Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Desperate financial times call for desperate measures and certainly I’ve put forth some crazy ideas here in my Weblog, but people expect a touch of insanity from a private blog.  On January 11, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Thomas Friedman in which he

1) discloses that his wife is a public school teacher (union member)

and

2) proposes that the government eliminate federal income tax on all schoolteachers

He says that “more talented people would choose these careers” if they didn’t have to pay any tax.

Were we to implement the tax break immediately, 100% of the benefits would flow to existing teachers because no new ones will be hired until September.  Friedman implies that these existing teachers are untalented because they are paid so little (topping out at just over $100,000 per year after 22 years, or age 44 for the typical person who starts after college) I don’t think he believes that the untalented will do a better job without the distraction of paying federal income tax, so perhaps he is holding out hope for five years from now.  In September 2009, a truly talented young person, hearing about this tax break, will decide to go to a teacher’s college to pursue a Bachelor’s in Education.  In September 2013 that person will have graduated and be ready to work.  Assuming an average career length of 30 years, by 2014 fully 3 percent of our schoolteachers will be the talented ones attracted by the tax break and taxpayers will only be wasting 97 percent of their money by paying the untalented legacy schoolteachers extra.

I’m kind of surprised that the Times ran this piece.

[Note that Friedman’s idea is not totally at odds with my economic recovery plan, in which I propose eliminating public employee unions and teacher tenure.]

Full post, including comments

Usually it is bad news if a plane has a reputation for being flaky.  The Piper Malibu/Meridian has a troubling history of engine fires, engine failures, landing gear problems, and generally weak construction for a plane that goes up to 25,000′ (Malibu; overworked piston engine with two turbochargers) or 30,000′ (Meridian; same plane with a turboprop engine).  The windshields are kind of a sore point too, costing $28,000 to replace after typical problems with the defroster.

But what if you want people to believe you when you call ATC and say that your windshield has imploded? There is really no better airplane.  Here’s a CNN article about a guy who bailed out of a 2002 Piper Meridian, tail number N428DC.  He probably doesn’t get much credit for managing money, but I give him a lot of credit for being able to parachute out of a Meridian, a plane whose door is a good long walk from the pilot’s seat and right next to the tail.

Update:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhgPCL3uCH4 shows the guy flying under a bridge in 2000.

Full post, including comments

Geography quiz for today:  What countries (or states within a country) are named after individuals or families?

To kick things off, I will supply one easy answer:  Saudi Arabia, named after the Saud family.

Full post, including comments

A discussion arose around looking for a new doctor and what it meant for a doctor to be “Board-certified”.  We called a friend who is an M.D.  She explained that this was an exam administered by an organization of specialists.  “A lot of the questions aren’t very relevant to practice and there are plenty of people who are good at taking tests who can pass the Boards without being good physicians.”  What if someone didn’t pass the Boards?  Could they still practice as a specialist?  “Absolutely.”

How about looking at where a doctor trained?  A doctor can’t graduate from residency without having achieved a certain level of proficiency at least certified by the hospital where he or she trained, right?  At least a few of the doctors at the hospital have to agree to sign his or her diploma? “Wrong.  Finishing residency means that you spent three years in residency.  If it was a very competitive residency, it means that the doctor looked good when graduating from medical school and getting matched.  But if he or she slacked off during residency, you have no way to know.”

I was beginning to get worried.  In aviation you don’t get a pilot’s certificate based on having taken a minimum number of hours of lessons, though there are minimum hour requirements.  You get a certificate when an independent FAA-designated examiner (or the FAA itself) flies with you and compares your skills to a published standard.  Was there nothing like that in medicine?  “There used to be for surgeons, but it was too hard to administer so they got rid of it.”

Just when I thought that it couldn’t get any worse, I reflected that hospitals were non-profit organizations.  The typical non-profit is focused on its staff, avoiding employee lawsuits, and growing its cash hoard.  There is little interest in the customer or the quality of services delivered.  If a resident was doing a bad job, maybe there was no way to fire the guy.  “Your fears are justified,” my doctor friend responded.  “I trained with one guy who was spectacularly incompetent.  He came close to killing a few patients.  Everyone knew that he was incompetent.  We were all dragged into a room by the head of the program who explained that this guy might sue if we continued to give him negative peer evaluations.  Thus we were not allowed to say anything bad about him in the future.  He finished his training.”

So… in a world where people who plug computers together get certified by Microsoft, it seems that there is some check on a doctor’s quality when he or she finishes medical school and virtually none after that.  How could a patient find a good doctor then?  “The only way is through personal recommendations from other physicians.”

Full post, including comments

In thinking about the Federal Government’s $1.3 billion spent so far on coupons for digital TV tuners, it occurred to me that at $40 per coupon, $1 billion+ was an awful lot of conversion boxes.  Dividing the $1.3 billion by $40, we find that the government has apparently handed out 32.5 million coupons.

http://www.connectmycable.com/resources/cable-vs-satellite.html says that 85 percent of U.S. households had cable or satellite TV in 2006.  Is it believable that the remaining 15 percent of U.S. households figured out that this government hand-out program exists, took the trouble to fill out the Web forms or paperwork to get their coupons, and brought home a converter box to uglify their homes?

If it is not believable, might there be some enterprising retailers out there who are delivering fictitious converter boxes to fictitious consumers?

[Note that this analysis is slightly oversimplified.  A house could have cable TV in the living room and an analog TV with rabbit ears on the kitchen counter.  The government might be wasting some of the $1.3 billion on administrative costs rather than putting it all into coupons (the newspaper articles on this subject aren’t clear on whether the budget was $1.3 billion in coupons or $1.3 billion in total for the program).]

[As a second aside, can anyone think of a greater waste of government money?  Regardless of how much was raised from selling the recovered spectrum, why would we choose to spend it on these converter boxes?  Wouldn’t $1.3 billion in extra scientific research have been more likely to give the U.S. economy a boost?]

Full post, including comments

Suppose you asked an employer building factories in Mexico, China, and South Korea rather than the U.S., “How come you’re not building the factory here?”  Perhaps the answer would be “I’m concerned that my workers won’t watch enough television.  They might spend their evenings learning new skills, reading books, or volunteering.”  In that case, Barack Obama is coming to the rescue of our economy by proposing a delay in our conversion to digital TV (nytimes story).

God forbid that an American would wake up one morning, turn on the television, and find out that there was no longer a broadcast analog signal.  If he wanted to continue to watch, he would have to order cable, get a new TV, or buy a conversion box without a subsidy from the Federales (we have apparently spent $1.3 billion so far so that people can keep running their old power-hogging CRT televisions; now the budgeted funds for conversion box coupons have run out).

It is comforting to know that our incoming president wants to ensure that as many Americans as possible waste as much time and electricity as possible watching old analog CRTs.

[I’m almost embarrassed that I didn’t add this important initiative to my economic recovery plan.]

[The government-issued coupons are for $40.  The converter boxes are $60-77 at Amazon.com.  All of this is to achieve the effect of having a crummy CRT-based TV with a digital tuner, which Walmart will sell you brand-new all in one box for $115 without government intervention.  Should you wish to enter the LCD flat-panel age, that starts at $228 at Walmart.]

Full post, including comments

I mentioned to a friend my wish that, as long as the government is spending money in hopes of boosting the economy, it would spend it on something that has proven to yield very high returns, i.e., open-source software.  He asked “How would you decide which projects to fund?  Most of the funding for software so far has come from the Department of Defense.”

My proposal would be copied from the way that universities implement their race-based hiring programs for faculty.  Each department in a university is given a fixed number of slots that they can fill by hiring whomever they believe is best qualified to be an assistant professor.  If, however, a department should hire someone whose skin is dark enough to qualify them as a desirable minority, that hire does not count towards their allocation.  In other words, a department with one slot that has found a white or Asian candidate can still hire that person and a favored minority in addition.  This way the university enlists its entire staff in helping with race-based hiring, rather than having one administrator at the top whose job is to find potential professors with the appropriate skin tone.

How can we apply this to open-source software and government agencies?  It might seem as though each government agency were spending as much money as humanly possible at all times.  Yet in fact each agency has an annual budget and is constrained by that budget.  If we were to set aside a few billion dollars we could say “Any agency that wants enhancements to existing open-source projects or wants to fund new open-source software can do so with all of the money coming from the central open-source software fund.”  That way agencies would be encouraged to spend money on open source because any funds spent wouldn’t come out of their usual budget.

How would it work?  Suppose that a 30-person group within the National Park Service wanted a Web-based tool for collaboration amongst themselves and a volunteer organization.  They find that a Drupal module does 85 percent of what they want. They would hire the developer of that module to add the features.  Those features could be rolled into the public distribution or made available separately to other programmers worldwide.  The money would come from the open-source software fund, no questions asked, rather than the Parks Service budget.

Full post, including comments

A rich friend forwarded me an advertisement that he got…

“Ferrari of New England is pleased to announce that we have 7 brand new Ferrari’s [sic] in Stock [sic] and ready to go, including 6 F430’s [sic] (Spider’s [sic] and Coupes) and a 612 Scaglietti.  This is indeed a rare opportunity to become the first original owner of a new Ferrari.  Most times it takes years and a purchase of a pre-owned Ferrari to attain this status.”

Full post, including comments

Automobile sales in the U.S. are down 35 percent for December 2008 compared to December 2007.  My conclusion is that the economy is in surprisingly good shape.  Why?  There is hardly a single person in the U.S. who actually needs a new car.  Cars have become so durable that the easiest purchase to defer is a new car.  A neighbor of mine is selling a 1997 Chrysler minivan.  It has 125,000 miles on it, works perfectly, and looks almost new because it lives in a garage.  He doesn’t trust it for long highway trips anymore.  The Blue Book value of this car is $3000 for a private party transaction, $1625 for a trade-in.  It would surely be nicer to have a brand new version of this same van (about $23,000 invoice, which presumably is the maximum you’d ever have to pay), but there would be no shame or inconvenience in driving this 12-year-old minivan.

The population growth rate of the U.S. is about 0.9 percent, so we might expect about 2.5 million cars to be sold as a consequence of newly licensed drivers (there are 250 million registered cars on our roads).  There are roughly 6 million car accidents every year in the U.S.  If we assume that the car is destroyed in 3 million of those, we would expect another 3 million sales due to accidents.  That’s an annual sales rate of 5.5 million.  In fact, sales are running at a rate of closer to 10 million, which means that 4.5 million cars are being sold as luxury splurges.  That doesn’t sound like a depression yet.

[January 6 Update: The New York Times has an article today on the fact that cars have gone from an average of 6 years old to an average of 9 years old.]

Full post, including comments

The news today describes the withdrawal of Bill Richardson from the job of Secretary of Commerce.  None of the articles point out that the guy has never had a job outside of government (wikipedia).  Does it make sense to have someone running Commerce who has never had any experience of trying to do any sort of business?  As private industry continues to shed jobs and government continues to grow, one might argue that in the long run all U.S. jobs will be government or government contracting, but we’re not there yet.  As a taxpayer, I get a bit nervous when I see the entire government run by people who’ve never been net payers of taxes (of course government workers do pay income tax, but their tax-funded salaries are larger than their tax payments, so on balance they are net recipients of tax dollars).

Full post, including comments