mike's web log

The best result of high taxes that you've ever heard

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:58:43 GMT

There's endless debate about whether raising taxes is bad for business. Unlike, I guess, many pundits and bloggers, I don't have the economic chops to get into that discussion.

However, I did recently run across an example of one quite unusual case in which extremely high taxes on a corporation, along with that company's strong desire to avoid paying those taxes, resulted in one of the great technological and commercial successes of the last, oh, 60 years. This I get from a fun little book named Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World by Sam Howe Verhovek, which I am zipping through.

This all pertains to Boeing. These days, Boeing's position at the apex of the commercial-aviation industry seems like one of those givens of the business world. However, it was not always thus. Consider the years after WWII. The war had been very, very good to Boeing, which among other things manufactured lots and lots of bombers. The end of the war, however, brought what was referred to (with some irony, I hope) as the "peace problem," and Boeing laid off 38,000 workers in yet another of its boom-bust cycles. Other manufacturers, like Douglas and Lockheed, also had a "peace problem," but in the late 40s, those companies did much better than Boeing did in commercial transport, where Boeing had something like 1% of the market.

Then came 1950 and the Korean War, and this is where the tax part gets interesting. Here's the setup:

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Tempest in (on) a coffee cup

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 01:42:11 GMT

As about just everyone on the planet knows, the logo for Starbucks is a mermaid. The coffee lady has gone through a number of transformations, from this:

To the latest design:

As an aside, just for fun I want to note that this latter design is very cleverly used to decorate Starbucks HQ in Seattle (the erstwhile Sears store-cum-warehouse), with the sea-lady peeking out from the top of the building's "tower":

Ok, so, the question du jour is where this logo came from. Corporate mythology has it that the design was "originally derived from a twin-tailed siren in an old sixteenth-century Norse woodcut." Sounds plausible, right?

Not to everyone. As recounted in the Wall Street Journal blog, of all places, a graduate student at Yale who writes a blog named Got Medieval thought this sounded fishy (haha), because, for one, "there’s no such thing as a 16th-century Norse woodcut."

Long story short (i.e., edited), ...

The twin-tailed siren isn’t from a “marine book” at all. She’s from an early German printed book, Das Buch von einer Frawen genant Melusina, a translation of Jean d’Arras’s Roman de Melusine. Melusine [more]

The case of the missing tollbooth

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 19:33:42 GMT

I got one of those robo-tickets not long ago, where you get caught on camera (or similar) and a week later you get a ticket in the mail. The infraction in question was that I'd crossed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and not paid the toll. (For those of you not familiar with the topography, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge connects Tacoma on its east side to Gig Harbor on its west side.)

I sent the form back and requested a "mitigation hearing," in which admit that you committed the infraction, but you tell them that there were, well, mitigating circumstances.

This all happened shortly before Christmas. My wife and I had attended a social event in Tacoma, which, let me emphasize, is not where we live, and which I don't know all that well. On the way home, through a set of maneuvers that I absolutely can't reconstruct, instead of going northbound on I-5 toward home, we somehow ended up going westbound on SR 16. Moreover, we didn't even realize this until all of a sudden I saw a sign for the Narrows bridge. But by the time I saw the sign, we were past the last exit on the Tacoma side, so like it or not, we were going to cross that bridge and head toward Gig Harbor.

Under the circumstances, the reasonable thing to do is to go to the next exit, get off the highway, and turn back the way you came. Yes? That's what we did. The exit immediately after the bridge is Exit 8, which is for 24th St NW. We got off there, crossed over SR 16, then got back onto the highway going eastbound toward Tacoma.

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Achieving new levels of coffee

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 11:54:39 GMT

In spite of living in Seattle, I don't often get to Seattle's Best Coffee[1], so I was unaware that before Christmas they'd launched a new campaign: their "Level" system. According to a press release[2], they're after "a radically simplified packaged coffee line designed to change the conventions of the coffee category."

The "levels" are basically roasts, with Level 1 being "Mild, light, and crisp" and Level 5 being "Bold, dark, and intense." They say that the level comes from roasting lingo, which makes sense ... in roasting.

Where this sounds odd to me, though, is when they accompany this with their "Find Your Level" come-ons. The problem, I think, is that they don't seem to have accounted for the idea that "level" also means, in non-roasting talk, things like "achievement" and "expertise." (Think levels in a game.) Thus, if my coffee "Level" is 1, does that mean I'm a beginner? And I should strive to move to a new level until I get to Level 5?

To me, it seems very hard to get away from this idea. I bounced this off a couple of people and got basically the same reaction from my limited sampling. Apparently if I were inclined to ever actually buy packaged coffee from SBC, I'd be perpetually stuck in Level 1. Sad.

I suppose it goes without saying that I also don't get what they mean by "change the conventions of the coffee category," but that just sounds like normal marketing hand-waving, where every change in package design is a radical overhaul of the industry. (I think the only company that can probably claim anything remotely like that is Apple, haha.)

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Beat the heat: email

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 17:15:16 GMT

The Seattle area is experiencing record heat this week (~100 degrees). At work, Facilities has notified us that they're diverting HVAC resources to keep the computer labs cool and are encouraging us to find ways to reduce our heat impact.

I have contributed the following suggestion! Sending emails raises the temperature. As individual characters of an email are pushed through the Ethernet cables, they scrape the sides, which results in friction, which results in heat. (The bigger the characters, the more they drag along the sides of the cables.)

So to keep heat to a minimum, I am recommending that people:

Send as few emails as possible.
Keep them as short as possible.
Use small letters.

I think that this suggestion alone will reduce cooling load significantly.

Disharmony at SSO

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:06:21 GMT

If you have any contacts at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, or if you follow the gossip side of the cultural scene in Seattle, you certainly know that things have not been smooth in the relationship between the orchestra members and Gerard Schwarz, the music director. Just how not smooth, however, might be a surprise. The New York Times had an article on Sunday that recounts just how bad things have become:

The Seattle Symphony Orchestra has carried disharmony to new heights, lurching from crisis to crisis. There have been allegations of vandalism aimed at players, including a dented French horn and a razor blade planted in a mailbox; a players’ survey that condemned the conductor only to be deep-sixed by management; and lawsuits filed by players accusing the conductor of mental if not physical abuse.

It is a cautionary tale of how the relationship between performers and a long-term leader can go awry and how, in an artistic hothouse, a tangle of emotion and politics can veer out of control and take on a life of its own.

It's a tricky situtation. The problems are affecting morale and relationships all through the orchestra. At the same time, tho, Schwarz has basically put the orchestra on the map, and the board is presumably loath to mess with a formula that, from the perspective of fame, audience loyalty, and $$$, has been extremely successful.

MS-Parking

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 07:29:22 GMT

Microsoft is a very progressive company in a lot of ways, and one of those ways is in commuting. The company encourages carpooling (oops, "ride sharing") in various ways, some of those in conjunction with Metro, our local bus authority. Microsoft runs a fleet of shuttle buses so that people can get around the sprawling campus without having to drive. It subsidizes multi-zone bus passes at 100% so that employees can use local mass transit, an option I take full advantage of. And recently it's begun a private commuter bus service for selected areas around Seattle.

Nonetheless, an ongoing (in fact, worsening) problem is parking. Every building at Microsoft has an associated parking garage, and those garages are filled every day either near to or over capacity, depending on which particular area of campus you're on. In certain clusters of buildings, the company has implemented "valet parking," as it's called -- you leave your car, and a gang of parking attendants shifts cars around in the garage in a vehicular game of musical chairs. What with Microsoft being a tech company and all, when you emerge from the building and want your car, you can punch a specified number into your cell phone and they'll have the car waiting. (Is the theory.)

I don't know the specifics of zoning for parking in Redmond and Bellevue, the two cities that the main campus straddles, and it's unclear to me whether Microsoft attempts to overbuild parking capacity (perhaps to the legal limit) as it throws up yet another building. Clearly, however, the company's growth rate is resulting in an overwhelming demand for parking as thousands of new employees join the small city's worth that's already occupying the deceptively (and decreasingly) pastoral Champs de Microsoft.[1]

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Roundup

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:05:06 GMT

It's crunch mode again. OTOH, Hawaii in 19 days.

The Tech Battle in Seattle. On the O'Reilly blog, Brady Forrest shows a map of Seattle that indicates where various tech companies -- Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Amazon among them -- are expanding their Seattle-area operations. This is good for jobs. Probably bad for traffic.[1] Bad (or good, depending on your POV) for real estate prices.

How to optimize your power strip. I've done some of this (esp w/r/t the UPS) and can recommend it.

Lawyers are always bad PR. Charles Miller has a cautionary tale: "What started as the opinion of a small number of commenters on a medium-traffic Australian forum site is now a portrait of a corporate bully trying to silence critics, splashed over the entire Internet."

The 7 Top employee bungles using Office. Philip Su recounts some of the ways in which Microsoft people have screwed up when using Office. As for #6, a guy I used to work with acquired the nickname "Hotstuff" after he received a, um, personal IM from his wife ... while presenting to the entire product unit.

[1] In case you haven't heard, Microsoft is starting a private shuttle service for employees who commute from selected areas. The company already subsizes bus passes at 100%.

Demographics of power outages

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:54:02 GMT

Well, dang. On Saturday we had a holiday open house, which of course we'd planned long before it was all, like, Seattle and the Blustery Day. We crossed our fingers and hoped for power. We got a break at my house, so were able to cook (and stay warm), but it remained cold and dark at Sarah's house, where the party was taking place. What the hell, we set up for the party anyway with camping lanterns and candles, and it all worked out quite well. We had fewer attendees than we'd originally counted on, of course, but a surprising number of people did show up (a surprising number of people found the place, which was a challenge in itself, considering there were no streetlights), and everyone was in quite good spirits. One factor that helped was that the more people showed up, the warmer it got.

A couple of lessons for us. One was that conviviality is a state of mind. The other is that people were quite happy with what was on offer, in spite of the long list of culinary offerings and activities that we had to forgo due to circumstances.

The big ice-breaking (haha) topic of conversation was "Do you have power?" which inevitably led to the question "Where do you live?" We were way at the south end of the Seattle area, and folks who'd made the trek from the north reported either no outage or a quick restoration of power. This led to some mock commentary about how we poor folks were going to be last to get power back, haha, isn't that funny?

Boy, little did we know. The Seattlest blog posted a map with commentary that I'm going to swipe outright (map, not commentary). Orange indicates outage; white indicates power. We were essentially at the bottom middle of the orange.

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Windstorm

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 23:53:37 GMT

Impressive windstorm. Estimated one million people without power in the Puget Sound area at the peak. Power is still not back for tens of thousands of people. By a stroke of luck, I got my power back today, which is a good thing, coz it's 36 degrees outside right now.

Here's a picture I took in my neighborhood.

Update 17 Dec 06 3:30p AFAIK, power is still out to a significant part of the MS campus, including the building that houses the servers that are of interest to my group. I couldn't be working even if I wanted to be. Which is just as well, because my main machine at home turned up dead -- at the moment, I'm guessing a bad power supply, but we'll see. Sheesh, what a mess.

Goodbye, Garfield High

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 09:50:53 GMT

My kids both attended Garfield High School. In fact, Sabrina's class of 2006 is the last class that will graduate from the venerable school in its current form; the building is due for renovation starting within days of graduation.

The school has a unique place in Seattle Public Schools. It was an integrated school for years before bussing ensured racial diversity in the school system, due largely to its location in the heart of Seattle's Central District. It also features some big names on its alumni roster, including Quincy Jones and Jimi Hendrix. The school has some of the highest test scores in the state, and has graduated an impressive number of scholarship winners. The jazz band and orchestra are among the best in the country. (Downbeat voted the orchestra the best in the country this year.)

Anyway, I note all this because KPLU, one of our NPR stations, did a report on the school the other day. MP3 version of the story is available here.

Bussed

Fri, 12 May 2006 23:05:11 GMT

I've taken the bus three times this week. My round trip is 40 miles, so I have not driven 120 miles, so to speak. At an average of about 30 mpg in commuter traffic, this means I've saved 4 gallons of gas, around $12. (We have subsidized bus passes, so the bus is free (!) to me.)

Driving takes me anywhere from 35 minutes late at night to an hour on Fridays when there's a Mariners game. Let's say an average of 45 minutes each way, so 90 minutes a day. The bus (which is actually two buses, one transfer) takes 1:15 best case, and 1:40 worst case (so far). Let's call it 1:25 average each way, or 170 minutes a day. 170 times 3 days is 510 minutes by bus; in the car, we'd be talking 270 minutes. So I spent 240 extra minutes commuting by bus -- 4 hours.

In both the car and the bus, I can listen to the radio (in the bus, on the MP3 player). On the bus I can read, assuming I don't forget to bring a book, like yesterday. I can work on the laptop, like now. In some but not all of the ST buses (half the trip), there's even wireless, in which case I can also do email or whatever. In the bus I can nod off, like half the other people.

No books, laptops, wireless, or sleeping in the car. But if I drive, I can run errands before or after work. To take the bus, I need to be out of the house by 8:10 am, and I need to leave work between 5:00 and 6:00, practically speaking. The buses run outside of those hours, but the intervals between buses -- hence overall commuting time -- become significantly longer.[1] If I drive, I can come and go as I please.

The buses run on a schedule, of course, but it's hardly rigid. For example, in the mornings, the ST bus is supposed to come every 10 minutes. This morning it was more like 15 minutes, with the result that it was mob scene and some people who got on at subsequent stops had to stand all the way.[2] Fortunately, I have not had this misfortune; it's a long time to stand.

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Triple traffic whammy

Wed, 08 Mar 2006 18:33:49 GMT

Wow, lots of traffic fun in Seattle this evening:

There a "major event" at the Arena tonight, which always generates tons of traffic. However,
The 520 bridge is closed due to high winds. So everyone is trying to get to the I-90 bridge. But wait!
There's an accident on westbound I-90 near the 405 intersection.

I swear, this city is going to choke to death on its own traffic.

Oh, well, I didn't want to go home tonight anyway.

Lake Union photo tour

Thu, 12 May 2005 08:55:30 GMT

The Morning News today publishes something by Matthew Baldwin, aka Defective Yeti, and Kate Bicket -- photo tour of their jogging route around Lake Union in Seattle. If you know Mr. Yeti, you will not be surprised to learn that this tour is slightly offbeat. Here are a couple of samples from the captions to inspire you to go have a look:

Seattle fancies itself a highbrow town, with a citizenry more likely to read Proust over a glass of Bordeaux than ogle breasts over a plate of hot wings.

Condominium accent marks are the new heavy-metal umlauts!

This particular Ivar’s has a take-out window and a great system for ordering: no system whatsoever.

Man, if my high school mascot had been the Fightin’ Carnivorous Flatworms, I would have had a lot more school spirit.

Slide 10 also features my favorite neologism today: "Utilikiltarians." I'm not sure how far outside of Seattle this term would be understood, tho.