Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Just back from a performance of George Gershwin Alone at the American Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square.  This is a one-man show by Hershey Felder, who sings, plays the piano, and talks.  It is tough to believe that Gershwin, born in 1898, might have been one of our contemporaries if not for his death from a brain tumor in 1937.  Although many of his Broadway songs and Rhapsody in Blue were very popular, Gershwin endured quite a few setbacks during his short life:  (1) rejection by the critics, (2) rejection by the woman he wanted to marry, (3) massive financial losses from the failure of Porgy and Bess (disliked by the critics), (4) severe headaches, (5) condemnation by one of the world’s most powerful men (Henry Ford didn’t like Jazz and blamed it all on the Jews, specifically Gershwin, and published his theories in the Dearborn Independent), and (6) butchery of his compositions by Hollywood.

Apparently Gershwin had a habit of locking the theater doors in New York to prevent the audience from leaving, then making them stay after a performance to sing along while he played at the piano.  Hershey Felder revived this tradition and made a bunch of the amateur singers in the audience stand up and perform in front of 1000 neighbors.  It was amazing to see the courage of these folks, who’d arrived totally unprepared.

Final note:  Gershwin wrote a song about Boston called “The Back Bay Polka”.  The lyrics include some choice lines:

Strangers are all dismissed —
(Not that we’re prejudiced)
You simply don’t exist —
    If you haven’t been born in Boston.

Think as your neighbors think,
Make lemonade your drink;

Keep up the cultured pose
By looking down your nose;
Keep up the status quos —
    Or they’ll keep you out of Boston.

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Email from a reader in St. Louis:

“I enjoyed seeing [the photos of Alex] particularly today as yesterday there was a polar bear scare in the neighborhood around our Zoo. Seems several independent observers called the cops to report a loose polar bear wandering their neighborhood. Yup, you guessed it: turned out to be a lost Samoyed.”

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In the July 22 New York Times, “IBM Explores Shift of White-Collar Jobs Overseas” talks about how upset people are that IBM wants to stop hiring Americans and move jobs to India.  An interesting question, though, is whether the people working at IBM right now are Americans in any true sense.

An American has a First Amendment right to free speech.  A corporate slave, however, generally forfeits his right to write about things that happen in his workplace as a condition of his employment and as a condition of receiving serverance pay after he is fired.  Because the typical corporate slave spends 60 hours per week commuting and working effectively this means that he has no right to write about anything that happens to him for most of his waking hours.  If the slave wants to get promoted he probably is wisest not writing or saying anything too controversial even if it does not regard work.

Americans are supposed to be a creative individualistic people.  See how long someone like that can hold a job in a big company.

An American has a constitutional right to equal treatment without regard to race or sex, unlike in Third World countries where ethnic group and sex determine one’s opportunities.  A corporate slave will be judged by the color of his or her skin and the presence of XX versus XY chromosomes in promotions under various affirmative action schemes.

America as traditionally conceived is a place of middle class opportunity and reasonably equal wealth distribution, unlike Third World countries in which a ruling elite collects all of the cookies.  A corporate slave will take home, on average, 1/500th the pay of his top managers.

Should we be worried therefore that big companies are moving jobs to the Third World?  Perhaps it is not a big a change as it would appear.  In some sense the Fortune 500 have already brought many aspects of the Third World into their cubicle farms on U.S. soil.

[See the book IBM and the Holocaust to learn just how committed IBM was to American-style values leading up to and during World War II.]

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Most people don’t care about computer operating systems anymore; they’re happy to run Microsoft Windows and pay Bill Gates an occasional tax.  However, for engineers that build 5000-machine server farms or cheap consumer electronics products it is often essential to have an operating system whose source code can be modified and/or that is free.  That’s the role of Unix, whose most popular current variant is known as “GNU/Linux”.

Unix was developed in 1970 at Bell Labs primarily by Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and Brian Kernighan.  It was substantially improved by University of California Berkeley in the late 1970s.  Richard Stallman and his collaborators in the free software movement, starting in the 1980s, further improved the system and freed Unix from AT&T’s cumbersome licensing restrictions.  Linus Torvalds contributed a free kernel that completed the job started by Stallman.

Through most of its life Unix has represented old ideas, old technology, and an inferior set of features compared to the research and commercial state of the art.  Nonetheless because it was cheap and easy to install on a wide variety of hardware, Unix buried all of its competition except for IBM’s mainframe operating systems and Microsoft Windows.

Under the original 14-year copyright period enacted by the U.S. Congress, SCO’s recent legal attacks against IBM and other Linux users would be impossible.  You couldn’t go to court and say “I want to sit on my butt and collect dividends from this thing that someone else did 32 years ago.”  But copyright today for corporate works has been graciously extended to 100 years, mostly thanks to some Congressmen on the Disney payroll (they didn’t want Mickey Mouse to become a public domain character).  Tim O’Reilly seems to be the only person in the U.S. adhering to the original 14-year term.

Effectively infinite copyright terms are good for Disney’s top managers (and would be good for Disney’s shareholders if the managers didn’t take all of the profits home as salary).  But are they good for American industry?  Microsoft can sit in Redmond making minor improvements to Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, a fairly modern operating system when introduced in the early 1990s but showing its age now, and collect 30% profit on its revenue (one sure sign of its monopoly power; Exxon/Mobil earns about 7% profit by comparison and Toyota earns 5%).    Companies can often make more money by asserting Congressionally-created intellectual property rights in ancient computer programs than they could by building something new and useful.  Being an American corporate manager, swaddled in government-guaranteed rights that never expire, is sort of like growing up in a very rich family.  You could make more money if you tried to work a bit but why strain yourself when you can be quite comfortable without working at all?

(If you want to follow the SCO saga as it unfolds, http://slashdot.org/ is probably the best place for news.)

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The July 28 Newsweek contains an article on how much difficulty the citizens of California are having in governing themselves.  If you live in New Hampshire you are forced to deal with one enormous unresponsive and remote government (the Federales) but your state and local governments are reasonably comprehensive and tractable.  California, however, has an economy bigger than France’s, a population of around 36 million (see this study, which notes that population growth in California every year adds the equivalent of the state of Vermont), and a geographic area larger than Japan’s.  What interests does a rancher on the barren plains of NE California have in common with a recent Vietnamese immigrant in central San Diego?  How is the average citizen of California supposed to be able to comprehend a $38 billion state budget deficit?  ($38 billion is enough to purchase the U.S. Navy’s entire fleet of 8 Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.)

Wouldn’t Californians be happier if they were broken up into the following states:

1) San Diego and its exurbs

2) Los Angeles and its exurbs, including Santa Barbara

3) Palm Springs and the surrounding desert

4) Central (the Big Sur coast all the way inland)

5) San Francisco/Sacramento and their exurbs

6) Northern California, capital at Chico or Santa Rosa (redwoods, ranches, etc.)

Now we have six reasonable size states in which citizens are usually within a 2-hour drive from their state government officials and never more than a 5-hour drive from their state capitol.

Comments from California readers?

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The July 14/21 New Yorker carries “Beneath the Sand”, an article by John Cassidy on Iraqi oil.  According to the article, despite massive reserves production is very low due to a lack of investment in the 1980s and 1990s and recent looting (Iraqis have been stealing massive oil processing equipment and taking it over to Iran by boat then selling it for $50/ton as scrap steel).

Under the most optimistic assumptions it seems that Iraqi oil production will rise to 6 million barrels per day by 2010, which will be worth $55 billion/year at $25/barrel.  The population of Iraq meanwhile is expected to balloon to 30 million people by 2010.  So on a per-Iraqi basis the oil revenue would only be about $1500 per year.  If half of that money goes for the cost of production, as a return to investors who rebuilt the industry, plus maybe some payments on Iraq’s foreign debt, we’re down to $750 per capita.  Let’s assume that income is distributed as fairly as it is in the United States.  The bottom 40% of Iraqis would therefore receive 12% of the income.  I.e., a poorer-than-average Iraqi in 2010 could expect to receive perhaps $200/year or so in oil money or benefits derived from oil revenues.

Having Iraq cranking out lots of oil and holding down oil prices will be good for American SUV owners but even under the most optimistic assumptions it looks as though it won’t do much for the Iraqi in the street.

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Perhaps there are some readers from Maine who can answer this question…  Why are there any jobs at all in Maine?

One thing I noticed from reading the local newspapers up in Moosehead Lake is that the non-tourist economy of Maine seems to be in trouble.  Wood and paper products can be obtained more cheaply from Canada under NAFTA.  The fishing industry is in decline due to lack of fish.  Tax rates are the highest in the U.S. because state and local government wants to pay itself and operate just like the Massachusetts government, for example, but without the high salaries that enable Massachusetts to be both profligate and rich.  (E.g., the average schoolteacher in Maine earns $37,000 for a 9-month tour of classroom duty, maybe 20 percent less than in Massachusetts, but her students’ parents may be earning less than half of what their counterparts in the Boston suburbs earn.)

You’d think that the answer would be tourism but most of Maine is too far from the crowded cities of the East Coast to make a practical weekend getaway.  The locals in Moosehead say that the amount of business from hunters is way down; the average hunter is getting to be very old.  Telephone customer service centers for banks have been important sources of employment for the last couple of decades but today most companies would probably send those jobs to India.

What is the role of Maine in the U.S. economy?  The workforce doesn’t seem to be especially well educated.  The climate is not attractive to most people, except for a few months in the summer.  Taxes are higher than almost anywhere else in the country.  Transportation of products to or from Maine is expensive because it is at the end of the road.  Are states like Maine to become the first victims of globalization?

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One thing that always strikes me when I visit a Third World country is how aggressive the drivers are.  People who own cars feel rich and powerful.  They assume that pedestrians are poor worthless members of society whose job is to get out of their way (or die across their hoods; whatever).  Egyptian families near my sister’s house in Cairo would have 7 or 8 kids, let them play in the street, and not be too surprised when one got run over by the maniacal, yet not skilled, local drivers.

The European Middle Ages seem to have been a similar period as far as transportation was concerned.  The nobles would ride horses and kick the peasantry into the mud by the side of the road.  Being on a horse made a man feel that he was superior, hence the expression “Come down off your high horse.”

The U.S. used to be different.  Drivers stopped for pedestrians and yielded to each other.  Behind the wheel of a car, it wasn’t necessarily correct to assume that you were more privileged than a pedestrian.  He might have been walking back to his brand-new Cadillac, after all.

Today Alex and I were nearly run over by a yuppie woman in the largest Lexus sedan.  She was gunning her massive V8 engine at 45 mph down a Cambridge side street.  I remembered the aggressive SUV drivers on the way back from Maine.  If you drive a 2000 lb. Toyota Echo (one of the emblems of Robin Williams’s loserhood in the fabulously art-directed movie One Hour Photo), you really need to drive defensively so that you don’t get flattened by a 6000 lb. SUV or a 4500 lb. luxury car.  But if you drive one of the largest cars on the road, strapped inside a steel cage with a seat belt and protected by air bags, you might not feel the need to pay attention to other cars.  If you can afford to spend $50,000+ on a car, plus whatever gasoline you require at 12 mpg, perhaps you would come to think of those on foot as not worthy to get in your way.

Thoughts anyone?  Is the U.S. going to become more like Egypt in terms of driving?

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According to this NY Times article, thousands of Muslims are protesting against “tyranny” in Iraq (of course, the Assyrians (the native Christian population prior to the Arab conquest of Iraq) are saying “we hope the Americans stay forever”).  It is therefore a good time to examine the etymology of the word tyrant.  To the Greeks a tyrant was simply someone who ruled without being born to rule (a king) or elected by the local swells (an “archon”, e.g., Solon; the term “anarchy” comes from the finding that if there is no archon to rule a city-state things could be pretty chaotic).

“Tyrant” in ancient Greece was a value-neutral term.  Some of the best leaders in Athens were tyrants, notably Pisistratus, who ruled at various times from 561-528 BC and, according to Herodotus and modern historians, laid the foundations for Athenian democracy.

Perhaps the U.S. occupation forces should try to reclaim the Greek heritage of the word.  Whomever we appoint to rule Iraq will hold the title “Tyrant of Baghdad”.

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It was a perfect summer day here in Boston, dry and warm but not hot.  The morning and early afternoon were devoted to flying to Chatham, Massachusetts (Cape Cod) for breakfast at the little airport restaurant.  Thanks to some friend air traffic controllers at Logan, we flew right over the Charles River Basin and downtown at 1000′ before heading down Rt. 3 towards the Cape.  We landed on Runway 29 at Hanscom right behind an F-18 that was taking off.

Midafternoon was time for a bicycle ride in Lincoln, Massachusetts.  Everyone in Lincoln is extremely agreeable, perhaps because the town is so spread out.  About half of the land is in conservation and left as woods, ponds, and trails.  The rest is houses for rich white people on at least 1 or 2 acres of land (Lincoln has no public housing and basically no low- or moderate-income housing; if you want to be poor you need to move to Cambridge or some other town that likes to house poor people).  Even the main roads are rather unhurried, woodsy, and perfect for road cyclists.  The most upsetting event in the life of a Lincolnite is airplane noise from Hanscom.  Residents show up at the airport to picket the handful of 30-seat turboprop commuter flights that are scheduled each day.  Front yards sprout “No FedEx at Hanscom” signs.  None of this really addresses the main issues:  (1) if people didn’t like airplane noise why did they move right next to an active air force base?  (2) most of the noisy operations at Hanscom are Gulfstream-style jets flying around rich people very much like the folks who live in Lincoln, not the 10 turboprop flights per day ferrying the rabble and low-grade middle manager wage slaves down to NYC.

After the bike ride, headed back to the airport.  The girl at the front desk was talking about movies.  Joanna didn’t like About Schmidt because it was so dark and depressing (ouch!  my cousin Harry Gittes produced it).  She cried during Titanic but only because her “ass hurt so much from sitting for 3 hours”.  Then Joris showed up to teach my fourth helicopter lesson.  This time I managed to hold a hover for about 3 minutes, handling all three controls.  We also practiced three takeoffs, patterns, and landings.  On the approaches, which are much steeper than in an airplane, it occurred to me that it is vaguely terrifying to be hurtling toward the ground in a machine. I’m glad that I did 500+ hours of fixed wing time before starting to learn rotary wing.

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