Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

From my friend David, today’s Dilbert strip covers the question of how an American CEO can get out of the office with his $50 million “pay package”.

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Tomorrow is moving day, saying goodbye to Cambridge and hello to Lincoln, Massachusetts. Our new house requires a little history lesson. In the bad old days people dug down into the earth to make a basement foundation for a house. For hundreds if not thousands of years these primitive people stored roots, boxes, and other junk down in this basement while they lived in various floors built well above the ground level. Above the top floor they built an attic in which to store more junk. This attic became very handy in the 1970s when people looked for a place to put insulation, a whole-house fan, and other energy-saving devices.

Fortunately for mankind, in the 1960s a group of MIT and Harvard architecture geniuses came along and designed the Deck House kits. Why have a contractor assemble building materials and the local drunkards on-site to frame a house when the thing could be precision-cut in a factory? Storing carrots and boxes in your basement? Why not live in the basement instead? The typical Deck House, including the one we are moving into, is cut into a hillside so that part of the basement is walk-out level. Half of the living space is in this “first floor”, directly on top of a concrete slab.

How about an attic? Wasteful! Just make the living room ceiling the underside of the roof. The roof in this house is about 5 inches thick from the bottom of the living room ceiling to the top of the asphalt shingles. I’m hoping that there is some insulation in there, but am not confident. In any case, there is no way to add insulation without redesigning the roof to be about twice as thick. There is also no obvious place for a whole-house fan. Storage? Dump it all in the garage.

What happens when you live in your basement? It tends to be kind of damp. How about cranking up the central A/C to dehumidify it? The geniuses behind the original Deck House didn’t see the point in running ductwork. As there are no conventional floors or walls, it is not obvious how to run ducts after the fact.

I am now on a fanatical quest to dehumidify the basement, partly because I want to store some slides and negatives down there.

My first idea is to minimize the amount of moisture coming into the basement. A landscaping company is coming over to dig away a small portion of earth against the foundation and see if it is moist enough to warrant a “French drain” (pipe with holes in it).

I know that concrete breathes and am wondering if humidity is coming up through the slab, which was poured in 1968 as part of an outrageously expensive construction project ($38,000 to build 4000 square feet; thank God that the government assures us inflation is minimal or I would be upset by the insurance company’s estimate of $800,000 to rebuild the place today). I have instrumented the house with a Honeywell weather station from Costco (am now a true suburbanite). The Honeywell is saying that the humidity is about the same throughout the house, at least this evening. Without the heat being on, it is a dank 57 percent relative humidity upstairs and down. So we have some evidence that water vapor is NOT coming up through the slab. A civil engineer friend says that basements are damped simply because they are cooler than the rest of the house and the humidity mostly comes from the outside air. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to attempt to seal the slab.

The slab is currently covered by some glue, a porous carpet pad, and a medium-thick carpet. She who has the last word on home decor says “carpet is disgusting; I would pay as much as $10,000 to have the carpet replaced by hardwood.” I replied “So I guess we won’t do it, then, because the quote for engineered hardwood was $15,000.” It seems that we are doing it…

The standard way that flooring companies put down hardwood over a basement slab is… by not using hardwood. A solid chunk of wood tends to warp. The solution for potentially humid conditions is particle board or plywood topped with a thin wood veneer. It looks like regular hardwood, but is resistant to warping. The installation starts by taping down a closed-cell foam underlayment, which is more or less impermeable to water vapor, and then floating the floor on top of the foam. An engineer friend recommends 6 mil polyethylene sheeting underneath the foam, overlapped by at least one foot at the seams.

My question to the suburban heroes reading this is… Why not seal the slab with a chemical before putting down the sheeting and foam? If we don’t do it now we will not have another chance for 20 years.

Then the question becomes how to seal concrete. Drylok is the standard product, but I’m not sure what value it would be on a 40-year-old slab. I talked to a company down in Texas, where they should know something about humidity, called Enduroseal. They recommended

1. cleaning to remove the adhesive with a product from franmar.com
2. treating with their own Hydraloc product
3. waiting 10 days
4. treating with their NCS-20 product (not sure why they recommended this on the phone; the current slab does not have any flowing water on it and actually feels dry to the touch)

Anyone out there competent to evaluate this company’s claims or have personal experience with this stuff? Is what they are selling better than Drylok from Home Depot?

Stepping back the larger question is whether it makes sense to seal the concrete slab at all. It is dry to the touch and the carpet feels mostly cool rather than damp. There is a slight musty smell in the basement and slight mold growth on a couple of beams.

[This is outside the scope of the current blog posting, but the next planned step after the sealing and hardwood is to install some sort of central plumbed-in dehumidifier. There is a small utility room at the center of the basement. One idea is to put a standard HVAC air handler in this room. Run ducts up to the top floor and discharge air up there. Have the intakes in a couple of the rooms on the ground floor, thus forcing the air to circulate from top to bottom of the house. Honeywell and Lennox both make whole-house dehumidifiers that plug into air handlers. Run A/C in the summer and the dehumidifier in fall and spring. While we’re at it, add an air filter and a humidifier for December through March.]

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Part of my planned move to suburbia includes shutting down 90 percent of my brain and spending the rest of my life watching 100 channels of HDTV from Verizon FiOS. The most logical place to sit and watch TV seems to be about 8.5′ back from a fireplace, above which is a nice flat brick wall that is part of the chimney. One additional constraint is that I want to use this TV for viewing/editing/critiquing digital photographs (much higher resolution than 1920×1080). A final constraint is that I don’t want to go too crazy with loudspeakers, so the TV should have at least the front channel speakers built in.

So… what size TV for an 8.5′ viewing distance?

Should it be plasma or LCD? Any particular brand?

What about mounting on a brick wall?

[Note: I don’t plan to use the fireplace underneath the TV, so no need to worry about heat damage.]

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File this one under “Cost of Paranoia”: Logan Airport shut down a runway for 20 minutes on Friday, delaying five flights, because a pilot saw a guy riding a bicycle along the perimeter road. It turned out to be an FAA employee. Full story: Boston Herald.

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It seems that my time as a yuppie, at least the “urban” part, is coming to an end. I’m moving to a suburban split-level Deck House next week. Here are some things that I’d like to be able to do…

• turn on most of the lights on the main level when arriving home
• turn on most of the lights on the lower level when walking downstairs
• turn off all of the lights when leaving the house or going to sleep (the feminine component of our household seems to be incapable of accomplishing this with traditional light switches)
• have the bedroom and kitchen thermostats turned up automatically at 6:00 am (oil heat and 1968 construction = painful bills)
• connect to the house from a Web browser and/or mobile phone and turn the heat on or off
• lock and unlock doors, perhaps via electric striker plates and keypads on the exterior
• connect to the house from a remote Web browser and see some video images
• run an alarm system using the same software/hardware (optional)

In the 1970s this would have been accomplished with X10. What’s a more modern system that is likely to be around for 20 or 30 years? Ideally each light switch or thermostat would be IP-addressable and connect via powerline network or 802.11. Some of the lighting control systems that I’ve seen for sale cost $100 per switch, which would be enough to put in an 802.11 chip.

[A separate but related question might be “With energy so expensive and computers so cheap, how come these things aren’t standard in every new house?” One would think that every new American house would have a button by the front door marked “I am the last person to leave” and it would turn off all the lights and quiet down the HVAC system.]

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The S&P 500 crashed another 7.5 percent today, bringing U.S. stocks, adjusted for inflation, back to where they were in mid-1996. Investors are apparently not sold on the idea that managers of U.S. corporations are going to pay them a healthy share of profits. What would it take to restore investor confidence in the U.S. market? How about governance reform?

Right now the shareholders of a public company are at the mercy of management. Without an expensive proxy fight, the shareholders cannot nominate or vote for their own representatives on the Board of Directors. The CEO nominates a slate of golfing buddies to serve on the Board, while he or she will in turn serve on their boards. Lately it seems that the typical CEO’s golfing buddies have decided on very generous compensation for the CEO, often amount to a substantial share of the company’s profits. The golfing buddies have also decided that the public shareholders should be diluted by stock options granted to top executives and that the price on those options should be reset every time the company’s stock takes a dive (probably there is a lot of option price resetting going on right now! Wouldn’t want your CEO to lose incentive).

If current trends continue, the CEO and the rest of the executive team will eventually have salaries that consume 100 percent of a public company’s profits and they will collect half ownership of the company via stock options every few years. Who would want to invest in that? Not sophisticated investors, it turns out. Big universities such as Harvard and Yale have reduced their exposure to U.S. public companies down to about 15 percent. Instead of buying a forestry company and watching the managers steal the trees, they’ve chosen to own forests directly. Given the laziness of university administrators, it should have been a wake-up call to the SEC that something needed to change when Harvard preferred to run its own forests.

Corporations are supposed to operate for the benefit of shareholders. The only way that this can happen is if a majority of Directors are nominated by and selected by shareholders. It may have been the case that social mores in the 1950s constrained CEO-nominated Boards from paying their friend $50 million per year, but those mores are apparently gone and the present structure in which management regulates itself serves only to facilitate large-scale looting by management.

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Three of us got together this evening to watch the Obama versus McCain debate. Each candidate seemed skilled at criticizing his opponent. Barack Obama had the additional skill of criticizing George W. Bush. Neither opponent seemed to have many ideas for improving the economy or American competitiveness. This was rather disheartening on yet another day when the stock market crashed a full 5 percent. We (the American people) may be on our own…

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Last week the U.S. Congress decided to give trickle-down economics its biggest test ever. They appropriated $700 billion in taxpayer funds so that we could give every mansion owner in Greenwich, Connecticut $1 billion each, with enough money left over to give every Park Avenue townhouse owner $100 million. The result was supposed to be renewed economic vibrancy across the whole U.S. What did we get instead? Another stock market crash, with the S&P 500 losing almost 4 percent of its value. To put this into perspective, this is roughly one year’s return on U.S. stocks, evaporated in a single day. The S&P 500 is now back to where it was in early 1998.

[Had you put money into the U.S. stock market in early 1998 you would have realized approximately 1 percent annual income in the form of dividends and a 0 percent capital gain. In other words, a gal who had diligently saved up $100,000 would have added $1,000 per year to her income by placing her faith in America’s largest companies.]

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I’m finally getting around to cleaning up some old personal photo essays and so forth, moving them from photo.net to philip.greenspun.com. An example is my personal guide to New York City. Almost every page in this little museum piece of how the Web worked back in 1995 and 1996 contained a link to the Yahoo directory, e.g., http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/design_arts/fashion/. Despite having thousands of employees, Yahoo was apparently unable to maintain a set of redirects and all of these links are now dead. That’s a great way to lose readers and lose Google Rank.

It is tough to understand why Microsoft would pay billions of dollars for a company that can’t manage this fundamental part of Web publishing. I admit to being rather lame and sloppy, but links that I published back in the early 1990s are still functioning, albeit sometimes through one or two redirects (transparent to the user).

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We apparently have an extra $700 billion of taxpayer money to spend in an effort to improve our economy. How are we planning to spend it? We are going to give it to investment banks and other financial services firms. What could we expect the result to be? America’s investment banks and financial services firms will be in great shape; the rest of the U.S. will lag behind.

What do you call a country with a thriving financial services sector and everything else rusting and obsolete? England. The City of London has been a leading provider of financial services worldwide for the last couple of centuries. During this period the rest of the country has lost its empire, lost its military power, lost its leadership position in scientific and engineering research, lost its leadership in manufacturing, and suffered from slow economic growth compared to its European neighbors.

By some accounts, the 1.22-square-mile City of London contributes roughly 20 percent of the UK’s GDP, employing only 300,000 people. (This compares to the U.S. financial services industry, which has grown from about 6 percent of the economy in the 1970s to roughly 10 percent today.)

Seven hundred billion dollars is enough money to reshape the American landscape. New York City real estate will become even more desirable. The rest of the country will decline gradually.

Do we have to spend our money this way? Why not put the $700 billion into tax credits for businesses that make capital investments? Or reduce the corporate tax, which would increase the value of American stocks? Or give tax breaks to foreign companies that open factories or R&D facilities here in the U.S.?

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