Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I’m trying to muster the energy to finish up a posting about Andrew Carnegie, but meanwhile it is probably worth relating a few facts about Andrew Mellon, also the subject of a recent biography. Mellon was a rich kid from Pittsburgh who got a lot richer running his dad’s bank. Mellon attempted to live entirely out of the public eye, but at the age of 46, he married a 22-year-old and the divorce 11 years later filled the tabloids of 1912. Mellon was one of our nation’s greatest art collectors, assembling the collection that filled the National Gallery building that he paid for. Mellon was an early advocate of Reaganomics. As Secretary of the Treasury, he cut tax rates for the wealthy in order to encourage investors to shift from tax-free bonds into more productive stocks in industrial companies. He also eliminated income tax for those with low incomes.

Mellon served under Republican presidents and when FDR came into office, he ordered the IRS to audit Mellon’s personal income tax returns. The IRS found nothing amiss and the Roosevelt administration turned to a criminal prosecution of Mellon. When a grand jury refused to indict Mellon, the Roosevelt administration filed a civil lawsuit before the federal Board of Tax Appeals. Mellon died a few months before being exonerated by the Board.

A couple of friends invited me to the Chocolate Lounge, which happens every Thursday night from 7:30 pm to 11:30 near the corner of Main and Mass Ave in Central Square. Quiet and relaxed, a great place for conversation.

Check out the names of the intersections in the GPS 32 approach to Logan Airport (BOS).

Some friends have organized BarCamp, here in Boston from March 17-18. Part of Barcamp includes a programming contest. I have donated Boston helicopter tours as prizes for the winners of the programming contest. If you’re a New England programmer with a desire to see the city from a Robinson R44, this could be a fun way to do it.

I met with an MIT student today who is from South Africa. I mentioned that I was going to Cape Town in April. He said that he was from Johannesburg. “I’ve heard that Johannesburg has a lot of crime,” I mentioned. “There are more deaths every year in Johannesburg than in Iraq,” was his reply.

I’m two-thirds of the way through Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw. He became the richest man in the world in 1901 after selling his steel company to J.P. Morgan, collecting $120 billion in today’s dollars. From page 600:

Carnegie had decided long before that America’s largest universities, “such as Harvard and Columbia… were large enough; that further growth was undesirable; that the smaller institutions (the colleges especially) were in greater need of help and that it would be a better use of surplus wealth to aid them.”

Last year, the Boston subway and bus system (MBTA) used tokens and cost $1.25 per ride. Today, with my car as frozen solid as a JetBlue Airbus at JFK, I decided to take the subway up to Davis Square. They have bought fancy new magnetic debit card machines. You don’t have to carry metal tokens anymore. The cost of a ride, however, has gone up to $2. This illustrates nicely one of the problems with user fees for government services. The government agency starts out by being spectacularly inefficient (MBTA bus drivers, for example, got paid an average of $55,000 in 2004, plus free health insurance and a pension plan vastly superior to anything in private industry). Then they decide that they need to collect user fees of $X. Then they come up with a system for collecting those user fees that turns out to be surprisingly expensive. Then the usage of the system falls due to the higher price. So it turns out that the fee collected per use ends up needing to be double what was originally planned, just to yield the same net revenue.

The deeper question for me is why the subway and bus system in congested Boston charges riders at all. Anyone who rides the subway instead of driving is doing the rest of society a huge favor by reducing pollution, global warming, and traffic congestion. The total revenues from bus and subway riders in FY2005 was roughly $240 million. We have at least 1 million cars that operate in Boston for 250 working days per year. If we charged drivers $5 per day per car as a congestion reduction fee, or about 1/4 the fee charged in London, that would yield revenue roughly 3X the MBTA token/card sales (assuming that the congestion fee and free MBTA reduced car usage by 40 percent).

If we paid the true costs of our transportation lifestyle, car owners would pay at least $5 per day for driving in the city and T riders would get free coffee and donuts as a thank-you.

I’ve prepared a job posting for a photography intern and would appreciate feedback before it gets more widely circulated. What did I leave out?

Jessica Livingston’s new book, Founders at work, contains a 28-page interview with none other than the author of this Weblog (plus interviews with a lot more genuinely accomplished folks!).

A friend asks

I have a lady friend who knows less than even the very basic basics of computer use, why and what programs are used for, etc.

Can you recommend a down-to-earth, layman’s terms book or possibly a website instructional that would help her get a firmer understanding of simple, basic computer use and the accompanying jargon that surrounds it?