20,000), which has reduced demand considerably for the $1 million plane).  Finally they have an Avanti Piaggio, indicating that the filmmakers did go down to the local airport and say “drag all of your weirdest planes out of the hangars.”

Anyway, it is great that aviation is featured in the film, at least as a tool for drug importers.  But to those of us who struggle to maintain proficiency and add ratings, it is humbling that a guy who spends most of his time playing with guns, cars, boats, and criminals seems to be able to fly anything with wings.

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Wynn Las Vegas is the latest and greatest hotel on the Strip. It was built and is managed by Steve Wynn, the man behind the Mirage and Bellagio. Wynn is built on the grounds and golf course of the Desert Inn, dynamited in 2001.  The Desert Inn was quiet and all of the rooms had balconies on which one could sit, read a book, and enjoy the desert air.  What happened to make the Desert Inn unprofitable?  “Starwood bought it and they didn’t understand the casino business,” a bellman said.  “I worked at the D.I. for 24 years.  The new managers came in and fired the casino hosts because they were expensive.  A casino host makes a base salary of $250,000 per year and then gets a percentage of whatever the people he brings in lose.  So you can see why someone would want to cut them out, but it turns out that you need these guys.”

The Desert Inn had 700 rooms; Wynn has 2700.  The hotel portion of Wynn is a big high-rise with plate glass windows that don’t open.  Forget balconies.  When you’re in your room, it is like being in an office building.  When you’re in the rest of the facility, it is like being in a shopping mall.  The surfaces and finishes are sort of luxurious, but the environment makes one desperate to get out and see what the air feels like.

Because the Wynn is so huge and makes so little use of information technology, there is no advantage to being a guest.  If you want to get your car out of the valet, you need to have your ticket.  They don’t record the name of the owner or the room number associated with a car.  If you lose your ticket, we were informed, you have to drive around the entire lot with a valet and look for your car.  When you find it, you have to prove that you own it (good luck with an airport courtesy car!).  If you want to walk out on the terrace and see the waterfall, you have to pay $20+ for drinks.  If you want to visit the Ferrari dealership on the ground floor, you and your fellow Wynn guest will have to pay $20 to get in (and then pay $38 for a baseball cap or $280,000-400,000 for a car (more than a brand-new four-seat Robinson R44 helicopter)), just like the rabble who walk in off the Strip.

The entire hotel and casino pulses with a Pop music beat.  The pool area doesn’t open until 8:00 am and the music is loud in every corner of the patio.  If you want to use the exercise machines, you have to pay an additional $25/day.  If you and your friend want to escape back to your room and use the Internet, it will cost you about $24/day to hook up your laptops.  When you’ve just about finished writing a Weblog post and hit “submit”, Wynn’s service will decide that you need to renew your agreement to pay for Internet service.  Your work will be thrown away and your browser redirected to a screen where you promise to pay them.

Some good things about Wynn:  comfortable beds, large and intelligently designed bathrooms (though it would have been nice if they cleaned the bathtub between our first and second night), friendly, helpful, and well-informed staff.  The nightly show, Le Reve, is fantastic.  The stage is a big round swimming pool with elaborate platforms for the Cirque de Soleil alumni to run around on.  Prodigious quantities of rain fall from the ceiling.  People fly and then dive.

Practical travel tips:  If you have the $400+/night to spend on a Las Vegas hotel room, but want a bit of fresh air, consider the Ritz Carlton in Lake Las Vegas, a short drive east.  Some of their rooms have balconies, a feature that hotels on the Strip have been eliminating due, supposedly, to suicides by distraught gamblers.  If are on a tighter budget and want to be in a place where you can walk out of the casino into a public street, consider downtown Las Vegas where you can stroll on the shaded and misted Fremont Street.  If you really want to hang out at Wynn, stay for $45/night across the street at The Frontier where you can drink $1.99 margaritas while viewing the nightly female mud wrestling and bull riding.  Now you have an extra $350/day and can easily afford the services of the Wynn ($85 for a man’s haircut, $70 for two people to dine at the buffet, etc.).  When you’re done with Wynn, you get a bit of fresh air strolling back across the street to your hotel room.

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