Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Let’s get depressed two days in a row…  It is the 10th anniversary of the consumer Web.  We have very good mapping services both on- and off-line.  A wide variety of sites are visited by people from all over North America every day.  Yet when people want to sell a house they almost always are forced to pay 6% to a realtor, just as they did 30 years ago before all of this fancy computer technology was widespread.

Has anyone tried eBay House?  Why doesn’t it work?

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In buying tickets for movies, plays, and concerts lately I’ve noticed that it is always more expensive to buy tickets over the Internet than in-person and usually more expensive on the Web than on the phone.  If we assume that the prices reflect costs it turns out that it is cheaper to pay a human to sit in a booth all day and/or to pay a human to sit next to a phone all day than it is to write some Web scripts and keep a server running.

Given that the hardware folks have done their share and that bandwidth is cheaper than ever, this is a truly sad commentary on the continued stagnation in the world of software.  The great Internet pundits of the 1970s (and the folks who copied those predictions and spit them out as their own in the 1990s) predicted a world of seamless commerce and lower prices.  How wrong they were.

[Tickets for what you might ask?  Tonight is McCoy Tyner at the Charles Hotel ($3.50/ticket extra); Friday night is the Boston Symphony Orchestra ($10/order extra).  Last night was the Harold Pinter play The Birthday Party at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater ($3.50/ticket + $1.50/order extra).  I’d give you my review of the play but this email review from a friend is much more to-the-point:

“I saw the Pinter on Sunday night, and all I can say is that it made the invasive gynecological procedure I had to have the next day seem pleasant in comparison.”

I guess they won’t be quoting her review in the advertisements…]

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Spain has been in the news lately, both for her Muslim guests who bombed the trains of Madrid (killing more than 200 people) and her citizens who voted for a new pro-appeasement government.  U.S. media are expressing shock that the instinctive reaction of Christian Europeans was to cave in to the demands of a violent minority.  Sitting here in a country where any attack is met by voters rallying around the government and pressing for a strong counterattack the European propensity toward appeasement seems odd.

But is there anything truly new here?  Even the mere threat of Islamic terrorism has for several decades been very effective at steering European nations’ foreign policy. Going back further consider the Germans in the 1930s and early 1940s.  A small minority of people living in Europe had an ideology and the will to use violence to back up that ideology.  Without a whole lot of effort or actual force they were able to conquer nearly every other European nation and convince those Europeans to accept major elements of their ideology.  European democracies appear strong but apparently are easy to control by anyone who threatens to disrupt the bourgeois comforts of the populace.  Nor do Europeans have the internal strength to dislodge violent minorities who’ve gained control of their societies.  In the 1940s it was the leveling of German cities by the British and American air forces and Soviet artillery that convinced Europeans of the impracticality of Naziism.

It would be tempting to attribute the cravenness of the average European to the climate or their proximity to Muslim countries.  Yet the English have been stubbornly resistant to both the Nazis and various Islamic threats despite being geographically proximate to Europe and hosting a large Muslim minority within their borders.

Even if we can be sure of the answer to what the average European would call Osama bin-Laden (“Sir”) we’ll probably never figure out any way to stiffen the backbone of the average Christian European.  The political scientist quoted in this blog on August 28, 2003 was perhaps correct in his prediction that France and other European nations would become Muslim dictatorships within the next generation’s lifetimes, partly through demographics and birthrate but mostly because the non-Muslim majority lacked the will to oppose a unified minority.

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According to this Washington Post article, the unemployment rate in the DC area is the lowest in the nation.  In the well-educated Maryland and Virginia suburbs unemployment is between 1.6 and 2.2 percent, ridiculously low compared to the national average of 6.6 percent.  Best of all the standards for working hours and difficulty are set by the federal government.  A doctor I talked to said that she went to work for the Food and Drug Administration:  “It felt like a 2-year vacation compared to working in a private practice.  The funniest part was that the people who worked there complained about how hard their jobs were.”

Want a job?  Go East Young Man!

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Norfolk’s standard tourist gem is the Chrysler Museum with its comprehensive collection of glass from ancient Greece and Rome through Tiffany and into the modern era (mercifully there is only one piece by Dale Chihuly).  Karen, Robert, and I visited a newer downtown attraction:  the Wisconsin, an Iowa-class battleship completed in 1944, mothballed in the mid-1990s, and installed in Norfolk harbor in December 2000.  The Iowa class are the largest battleships ever built by the U.S. Navy.  We strolled among the 16-inch guns, festooned with photos of the shells, each of which weighs as much as a Honda Civic, zooming off towards Iraqi military targets during the 1991 Gulf War.  It occurred to me that the Wisconsin represents a stage in a cycle of taxation.

We tax ourselves to create a small government capable of taking actions, some of which make foreigners angry.  We then have to tax ourselves even more so that our government can build battleships that go forth and drop 2700-lb. shells on our new enemies.  After those enemies are all dead and/or cowed the surplus tax revenues are used for more government activity, which angers new and different foreigners.  So we have to raise taxes again to build more weapon systems to attack more foreigners.  And the cycle continues…

[Visitor info:  There is no charge for visiting the Wisconsin and the volunteer guides are very knowledgeable.  You can’t go below decks, however, because the interior is preserved with dehumidifiers.  An oil-powered battleship doesn’t figure into the Navy’s carrier-centric needs right now.  However, the Navy still owns the Wisconsin and may recommission it one day if its capabilities are required.]

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I asked a new friend for enough information to fill up a Microsoft Outlook record for her.  Here’s part of what she came back with…

• HEIGHT: 5’6.5″
  
• WEIGHT: negotiable
  
• EYE COLOR: hazel
  
• HAIR COLOR: light brown before appointments with Anna and blonde after apts. with Anna
  
• MEASUREMENTS: small, large, large

If only public companies reported this accurately…

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In the unlikely event that anyone cares and/or wants to get together…  Alex and I are flying Diamond Star N505WT down the East Coast this week.  The plan is as follows:

• Sunday:  Bedford, MA to Teterboro, NJ for lunch with cousin Lynn and family, proceeding to Gaithersburg, Maryland to see parents, siblings, and friends
  
• Tuesday:  to Norfolk, VA to see friends
  
• Wednesday: to Gettysburg, PA to visit Matthew Amster, professor of anthropology at Gettysburg College
  
• Thursday or Friday:  back to Bedford

I don’t expect to be able to get Internet access so if you want to get together in one of these places call 617-818-1256 (the cell phone).

[Oh yes… for those who wonder about the safety of letting a dog fly the airplane… I passed my Commercial pilot’s certificate checkride two weeks ago and now am working on the Certificated Flight Instructor (CFI) rating.  So it is good practice to fly from the right seat and let a student try his/her hand/paw at the stick…]

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An architect comments on MIT’s latest dormitory.  Well you can’t please everyone…

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It is tough to imagine anyone being nostalgic for this past winter in New England but perhaps this photo of sammies in the snow will do the trick.  It comes to us from Willie Stromeyer, whom I met as an 8-year-old son of a friend.  He’s now married and living in Upstate New York.

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In this interesting New York Times editorial, Nicholas Kristof looks at CEO pay from the perspective of “what would this guy do if we didn’t pay him $200 million per year?”  (the $200 million/year is what Michael Eisner earned during some of his better years at Disney (oftentimes those were bad years for stockholders and employees but that’s another story)).  Kristof points out that

“There is a huge supply of would-be C.E.O.’s and negligible demand from companies for new ones, so their price should be cheap — if boards would use their leverage. When Jack Welch retired, General Electric held a contest among three underlings to succeed him. Each was desperate to get the job. If G.E. had done its usual tough bargaining, it could have signed Jeffrey Immelt on a 15-year contract for a mere $750,000 a year in salary, plus reasonable incentives for long-term success.

“Except for turnaround experts, C.E.O.’s have few transferable skills and are in little demand elsewhere. The average 63-year-old head of a plastics company has almost zero chance of finding a better job elsewhere. One study found that of 77 cases when a major company had to find a new boss, only twice was this because the C.E.O. had left for another corporate job.

“Think about it. If Mr. Eisner, who turns 62 on Sunday, wanted to switch jobs now, what other public company would hire him as its new chief executive? Frankly, Mr. Eisner is so desperate to hold on to his job that Disney should try to charge him for the privilege of remaining in his post.”

Eisner has transferred at least $1 billion from Disney’s shareholders’ pockets into his personal checking account over the years.  So he probably could afford to pay quite a bit to keep his job!

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