Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I keep reading about how the U.S. economy is in such bad shape and that people are out of work.  Yet when I try to buy a new minivan, either Toyota or Honda, I’m told “You have to wait three months to get your choice of color and options and you have to pay list price.”  What I want is a 2005 Honda Odyssey, Touring trim, white, with nav system (the center windows go up and down on the Odyssey, making it good for dogs).  The list price is something like $35,000 and presumably dealer profit is around $3000.  Toyota dealers were selling leftover 2004 Siennas for nearly list price as well!  If one listens to the John Kerry supporters here in Cambridge it sounds like doomsday for the U.S. economy.  If one walks into the local car dealer, however, it is apparent that the minivan-buying middle class has a lot more cash than back in 1998 when I bought my Sienna for $500 over invoice.

[p.s.  I’m going down to NYC tonight through Sunday morning.  More evidence that the economy is booming is supplied by the fact that nearly every Broadway show is sold out, despite $100+ ticket prices.  Any NY locals reading this blog with ideas for Thu, Fri, and Sat evenings?]

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I attended a dinner party this week in which all of the other guests were foreigners, coming from Mexico, Taiwan, and Colombia.  It was the night of the last presidential debate and the topic of the election came up.  All of the foreign guests espoused great hatred for George W. and blamed the Republicans in general and W specifically for all the violence perpetrated by the U.S.  These were all young grad students and post-docs and apparently America’s long history of violence hasn’t registered with them nor the fact that much if not most of that violence was authored by presidents from the Democratic Party.  I pointed out that the Japanese had killed fewer Americans in their attack on Pearl Harbor than died on September 11, 2001.  Yet Roosevelt, a Democrat, had killed millions of Japanese in retaliation rather than negotiate a settlement.  Kennedy started America’s Vietnam War, which his Democratic successor Johnson escalated.  Jimmy Carter, a famously wimpy Democrat, articulated the Carter Doctrine that any threat to control of Mideast oil supplies would be met with American military force then backed that up by funding a proxy army in Afghanistan against the Russians.  It would seem that W. and the Republicans have no monopoly on aggression in foreign lands and yet somehow the American people get a free ride.  If we can say “we didn’t vote for W” we are considered good citizens of the world.  George W. Bush attracts all of the hatred.

Maybe we should take advantage of the fact that we have our scapegoat in place.  We can make a list of all of the countries that we need to invade, install puppet governments in, or steal their natural resources.  If W. loses the election we go on a big military spree until mid-January and then Kerry can come in and say “We had nothing to do with the fact that Bush kicked your asses but sadly the U.S. government never apologizes for anything or returns any loot.”

[I did catch up by skimming the transcipt of the debate later.  My favorite thing that was said was from Bush:  “the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care.”  This is what distinguishes a visit to a hospital emergency room from a visit to McDonald’s.  Even if you don’t have health insurance and are going to be reamed out of $2000 for a simple X-ray the experience is pure Third World.  As far as the staff is concerned you are not their customer.  Insurance companies, Medicare, and Medicaid are the customers.  If an executive from Blue Cross showed up at the hospital she would not be kept in a waiting room overflowing with the sickest most contagious SARS-ridden people in the metropolitan area.  If nobody had health insurance hospitals and doctors would start to pay more attention to the patient experience.]

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The October 4, 2004 New Yorker magazine carries an interesting article by Ian Parker about Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne, which won the X-Prize.  Rutan discusses his concern during the first flight that his friend Mike Melvill, 63, might have been killed.

“I’d have lost a friend.  You could say, ‘I should pick a pilot who I’m less friendly with, a guy who’s a stranger to me and just working for me, so if he gets killed…'”  [Rutan] smiled.  “You could say, ‘Let’s have a lawyer fly it'”–a pause–“‘or a liberal.'”

Rutan is quite expansive on the uselessness of the federal government, especially as evidenced by the spectacle of NASA’s inefficiency.  Ian Parker inserts some balance by noting that Rutan operates from the Mojave airport, a recent recipient of $3.9 million from the FAA to improve taxiways.

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In last night’s presidential election debate Kerry confidently claimed that he had a plan for fixing Iraq and made it sound like it was going to be pretty easy.  Get some more countries involved, smile at Iraqis, move on.  It made me wonder whether it is wise for a politician to promise so much.  Americans who follow the news know that Iraq is a terrible mess and has been for most of its history as a country.  To myself and a friend who watched (she is a bleeding heart old-style liberal who hates W.) Kerry seemed ridiculously overconfident when he said that he had a plan for Iraq and was sure that it was going to work.  Did this strike an off note with anyone else who was otherwise a Kerry supporter?

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Back from Santorini and Crete, the final destinations of my little trip to Greece, I am reflecting on all of the conversations that I overheard among people about to get onto a ferry or an airplane and those staying behind.  About 80 percent of the time a man saying farewell to a traveler would say “Have a good trip.”  About 80 percent of the time a woman saying farewell to a traveler would say “Have a safe trip.”

Men apparently fear that the traveler will suffer discomfort, e.g., that a tour group of 750 Croatian college grads will pile onto the ferry in Santorini, all of whom need to pass through one standard-sized doorway on a car deck and thus the ferry will sail 1.5 hours late with people still stuck in the airless windowless car deck.  Or that you’ll show up in Heathrow after all the flights to Boston have left and learn that the rooms at the airport Hilton are 293 pounds per night ($522, about what a typical Brit spends on a one-week package beach holiday on Corfu or Crete, including airfare, hotel, and most meals (the airport information desk staff found me a B&B for $71)).

Women apparently fear violence and accidents.  Heathrow airport feeds this fear with periodic announcements “Passengers are reminded not to leave baggage unattended and not to look after baggage for other persons.”  I.e., if the person sitting next to you says “Would you mind watching this stuff while I go to the bathroom” you’re supposed to say “No” on the theory that they might be part of the Jihad Against Pret a Manger.

One odd item:  one of the movies selected by British Airways for the Boeing 777 flying from London to Boston was “The Terminal”, about a guy trapped for 9 months at an international airport (supposedly JFK but reconceived by Hollywood types who travel by private jet and never see the interior of a public terminal in the U.S.).

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Just finished a couple of fun books by Bill Blunden: Cube Farm and Offshoring IT.  Cube Farm should be required reading for young people considering careers as computer programmers.  Blunden goes from an enthusiastic undergraduate studying Physics at Cornell into a world that claims to be short of technically educated folks but in fact has few jobs for physical science nerds (“Adam Smith’s invisible hand was giving me the middle finger”).  Blunden ends up waiting tables for three years, going back to get a master’s in operations research, and then selling himself as a Java programmer.  He ends up at Lawson Software, a firm that competes with SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft in business software.  For young folks who are inspired by Bill Gates and the handful of programmers who’ve crafted popular games this book is a good introduction to the life of the average programmer.

Offshoring IT is a weaker book but it contains some fun facts to know and tell.  For example, we learn that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts spends $86 per subscriber per year on information technology.  And that New York City has stopped relying on India to process parking tickets; they’re now handled in Accra, the capital of Ghana, by workers making $70 per month.

Blunden makes the point that offshoring is a good way for a corporation to circumvent age discrimination laws.  Companies, especially in IT, like young workers.  They’re cheaper, have more energy, incur lower health insurance costs, and don’t draw retirement benefits.  Microsoft, for example, tries to hire the vast majority of its people straight out of college.  A company could not legally fire all of its older-than-50 workers and replace them with Americans fresh-out-of-college.  Yet it is legal to fire an older workforce in the U.S. and replace it with a young workforce in India, China, or the Philippines.

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I would appreciate comments on a draft article.  The topic is “what would an ideal computer science education look like?” (for a college-age person hoping eventually to get a job as a software engineer rather than staying in academia)

The draft is available at http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/undergrad-cs but please comment here.

Thanks in advance.

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If you are a Microsoft Excel Achiever, download the following spreadsheet:  http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/blogs/gems/philg/DebateAnalysis.xls

You can type in a word and get a count of the number of times that Kerry and Bush used that word in the most recent debate (the spreadsheet includes some samples but I suggest that you try “internet” to get the ball rolling).  An interesting item courtesy of some friends of friends at Harvard Law School.

[Notice that this supplies evidence for the theory that no interesting software is currently being built in C or Java.  While CS grads keep going over the same old ground in C and Java, cool people with cool ideas use declarative programming languages, such as Excel, to build cool programs.]

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I’ve been without Internet, email, or telephone (brought the phone; forgot the charger) for two weeks here in Greece and therefore have missed out on the news.  Checking today from Santorini it appears that absolutely nothing actually new has been reported.  Hurricanes and typhoons have struck various places that get hurricanes and typhoons every year.  People who have hated each other for a long time continue to skirmish.   Politicians have given speeches and interviews where all questions are answered vaguely and blandly.  I’ve long thought that it is much better to invest time in books and magazine articles rather than the newspaper and every time that I’m away from the news this belief is deepened.  Yet most people can’t resist reading the newspaper in the morning or clicking the “News” icon in the Google toolbar.  Could this be a source of economic and intellectual stagnation?

A very creative and productive friend says “I’ve found that if I read the New York Times in the morning I won’t get any serious work accomplished for the rest of the day.”  His theory is that because the information in the newspaper is scattered, without supporting background information or sustained argument, the result is a disrupted and scattered focus in the reader’s mind.

Thoughts and experiences?  Anyone else noticed a correlation between refraining from catching up on the news and getting real work done?

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Just finished a 10-day 2000-km. driving tour of the Greek mainland and have moved on to the island of Santorini.

The Itinerary:  Athens-Mycenae/Nafplio/Epidaurus-Monemvasia-Sparti/Mystras-Ancient Messene-Ancient Olympia-Patras Bridge-Corfu-Parga-Ioanina-Metsovo-Meteora-Delphi-Athens (a few of these are listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites)

The tourist attractions of modern-day Greece start with rugged mountain scenery dotted with ancient sites from the days when the city-states ruled this corner of the world, circa 400 B.C.  Unfortunately most of these are in bad condition due to earthquakes and wars.  The Romans were here until around 250 A.D. building impressive and more lasting structures such as theaters and stadia.  The next phase of Greek history is difficult for Americans to appreciate.  The center of the Greek world from 324-1453 A.D. was Constantinople, present-day Istanbul, not Athens.  The present-day Greek mainland was a provincial backwater during this time though some impressive monasteries were built, notably those on the rocks in Meteora, as featured in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only.  After the Turks overran Constantinople the present-day Greek mainland was occupied for most of the following centuries by the Turks, who did a lot of damage to the future Greek tourist industry by destroying all of the Christian artwork that they could find, notably frescoes inside churches.  The Venetians managed to hold onto some islands and coastal towns long enough to build interesting buildings and fortifications.  The British came briefly to build roads and hospitals in places such as Corfu but their main impact on tourism was carting off some of the best stuff such as Lord Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon friezes.  The 2004 Olympics were a godsend to the infrastructure, especially in Athens which was once one of Europe’s most polluted and traffic-clogged cities.  Now there is a subway system that runs right to the airport, a 600 million Euro bridge spans the Gulf of Corinth at Patras, and a lot of new and/or improved highways winding through the mountains.

Greece is incredibly popular with British and German tour groups but not very popular with Americans despite the fact that it is much easier to get around Greece using the English language than it is in France or Italy.  Almost any sign on the road or in a museum that you might want to read is translated into English.  Cigarettes are a staple of life for Greeks and the European tourists that they host but the smoke isn’t oppressive as it is in Northern Europe because nearly every meal is eaten outdoors. If you make the usual adjustment for the Mediterranean male’s habitual overestimation of his driving skills it is easy to get around by car and parking is never a problem.

Travel planning tips:  Try to include Meteora and Delphi in any trip to Greece.  You could do both in 3-4 days with a rental car.  If you’re short on time, skip Corfu.  The island is overrun with German and English package tourists and the coastline is overdeveloped.  Corfu Town has some nice Venetian architecture but nothing like Venice itself.  May and June are probably the best months to visit Greece.  September can be extremely windy in the Aegean and ruin a trip to the most popular islands.  July and August are hot and overrun with European tourists.  Even with the Euro over $1.20 the cost of traveling in Greece is about the same as traveling within the U.S.  Hotels and restaurants are much cheaper than in other European countries.  You can find a somewhat crummy double room almost anywhere outside of Athens for less than 40 Euros per night.  A typical high-quality meal at a family-run taverna will be 12 Euros per-person with wine, including tax and service.

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