Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Sitting around with a couple of friends at breakfast in Santa Clara, the question of how to spend $100 million on charity came up.  As these folks had been working at Google for a few years this was not mere idle speculation.  Giving money to U.S. universities was ruled out in advance; they are too rich and too inefficient.  Going to the other side of the wealth spectrum helping Africa had also been previously nixed; hundreds of $billions are already being pumped into that continent with negligible results.  The rest of the world of possibilities was open for discussion.

My personal suggestion #1 is to support online education.  People almost everywhere in the world have computers with Internet access but there is precious little online content that will enable them to improve themselves.

My personal suggestion #2 is to use the money as a seed for a bank-financed real estate development, modeled after towns in Mexico, Peru, and the rest of Latin America.  Americans are rich but lonely and not nearly as happy statistically as Mexicans.  I think one big reason is that most Americans live in sprawl-land where it is difficult to meet friends and interact with neighbors.  There are plenty of 1000-house real estate developments being built right now in the Southwest.  Why not build one around a central plaza like a Mexican or Chilean town?  Offer very low rent to vital shops such as a supermarket, a hardware store, etc., so that it doesn’t turn into a travesty like Disney’s Celebration near Orlando, Florida.  Include one of the “small high schools” that Bill Gates likes to talk about (private, presumably).  And then hire sociologists to come in and figure out if people are in fact happier in such a community.

My personal suggestion #3 is to fund open-source software.  A tremendous amount of benefit has been delivered to people around the world by free and open-source software.  Aside from Web applications it is in fact tough to think of things that can be built by just a handful of people that touch the lives of millions.  Yet traditional foundations don’t think software is interesting and the U.S. Government spends its time and effort suing Microsoft instead of paying programmers to improve the GNU tools and Linux.

Who has some better ideas than these?

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http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/01/news/fortune500/buffett_talks/index.htm?cnn=yes summarizes Warren Buffett and Charles Munger’s address to shareholders.  My favorite line:

Some people seem to think there’s no trouble [with Ford and GM] just because it hasn’t happened yet. If you jump out the window at the 42nd floor and you’re still doing fine as you pass the 27th floor, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a serious problem.

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The latest New Yorker magazine has a story about the Mongols, under Hulagu, sacking Baghdad back in 1257 A.D.  There are some fun facts in the article such as that Genghis Khan was said to have had 500 wives and concubines.  Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at Oxford University, has done Y-chromosome studies and estimates that roughly 32 million people today are descended from Genghis Khan and his harem.  Charity was not a big part of the Mongol system:

When anyone begged from [the Mongols], they replied, “Go, with God’s curse, for if he loved you as he loves me, he would have provided for you.”

No theodicy problem for Genghis and pals…

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Back in Boston now with a couple of tales from West Los Angeles and Montreal.

A friend who moved out there 15 years ago asked about some of the bright young MIT-graduate nerds she had known back in Boston.  These are guys in their mid-40s and nearly all struggling to find reasonably interesting employment as engineers.  They’re competing with recent graduates in their 20s for jobs paying less than $100,000 per year, which makes it tough to support a wife and kids given the high cost of living in the Northeast.  As my friend looked sad to hear this news I observed that “If they’d gone to law school they’d all be partners by now making, I guess, $300,000 per year.”  My friend lives in medium-sized house in a good neighborhood, has three kids in private schools, a nanny, cleaners, and a personal trainer.  Her response?  “Three hundred thousand per year?  Is that all that lawyers make back East?  How can anyone support a family on $300,000 per year?”

I asked a 17-year-old kid what he had done on his spring vacation from private school:  “A bunch of us went to St. Louis on a ***** company jet and went to the Final Four basketball games.  Then we got back on the plane to go to some parties in Manhattan.”  [company name elided so that any shareholders reading this blog don’t cry when they get their meager dividend check]

NPR did a segment this afternoon on a pregnant 13-year-old in Florida whose state agency guardians won’t let her have an abortion.  One of the experts interviewed said “there is no way that someone that young can consent to sex.”  This reminded me of a high school girl in Montreal who said “Newspapers complain that 13-year-olds are having oral sex.  Well, it was not too long ago that 13-year-old girls were married.”

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http://hometown.aol.com/mschue5938/dogpoweredscooter.html

Needs no introduction.

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After touring the Robinson Helicopter factory in Torrance, I hopped in a Robinson R22 for a flying lesson with Bruce Cochran at Pacific Coast Helicopters.  Before settling down to practicing the maneuvers and emergency procedures necessary for a Commercial rating we embarked on a scenic tour of Los Angeles, starting with a flight 500′ above the beach towards Marina Del Ray.  The Class B airspace for LAX extends to the surface at the coast so Bruce called the LAX tower for clearance through the “Bravo” at or below 150′.  Normally the FAA encourages pilots to stay 500-1000′ above houses and people but here it is more important to keep the transitioning helicopters below the jets departing LAX and heading out over the Pacific.  By the time we got to the Santa Monica pier we were clear of LAX airspace and climbed back up to 500′ and continued up as far as Malibu before heading east toward the New Getty.  The conventional altitude for helicopters is 1000-1200′ above sea level here and the New Getty is probably around 800′ MSL.  So we were almost looking sideways at the museum and garden.  Then we headed over toward downtown and the Los Angeles Cathedral and the new Gehry-designed concert hall, careful to avoid the police helicopters that are on more or less constant patrol in these areas.  Heading south from here we again were required to call LAX and ask for a transition southbound over the 110 freeway at 900′.  We finished our scenic tour over the Queen Mary in Long Beach before heading back to the Torrance airport for a little practice into winds that were now gusting up to about 20 mph.

I can definitely recommend this excursion for any helicopter student or pilot.  Don’t try it solo, however, because you need to talk to so many different air traffic controllers and know so many local landmarks and customs.

[Pacific Coast Helicopters will take non-pilots on the same itinerary as a sightseeing tour.  It is certainly fun for getting some perspective on LA freeway traffic.  Lots of monster SUVs going nowhere burning premium gas that is now up to $3.10 per gallon in Malibu.]

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United Airlines from Chicago to Los Angeles was packed with people returning from the Herbalife convention in Atlanta.  “There were 38,000 of us and Elton John opened,” one woman from Australia noted (she was rather on the square side and not someone you’d expect to ask “Lose weight now, ask me how”).  It occurred to me that on nearly every commercial airline flight that I’ve taken in the past year I’ve run into someone who was traveling to or from a multi-level marketing (a.ka. “pyramid scheme”) convention.  If the airlines want to improve their financials they should use their federal subsidies, most of which in recent years have gone to paying executive salaries, to seed more multi-level marketing companies.

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In an attempt to build up my skills in the Piper Arrow, an example of the “complex” airplane that must be used for an FAA flight instructor flight test, I went out to western Massachusetts on Saturday to MassMOCA, an electronic components factory converted to contemporary art museum.  The most arresting exhibit currently is by the explosion artist Cai Guo-Qiang.  He tricked out Ford Tauruses with fiber optics to simulate rockets and fireworks then hung them from the ceiling in one of MassMOCA’s largest rooms.  This is well worth the trip to the North Adams airport (KAQW; surrounded by mountains and not suitable for IFR or night operations).  If you were bored by the car exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts you’ll like this one.

http://www.caiguoqiang.com/project_detail.php?id=114&iid=517 shows some photos.  The exhibit closes in October 2005.

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A friend trained in economics, let’s call her “Polly”, was over to the house for dinner last night.  She asked if we knew anyone for a twentysomething friend of hers, let’s call him “Bunbury”, who worked a demanding software management job at a big software company.  He was a “really nice guy” and she was perplexed that he couldn’t find someone.  If someone at the table had said “there is a company traded on the NYSE that is really undervalued” she would have immediately hammered him with an explanation of the Efficient Market Hypothesis:

“An ‘efficient’ market is defined as a market where there are large numbers of rational, profit-maximizers actively competing, with each trying to predict future market values of individual securities, and where important current information is almost freely available to all participants. In an efficient market, competition among the many intelligent participants leads to a situation where, at any point in time, actual prices of individual securities already reflect the effects of information based both on events that have already occurred and on events which, as of now, the market expects to take place in the future. In other words, in an efficient market at any point in time the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value.”

(see http://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/91malkiel.pdf and http://www.investorhome.com/emh.htm).  Why then was Polly convinced that her friend was such a catch?  Applied to romance, the Efficient Market Hypothesis says that if the guy were actually worth dating one of the millions of women who live within a 30-mile radius of his house would have figured it out.

It occurred to me that all of the really nice mature easygoing people that I know are married.  If one looks carefully at a single person it is usually not hard to find an explanation for why they are not happily paired.  One might be able to find an exception in an isolated fishing community in Alaska but in a major metro area within the Lower 48 it seems improbable.

What about Bunbury?  Polly says that he is smart but presumably all of his intelligence and cleverness is expended at his 80-hour/week job, which in any case is best described as “sits at a desk and types at a computer”.  What’s left over for a potential partner is part of a paycheck.  If she wants to marry a paycheck, there are plenty of medical doctors and Wall Street guys who make a lot more than Bunbury.

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No reporters have called in the last couple of weeks to ask about the Harvard Business School “hacking” incident, in which applicants who edited URLs could discover whether or not they’d been admitted.  I had a tough time understanding why the story had such long legs when, after all, quite a few Web sites over the past 15 years have had similar vulnerabilities.  What was unusual about the business schools is that they blamed their Web site users.  Every other publisher has secretly spanked its programmers, patched the hole, and tried to pretend that it never happened.  The B-schools, however, somehow came up with the innovative idea of blaming everything on the cut-and-pasters out there in the wider world rather than on the dazed-by-donuts coders who couldn’t get the authorizations right for various pages.  That’s what made the story different and what attracted so much press.

[This was not actually the first time that HBS had trouble with the world of commercial junkware.  They outsourced their placement office interview scheduling a few years back and the system managed to screw up students desperate for jobs in a down economy.  The student newspaper ran a cartoon lampooning the administrators responsible and the deans decided to fix the problem by threatening to expel the editor of the newspaper for violating Harvard’s speech code (see http://www.thefire.org/index.php/article/4909.html).] Full post, including comments