Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Forty years ago it cost $500 to buy a factory-made TV and $10,000 to have a nice house built from scratch on a plot of land, a ratio of 20:1.  Today the TV costs $200 and assembling the local tradespeople and lumber will probably set you back $200,000, a ratio of 1000:1.  Part of this difference may be ascribed to the TV being built with $1/day Chinese labor.

How about this for a brilliant business idea:  clearcut a Canadian forest (they love to cut down trees in British Columbia) and ship the lumber to China, build modular houses there and ship the completed houses back to the U.S. in container ships.  Sell them at Walmart (they’ll sell anything Chinese-made at Walmart).  The quality won’t be quite as good as the best custom homes in the U.S. but it will be good enough and when things start to get creaky in 20 years you can throw the house out and buy a new one at Walmart or Home Depot.

This is not a totally new idea, of course.  Nearly all houses in Scandinavia are factory-built.  We have it here in the South with http://www.topsider.com/ and in Quebec with http://www.profab.ca/ but I don’t think anyone has tried it with Chinese labor.  It costs less than $2000 to ship a container from China to the U.S. and a prefab house ought to fit in one or two containers.  So shipping shouldn’t be a killer.

Chinese-built houses wouldn’t have a huge impact where I’m sitting right now, on top of a $1 million plot of land in Berkeley, but in Maine or the Midwest, why not?  Think about all the poor people currently being housed in cities, occupying housing that could be sold to rich yuppies who would pay huge property tax.  The City of Cambridge just spent about $1.5 million buying and renovating the house behind my condo so that they could park a poor family there.  Why not give the poor family the $1.5 mil in cash and they could buy some land in an uncrowded part of the country ($20,000) and a house at Walmart ($40,000) and live comfortably for the rest of their lives off the interest?

Or consider the vacation house dilemma.  Do you really want to spend a year or two dealing with contractors and paying big bucks when you could buy a second house at Walmart for $40,000 and put your money into travel, jet aircraft, etc.?

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Sartre never tried to drive around the Bay Area so it is tough to know where he got his inspiration for the line “Hell is other people.”  Certainly he would have been inspired by my trip from Berkeley to San Francisco today.  Traversing a few miles of I-80 here (the Bay Bridge) took 2 hours, longer than flying over the entire stretch of I-80 that traverses Utah (from Wyoming to Nevada).  No accidents; just a normal flow Sunday around noon.

From the wheel of my 1992 Honda Civic, the subject of an experiment by my hosts in how long a car can run without ever being washed or maintained, I had ample opportunity to observe sailboats in the bay and boat-sized SUVs on the bridge.  It seems that sports cars have vanished from highways around San Francisco.  If you’re seldom going to exceed 20 mph or travel more than 5 seconds before stopping, it doesn’t make sense to have a manual transmission.  You need to allow 2 hours for each trip and therefore you’ll want an upright driving position and very comfortable seats.  On-board espresso and Diet Coke machines would be nice (along with a bathroom to match) as would an autopilot for traffic jams.  Cruise control isn’t much use in the Bay Area because mostly it is designed to work at speeds of 30 mph and greater.  What you really want is a system that will go at speeds of 3 mph and less, inching your car along in a traffic jam.

Speaking of inching… my hosts also have a new Honda Civic hybrid.  It isn’t quite as glorious as imagined.  It can’t inch its way forward in a traffic jam by dint of electric power.  If the car is moving, the combustion engine is running.  The electric stuff is there to provide extra acceleration for leadfooted drivers.  So basically you could have a car that was just as fuel efficient if you were willing to tolerate sluggish acceleration (which in the Bay Area wouldn’t be an issue since there is seldom more than 20 feet between you and the car in front of you).  Also the entire ventilation system shuts down if the engine shuts down at a traffic light.  Finally the system isn’t very smart.  If you accelerate to 30 mph and then stop at a light, the engine is shut off.  If you need to creep forward a bit and then stop for 2 minutes, the engine continues to run because you never got over a threshold speed.  My hosts say that what they really want is a button on the steering wheel that will tell the car “okay to go to sleep now”.

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A slightly built female engineer is walking through the San Jose airport, lugging two enormous suitcases that appear to be extremely heavy.  A businessman in a suit comes over and asks the lady if he can assist her with her bags.  While reaching for one of the suitcases he notices the watch on her wrist.

“Say, that’s an unusual looking watch,” he observes as they walk out to the engineer’s car.  “Thanks,” she replies, “I made it myself.”  What does it do? the businessman wonders.   “Oh, it runs a stripped down version of Linux, connects via Bluetooth and 802.11g, sends and receives FAXes, lets me work through email on an eyeglass LCD display, holds current digitized VFR and IFR charts for my Cirrus airplane, plus a lot more.”

“Wow!” says the businessman, “Can I buy it off you?  I’ll give you $3000.”  The engineer thinks for a minute and then says “Sure, I can always build myself another one.”  She hands over the watch and the businessman starts to walk away.  She holds up the two suitcases and calls out after him “Hey, don’t you want the batteries?”

…

After two weeks with a Compaq iPAQ 3765 PocketPC, very kindly loaned by Andrew Grumet, here’s what I’ve learned…

• the batteries go dead after looking up 10 addresses over a period of 3 days (by contrast on one charge my old Handspring Treo would last for a couple of days as a phone and then at least 2 weeks as a Palm)
  
• there is no battery level display (takes about 8 stylus strokes to find the current battery level)
  
• handwriting recognition doesn’t work for me
  
• it was a lot easier to enter text on the Treo’s thumb keyboard than using the stylus/screen keyboard on the PocketPC
  
• carrying a separate phone and PDA is painful
  
• I couldn’t get the iPAQ to sync with a laptop via IR, only with a desktop via USB

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“You’re going to stop in Reno?” Faith asked incredulously.  “It’s a hole, a lame version of Las Vegas.”

Reno has virtues beyond a big airport, cheap downtown casino hotels, cheap retirement homes for Californians who’ve come to enjoy Nevada’s income tax-free environment, and lack of traffic jams.

Up on a hill to the north of town is the Wilbur D. May Center.  Wilbur’s dad was a poor hardworking Jewish boy from Leadville, Colorado who started the May Department Stores chain in 1887.  The son, however, found that work wasn’t to his taste.  He got his pilot’s license and a series of airplanes, learned to paint and compose music, bought a ranch in Nevada, and traveled around the world shooting animals and collecting trinkets.  The trinkets and animal heads are on display in Reno.  Wilbur May went around the world 40 times before his death in 1982 at the age of 84.

Smack downtown is the National Automobile Museum, mostly the collection of Bill Harrah, the founder of the Harrah’s casino chain.  These are the most beautiful cars that you’ll ever see, with a lot of fantastic examples of custom coachwork from 1910-1935.  A car back then was sort of like an airplane today:  handmade in small quantities and priced between 1X and 3X the cost of a nice house.

As it happened the arrival of Diamond Star N505WT coincided with “Hot August Nights” and 5000 classic cars cruising around town, mostly street rods and 1960s muscle cars.  After going to the gym and watching the cars roll past, I had dinner in the Eldorado’s Italian restaurant.  An accordian player filled the room with the theme from The Godfather movie.

The 8:00 am trip over the Sierra at Donner Pass was smooth and uneventful at 10,500′.  “Welcome to the West Coast,” said the friendly woman at Travis (Air Force Base) Approach before handing me off to the Napa airport tower.

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At the Joslyn Art Museum here in Omaha there is a sign next to a Gauguin explaining that the stock market crash of 1882 resulted in Paul Gauguin’s unemployment from the investment bank where he was earning a comfortable bourgeois salary.  Gauguin’s family life suffered when his wife left and took the kids with her back to her parents’ house in Copenhagen but his art improved.

Consider all of the creative people who were lured into tech-oriented careers during the 1990s.  Most of them aren’t hardcore nerds at heart so now they’re back doing creative things again.  100 years from now art museums will have signs reading “the turn-of-the-century tech crash enabled Jane Frobenius to stop writing press releases and go back to her video art”.

[Oh yes, life is sweet here in Omaha.  The hotel is right in the Old Market area, surrounded by funky shops and restaurants.  My cousin Harry Gittes produced a movie here (“About Schmidt”) and consequently was able to send his local friends out to show me around (including the obligatory drive-by of Warren Buffett’s house; our nation’s 2nd richest guy lives in a nice modern house in a residential part of the city without any thugs or fences in evidence).  If the weather is good, however, N505WT will be departing tomorrow morning for Alliance, Nebraska and www.carhenge.com.]

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Moving on to Omaha tomorrow morning so it is time to reflect a bit on the strangest things that we’ve seen here at Oshkosh:

• A twin-engine Russian amphibian that sits with its wings in the water.  $650,000.
  
• A hovercraft that can rise 4′ out of the water and fly on stubby wings (no ailerons, just rudder and elevator).
  
• An enormous cargo jet that can carry enormous jets (or at least parts thereof).
  
• A 1939 Sikorsky S-38 painted in an African jungle print just like the plane in the book I Married Adventure (the story of Martin and Osa Johnson)
  
• A fabric-covered, wooden-winged 1937 biplane powered by an enormous piston engine and… a jet engine.
  
• Aerobatic champion Sean Tucker, who regularly pulls 10Gs, noting that he was afraid to fly in the clouds and took United Airlines rather than fly IFR
  
• Lines outside the men’s showerhouse but never the women’s

That’s all the news from Lake Winnebago…

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My Handspring Treo (review) died today, its 5th hardware failure in 18 months.  It is out of warranty so the $600 device heads for the trash can and I’m simultaneously deprived of calendar, address book, and mobile phone.  The preceding string of Handspring failures necessitated the purchase of a Motorola GSM phone as a backup so as soon as Margaret gives me back the Moto I can talk.  That leaves the question of replacing the Palm functions.  A year ago the cheapest Palm was $99.  With advances in technology and brilliant new engineering cleverness and Chinese labor the cheapest Palm today is… $99.

Is it time to accept Bill Gates as my personal savior and switch to PocketPC?  Theories in favor of PocketPC:

• lots of aviation software, including things like in-flight weather radar and very good flight planners, for PocketPC
  
• it is a Microsoft world so one might as well adapt now
  
• better syncingwith Outlook (my primary desktop source of info)
  
• can run Excel, which is the preferred programming environment for lots of everyday tasks, e.g., weight/balance for airplane

In favor of the Palm:

• can get a simple slow device that will run for 2 weeks+ on disposable AAA batteries (no need to lug around charger and remember to charge up all the time)
  
• simpler user interface (though I’d have to learn graffiti)

What do the gentle readers think?

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The Alaska 2002 trip report expresses amazement that George W. Bush, the most powerful man in the world, would want to lower himself by mentioning Saddam Hussein in his speeches.  How have things changed in the 12 months since that amazement was recorded?  George W. isn’t talking about Saddam anymore… he’s talking about Saddam’s sons.  Is this an improvement?

Saddam was a hero to Muslims worldwide.  He was a self-made man.  He kept civil order in a fractious country.  One might argue, as I did, that Iraq was too insignificant a country to merit the direct notice of the U.S. President but as an Arab leader Saddam was probably above average.

Uday and Qusay are now the names on President Bush’s lips.  What are their achievements?  They chose their father wisely.  That’s pretty much it.  Uday and Qusay have been built up in the Western press as being especially cruel but by modern-day Arab or WWII German standards it is unclear that they are notably vicious.  And even if they were, why glorify their memory with all of this personal attention from the leader of the U.S., the representative of the American people?

Can we not find larger concerns?

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Here are some books that I’m packing for a trip to Oshkosh and thence onward to the West Coast:

• The Peloponnesian War
  
• Geek Love
  
• The Importance of Being Lazy
  
• A Confederacy of Dunces (a reread from 20 years ago)

Maybe if other folks on this server start reading now we can have an Oprah-style discussion in September.

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This just in from a student at a university in Florida:

I’m studying Computer Science. A few years ago when I started, the department was understaffed, underpowered, and overcrowded with the huge rush of students that the internet bubble seemed to create.

The University rushed to fill the need, doubling the staff, modernizing hardware. Class sizes seemed to go from around 20 students per class to nearly 100. Every class, every term, filled up early.

Now my question is: where did all these people come from, and where did they all dissapear to?

Now the classes, hallways, and labs are nearly empty. Classes built to hold 100 students now have 10 spread throughout the room. The lab is never more than half full.

Were all the people quick to jump on the tech bandwagon transplants from the business department who’ve now gone back? Hard to tell.

As someone who’s been interested in Computer Science and programming since the 6th grade, it’s been fun to watch everything unfold. Fortunately (I think), those of us who were here before the great internet bubble seem to be the only ones left around after it.

Are young people wising up?  And do we really need more bachelors in Business Administration?

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