Omar, as usual, posted some good thoughts about Apple. I share a lot of them, except that I don’t have the chutzpah to post them.

My favorite snippet is this one:

shahine.com/omar/
Then there is stuff like “look, this company wrote this crazy cool application in 2 minutes! Our dev tools are so easy, you can lean Objective C and crank out an iPhone app and port your application in a few days”. This reminds me of when Apple had Adobe on stage and convinced the world that recompiling PhotoShop for Mac OS X took them only 2 weeks. It took them 2 years I think to actually ship.

Actually, it took 3-4 years because Photoshop 7 didn’t ship until 2002. Here’s a snippet that (of all people!) Jorg Brown wrote for Macintouch:

But Carbon allows Mac developers to do all this without having to work as hard. As an example, a VP at Adobe demo’d a version of Photoshop that had been re-written to work with Carbon; in a week and half of part-time work while Photoshop 5.0 was being finalized, he had made the necessary changes to Photoshop. It’s a far cry from the years of effort it would have taken to move to Rhapsody. Also, apps re-written for Carbon will also run on Mac OS 8!

The whole time the Mac community yelled at Adobe for dragging its feet, not understanding that in reality, it was incredibly difficult due to the moving target.

I also liked Omar’s quip about pricing.

Some eye opening stats. I’m guessing that the $150 OAK-JFK tickets I bought in 2002 won’t be happening again.

The Middle Seat - WSJ.com

Airlines don’t release profitability data about specific routes, but they do have to report lots of operational information to the government. JetBlue, for example, said in its government reports that its A320s burn an average of 771 gallons of fuel an hour, so the total fuel bill for a JFK-Long Beach round-trip comes to more than $35,000 at $4 a gallon for jet fuel, the price when oil is at about $135 a barrel. Spread that over the average load of passengers for JetBlue, and the fuel cost for each passenger comes to $292 round-trip. A JetBlue spokesman confirms that those numbers are close to the airline’s current results.

That’s plenty steep when you consider JetBlue’s average fare in the fourth quarter was $376 round-trip on the JFK-Long Beach route, not counting taxes and government fees. Fares today are higher, but the fuel bill per passenger is about $140 higher round-trip than last year, and fares haven’t gone up that much.

In the future, some day we’ll be talking about “Remember those days when we could fly to London?”

On my drive in this morning, I was listening to a discussion about the 30th anniversary for Prop 13. For those of you who aren’t in California, Prop 13 was a ballot initiative passed in 1978 that fixed property taxes at 1% of assessment at purchase, with a maximum of 2% growth year over year.

In practical terms, that means that when you buy a house in California, you might be paying $8000 in property tax (.01 * $800,000 - a typical 3br/2ba), but your neighbor Jimbo, who is 22, lives alone, but whose grandparents paid $80,000 for an equivalent house before 1978 pays just $1449 year.

Fortunately, the increase is fixed at 2%, so in 2108, when the houses in your neighborhood are worth $105 million (5% year over year appreciation), your children will be paying just $57,957 in property tax, but the suckers next door will be paying $1,052,010 a year. Oh, your neighbor Jimbo’s children will be paying $10,498 a year in property taxes.

I wonder how we will pay for roads and teachers in 2108. 99% sales and income taxes?

Which brings me back to why I started writing this - the interview had this classic exchange (paraphrased):

Interviewer: “Some say that Prop 13 has led to the decline of schools, crumbling roads, and growth in box stores and automalls everywhere. What do you say to that?”

Prop 13 supporter: “We as we just heard, recent polling indicates that an overwhelming number of Californians (70%+) support it, so clearly they value it.”

Let’s switch out Prop 13 and its related terms, with “smoking” and its related terms:

Interviewer: “Some say that smoking has led to the decline of air quality, health in children, and growth in lung cancer incidences. What do you say to that?”

Prop 13 supporter: “We as we just heard, recent polling indicates that an overwhelming number of smokers (70%+) support it, so clearly they value it.”

Talk about dodging the issue.

Another great argument I heard went something like this:

Prop 13 supporter: Those who claim that Prop 13 have impacted our schools should note that per student spending has increased 30%, adjusted for inflation.

That sounds really impressive until you realize that:

1. It’s over 30 years
2. It comes out to be less than .9% year over year above officially published inflation.

Is it any wonder a documentary film about this topic was called “First to Worst“?

In the 1950’s and 60’s, California’s schools were the  national model. “There was a commitment to excellence,” author Peter Schrag  says in the film. “California was the land of new opportunity; there was wonderful  historical tradition in that.” Today, California’s schools rank near the bottom. Since tying with Mississippi and Guam in the mid 1990’s, state test scores have barely nudged upward. “We basically turned our back on schools,” John Mockler, an education policy expert, relates in the film.

FIRST TO WORST pays special attention to Proposition 13, the 1978 anti-tax law (still in effect) that froze property taxes on businesses and homes and, critics say, cut funding for public schools off at the knees. “We’re always on a survival level,” Harriet McLean, a principal in Contra Costa, explains in FIRST TO WORST. “We’re understaffed, we’re over-crowded, and our roof leaks.” McLean takes viewers on a tour of her school, which is typical of appalling conditions found in many schools throughout the state.

Let’s face it, gas is pretty darn expensive. My car only takes premium, so I just paid $4.60 a gallon. In fact, I’m going to start carrying my camera with me so I can take a photo the day I pay $5.00 a gallon.

I find a lot of the conversations around gas prices to be rather interesting. Personally, I think in many ways we brought this upon ourselves - for example, you wouldn’t pity the crackhead who complains that his dealer just hiked prices 2 fold. And still, gas is cheaper than brown water (aka coffee).

That said, there are a lot of arguments I find rather peculiar: one that I hear is that this is because evil oil companies colluded to prevent refineries from being built. A similar one is that crazy environmentalists who seek to destroy our nation prevented refineries from being built. From what I’ve read it’s a little of both, plus a bunch of business thrown in: refineries cost hundreds of millions to build, have a low profit margin, and in the 1990’s there was a glut of them, so they actually lost money. Oh, and getting permits is non-trivial due to community opposition (would you want to live next to a refinery?) So why would invest in something that has worse returns than tax free, risk free T-bills?

Another argument I heard recently was that gas prices are so ginormous because we failed to provide the right subsidies to encourage exploration and discovery of petroleum.

Really?

Here’s a nugget of info from one of my favorite blogs - here’s a snippet from a piece that published on 7/31/2006 about something that happened in 2005:

Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up: Congress Blames the Hedge Funds, Part IV: This Isn’t Complicated
Not quite a year ago, in the halcyon days when oil was trading at a mere $65 a barrel, we reported (in “Why We Have an Oil Crisis, Or; Wait ‘Til Chuck Schumer Gets a Load of This,” September 25, 2005) that British So-Called Petroleum was spending more on dividends and share repurchases than on finding oil.

Seven billion dollars more last year, in fact.

We are not making that up.

The Investors Relations person of British So-Called Petroleum told a group of investors back then that it made no sense to plan its exploration spending based on $65 a barrel crude oil when everybody knows crude oil prices fluctuate—so BP was using a more conservative oil forecast when calculating where and how to invest its unstoppable cash flow.

How conservative?

If you guessed $50 a barrel, you would be wrong. If you guessed $40 a barrel, you would also be wrong. Not even $35 a barrel would have been close.

No, the crude oil forecast British So-Called Petroleum was using in its forecasts was $20 to $25 a barrel.

We are not making that up, either.

We suggested that BP should change its name to “British Dividends & Share Repurchases,” our point at the time being that the energy crisis wasn’t like to end so long as the major oil companies felt compelled to return more money to shareholders than they spent exploring for new sources of crude.

Now, you might think that given, 1) the rising political heat, and 2) the fact that crude oil is now over $70 a barrel, the majors would have re-thought their low-prices-forever forecasts and started pushing the pencil on more expensive projects that would help bring more supply on the market.

But just last week, Exxon Mobil announced earnings, and while the headlines in the mainstream media all focused on the so-called obscene profits now falling into the lap of the world’s largest oil company, not much has changed: the world’s largest bank—er, oil company—spent $5 billion on capital projects, including oil and gas exploration.

But it spent $8 billion making its shareholders richer.

Now, frankly I don’t think there’s anything wrong with paying off profit in the form of dividends. After all, a publicly traded company exists to deliver positive financial results for shareholders. If the company decides that dividends is the best way, and the shareholders agree then they all win.

So back the original point - would subsidies and tax credits for exploration really have helped?

You’re Doing It Wrong: How To Properly Work Your Ceiling Fan. Yeah, You Read That Right
Ceiling fans aren’t just on/off affairs, and it’s possible you could be using yours incorrectly. According to Consumer Reports, people get tripped up by the ability to reverse the direction of the blades…

If the blades are spinning counterclockwise, then you’re doing it wrong, and the fan is circulating warmer air. You want the blades to rotate clockwise, generating a relaxing breeze to help ward off this miserable !@#$% heat.

This was probably the most useful blog post I read all week.

gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”: 10 things I hate about web 2.0
10 things I hate about web 2.0

How true. Check it out. 2.0. Someone should start a conference to have a two way conversation about this.

Adrian McCarthy, a coworker of mine, had this observation:

Paramount silencing portions of Indiana Jones in theaters? - Boing Boing
While at the cinema yesterday, I read a notice posted by the box office that Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of _Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull_ in order to deter and track piracy. The notice acknowledged that the momentary silences were annoying but that it was out of their control. Basically it said, please don’t bug the manager if the sound drops out, unless it lasts more than a minute.

I searched this morning, but I can’t find any mention of this on the web. I was going to snap a picture of the notice to post on my blog, but my cell phone battery had died–and I probably would have been chased off by a security guard.

Blanking out chunks of audio seems a rather crude way of watermarking the film. Once again, it’s the paying customers who suffer.

For reference, it was the Regal Cinema at Hacienda Crossing in Dublin, California. I was there to see Speed Racer in IMAX, so I didn’t directly witness tampering with Indiana Jones.

I saw KotCS last Thursday during the day courtesy of work. And indeed I did notice two distinct audio drops - but I naturally assumed it was the theater’s fault (I’ve had some pretty bad experiences at the theater on Shoreline.)

Perhaps it was by design it seems.

The Informed Patient - WSJ.com
Patients suffer higher rates of death, complications and medical errors when they are treated during thinly staffed off hours. Now, some hospitals are taking steps to improve safety and reduce their own legal liability from mishaps.

Institutions that long relied on having doctors on call at home are hiring physicians known as nocturnists, who work only night shifts. Some hospitals have begun staffing intensive-care units round-the-clock with critical-care specialists who do double-duty coping with a crisis anywhere in the hospital. And new policies are being put in place to improve communications at the hand-off between the day and night shifts.

“People get sick 24 hours a day, but there is a stark discrepancy in the quality of care on nights and weekends” when 50% to 70% of patients may be admitted, says David Shulkin, chief executive of New York’s Beth Israel Medical Center. Dr. Shulkin has been making midnight rounds at his hospital on a regular basis to evaluate the quality of care and the need for additional staffing. In a recent editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, he called on counterparts at other hospitals to do the same.

[snip]

The risks of seeking after-hour care are well documented. Recent studies show higher death rates for patients who arrive at the hospital with strokes after hours. This is also the case for patients who have a cardiac arrest at night when they are already in the hospital. And Stanford University researchers who examined close to five million hospital admissions in three states reported last year that rates of complications are significantly higher on weekends for surgeries including vascular procedures and obstetrical trauma during cesarean sections.

Night-shift nurses often have bigger patient loads than nurses during the day, and may feel under pressure to take unsafe shortcuts. David Longnecker, an official at the Association of American Medical Colleges in Washington, D.C., says he was in a New York hospital for a diagnostic procedure recently. A nurse came in to change the bag on his IV medications twice during the night, he says. Even though he was awake, the nurse didn’t ask him to identify himself or check the name on his wristband against the medication, which is standard procedure. “Fortunately, there was no bad outcome, but it was a perfect setup for a major accident,” Dr. Longnecker says.

This isn’t particularly surprising. Actually one of the things that really frustrates me is the availability of some doctors - 3-4 day work weeks, etc.

I can’t really blame the system. 1) People generally don’t want to work those hours. 2) It costs more and isn’t profitable.

Another reminder to never get sick or injured.