Missing the Point

 The NY Times bemoans the tax free presence of a few buildings on 125th St owned by Columbia University. They note:

As Columbia University puts the last touches on its brand-new campus in Harlem, it has reached a milestone: The university is now the largest private landowner in New York City. In a city where land is more valuable than almost anywhere in the nation, the school now owns more than 320 properties, with a combined value of nearly $4 billion. The growth has helped it stay competitive within the Ivy League and meet its broader ambitions to become a global institution. By many measures, those ambitions have also helped lift the city around it, attracting higher numbers of students, producing new jobs and boosting New York’s reputation as an international center of knowledge. But as Columbia has expanded its footprint, it has also become more of a drain on the city budget because of a state law more than 200 years old that allows universities, museums and other nonprofits to pay almost no property taxes.The law saves Columbia more than $182 million annually, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The amount has soared from $38 million just 15 years ago as the university has bought up more properties and their value has increased.

The example of where this has benefited the community is the MIT complex of Whitehead, Broad and Koch, centers of world excellence that were transformative in Cambridge building a massive biotech community and generating massive amounts of new tax revenues. It took time and patience of Cambridge City Council, as about as left wing as one can ever get, yet it works. Thus the Columbia example may be similar, extending from 110th St past 125th St on the West side up and down Broadway. Opening opportunities and relatively accessible for those in town and those out of town. 

Perhaps the Times should look at how this worked elsewhere.

 

"Andromeda Strain": Redux

 In Creighton's book a Government satellite brings a deadly virus back to earth. After Apollo 11 the moon rocks were treated as highly contagious items. In the recent NASA asteroid samples NASA treats them like local store bought candy. NASA states:

After years of anticipation and hard work by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security – Regolith Explorer) team, a capsule of rocks and dust collected from asteroid Bennu finally is on Earth. It landed at 8:52 a.m. MDT (10:52 a.m. EDT) on Sunday, in a targeted area of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City. Within an hour and a half, the capsule was transported by helicopter to a temporary clean room set up in a hangar on the training range, where it now is connected to a continuous flow of nitrogen. Getting the sample under a “nitrogen purge,” as scientists call it, was one of the OSIRIS-REx team’s most critical tasks today. Nitrogen is a gas that doesn’t interact with most other chemicals, and a continuous flow of it into the sample container inside the capsule will keep out earthly contaminants to leave the sample pure for scientific analyses. The returned samples collected from Bennu will help scientists worldwide make discoveries to better understand planet formation and the origin of organics and water that led to life on Earth, as well as benefit all of humanity by learning more about potentially hazardous asteroids.

 In the retrieval NASA folks just walked around assuming it was clean. It appears as if the precautions of 50+ years ago just went out the window. Cross your fingers folks! Pray!

A Good Assessment

 In a short piece in the Harvard Gazette they note:

Federal agencies helped set the stage for a wave of COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories about its origins through early missteps in messaging about the virus and control measures, stumbles that fueled public distrust and hampered government efforts, according to New York Times health and science reporter Apoorva Mandavilli. For instance, public health agencies failed to speak clearly and in a timely fashion about how the virus could spread indoors, Mandavilli said in a talk sponsored by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication on Wednesday afternoon. Officials initially put more emphasis on hand hygiene rather than masking and erred in communicating candidly about the vaccines and side effects. Anti-vaccine activists used all of that to their advantage. “The lack of honest conversation has undermined trust in public health,” said Mandavilli. “Whenever there’s silence from the public health agencies on the topic, that’s when misinformation gets in, and suddenly, it’s difficult to counter that message because it’s simple; it gives you easy answers; it’s memorable. And once it gets in there, it’s hard to get rid of.”

 The above two points are interesting. First, the means of spreading is still an open issue. How big are the carriers, what are the dynamics of the carriers, what is the lifetime of the carrier, etc. There are yet any reasonable well accepted answers. Demos we have, but they are meaningless. Now hands vs communal spread is something that could have been solved. It again begs the question of what the carrier is and what is the lifetime of the virus, with and without a carrier.

The Failure was the Government. It still is.

 

Tools

 Software is a tool. Like a hammer, a drill, or even a keyboard. As one uses it again and again it becomes second nature. Take QWERTY keys, I still search and peck at them, but I kind of know the layout. Take a surgeon, as a surgeon operates with say and extractor the movement and pressure required is second nature, it allows precision and speed. 

Now software folks seem oblivious to their product being a tool. They somehow think they can say just rearrange the letters on the keyboard. Microsoft is classic, a new Windows OS moves the keys about in how it operates. Each month we get some unwanted change. Recently Mozilla made a change to Thunderbird, it mail system. For decades it was great. Then some SW person decided to shift the keys about. Nothing works as it did before. All I want is to read and send email. 

We see the same in autos. The SW now resides in a large TV screen blocking our view of the road and requiring a massive amount o confusing manipulation. Just try changing a radio station or a setting of temperature.

Human factors is not something a SW person deals with. A recent example is the parking system at my local train station, a "joint" effort with the town and a SW company. Municipal workers are not know for their support of their taxpayers. So the combination resulted in what in my opinion a deceptive advertising, namely signage which represented in my opinion a deceptive fact and a SW system that in a similar fashion assumed that one could ascertain all the steps required without any direction.

Another example is my iRobot. There is now instruction manual. Got a problem, then just hunt and peck on you smart phone and pray you can find a solution.

Now we will be adding "AI". I would hazard to guess that this with the rest of SW will just make doing anything unbearable!

Musk

 I just read the Musk bio by the well known journalist Isaacson. It is reasonably good journalism of who said what when. A recitation of the "facts" as he recorded them. Yet does it tell us anything about the man? He has been driven in so many disparate dimensions that one cannot get a handle. From rockets to cars to drilling, to satellites and then social media. The latter is the easiest to understand. The four others have been tried by others before. Satellites, low orbit ones for communications, were first proposed by a group at MIT Lincoln Lab in the late 1950s, actually millions of reflective needles to bounce transmissions back to earth. The rockets, well they have been around for almost a century and Musk realized that NASA was more a burden than an asset. A massive bureaucracy loaded with political appointees and massively risk adverse. So Musk took the next step shedding the Government mid set. Electric cars, well DoE had been working on them in the early 1970s, tells one has effective they were.

But Musk's success in my mind was based on three things; people, people, people. Musk was not an expert in any of the areas he is in. In fact he is really not an expert in anything, other than selecting people and using them for s while to better his progress. My question then is; where did he get them from and how did he select them? 

That has always been my greatest challenge in the dozens of companies I have been with. Finding the right people. If you hire someone my experience is that at best 25% will be useful. The remainder become baggage. But you do not know that up front. Musk seems to have beaten the odds here. Is that because he has great Silicon Valley contacts, great head hunters, luck? 

Isaacson tells us nothing of the business, the drivers, the selection of people. Possibly someone better will.

Last Seen in Leningrad

 Back in the day when I was in what was then Leningrad, now St Petersburg, I saw the local state owned grocery stores. On Monday, bread, Tuesday milk until 10AM at best, beets on Wednesday etc. Long lines, no signs, many never getting food. Vodka was readily available, people brushed their teeth with it, the local water was infested with Giardia, an intestinal parasite. Otherwise Communism was great.

Along comes the Mayor of Chicago as noted by local press:

The city of Chicago is partnering with an outside organization to explore the idea of opening a municipally-owned grocery store to provide access to fresh groceries in underserved areas of the city. Mayor Brandon Johnson announced the partnership this week with the Economic Security Project to build the grocery store, which the administration says will “promote food equity and accessibility for all Chicagoans,” according to a press release. If opened, the store would be the first city-owned grocery store in a major U.S. city, according to the press release.

 Perhaps this is a weight reduction program. Reduces diabetes, heart failure etc. Great idea! Worked in Russia. Perhaps they can give out free vodka next, to stun the hunger pains. Or is the water system to collapse next?

It's 1959 and I am looking at College

 In 1957 in my Civics class in Secondary School we had a free copy of the NY Times each morning. We were to read it and write a few paragraphs on an important article, attaching it to our writing. By 1979 I started to look for colleges. But first, I had to see what college would "buy" me, namely a job. Thus each Sunday I would get the NY Times and look at the job ads in the Weekly review section. These were professional ads. That way I could see where the jobs were and what I needed to study to get one. Seemed logical. College was a gateway to a real job, instead of collecting garbage for the Sanitation Department in NY.

 That is where I saw lots of jobs for engineers. My father had studied a bit before he was drafted into the Navy in WW II so I had a few old books around. I could understand some of it. So off I went looking for colleges that taught engineering and were "free". I had accumulated a few scholarships, remember MIT was then just $750 per year and my parents were not capable of contributing. No loans back then, but if one worked their butt off one could attain scholarships. 

Now getting in and paying for it were just two of the necessary steps. The next was studying and succeeding so that the job would be there. Little did I know it would be almost ten years and a bunch of degrees latter that by May of 1971 the same NY Times section was empty, no jobs! Nixon has crushed the economy totally, helped by Johnson and his war and domestic spending. Great Plan in 1959, lousy execution in 1971.

But I had skills which I could parlay, namely I also was a trained electrician. So when my Advisor at MIT asked what I was doing after all my degrees I said I was working as an electrician in New York City, wiring the Staten Island Dump for methane extraction. Needless to say there was a fear that I would end up on Page 1 of the NY Times as an example of Nixon's economy! Thus I got a faculty appointment! Much lower paying but it had "dignity", namely it hid the worst effects of the economy.

Now along comes the flighty professors of some ilk saying that my efforts of getting a job were wrong, I should have had fun. leisure. Perhaps the author would like to recall Viet Nam and the Draft, the leisure alternative.  The NY Times notes:

But the expectation that college will help them land a job has led too many students to approach college like a job in its own right: a series of grim tasks that, once completed, qualifies them to perform grimmer but better-paid tasks until retirement. That’s a shame, because this mentality leaves no room for what college should primarily be about: not work, but leisure. 

Thus the leisure quote. My reply, are you out of your mind! If MIT is now almost $75,000 a year, 100 times what it was back when I first looked, you better find a job and a good one. A student is spending four or more years at an extortionary level of payments solely to gain employment. If one wants leisure then get rich and dumb parents, ones who would allow such indulgence. For almost all of us, colleges is a job to get a job, and it is a job where one pays the employer. This nonsensical attitude is what results in $2 trillion in college debt!

Something's Strange

 Just in checking unemployment numbers I did the following charts. First the unemployment rates. Here is show reported and compare to 2006 baseline fixed as percent of population. We see that there is now a marked variance.

 

Then below we show the workforce size. It is growing faster than the population.

Then we see the employment differences.

Somehow we have many more people in the workforce. Strange.