Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

This one is for folks graduating from college in 2008…

The 2007 calendar year was one in which America’s financial system more or less collapsed, though we didn’t realize how thoroughly until early in 2008.  It was also a year in which Wall Street paid out record bonuses, a total of $38 billion at just a handful of banks (source).  One of the firms that paid out $billions, Bear Stearns, essentially went bankrupt last week, but is being bailed out at taxpayer expense (story).

It has gotten to the point where only a fool would refrain from high-risk bets at any large Wall Street firm.  If the strategy randomly succeeds, the bankers can transfer $billions into their personal checking accounts as bonuses for a job done well.  If the roll of the dice isn’t favorable, some $billions in compensation can probably still be extracted while the general public absorbs the loss through taxes.

[I had my own interaction with Bear Stearns in January 2008.  One of their brokers had figured out that I was semi-rich.  He sent me an email:

“I wanted to first of all wish you congratulations, and hope that you have a moment to learn about our team here at Bear Stearns. Our group specializes in working exclusively with founders and corporate executives who go through liquidity events.

“From your resume, I have seen the previous accolades and imagine that at some point you have utilized someone to guide you through one of these transitions.  However, this also may be a good inflection point where Bear Stearns could act as a good conduit as 2007 has ended and you have sold another business venture where liquidity is created.”

This was shortly after two Bear Stearns hedge funds blew up, wiping out 100 percent of the $20 billion that investors had pledged to their care. Bear Stearns itself had pocketed $billions in fees from these investors in the preceding few years, so all was not lost, but being a Bear Stearns client didn’t seem like a good way to beat the index.  My reply:

“Thanks, but I think I did a lot better than Bear Stearns did for its customers last year.  Because I wasn’t smart enough to choose or run a hedge fund, I had my money parked in boring Vanguard funds, mostly index funds.”

]

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Recession is upon us, economists seem to agree, and now we need only discuss how to get out of it.  One popular solution is to cut interest rates and print money.  That has worked in the past for most of the U.S., but it did not work for Rust Belt states and cities such as Michigan, Cleveland, and Buffalo.  The Rust Belt was unattractive to new business investment due to its high labor costs, high taxes (many of which were necessary to pay for commitments made decades earlier, either bonds or pensions for public employee unions), and inner-city crime (Detroit).  Companies did invest the newly printed money, but they invested it in other regions of the U.S.

The Federal Reserve Bank is cutting interest rates, printing money, and ladling out the public’s cash to mortage speculators.  When folks get their hands on this money, will they invest it in things that will cause the U.S. GDP to grow in the long run?  Consumers will buy stuff, presumably manufactured items made in China or oil from Venezuela and the Middle East.  Companies will invest some of the money, but presumably where they think it is most efficient to invest.  In the old days, U.S. companies nearly always invested somewhere in the U.S.  China was closed to foreign investment.  India was tangled in bureaucracy and regulations.  South America was unstable politically.

How does the U.S. stack up right now as a place to invest?  Our workers are expensive because the cost of living here is high and their taxes need to be high enough to pay for a lavish government sector and an Iraq adventure that Joseph Stiglitz estimates will cost $3 trillion, a sizable fraction of our annual $14 trillion GDP.  Our college graduates are roughly equivalent in ability to other nations’ high school graduates (story) and a lot of our high school graduates could not compete on the world market for any jobs other than manual labor.  Our transportation system is comprehensive, but traffic jams can take an hour or more out of a worker’s day.  Unlike other countries, we have no plans to implement congestion pricing.  In communications, we lag countries such as South Korea in broadband speed and percentage of households connected; we lag all of Europe and most of Asia in mobile phone coverage.  Our consumer market is huge, but it is also brutally competitive and most consumers have all of the stuff that they need; emerging middle classes in India, China, and Arab countries represent more of a profit opportunity.

If we handed out $500 billion right now to U.S. businesses and told them to invest it, how much of that investment would happen here in the U.S.?

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America’s prison population has been in the news recently, having reached a record high in absolute numbers, partly due to population growth, of course, but still representing about 1 percent of the adult population. Economic statistics are affected by imprisonment. The person in prison stops paying taxes and generating GDP. The companies that built prisons and the people who work in prisons are accounted for as adding to GDP (story). If we assume that for every two people in prison, there is one person involved in prison construction or management, and that prisoners and guards would both make average salaries if working in some other industry, the effect on the economy is 1% down from the prisoners not working and 1/2% up from the prison industry working.

Does it make sense to say that our GDP is reduced by only 1/2%? Suppose that 66.6% of us were in prison and 33.3% of us were building and running prisons. An economist would say that our economy was reduced either by 33.3% or 66.6%. In fact, however, no food would be grown, no products manufactured, and no private houses constructed. People wouldn’t be able to buy import anything from other countries because the 33.3% of the population that was working would have to pay 100% of its salary in tax just so that it could pay itself.

Putting immigrants in prison is probably the worst imaginable thing to be doing economically. It is tough to find good national statistics, but http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/business/30leonside.html seems to indicate that about 7 percent of the U.S. population are noncitizens and that the percentage among prisoners is similar (it is about 17 percent in California state prisons). Suppose that 1 million immigrants come over the border tomorrow, commit crimes, are apprehended, and are put in prison. The economists would record a massive spike in GDP. We paid police officers to find these folks, we paid construction workers to build new prisons, we paid guards to watch them, we paid managers to supervise the guards, we paid farmers to divert grain from our biofuels program to feed these folks. So the numbers look great temporarily, but the effect on the welfare of American citizens and our competitiveness for new business investment would be devastating. [Just as the tornado that hit Atlanta yesterday will increase GDP as windows are replaced and buildings repaired, though the people of Atlanta are certainly not better off and we could have spent that money building factories instead.]

At the very least, running an expensive prison system seems to put us at a competitive disadvantage to countries that can manage to achieve similar levels of public security without such a large or expensive prison system. Our taxes will be higher compared to those other countries and that will discourage business investment.

If we want to dig ourselves out of this recession, we may have to stop committing crimes against each other!

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An interesting new article about Microloans from James Surowiecki, the New Yorker’s financial writer.

It prompted me to check my portfolio at kiva.org.  I loaned out $650 back in July.  The borrowers were four people running small shops and hair salons in Ecuador.  Nearly all of the money has been repaid.  By choosing Ecuador, I have apparently done better than the average Kiva user, who loaned out $95 and who has suffered a 3.76 percent delinquency rate (compared to 0% for me).  I re-loaned $100 to Rhoda Mbwila in Tanzania so that she can raise some more chickens to sell.  She has previously  paid back a couple of loans from the same local organization.  I loaned another $100 to a woman running a shop in Huancayo, Peru (a Google search reveals this to be a very nice town indeed).  I loaned the rest of my $350 in available credit to Luz Perez Yauri, who has an alfalfa farm in Huancayo (as long as the Chinese keep getting richer, I have faith that commodity prices will stay high, not to mention the fact that the U.S. will need to import food like crazy once we’ve melted all of our grain down into biofuel for our SUVs).

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If you have $60 million(?) to spend on a new personal airplane, the Gulfstream G650, described in this Aero-News.net article, might be a good choice.  The machine demonstrates that innovation can be pushed through the FAA certification process as long as you give yourself a few years and a few $billion.  The G650 shows the pilot synthetic terrain, almost as realistic as if you’d hooked up a $30 GPS to a $39 copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator.  More interestingly, it has a forward looking infrared camera to show a real-world image through fog or rain.

For folks who like to spend a lot of time on their new airplane, the cabin pressurization system is great, able to keep the cabin at 2,800′ while the plane is flying at 41,000′.  To soar above the rabble, the G650 can get to FL510 (51,000′) and the pressure inside the cabin falls to about 5,000′ above sea level.  The plane is even faster than the Cessna Citation X, the previous champ at 0.92 Mach, with a cruising speed of 0.9 Mach and a maximum speed of 0.925 Mach.

The world’s fastest flying airplane comes with the world’s slowest loading Web site: http://www.gulfstream.com/gulfstreamg650/

[If you think that by chartering one of these puppies for $10,000 per hour, you’ll escape the pain and suffering of Transportation Security Agency screening, you might just be right.  The takeoff weight is 99,600 lb., just squeaking in under the 100,000 lb. threshold where TSA screening for charters is required.  My understanding that if you own the plane outright and are just flying around in it, no screening would ever be required.]

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If you spend enough time with hookers, apparently people will forget to ask whether or not you’re doing a good job. This New Yorker magazine article, “The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer”, from December 2007, suggests that he was not accomplishing much.  Foreigners and financial services firms were keeping New York City flush while the rest of the state continued its decline.

It is unclear what the new guy is going to do.  What would it take to create jobs in Buffalo or Rochester?  Why would a company subject itself and its workers to crushing taxes to pay for public employee union deals made in the 1970s when they could locate in South Carolina instead?

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My T-Mobile cell phone bill came today. The Bahamas trip cost $144 in roaming fees. The interesting thing about this is that the phone was turned off for nearly the entire time that it was in the Bahamas and I didn’t make or receive a single call. When I settled in at the first hotel, I noticed that no service was available. To save the battery, I turned off the phone. Once or twice at other islands, I turned the phone on to see if service was available, and once or twice it was, but I turned the phone off afterwards. So the T-Mobile system knew that I was in the Bahamas, but the phone never rang and no calls were ever connected. Nonetheless, they billed $3 for every incoming call that anyone attempted to make during that time and then another $3 as a “voicemail fee” for the person talking to their voicemail system. If the person leaving the message was longer-winded, and spoke for two minutes, the total charge for the call would be $12.00 total.

One interesting note is that when I checked my voicemail, there were only 5 messages, yet T-Mobile charged for 21 inbound interactions with their voicemail system (at either $3 or $6 per interaction).

I called T-Mobile customer service and asked that they remove these charges. They refused.

[One positive note:  The T-Mobile SMS system seems to bill a little more accurately.  The system did not charge me for any SMS messages during the time that the phone was powered off.]

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It is time to replace my hated Motorola KRAZR phone, whose virtues start and end with the fact that it is a flip design.

I’ve decided that I need to make my entire life Google-centric, storing all calendar events and contacts with Google and continuing to use Gmail. The ideal phone would therefore presumably be the new Google Android phone, but that won’t be available until the end of 2008?

So… what phone can sync reasonably well with the Google Web-based apps? And simultaneously run a good gmail client (is the Java one better for small screens than just trying to use a phone browser with the standard HTML Gmail?)?

I travel around a lot and am too busy to mess with trying to configure Wifi at every stop. That means the phone must have high-speed cell phone network data capability (i.e., the iPhone must be ruled out).

It would be nice to have a phone that is good for running Google Chat and/or AOL Instant Messenger, to keep in touch with my friends (though it may be sufficient to run Google Chat alone since that can connect to AIM).

A friend has a AT&T Tilt (made by HTC) that seems to have every possible feature: high-speed data, built-in GPS, real keyboard, music, video, etc. I played around with it a bit, however, and found that Web browsing, while not painfully slow as with the iPhone, was somewhat clumsy because it doesn’t appear to reformat pages for the small device. I think the interface would have worked great with a much larger display. The thing is Windows-based, which makes me believe that syncing it to Google apps will require piping everything through Microsoft Outlook (not ready for that much pain, I don’t think).

It would be nice to have a phone that works in foreign countries, so that rules out Verizon and Spring, correct? Or do they have some kind of scheme to let their customers talk in GSM countries?

It would be very nice to have a flip-phone design, so that the phone doesn’t make or answer calls from within my pocket, but I have a feeling that this is too much to ask and that I’m out of sync with American consumers.

I’m wondering if given the inherent cumbersomeness of smart phones if it isn’t worth sucking it up and getting a very small computer that can also make phone calls. If the thing can fit into a blue jeans pocket, it would be small enough.

What are the smart kids using for smart phones these days?

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Folks: In an effort to become the consummate condo-dwelling yuppie, I replaced my 10-year-old (mid-priced) Whirlpool dishwasher, whose cleaning power was beginning to fade, with a $1200 Bosch. The new Bosch leaves food on silverware and dishes and can’t clean pots or pans. The Whirlpool, at age 10, did a far better job. Compared to the Whirlpool when new (throw in any dirty dish, without scraping or rinsing, and pots with all kinds of stuck-on crud), the Bosch is a joke. (full story) Anyone else have a Bosch dishwasher? How does it compare to your old American-style dishwasher?

[Update: After four service visits, Bosch figured out that the circulation pump on this machine was defective. Service visits number 5, 6, and 7 were devoted to bringing out a replacement part, opening the box, discovering that the replacement part was also defective, and driving away. On service visit number 8, the Bosch guy showed up with a working replacement circulation pump and installed it.  The dishwasher seems to work better now.  It only took 25 phone calls, 8 days home from work waiting for the repair guy, and more than twice as much money to get a dishwasher that works as well as the 1996-vintage Whirlpool (which never required any service in 11 years).  Surely there is no better time to be a yuppie…]

[Update 2: I moved to a new house in October 2008. The house had a fancy stainless steel Bosch dishwasher already installed. Problems that occurred within the first 6 months: (1) the lower spray arm cracked and fell off; (2) the soap dispenser would not close reliably; the seal at the bottom of the dishwasher leaked. After those were fixed (don’t ask what it cost!), the dishwasher worked reasonably well (nowhere near as well as the ancient Whirlpool) for a few months then suffered a 100 percent failure whereby it refused to start (though all of the LEDs behaved sensibly).]

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… and now she wants a prenuptial agreement reading “In the event that husband (henceforth referred to as ‘The Slimy Weasel’) is caught with a hooker, intern, dominatrix, etc., the wife (henceforth referred to as ‘The Long Sufferer’), shall not be required to appear on any dais, adjacent to any lectern, or in frame when The Slimy Weasel is giving an interview explaining his conduct.”

[Why is it that whenever we see a politician speaking and a stoic wife standing adjacent we don’t have to read the story to figure out that he was caught with his hand in some cookie jar?]

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