The State of Living Today

OK, back on the blogging horse, this time with a sobering look at how much it costs to live, on average, today.

A few weeks ago, there was a lot of news when the US Department of Agriculture released new figures on how much it costs to raise a kid in the US today, from age 0 to age 18:

$222,360

The cost is before college, and is for 1 kid.  The report notes that families with 3 or more kids spend 22% less per kid.  That makes a lot of sense.  As the youngest of 3 in my family, I was the recipient of lots of hand-me-downs.  And I liked it that way, gosh darn it!

But that got me thinking: if the cost of raising a kid is that much, and the median household cost in the US is now $176,900, how much does it all add up to, annually?  I mean, how much do you have to earn to account for all those things they say you should be doing, like saving for retirement?

So, let's break this down.  I'm going to make a ton of assumptions, but I think they're within the ballpark of reasonable.  And the point of this exercise is really to get down to an order-of-magnitude estimate of what it costs, not to quibble about the third-decimal-place of accuracy.  So here we go:

• The average family has 2 kids.  And, let's assume that the second kid gets a 15% discount.  $222,360 per kid, minus a 15% discount for the second kid, results in a cost of $1904 per month.
• The median house in the US is $176,900.  If I assume a 20% down payment on the house, a 30 year fixed mortgage loan at 5% interest, and $1,000 property tax per year on the place, those monthly payments are $843 per month.
• I'm not counting on Social Security to bail me out for retirement, so let's say you and your spouse want to retire with $1 million. (That's actually pretty low by many estimates.)  And let's say you have 35 years left to save, and your current retirement nest egg is $50,000.  At 5% interest per year (yes, conservative, but who likes to play aggressively with their retirement?), you need to save $8,000 per year, or $667 per month, for retirement.
• As I blogged about before, college is expensive.  If each kid is going to squander over $200,000 on college, I'd better start saving, fast.  To get to $200,000 in 18 years, again at 5% interest, that's $500 per month, per kid -- or $1000 per month.  

(Unfortunately, I'm not going to even remotely touch the rate of college tuition increase, even though it's a freaking huge deal and makes this estimate painfully low.  In this case, the kids will have to scrape up some of their own money and make up the difference.)

• Lastly, there's the living expenses of, well, me.  Let's say that's $1000 per month.

The above comes to $1904 + $843 + $667 + $1000 + $1000 = $5414 in spending, per month.

So assume a 28% federal tax rate, and you get about:

$90,000 per year

That's a household income of $90,000 per year, required to do the "average" American things like own the median cost house, raise 2 kids, save for college, and save for retirement.  I freely admit that I've probably double counted in there somewhere -- I did not read the entire USDA report, and they may already have included the "kid portion" of the larger house that's required; I didn't account for tax deductions on the mortgage interest; et cetera -- but it sure is eye opening to get a value that is approximately 80% higher than the median US income.

Obviously, something has to give, and I think in middle part of this decade, it was the absurdly low savings rate in the US:

We'll see what happens in the future.  For now, I've gotta get back to work.  Looks like I've got some earnin' to do.

The State of Education, Redux

Sorry for the absence lately; we've been moving and I've been tied up with the rest of life.

I just wanted to point out that it appears Bill Gates agrees with the sentiment about (higher) education becoming a more web-centric experience in the future:



Or, there's a text summary here.

In any event, stay tuned for more postings in the next few days.

The State of Education

Sooner or later, I fear that there's another bubble that's going to burst, and it's the private education system in the US.  I don't claim to know how it's going to burst, or (more importantly) when it's going to burst, but the cost of a private, higher-level education is simply becoming untenable.

Cost to attend one academic year at Harvard (including tuition, room, board, and fees) for 2010:

$50,724. 

The median household income (for 2008, the latest data I could find):

$52,029.

Tuition costs have been rising at about twice the rate of inflation since 1995.

The above image is borrowed from the FinancialAid.org site, a great repository of information like this.  Wikipedia also has a discussion about the inflation of college tuition, although it's a little harder to digest.

I could rant for hours about how the system of financial aid is fundamentally flawed (it's treating the symptom, not the problem, and it's just using taxpayer dollars to extend the joyride), but maybe that's better saved for another post.  This post is actually meant to have a positive note to it.

So, in that light, this guy is my hero.  Sal Khan has endeavored to place over 1,400 "lectures" on a website, all in 10 minute chunks that can be downloaded via YouTube.  The topics over everything from biology (Adenosine Triphosphate; The Kidney and Nephron) to Chemistry (Gibbs Free Energy; Galvanic Cells) to Finance (Collateralized Debt Obligations; Treasuries).  I've watched a few on LaPlace Transforms and on Probability and the binomial distribution, and they Don't Suck.  The writing is a bit like chicken scratch, he sounds like my friend Jamie, and I'm pretty sure I would go at LaPlace transforms a bit differently, but the message is there, clear, unambiguous, and readily digestible by the unwashed masses.  For free.  And if you didn't follow something, it's easy to rewind and go back.  This is appealing, and I know I need to brush up on my statistics.

The advantage that universities provide today is that you get a certificate of completion, otherwise known as a diploma.  If an interviewee is in front of me who has just graduated from Penn State University with a degree in aerospace engineering with a 3.4 GPA, I have a pretty good clue of his abilities, his work ethic, and his ability to learn.  I have no such insight into someone who has "completed 700 courses of the Khan Academy."

But I would love to be like Sal: take a few subjects, spend an hour or two brushing up on them from various (unintelligible) textbooks, think on it for a bit, and then assemble a few 10 minute lectures.  To me, that sounds like a tremendous amount of fun, and would be rewarding .... although, there wouldn't be much personal interaction.  I'm pretty sure I could do better than most (but not all) of my college professors.  But to do 1,400 of them?  Wow; that's an impressive feat.

So, with the increase in popularity of sites like Khan's, Bureau 42's lectures on quantum physics, The Teaching Company, and MIT's Open Courseware, perhaps there's a new niche: the college graduate exam.  This could well be the internet education of the future: you do you own learning and studying, and then take an industry-accepted competency exam.  Then, as an employer, I would be able to see your entire transcript and your overall GPA.  It's not perfect, but compared to a $200,000 Harvard education, it's pretty tempting.

Driving in DC #4

Often, when one is trying to navigate the twisted pile of spaghetti that is the DC roadway system, there comes a case of information overload.  The beginning of Canal Road, where it splits off from Foxhall road, is one such instance.  Glance at the picture below, as if you were driving at the posted speed limit of 35 miles per hour, and tell me if you can comprehend and process all of it:

Quick: it's 4pm on a Wednesday; should you make the turn?  If you have to think for more than about 0.4 seconds, you're too late.  You've either missed the turn, or you're now driving the wrong way down a one-way street.

I'm also standing at about the point where cars make the turn.  The print on the signs really is that small.

I completely understand the traffic designer's need to make traffic flow as smoothly as possible during the rush hours.  In this case, both lanes of Canal Road are one-way into the city (as in, opposite the way I'm facing for this picture) during the morning rush hour from 6:00 am until 10:00 am.  But then both lanes are going OUT of the city from 5pm until 7pm Monday thru Friday, except holidays.  All other times, it's two-way traffic.  On paper, or on the static desk of a traffic engineer's workspace, that probably makes sense.

But in practice, as shown in the above, there's just no way that a driver can process all that.  There are no signs preceding this one to tell you what's coming up.  There are no electronic overhead signs to tell you which lanes are valid and which ones are not.  And I bet it doesn't get any better when that orange traffic sign is uncovered. (I didn't peek to see what it says.)  Frankly, I see the giant DO NOT ENTER sign and keep on going.

The GW Parkway, on the other side of the river, is a much better way to get out of town.

The Loss Term

Everybody else is blogging about the BP oil spill, so I thought I'd join the fray.  But from an engineering perspective.

As the annals of history evaluate and scrutinize the events in gory detail of case study after case study, I believe that adding the dispersant will emerge as the worst single decision in the entire crisis.

This problem is a lot like reactor theory.  You have a diffuse gas (oil) in a dispersive medium (seawater).  There is a source term (the leaking pipe).  The approximations of reactor theory were built for this kind of stuff.

The fundamental equation here is the scalar Helmholtz equation, drilled into every nuclear engineer's early education:

D is the diffusion coefficient; it's how fast the oil "bleeds" through the water.
Sigma(a) is the absorption coefficient.  This is the "loss term" that the title of the blog talks about.
S is the source term, and it's estimated at 12,000 barrels per day.

So, the "D del-squared phi" term describes how fast and how far the oil spreads.  S is the 12,000 barrels or 500,000 gallons per day input into out system.

The "sigma-a phi" term describes how fast it's absorbed by something in the water -- the loss term. The loss term is either:
1.  Falling out of solution and ending up on the seafloor,
2.  Washing up on beaches, or
3.  Being eaten by tiny microbes.

But those microbes take a long time to eat up oil.  This webpage and video by the makers of Corexit is helpful and informative.

As of May 25th (which is a week ago at this writing), over 830,000 gallons of Corexit had been dumped into the water to break up the large globules of oil into tiny droplets that dispersed.  In the equation above, this makes D go from a small number to a huge number, and spreads the oil farther.  Without dispersant, you'd have a large, globular, sticky mess.  With Corexit, you have an even larger mess that can distribute and diffuse over a much larger area.  It does not speed up the oil-eating process fast enough to allow the microbes to eat the oil before it washes ashore!

Let me say it again, in a different way: since there is way more oil being dumped than the microbes can ever hope to eat, the only effective loss term is basically washing up on shore.  The use of a dispersant is inappropriate in a problem this large.  Spreading Corexit only makes it worse, because the diffusion coefficient (D) is now huge, and the oil slick can spread over a much wider area.

Ah, the law of unintended consequences.  I think for oil spills where it's already contained, the use of dispersants make sense.  In this case, though, the dispersant allows the oil to spread over a larger area, and makes the problem worse.

The Law of Requisite Parsimony

At some leadership class, I learned "The Law of Requisite Parsimony."  Despite its having a ridiculous name, it's a fun and useful thing to remember:

The human brain can only keep track of 7 things, plus or minus 2.

Oh, how true.  (Digits of pi, 41 in my case, don't count.  That was just a bored day in high school physics.)  Which is why I must admit to the masses that I have begun to write down some hints to the passwords required on work systems.  This was a big source of frustration for me at work last Friday.

In any working environment, you're going to have a few different systems that you interact with.  For me, as a contractor, it's a lot: there's this client's system; there's that client's system; there's the "mother ship" encryption scheme ... I counted, and I interact with no fewer than 7 different systems on a daily basis.

Each requires its own password.  Some can have no greater than 8 characters.  Some can have no fewer than 9 characters.  They all must be changed quarterly, biannually, or annually.

I have no hope of keeping them straight; the Law of Requisite Parsimony is hopelessly broken.  In each system's attempt to be as secure as possible, they have put me in the untenable position of keeping each system's requirements' separate and up to date.  The best I can do is write reminders to myself -- hints and suggestions, not the actual passwords -- but I can't wait for the day of biometric scanners becoming more ubiquitous.

A Time of Crisis

The Deepwater Horizon oil well continues to spew crude oil into the Caribbean at a rate of 210,000 gallons per day.  Initial attempts at using undersea robots and capping the well were all unsuccessful.  Clearly, this is a very, very difficult technical problem located 100 miles offshore and about 1 mile below ground.

In a mighty need to appear relevant and action-oriented, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a hearing today, grilling the BP America Chairman, the CEO of Transocean, and a senior executive at Halliburton.  NPR has a good wrapup of today's testimony, for more details.

(the above image is taken from the webcast; I assume that material is public domain and nobody will complain about copyright issues.  If I'm wrong, please tell me in the comments.)

Come on, Congress.  Really?

Here's my beef: This is a waste of resources at this time.  Testimony before Congress is not taken lightly by anyone.  I've helped prepare Congressional testimony for two different jobs now (on much lower-profile issues than this), and there is a small team of people spending the better part of a week scrutinizing every word, every phrase, every nuance of testimony.  There is A LOT of time sunk into preparing for these events, and I can only imagine that it's been a similar story for the executives who gave today's testimony.  But these folks have better things to do with their time.  Even though only a few dozen people will probably ever watch the whole hearing (it can be found here; and I haven't watched all 218 minutes of it), a few Senators got to Look Tough and grill the executives for a while on what they knew and when they knew it.  A particularly juicy -- and at this point irrelevant -- exchange starts at 184:45.  Watch thru 187:00.

Now don't get me wrong -- there is plenty of blame to be placed here, either on the manufacturer of the blowout preventer, or the operating company who had shoddy work practices, or the owner of the operation who's ultimately responsible for it all.  But now is not the time to be hauling these folks in front of Congress while 210,000 gallons of oil continue to spew into the ocean every day.

Is diverting these senior executives from their day jobs really the most helpful thing Congress can do right now?  I don't think so.  It would seem to me that lending Army Corps of Engineers, available Navy and Coast Guard vessels, and oil booms and oil dispersants to the problem would be a better use of resources.  And we'll do the finger pointing and blaming AFTER the leak is stopped.

The lawyers need not worry.  Hundreds of lawsuits have already been filed; some enterprising group has even taken out the domain name www.bplawsuit.net and populated it.

My heart goes out to the engineers, scientists, boat operators, and trade craft who continue to diligently (and un-gloriously) work nights and weekends, desperately trying to solve this fiendish problem.  I'm pulling for you guys.

Bloatware

Just because we have gigabytes (and even terabytes) of storage available on our modern computers, it's no reason that programs need to use all that space up.

Take, for example, the venerable Adobe Reader program, designed to be the One PDF Reader To Rule Them All, be it for Windows, Mac, Linux, or whatever operating system you're running.

On its website, Adobe describes the Reader program as follows:

Adobe Reader is the global standard for viewing PDF files. It is the only PDF viewer that can open and interact with all PDF documents. Use Adobe Reader to view, search, digitally sign, verify, print, and collaborate on PDF files.

But, mind you, this is just the reader, not the full blown development program.  Because of a somewhat-fancy pdf file I needed to read, I had to download the latest version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader.  This is what the install screen presented me with:

Are you kidding me?  Nearly 300 MB so I can read a pdf file?  I posit that the "Portable" in "Portable Document Format" is a misnomer if the reader program requires 300MB to install.  The installer download alone was 50MB -- suppose I don't have access to a high speed internet connection?

And so it goes; the inexorable climb towards ever bigger and more complex software, providing more and more opportunities for nasty viruses and other bad things to be inserted into the programs.  The installer for Microsoft Office 2010 is 600MB; the whole suite of programs is 3.5 GB.

Whatever happened to elegance and simplicity?  I remember the old days of the Mac classic, where the operating system and all your applications and files would fit neatly on an 800K floppy.  The first shipping version of Adobe Photoshop fit on an 800K floppy.

The risk, as I suggested above, is that it creates many unknown trap doors for people to take advantage of and cause unintended consequences.  I wish Adobe, Microsoft, and the other software giants out there would realize the utility and need for fast-and-light access to their wares.