Thoughts on a battleship: Cycle of taxation

by philg

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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A complete Microsoft Outlook record

by philg

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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Philip and Alex fly down the East Coast

by philg

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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Who would hire Michael Eisner?

by philg

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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Mel Gibson and the Passion movie again…

by philg

A man goes to see Mel Gibson’s new movie, The Passion, and is inspired to take his family to Israel to see the places where Jesus lived and died.  While on vacation his mother-in-law dies.


An undertaker in Tel Aviv explains that they can ship the body home to Wisconsin at a cost of $10,000 or the mother-in-law could be buried in Israel for US$500.


The man says, “We’ll ship her home.”


The undertaker asks, “Are you sure? That’s an awfully big expense and we can do a very nice burial here.”


The man says, “Look, 2000 years ago they buried a guy here and three days later he rose from the dead. I just can’t take that chance.”

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Brutal article on declining computer science enrollments

by philg

Today’s New York Times carries an article entitled “Microsoft, Amid Dwindling Interest, Talks Up Computing as a Career” about Bill Gates going around to universities encouraging young people to major in computer science.  The chairman of EECS at MIT worries about the decline in enrollment (10 years ago his predecessor fretted about the explosion in enrollment; sic transit gloria major).  All too close to home…

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comments on the Mel Gibson/Haiti posting

by philg

Hmm… this Manila software that Harvard runs seems to have mislinked all the comments posted.  I’m cutting and pasting some manually and please feel free to use the comments button underneath this posting to comment on the original (below).


From Zoran Lazarevic:



Two hundred years in a history of a nation is a short time to change human behavior without force. For one example, think that slavery was abolished in the U.S. in 1865, but the first black generation that grew in freedom and equality was born in 1970s.


Compare today Serbs living a couple of miles away: across the river Danube which marked the border between the Austro-Hungarian empire (north) and the Ottoman empire (south). In the north, they live in neatly painted houses lined along geometrically straight roads, behind tall walls keeping the privacy of their property. Villages just south of Danube are hectically built around worn-out curvy roads, having short transparent fences displaying property in slight disarray. The north prides itself with culinary craft and the taste for fine arts from Austria and Hungary. The south takes pride in warriorship and macho attitude, and jokes about its own widespread bribery.


Serbia proper was liberated from the (Turkish) Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s, and united with the north in 1918.  There is absolutely no question, that if separated, the two regions would have very different economies. Just like there are vast differences between other ex-Yugoslavia states. And that is all after a century of common life, mostly under communism which tried to kill out (pun intended) all differences in religion and nationality.


From Fazal Majid:



You could blame Lazare Carnot (d. 1823) for fathering Sadi Carnot (d. 1832), the inventor of thermodynamics, and thus leading to global warming…

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