Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I spent Sunday attending the wedding of two friends.  Generally the idea of being trapped inside a hotel conference room on a fine summer’s day fills me with horror.  In this case, however, the wedding had some cultural interest because the groom was Korean-American and the bride Chinese-American.  One big difference was the level of participation of the parents.  They came right up to the front and, before any vows were exchange between bride and groom, each of the young people promised to love and honor his or her in-laws.  Another difference was the level of intelligence and education in the room.  Asian-Americans are our most discriminated-against ethnic group.  They have a tough time breaking into the Old White Guys’clubs and golf games.  They are officially discriminated against by universities and government because they aren’t the right kind of minority.  How do Asians respond?  Apparently by studying and working like demons.  A person at the reception who attended an Ivy League college, earned an M.D. or Ph.D., and was a good enough violinist to play in a symphony orchestra would have been average.  The Taiwanese-American woman officiating had an M.D. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from MIT.  Twenty more years of Affirmative Action and we will have effectively bred a super-race of Asian-Americans.

My favorite part of the wedding was the groom’s mother’s toast.  She recounted how, not having ever been introduced to a girlfriend, she sat her son down and said “I’m your mother.  I will accept whatever you tell me, even if it is difficult.  Just tell me the truth:  Are you gay?”  Thanks, Mom.

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http://philip.greenspun.com/business/mobile-phone-as-home-computer details an idea for giving a Joe Consumer the illusion that his smartphone is his only computer but still providing him with 99 percent of the function of a home PC that would otherwise need to be separately administered, upgraded, etc.

Comments would be appreciated as I’m going to talk about this at Xerox PARC in a month or so.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20050922/tc_pcworld/122653 is a fun story for former Treo owners such as myself.  I had about 10 Treos, each of which suffered a catastrophic hardware failure after about two months.  I gave up when they stopped replacing them under warranty.  I sorely miss the keyboard but my Motorola/WinXP phone has been working great for about a year.

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This has been my week of comedy shows.  At the Piper Malibu and Meridian Owner’s and Pilot’s Association annual convention we were fortunate to have the opportunity to hear from Norm Macdonald and Victoria Jackson, Saturday Night Live alums.  Tonight it was a younger generation at Harvard Square’s Comedy Studio (upstairs from the infamous Hong Kong restaurant).  Out of the nine acts featured by comic/emcee Dan Sally, the clear standouts were Rebecca Anderson’s impersonations and Matt Soni’s stage presence.  The worst was oldster Gary Sohmers, a public TV junk collector, who said that the secret of happiness was to surround oneself with the stuff of one’s childhood and to hate George W. Bush.  To my mind, Sohmers’s only redeeming feature was his graying ponytail, which made him resemble the television producer driving in his Jaguar during the opening scene of the movie Intolerable Cruelty (seen with Spanish subtitles in Bariloche, Argentina).

I’m parking this posting here so that I can come back five years from now and say that I saw Rebecca Anderson and Matt Soni back before they were famous.

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Done with my CFII (checkride was yesterday; hot, bumpy, surface wind gusts to 24 knots, but I passed and now can teach Angelina Jolie her instrument rating), I jacked into the World Wide Cybernet for the first time in awhile and found the following email from a reader of http://philip.greenspun.com:

Are you Philip Greenspun? Do you perform as Bonkers the Clown?
What city are you in?

John Rain – Dallas, TX

Perhaps it is time to revise my personal site.

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http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/09/08/report_rates_boston_most_expensive_city/ says the following:

Propelled largely by high housing costs, Boston is now the most expensive metropolitan area in the country, outpacing Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and even New York City, according to a report that will be released today.

The report found that last year, a family of four living in the Boston area needed $64,656 to cover its basic needs. This was $6,000 more than in New York City, and about $7,000 more than in San Francisco. Living expenses, which include healthcare, child care, and other basic needs, were $44,000 or less in Austin, Texas; Chicago; Miami; and Raleigh, N.C.

The third annual ”Housing Report Card,” produced by the Boston Foundation and the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, concludes that even an uptick in housing production could not halt the relentless climb of Greater Boston’s housing prices, which are increasing far more rapidly than are wages.

Should we be concerned that housing prices are so high?  In some ways it is depressing that government here is so restrictive that even rich people are forced to live in 120-year-old wooden slums.  In Cambridge, for example, it is illegal to tear down an old structure and rebuild something decent of the same size; the new house would have to conform to modern zoning setbacks and height restrictions so that if you tore down the typical 2-family or 3-family 4500 square foot slum you’d only be able to build a dollhouse to replace it.  On the other hand, perhaps we should feel good that people love it here so much they are willing to pay $2500 per month for a small apartment.  On the third hand, maybe it is only because most of the rest of the country has become such a sprawl-ridden wasteland that Boston seems comparatively attractive.

I was driving up Route 1A the other night to visit a friend in Marblehead.  The route goes past wooden slums hard by the highway all through Everett, Revere, and Lynn.  One’s gut feeling about such an apartment is “they would have to pay me to live here”, especially since the daily traffic jams getting in or out of the slum are horrific.  Yet compared to the rest of the country these apartments rent and the slum houses sell for far more than a nice comfortable place of equivalent square footage almost anywhere else in the U.S.  I guess I’m not surprised that people would be willing to pay a premium to live in beautiful Back Bay or among the intelligent wanderers of Harvard Square but why are the prices in the slums of Everett so high?

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The New Orleans tragedy highlights the need for some better measures of national well-being.  If our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is rising we tend to think that the national well being is rising.  Some of the problems with assuming this direct correlation are subtle.  Mexicans are happy even though economically poorer, perhaps partly due to their strong family ties.  An American who moves from his pleasant home town in the Midwest to the sprawling wasteland of Southern California is probably earning more and generating more economic output but perhaps his enjoyment of life has been reduced.  It would be tough to adjust for these subjective factors.  Calamities such as New Orleans or 9/11 might be worth adjusting for.

Consider a less emotionally charged example.  In Case 1 you decide that your Jeep Grand Cherokee isn’t big enough to carry pretzels and walnut oil back from the Trader Joe’s.  You give the SUV away to your sister and buy a Chevrolet Suburban.  In Case 2 you get distracted listening to NPR complain about the cruelty we are inflicting on our Afghani guests in balmy Guantanamo Bay, skid on the ice in the subfreezing depths of a Massachusetts February, and crash that Grand Cherokee into a tree.  You buy a Suburban as a replacement and the local tree company is hired to remove what remains of the tree.  In Case 2 the GDP will be reported as higher.  In addition to a new SUV being bought a tree company was paid.  Never mind that in Case 2 your sister is still walking everywhere and people who had enjoyed shade from that tree are getting skin cancer (their treatments will further inflate GDP).

In New Orleans a tremendous amount of money will be expended on getting us back to where we were before.  The same people will be living in substantially the same housing and working in substantially the same office buildings and yet $billions will have been spent to pump out water and shore up foundations.  In New York at least $10 billion will be spent on rebuilding the World Trade Center site.  It might be a little nicer than what was there on September 10, 2001 but functionally will be similar in terms of office space square footage.  This $10 billion will be recorded as an addition to GDP but it won’t have the same positive impact the World Trade Center remaining standing and $10 billion of entirely new office space constructed in growing regions of the U.S.

What’s the point of this analysis?  When you look at decades of GDP growth and can’t figure out why there are still so many poor people ask yourself what percentage of that GDP was spent on replacing stolen car stereos, reglazing broken windows, hiring extra security personnel after terrorist attacks, and other similar “get back to where we were” projects.

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A friend of mine is a singer/songwriter who gives concerts that attract mostly between 100 and 300 people.  He has a new CD that he has made himself and can sell at any price that he wishes.  So the question becomes what would be perceived as a fair price for this product and induce people to buy it?  The record companies seem to think “whatever we charged in 1980, adjusted for inflation, is good” but their declining sales seem to indicate otherwise.  The younger folks whom I’ve talked to mostly report that (a) they have no money because it is all going to mobile phone and cable TV/Internet, (b) they have no space to store CDs because they are paying $750/month for one room in a cramped Somerville apartment, and (c) they don’t think of CDs as representing a good value compared to alternatives (I just signed up to Rhapsody as part of my Sonos whole-house music system experience and for $10 per month it is pretty impressive how much stuff one has access to).  The old folks report that (1) they already have XM or Sirius satellite radio in their fancy new cars, and (2) they already have CDs of the music that they like best (will there ever be another band as great as ABBA?).

The question I asked was “You go to a concert with about 150 other people and enjoy the music.  The moderately successful artist is selling CDs after the show.  You don’t think that any of your friends already have the disk and therefore you won’t be able to borrow and rip it easily.  How much would the CD have to cost before you would definitely buy it?”

Answers so far:  27-year-old female: $5; 40-year-old male medical doctor: $5; another 27-year-old female: $5; 29-year-old female: $5; 41-year-old multimillionaire male $4-8; 30-year-old male: $9; 36-year-old multi-millionaire male: $9;  32-year-old male $10;  35-year-old female medical doctor: $10; 39-year-old male: $10; 42-year-old male $10 [if no data on wealth provided, assume comfortable middle class or above]

What do the readers say?  Please comment and include your age and sex.  If your income level is unusual please indicate with “student”, “multi-millionaire”, “medical doctor” or similar.  If your occupation is somehow related to the entertainment business, please indicate.

Thanks!

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When you’re a kid you feel secure imagining that the people who manage critical government functions are old, wise, and well-qualified.  There comes a sad point in many lives when the cruel facts shatter this illusion.  You wake up and realize that folks running multi-$billion programs are younger than you and, objectively, no better qualified to do their tough job.

For me this moment came about seven years ago at a friend’s house in Cambridge.  Another guest was a high official in the Clinton Administration charged with supervising $billions in health care expenditures.  She was about my age, pleasant, a friend of Bill Clinton’s, and had absolutely no relevant experience for the job.  She was not a medical doctor, had never worked in a hospital, had never managed a large business or budget.

For much of the rest of the country the moment seems to be now, upon learning that the federal government’s $6 billion/year emergency management capability is being managed by Michael Brown, a guy whose last job was running a horse show association.  One would naively have expected a retired military logistics expert to be chosen to head up FEMA.  Instead we get the lawyer/horse guy.

A lot of folks in Latin America remain convinced that the Man (Uncle Sam) is keeping them down.  Considering that the Man is actually mostly guys like Michael Brown they ought to be really embarrassed that they are such pushovers.

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I’ve noticed a wide variation in how disturbed friends and miscellaneous New Englanders feel about the situation in New Orleans.  Some are very emotional while others don’t seem profoundly affected.  I have started asking folks “how much TV news coverage of the event have you seen?”  Feeling distraught seems to be correlated with watching TV.  Those who’ve read textual descriptions of the suffering in newspapers or on the Web aren’t anywhere near as upset as those who’ve seen video clips of people suffering.  Reading the lines “hundreds of people were screaming” isn’t as disturbing as seeing one person scream.

This seems to jibe with something a public TV producer once said:  “Television is useless for conveying information.  If you print out the script for the 20+ minutes of nightly network news it is only a few pages that you could read in a minute or two.  Very few facts are communicated during that newscast.  Television is good for making people feel a certain way.”

Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

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