The cost of public broadcasting

Posted on 2013-10-28 by

One morning this past week, I spent some time listening to BBC Radio 4 “open up”. (It was actually yesterday evening for me, because I was listening live, and 0520 BST, when Radio 4 switches from relaying BBC World Service programming to domestic programs.) It reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write a comparison of how much other English-speaking countries spend on public broadcasting and how much we do. Radio 4 is the BBC’s flagship spoken-word radio service, and it compares most closely to the standard “NPR news and information” format on public radio stations in the U.S. But there are some rather striking differences, both in how they’re programmed and, more importantly, how and to what level they are funded, and I wanted to write a bit about this.

It is clear to even the most casual observer that the British spend vastly more than we do on public broadcasting in general. Each of the UK’s 25 million television households pays an annual “licence fee” of GBP 145.50 for the right to watch broadcast television, at least in theory. (There is obviously some cheating, but the enforcement is fairly effective.) All of this money goes to the BBC, although it is required to pass some of it on to other organizations. In 2012, the year for which I have information, the BBC also received a state grant of GBP 277 million to pay for the BBC World Service and BBC Monitoring, but in future years the licence fee will also pay for this. In addition, the BBC earns GBP 222 million from commercial services, the vast majority of which is from BBC Worldwide, the organization which licenses BBC branded merchandise globally and BBC content (primarily television series) in other countries. All told, in 2012 the BBC spent GBP 3606 million on “licence fee funded services”, including four national broadcast TV services, BBC News Channel, BBC Parliament, two children’s TV services, ten UK-wide radio services, six “nations/regions” radio services (two each in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland), 40 local stations in England, and the BBC News Web site. At today’s exchange rate, that all works out to $5.828 billion.

Now let’s look at the US side for some overall top-line figures on public broadcasting. When the Public Broadcasting Act was passed in the late 1960s, public broadcasting of a sort already existed in many major cities, but large parts of the country were not covered. Public broadcasting at the time was operated primarily by universities and charities, although some states, cities, public libraries, and school districts operated stations (in some cases under commercial licenses). The first networks, like the Eastern Educational Network, had been set up as cooperatives, owned by the stations they served. Many of the local public broadcasters had started out leasing time on commercial radio stations for their programs, and many of the university-based stations were operated by the cooperative extension services at land-grant colleges. The whole public broadcasting arena was very fragmented, nothing you could properly call a “system”, and the commercial broadcasting interests wanted it to stay that way. The result was somewhat more organized, as the stations were encouraged to form national cooperatives and were provided with direct grants to pay for national programming. Grants were also available for states, existing broadcasters, and new (independent) organizations to start up stations and networks in those unserved areas (including whole states like Vermont, which did not get public radio until the late 1970s). But all this local independence comes at a great cost: there is no authority who can commission new programs for a national audience; instead, new programs must either be slotted into the format of an existing program (as with the PBS “Masterpiece”), or program producers must individually court each station — the cost of which is prohibitive for anything but a long-running, open-ended series. Hence the domination of the NPR schedule by news, talk, and music programs which are much the same every day for years on end, and the lack of significant change in the “national” PBS schedule over the course of years if not decades. And that’s how the commercial broadcasters wanted it. (It is instructive to compare this situation with that of the national religious broadcasters like EMF Broadcasting, which today operate multiple networks reaching nearly every market in the US, each with a single national program stream, and (nearly) all local stations owned and operated by a single corporate entity.)

It’s difficult to say exactly how much we spend on public broadcasting in the US, because of both organizational fragmentation and the wide variety of sources of funding. However, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting attempts to collect and collate this data, and its annual Public Broadcasting Revenue Reports are considered the best available information. The FY2011 report is the most recent available (covering October 2010 through September 2011), and it tells us that public broadcasting as a whole received $2.836 billion in total revenues, including government and private foundation grants, individual contributions, and advertising (referred to as “underwriting” in the US public-broadcasting world). Three million people gave an average of $130 to support public television, and slightly fewer than three million gave about the same amount, on average, to public radio. Public stations’ commercial activities brought in an additional $148 million. The federal government accounted for about 18% of total revenues, and all taxpayer funding amounted to 38% of the total.

So now that we have some numbers, let’s compare. Even with its much smaller population, the UK spends about twice as much on public broadcasting as the US does. It looks even more shameful if you compare the cost per television household. As I noted above, each UK television home is supposed to pay GBP 145.50 per year, and this income source funds nearly all of the BBC’s activities (radio and online as well as television). In US dollars at today’s exchange rate, that’s $235.18 — or more than $100 more than the typical voluntary contribution to a public broadcaster in the US. If you multiplied that by the actual number of television households in the US — Nielsen estimates that there are 115.6 million of us — that would be $27.2 billion, or 9.5 times what we currently spend, advertising included. (“And that’s why we can’t have nice things.”)

I started this post talking specifically about BBC Radio 4. Radio 4 and its digital companion Radio 4 Extra are available throughout the UK (and globally through the Internet, with some programs, mostly sports, excluded due to rights restrictions). It is considered a “spoken word” service, which is a broader remit than the news and talk shows that dominate most NPR stations’ schedules. (There is a separate talk and sport station, BBC Radio 5 Live, as well as a national commercial talk and sport station, TalkSport, both of which operate on AM frequencies that used to belong to the BBC’s nationwide music networks.) In addition to news and weather, Radio 4 commissions new documentaries, sitcoms, soap operas, radio plays, dramatic readings of books, game and quiz shows, and programs about science, history, travel, the arts, the law, and of course politics. Most programs (with the exception of ongoing news and public-affairs programs) are commissioned in series of 6 to 13 episodes; there’s no expectation that shows will run for an entire year, which gives program producers and commissioning editors much greater freedom to experiment with different concepts and formats. Yet popular programs endure, and come back for new series regularly, like the panel game “Just A Minute”, which has been running (with the same host) for 45 years — but not for 2340 weeks straight! Much of Radio 4’s content could never find a home on any NPR station (ignoring the question of nationality) unless it could somehow be packaged as a 50-week-a-year series, with special reruns for all the pledge drives, and carefully edited with local breaks for a standard NPR “hour” or “half-hour” time slot.

How much does all this variety cost, and how does it compare to the cost of our public radio? Looking at the BBC report, in 2012 Radio 4 spent GBP 88.1 million on “content”, 8.6 million on “distribution”, and 19.9 million on “infrastructure”. If we sum those up with the costs for Radio 4 Extra (a digital service which broadcasts mostly repeats of Radio 4 programs), it comes to GBP 124.1 million, or just under USD 201 million at today’s exchange rates. It would probably be fair to include some of the cost of the BBC’s Web services as well, since our public broadcasters also have important Web presences; for the whole of the BBC that comes to $186.4 million. By contrast, the CPB report tells us that public radio had revenues of $1.062 billion in FY2011, of which only 10.8% came from the federal government. Suddenly it looks like we’re getting a raw deal: while a large part of the cost of public radio is undoubtedly due to the sheer geographic size of the country — the BBC has (or rather, rents) far fewer transmitters for all of its stations combined than US public radio stations operate — a significant amount of waste is undoubtedly due to the fragmentation of the public radio system, with each local station having its own management, executives, boards of directors, local program hosts, board operators, advertising salespeople, community outreach coordinators, and so on. (EMF Broadcasting would truly be a more apples-to-apples comparison here.) “Local” isn’t necessarily better.

The BBC report tells us that Radio 4 costs GBP 0.012 per listener-hour. I don’t know where or how you would find or even estimate this number for public radio in the US.

By the way, I looked at annual reports for the CBC and the ABC, but unfortunately neither public broadcaster presents its numbers in a manner that is conducive to this analysis. Both are funded by a direct appropriation from their respective federal governments, and the CBC additionally sells advertising on its television services and its music-oriented radio services.

Comparing US public and religious broadcasters

I asked Scott Fybush to review this post before publication, and he suggested that I look at EMF Broadcasting’s financials, and compare them to a public broadcaster. In tax year 2011, EMF reported annual revenues of $112.9 million, and $77.1 million in expenses, including $22 million in salaries for its 399 employees. (Approximately 2500 people volunteer.) Operations and engineering for EMF amounted to $20.3 million, and “program service” expenses in total were $66.3 million. The highest paid employee was CEO Mike Novak, who pulled down $469,000 in total compensation. EMF gave out a $19,000 grant to another Christian charity, and funded a related organization, K-Love and Air1 Foundation, with about $5 million in capital. At the time of its 2011 IRS form 990, EMF had about $130 million in liabilities, including $64 million in mortgages on its station facilities and $60 million in tax-exempt bonds issued by the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority and the town of Morrison, Colorado. (EMF’s corporate headquarters is in Rocklin, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento.) EMF reported net assets of $335.8 million, and its revenue per employee was $283,000 (net income per employee, $87,000).

By contrast, Vermont Public Radio also operates two 24-hour networks, mostly in the state of Vermont. (One VPR station, WOXR, is licensed to and transmits from New York, and VPR receives contributions from New York and New Hampshire residents in addition to Vermonters.) For the same tax year, VPR reported total revenues of $9.1 million, total expenses of $8.2 million, and salary expense of $3.8 million for its 101 employees. (VPR reported having exactly 173 volunteers.) VPR’s program service expense was $5.7 million, of which $895,000 was for program acquisition fees, although they don’t give a breakdown of NPR vs. PRI vs. APM programs. VPR had an endowment of $11.8 million, and net assets of $20.4 million, including real estate, physical plant, and equipment of $7.2 million; the network does not report any significant outstanding debts. In public support, VPR reported receiving advertising time from commercial broadcasters worth nearly $1 million; VPR also received less than $1 million in federal grants, and the rest of its public support came from private contributors and foundations. VPR’s highest-paid employee was its president, who made $144,000 in 2011. VPR’s total revenue per employee was $90,000 (net income per employee $8,300).

BBC Radio 4 program diversity vs. an NPR station

I wanted to provide a sampling of the sorts of programs that Radio 4 provides versus what is on the typical NPR station. I took VPR as my example of an NPR station, which may or may not be representative; you might also want to compare schedules at some big-city stations like KPCC, WNYC, and WBUR. Both schedules are for Friday, October 26, 2013.

VPR starts out its broadcast day at 6 AM with “Morning Edition”, NPR’s flagship national news and interview program, for three hours (starting with the second hour and taking one full “rollover”). After that is an hour of “Newshour”, a BBC World Service program distributed by PRI. “On Point” follows, a talk show from Boston’s WBUR, and then the local “Vermont Edition”, an hour-long topical call-in show. VPR goes back to the network for “Here & Now”, an NPR-distributed news/interview program also from WBUR, which used to be followed by an hour of “The Story with Dick Gordon” until that ended earlier this month. (VPR’s online schedule hasn’t been updated to reflect the end of the interview series, which was distributed by APM and produced by North Carolina Public Radio.) Next up is “Fresh Air”, the long-running Philadelphia-based interview show with Terry Gross; that’s followed by 2 1/2 hours of “All Things Considered”, NPR’s afternoon-drive news and interview program (“the other flagship”), and APM’s “Marketplace”, a business and finance show. “Vermont Edition” repeats at 7 PM, and it’s followed by three hours of “Friday Night Jazz” before joining the BBC World Service all-news service for North America (distributed by PRI) until the next day.

On BBC Radio 4, the day begins with the Shipping Forecast, a product of the UK Met Office intended primarily for mariners (who listen on Radio 4’s 198 kHz longwave service). Sometimes considered an example of “found poetry”, the Shipping Forecast is popular enough that the morning and late-night broadcasts are also heard on Radio 4’s primary FM transmitter network (which does not carry the midday version, heard on LW only). Next up is a 13-minute news briefing, followed by a two-minute “Prayer for the Day” given by a leader from one of the UK’s major religious organizations. “Farming Today” follows the prayer; it also runs for 13 minutes, and is then followed by “Tweet of the Day”, which is not a cross-promotion with Twitter (that would be considered advertising, which is forbidden by the BBC’s broadcasting license), but rather, recorded birdsong from a different species (found in the UK) every day. The “Today” program is Radio 4’s flagship news and interview program; it runs from 6 to 9 AM, and includes embedded subprograms “Thought for the Day”, “Yesterday in Parliament”, and “Sports Desk”. This particular Friday, “Today” is followed by “Desert Island Discs”, a long-running program where pretend castaways are asked to give and justify their choices for the musical selections that will accompany them on their exile. That runs for 45 minutes, and the hour is filled out with “Book of the Week”, a dramatic reading of selections from a different book each week, striped across all five weekdays. (This week’s book is Bonkers: My Life in Laughs, a memoir by comedian Jennifer Saunders.) At 10 AM, “Woman’s Hour” (which only runs 45 minutes) talks with Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand, and that is followed by episode 10 of Gillespie and I, the “15 Minute Drama”. A half-hour documentary at 11 AM traces the history of the English Football Association, and that is followed by a half-hour sitcom about parenting, “The Gobetweenies”. Noontime is the consumer program “You & Yours”, which runs for 52 minutes and is followed by the amateur interview program “The Listening Project” for five minutes, and a three-minute weather forecast.

“The World at One” is Radio 4’s major midday news program, and it’s followed by a 15-minute documentary (this Friday it’s “Terror Through Time: Africa Erupts”, a look at the ANC’s internal debate over the legitimacy of terrorist tactics in the struggle to end apartheid). A repeat of the long-running soap opera “The Archers” follows (also 15 minutes), followed by a 45-minute episode of a drama series, “G.F. Newman’s The Corrupted”. At 3 PM, “Gardeners’ Question Time” runs for 45 minutes (in this episode, the panel visit Leicester University and Botanic Gardens), and the hour is filled out with the first episode of “Edinburgh Haunts”, a series of three newly-commissioned ghost stories set in the Scottish capital (this one by Val McDermid). “The Last Word” is a half-hour of obituaries, and it’s followed by “Feedback”, a program which responds to listener comments about the rest of Radio 4’s programming. That runs for 26 minutes, and is followed by another installment of “The Listening Project”, and then at 5 PM is “PM”, Radio 4’s hour-long evening news analysis program. The “Six O’Clock News” follows, and then series 41, episode 5 of “The Now Show”, a topical comedy and satire show that usually alternates in this time slot with “The News Quiz”. A fresh episode of “The Archers” follows, and then at 7:15 the arts program “Front Row” with Kirsty Lang runs for half an hour. “15 Minute Drama” repeats at 7:45, and the live-audience political discussion show “Any Questions?” follows at 8 PM. “A Point of View”, which the schedule describes only as “A weekly reflection on a topical issue”, runs for 10 minutes, and then at 9 PM, “Terror Through Time” returns with an omnibus edition of the week’s programs. It’s followed by a weather forecast, “The World Tonight”, a 45-minute global news analysis program, and then “Book at Bedtime” with episode 5 (of 15) from Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. Another literary program, “A Good Read”, has a rerun at 11:00, and it’s followed by “Today in Parliament” and more of “The Listening Project”, then the midnight news, a rerun of “Book of the Week”, and the late-night Shipping Forecast, before handing the reins over to the World Service for the overnight hours.

References

Posted in Broadcasting & Media | Tagged , , , , , ,

New car update

Posted on 2013-10-19 by

I spent most of this afternoon working on the new-car thing. First stop was the closest dealer that actually had a 370Z coupe in stock. I really, really, like that car. Unfortunately, the salesman confirmed that it is really impractical in winter — most buyers are rich enough that they can garage theirs for the winter and drive something else — and that the 7AT version is built in very low quantities and almost impossible to find. I did get to sit in it, and found it quite comfortable inside, albeit a bit awkward getting in and out. /me sighs.

Next stop was the Ford dealer I visited last week, and still no Fusion hybrid, but the guy I talked to promised to find out when they were getting one and give me a call back on Monday. We’ll see on that front.

I spoke briefly to my favorite Honda salesman, Dennis Young at Boch Honda in Norwood, about the Accord Hybrid, which he has already driven; he said they’re positioning it for people who drive 20-25,000 miles per year, but it sounds much more interesting than the failed Accord hybrid of 2006. He gave me a photocopy of a Crain’s article about it which gives more detail than the Honda press release, and I expect to go back down there at the end of the month once they actually take delivery of one. (This is why I won’t allow myself to be talked into doing a deal early: too many new cars are being released around this time of year and keeping the handover as late in the year as possible is a regret-minimization heuristic. In any event, the Accord hybrid is a completely new powertrain for Honda, with an innovative, um, hybrid electromechanical transmission. At moderate speeds, the 2.0-liter I4 engine is coupled to a generator, and an all-electronic transmission runs the drive motor. At highway speeds, the motor and generator are clutched out, and the engine couples directly to a single-speed reduction gear transmission. The valve timing is adjusted to run a normal cycle for gas mode and Atkinson cycle when in hybrid mode. Honda claims 50 mi/gal city and 45 mi/gal highway on the EPA test.

From there I stopped by Natick Mall and stepped in to the Tesla not-really-a-dealership-honest! there, just out of curiosity more than anything. I couldn’t afford a Tesla even if I had a garage, but it’s a nice-looking car despite the goofy giant touch-screen on the center console. (While I was at the mall, I noted in the food court that there is now a specialty-french-fry franchise, something I would never have believed had I not seen it in person. Unfortunately, their “garlic” fries are in a thick, gloppy “parmesan” cheese sauce, not butter as would be proper — and of course they are much more expensive than normal fries at one of the mall’s fast-food franchises.)

Finally, I went to an Acura dealer to find out when they were getting an ILX hybrid. They have one on order, it turns out, but there’s no delivery date yet. The 2014 ILX carries over Honda’s old “IMA” hybrid system, with a 1.5-liter engine, and seems like a bit of a long shot at this point. The salesman began to lose me when I asked what upgrades the ILX had relative to its platform-mate Civic hybrid and he said “well, it’s a luxury brand”, as if that explained everything. Honda still hasn’t released the details on the 2014 Civic hybrid, so far as I can tell, which makes me wonder if they are going to give it a new powertrain this cycle as well.

One other note: it looks like gas prices have changed quite a bit since I did my chart a few weeks ago. Regular unleaded is down to $3.359 a gallon in many locations, but the prices of higher grades and of diesel have decreased rather less, with diesel still up around $3.80.

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The admin’s manifesto

I am a network administrator. I work on a team of fewer than a dozen people, only one of whom is a full-time developer (and it’s not me). But I do write code — software that supports the operational needs of my organization; software that helps me do my job. That code has a lifetime of years; some of it is already in its second decade. I need stable programming environments. I need to be able to write something, get it working, and then not have to think about it until my environment changes. I do not have a staff of fifty. I do not want to do what the “cool kids” are doing; I am an administrator, and what I do will never be “cool”. But the “cool kids” will not be able to do anything if my infrastructure doesn’t work right, consistently, efficiently, over the long term. I do not have $2 million in VC money to throw down a rathole while you rototill some language, package, or operating-system component I depend on a dozen times a year. Cool new stuff is nice, everybody wants cool new stuff once in a while. So long as the old stuff (which was cool new stuff itself once) doesn’t break. So long as it happens on a predictable schedule — measured in years or quarters, not months, not weeks, not days.

The people I support are going to work on one thing, and produce one deliverable (a Ph.D. thesis), over the course of three to seven years. They (or their advisors) would like to spend their money on inventing their own cool new things. They get unhappy when it gets spent on staff time to do unproductive things like rewriting infrastructure software to catch up with development environments that assume anyone who writes a line of code works on a team of fifty full-time developers. My colleagues and I don’t. We are sysadmins, and network admins, and we keep the bits flowing and empty the bit bucket when it gets full. On occasion, we’ll build infrastructure that enables someone to do something really important and groundbreaking. There are more of us than there are hot new Silicon Valley Web startups, and we’re tired of being taken for granted by developers.

Thank you for your attention.

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-18 by | Tagged ,

What Congress should do now

Posted on 2013-10-18 by

In a statement today, the President spoke about what he wants to see from a long-term budget deal. But the voices of ordinary people ought to be heard, too, so here are my wishes, some of them process-related and some more substantive.

  1. Congress should adopt a rule making a two-year appropriation cycle mandatory for all discretionary spending, make it easier to discharge overdue bills from the House Appropriations Committee, and prohibit filibustering of overdue appropriations bills even when they are not considered under reconciliation.
  2. The debt limit should be abolished, permanently. There is absolutely no excuse for such gimmickry; if Congress wants to limit the federal debt, it can and must do so by reducing the deficit.
  3. The mortgage-interest and state property-tax deductions should be means-tested. (Ideally they would be eliminated entirely, but that would hurt many homeowners with modest homes and modest incomes, and thus is politically unpalatable unless phased in over an impractically long period.) A reasonable phase-out would be to leave the bottom three quintiles at 100% deductibility, and then reduce it linearly to zero between the third and fourth quintiles. Use the savings to institute a nonrefundable rent-paid deduction, to reduce the housing-market distortion inherent in the ownership subsidy.
  4. Some measure of corporate tax reform is absolutely necessary. The U.S. has the most baroque system of corporate taxation in the OECD, with high marginal rates that essentially no company ever pays — both due to the large number of loopholes and exemptions, and also by manipulating their corporate structure through sham foreign licensing subsidiaries to shift income to offshore tax havens. A broader corporate tax, with lower marginal rates but more limited exceptions and a robust dividends-paid deduction, ought to earn favor with both parties even if it was revenue-positive.
  5. As part of the corporate-tax package, eliminate the special treatment currently given to individuals’ investment income, and return to treating it like any other income. The combination of the two should result in a market-driven rebalancing of dividend yields, as the change would eliminate the preference currently given to capital gains over dividends.
  6. The cap on the Social Security wage base should be eliminated. This will ensure the solvency of Social Security into the indefinite future, and the progressive nature of the benefit formula makes up for the flatness of the tax. It may also be possible (I don’t know if the exact numbers support this) to reduce the “payroll tax” rate at the same time.
  7. While I’m on the subject of the “payroll tax”: let’s fix that idiocy too. A “payroll tax” is no more and no less than an income tax that Congress (or the state legislature) has decided to hide from working people. The fix could be done in phases, with employers first required to report their “payroll tax” as “non-taxable income” on employees’ pay stubs and W-2s, and then a few years later, make it all taxable income and adjust the tax rates accordingly to be revenue-neutral on a bracket-by-bracket basis. The same thing should be done with other expenses that are currently pretended to be paid for by employers, like health care and parking. It shouldn’t be done with pension contributions, however, for reasons that should be obvious.
  8. Restore dischargeability of private student loans in bankruptcy.
  9. Introduce a financial transaction tax, on the order of 1 to 5 basis points. Use the proceeds to fund SEC and CFTC enforcement.
  10. Eliminate transfers from the general budget to the Transportation Trust Fund and either cut federal spending on transportation or else increase fuel taxes to pay for the amount of spending that is actually desired by Congress.
  11. Eliminate transfers from the general budget to Medicare, and increase Medicare taxes to fully fund all Medicare programs out of dedicated revenues.
  12. Introduce a national “diversity sales tax”, which would apply whenever a good is sold in one state and delivered (whether electronically or by courier) to an end user in another state. All such sales should be subject to the tax, whether or not the states participated in the program, and the revenue would be divided proportionally among participating states according to transaction volume, attributing each sale to both origin and final use states. Participation would be limited to states which agree to accept the proceeds as full and complete satisfaction of their residents’ sales and use tax liability for covered transactions, but states would be allowed to participate even if they did not charge a sales or use tax on intrastate transactions. (Revenue attributable to non-participating states would be distributed proportionally among the participating states, not left in the Treasury.) This would benefit many states and many businesses, but I’m not entirely sure it’s constitutional.

That’s almost all about taxes and tax expenditures; I have some ideas about spending priorities that will have to wait for another time.

Posted in Law & Society, Transportation | Tagged , ,

Hybrid options begin to fill in; automaker Web site usability

Checking up on the hybrid front, I found that the Acura ILX hybrid for 2014 is finally on sale, as of Tuesday, and an Accord hybrid, which I didn’t even know about, goes on sale at the end of this month. Unfortunately, Honda’s main vehicle Web sites didn’t tell me that — I had to dig through press releases. (This underscores the incompetence of automaker management; can you think of a technology company that would put a product on sale before their Web site had any information about it?) Hyundai is still running behind on nearly their whole lineup, including the Sonata hybrid.

Meanwhile, I’m still thinking about that 370Z that I’m probably not going to buy. I wasted a couple of hours searching on Nissan’s (awful) Web site to see which dealers actually had the model I was interested in; there are four dealers that have them, all in red and black, none with autobox, so there’s no chance I’ll end up test-driving one (unless there’s someone in New Hampshire or Rhode Island that has one). I might go find the nearest 6MT, which is in Stoneham, just to see if I can even fit in the thing, and maybe talk to a salesperson about why they’re so limited around here. Note to automakers: don’t make me select each one of thirty different dealers to find out that they don’t have what I’m interested in, just tell me which f’ing dealer does, and how far away they are.

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-17 by | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

First test drive

Posted on 2013-10-14 by

Over the Columbus Day weekend I managed to see a number of car dealers and learned a bit, plus I finally got to test-drive something. Some random notes in no particular order:

That Nissan 370Z is looking less and less likely. It was always a bit of a stretch, but it still looks like a fun car to drive. I may never find out, however, since none of the dealers around here seem to have them. I saw one dealer with an open-top model in the showroom; I checked two other Nissan dealerships and both had tiny showrooms on tiny lots filled with used Altimas and new Leafs. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have an EV — but I don’t have a place to park one where it could charge, and the range is still lacking.

I talked to a salesperson at a Ford dealer and had a chance to sit in a regular (non-hybrid) Fusion and C-MAX. The Fusion feels really cramped and has very limited headroom — and I’m not by any means a tall guy, so that may turn out to be a dealbreaker on what seems otherwise a very nice car. He didn’t have any hybrid Fusions available to test-drive but said he should be getting more soon, so I will go back and give it a try. I’ll try the C-MAX as well just to make sure I’m not discounting a perfectly reasonable option; although its mileage is nowhere near as good as the Fusion’s, it does cost less even in the top “Platinum” trim level.

I also went to a VW dealership where the salesperson tried to tell me that the Passat had more headroom than my current Accord — after I had hit my dead on the door and then almost did so again on the center lamp thingy. He was very eager to push his stock of 2013s, too, even though the incentives rarely make up for the reduced residual value on which the cost of a lease depends. Then when I reminded him that I wasn’t buying anything right now, he went into the typical car salesman’s “and what if I did this” spiel. I’ll try another VW dealership first — hopefully one with some 2014s on the lot. I was ignored at a nearby Mazda dealer, again with a small showroom on a very small lot (so small that I had to park next door).

Finally, today I managed to actually get a test-drive, of Mercedes’ entry-level CLA250 four-door coupe. I found the design to be a bit less comfortable that I would have expected from a Mercedes, with fairly stiff seats, limited headroom (especially in back, although I’m not likely to be too concerned about that), and a very odd information display bunged in the middle of the dash atop the center stack. The ride quality was decent, but the auto-start-stop system detracted significantly from the smooth shifting of the double-clutch 7-speed. Also surprising was the fact that Mercedes has not followed nearly all other rivals in this segment by switching to pushbutton ignition. While the CLA250 does not have a standard metal key, it still requires a physical object (a rectangular piece of plastic with an RFID inside) to be inserted into the dash in order to start the car; this seems like a strange choice considering the fact that competing vehicles even two categories down have supported “keyless” ignition for some time. Last and most definitely least, I personally am accustomed to console shifters; to have a big covered cupholder where the shifter normally sits felt a bit weird to me, and the electronic column shifter would take some getting used to. Those are the major minuses; on the plus side, the residual value on these cars is excellent, so even a fairly expensive final sticker price may actually turn into a very affordable lease. Overall, I don’t think I’m going to end up buying a CLA250, but I haven’t scratched it off the list yet.

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Game proficiency and mental health

I have exactly two games installed across all of my computing devices. (Obviously I’m not a gamer and not likely ever to be one.) I’ve been musing on long-term trends in my performance in these two games, and I have come to two conclusions (unsupported by any sort of rigorous analysis): that my performance in the two games has a negative correlation, and that the overall magnitude of my success on one and failure at the other depends on my mental state — specifically, whether or not I’m depressed.

I expect that this comes as no surprise to psychologists and cog. sci. people.

The two games are classic 2-D X11 games. Seahaven Towers is a solitaire variant, known to many through the Microsoft version called “FreeCell”, and Jewel Box is a Tetris-family spatial recognition game. Seahaven differs from the Microsoft game in one important respect: it does not reject (randomly-generated) starting positions that have no solution. This allows a very natural scoring system, in which a “win” constitutes either solving the puzzle (getting all the cards in order with four or fewer units of temporary storage) or correctly identifying that the puzzle has no solution, and a “loss” is giving up on a puzzle that has a solution. (If there is a solution, it is guaranteed to be found by a depth-first search, but this algorithm may require greater stack depth for backtracking than most humans — including me — are capable of. Computers have no problem with this, since there can never be more than 50 conceptual stack frames in a single-deck solitaire game.) My long-term “win” rate is around .699, but when I’m down in the dumps my patience and short-term memory both take a big hit, and as a result my performance takes a nose-dive. Seahaven stores its state in my home directory, so it doesn’t get reset when the package gets reinstalled; thus, I normally only see changes in instantaneous performance through a decline in my long-term average (in more than 32,000 games over the past two decades).

Jewel Box, by contrast, does not stress short-term memory at all; like other Tetris-family games, each randomly-generated game piece is revealed as the game progresses, and the speed of the game increases over time until the player runs out of “lives”. This exercises visuo-spatial skills — recognizing the colors of the jewels on the playing board and how the next set of jewels will fit into the gaps — and, in later stages, fast reflexes, but not a whole lot of memory. (The scoring system of the game does reward cascades exponentially, so there is some benefit to planning ahead, but the PRNG has a way of upsetting whatever plan the player may have, so there is a limit to planning, particularly as the game speeds up.) This means that a fairly mindless playing style — see next piece, move it into position, watch it drop, repeat — is sufficient. When depressed, my scores certainly don’t decline; if anything, they improve. However, xjewel uses a shared global high-scores file that does get erased when the package is reinstalled, so I can’t easily compare my performance today to last year or last decade.

One huge caveat: when I’m feeling good, I’m not playing games all that much, I’m doing something less repetitive and more rewarding, like writing and researching for my Web site, or annotating my photo galleries. Or making progress on my enormous to-read pile. Just one anecdote, by no means data, never mind evidence.

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-11 by | Tagged , , ,

What business do car dealers think they’re in?

Posted on 2013-10-07 by

After navigating a series of unspeakably awful automaker Web sites to gather the raw data for my previous post on fuel economy, I spent about an hour today looking at dealer locations and hours — particularly service hours. When I get a new car, particularly one with a lot of new technology like a hybrid, I want some assurance that there will be a factory-authorized service department available when and where I find it convenient. It seems that many dealership service departments still work “bankers’ hours” — or even less, given that many bank branches are open evenings and weekends these days. The rest of retail has figured out, by fits and starts, that it doesn’t matter whether they’re open or not when their customers are all at work, so if they want the custom, they have to be open when other businesses aren’t. The car dealers don’t seem to have figured this out. (They’re open for sales, which is useful once every three years or so, but not for service, which you need a few times a year.) Not being open on Sunday is nearly a killer for me, since Sunday is my errand day.

There’s probably a good economic reason for this (salespeople on commission versus service techs on hourly wages must play a big part) but it’s still irritating, and something I have to consider. So here’s the table that represents that. (Note that these are authorized service departments convenient to me, and things were you live are probably different.)

Nameplate Service on weekends
Honda 1 of 3 closed on Sunday
Mercedes 2 of 3 closed on Sunday, 1 of 3 closes early Sunday
Toyota 3 of 4 closed on Sunday
Acura all closed on Sunday
Hyundai all closed on Sunday
Mazda all closed on Sunday
VW all closed on Sunday
Nissan all closed on Sunday, 1 of 4 closed Saturday afternoon
Ford all closed on Sunday, 2 of 4 close early Saturday
Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , ,

Thinking about fuel economy

Posted on 2013-10-06 by

The lease on my car is up in a few months, and so I’m currently thinking about what sort of car I should get. Last time, I wanted the brand-new Hyundai Sonata hybrid, but the North American launch kept on getting delayed and delayed until I could no longer wait, and went with another Honda Accord (I’m on my fourth, but the first one was totaled in an accident after less than six months). I could get another one, but I really ought to look around at what else is after. I’m old enough that I could get a “mid-life crisis car” even though I haven’t had a mid-life crisis, but I always feel a bit bad when I have to fill up, so maybe I should go for a more fuel-efficient car instead. I certainly don’t need a car as big as the Accord I have now — I’m only one person, and the only things in the back seat most of the time are a snow brush and a bottle of wiper fluid. In the abstract, I’d love an EV, but given the length of my commute and the places I want to drive, that’s really not a practical option. (A plug-in hybrid might be, because it’s sometimes possible to plug in at work, but I don’t know how long that will last if it becomes a popular option. I don’t have deeded parking at home so plugging in at home is out of the question.)

One of the things I thought was worth looking at was the annual cost of fuel. It’s important to remember that this does not account for all of the other ongoing expenses, like insurance, which vary widely between cars, but it’s also one way of figuring out whether getting a hybrid, turbo-4, or diesel is “worth it” (at least on the basis of fuel costs alone). Particularly with diesels, it’s important to remember that diesel is the most expensive road fuel regularly available, 39 cents per gallon more expensive than regular unleaded at the current statewide average prices here in Massachusetts. I also live and work in places with higher-than-average prices, and of course the price of fuel (and electricity!) fluctuates significantly through the year.

My normal practice is to get a 36-month, 45,000-mile closed-end lease. This keeps the payment affordable and gives me an easy out; car companies sometimes guarantee a higher than expected residual value as a way to subsidize leases, which means that the buyout price on a car lease can be more than the car’s market value at the end of the lease. To make the table below, I assumed 15,000 miles per year, which is pretty close to what I actually do (16,000 might be more accurate — we’ll see how I did when I turn the current car in this December). I also assumed that my driving would be evenly split between highway and city driving, which is a reasonable guess. (My round-trip commute is 28 miles “highway” and 32 miles city, but some of that “highway” driving is awfully “city”-like. Most of my non-commuting mileage is on the highway, though.)

The table below shows the results. Some of the spec sheets are pretty confusing about which fuel type applies to which model/trim, and in a few cases the 2014 models aren’t actually available yet, so I used the 2013 figures (assuming that they will be out by December — never mind how well that worked last time). The fourth column shows the expected savings (or additional cost) relative to getting the latest generation of the same Accord as I have now.

Fuel costs for various cars
Make/model Fuel $/year Savings (cost)
per mo.
Nissan 370Z Touring w/Sport pkg. 93 $2654 $(49.97)
VW CC R-Line 93 $2264 $(17.46)
Acura TSX Special Edition/AT 91 $2187 $(11.05)
Nissan Altima 3.5SL RUNL $2073 $(1.55)
Honda Accord EX-L V6 RUNL $2054 N/A
VW Passat SEL Premium 1.8T RUNL $1896 $13.20
Mercedes-Benz CLA250 93 $1886 $14.03
VW Passat TDI SEL Premium ULSD $1726 $27.36
Acura ILX Hybrid (2013) 91 $1462 $49.36
Hyundai Sonata Hybrid (2013) RUNL $1408 $53.86
Toyota Camry Hybrid XLE 2.5L RUNL $1368 $57.28
VW Jetta Hybrid SEL Premium 93 $1300 $62.86
Ford C-MAX Hybrid SEL RUNL $1259 $66.28
Honda Civic Hybrid (2013) RUNL $1212 $70.19
Ford Fusion Hybrid Titanium RUNL $1134 $76.70
Honda Accord hybrid RUNL $1126 $77.33

You can think of the right-hand column as “how much more (less) should I be willing to pay per month just on the basis of improved (worse) fuel economy?” Of course, it doesn’t actually work like that — a 370Z costs more, not less, than even the fanciest Accord. But if you’re comparing a hybrid versus a comparable diesel versus a comparable conventional gasoline engine, it can help answer the question of whether the “hybrid premium” is worth it or not. (Of course, the price of gas also matters — if I were paying Suffern/San Francisco/Baker prices for gas, the more efficient cars would look significantly better.)

These are all cars that I’ve thought a bit about, but haven’t actually test-driven or even tried to get into any of them yet. (I did eliminate some nameplates not shown here on the basis of either practicality or feature availability.) I’ll post updates as the process goes forward. (By the way, isn’t it absolutely shocking that the browser people still haven’t managed to implement proper alignment for currency values in table columns even 14 years after HTML 4.01?)

Source for gas prices: Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, “Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Prices for October 1, 2013“, who apparently get it from AAA. Since they don’t provide a permalink, the prices I used (all per gallon) were: RUNL, $3.556; 91, $3.752; 93, $3.884; ULSD, $3.946.

UPDATE: It appears that I totally forgot about Mazda. If I find anything I like in their line, I’ll update this post with the mileage.

UPDATE 2 (2013-10-12): I discovered an arithmetic error in my calculation of the costs for the Accord V6, and have updated the table. The monthly numbers may be off by a cent or two due to double rounding.

UPDATE 3 (2013-12-19): Added Accord hybrid (50 city, 45 highway) to the table. I have not updated the assumed gas prices even though they are down about 20 cents per gallon over the past three weeks.

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Musical collets

Posted on 2013-09-30 by

A month or so ago, the CSAIL machine shop got a new milling machine to replace a Monarch milling machine from 1956 (seven years older than the Lab itself). I never used this machine — or indeed any of the other machine tools in the shop, not being exactly handy or physically creative. The old machine looked like this:

1956 Monarch milling machine

1956 Monarch milling machine

A couple of weeks ago, a grey metal cabinet showed up in a dead corner of our office. Sitting on top of the cabinet were a variety of chucks that had been used with the old milling machine. (There were still three other milling machines in the shop — an old Bridgeport vertical milling machine with a retrofit CNC controller, a newer vertical machine that was installed last year, and a 1952 Hardinge lathe, plus the new machine — but apparently these parts were either too worn to be useful or did not fit any of them.)

Then one day a week or so ago, Eric Prud’hommeaux dropped by to return some equipment that he had borrowed, before getting on a plane back to France. He had worked in a machine shop in a previous life, and when I opened up one of the drawers of the cabinet, he was impressed by what was inside:

Drawer full of collets

Drawer full of collets

He picked one up, then another. He struck the two collets together, and I was surprised to hear tones coming from what I had assumed to be grimy machine-shop equipment. I shouldn’t have been so surprised: it’s obvious from the construction that each “finger” of the collet acts as a spring, so striking them together ought to produce oscillation, and since the four fingers are made to very precise dimensions, the vibrations of one ought to be amplified by the other three. Each collet had a different inside diameter, down to 1/64th of an inch, which meant that the fingers would have a different mass, and perhaps a different spring constant, effectively tuning each collet to a different frequency. A pure tone could be obtained by striking a single collet with a non-vibrating piece of metal — say, a chuck key.

The top drawer of the cabinet had a flip-up front, exposing this plywood carousel:

Collet carousel

Collet carousel

There are a series of holes drilled into the plywood, each marked with the inside diameter of the collet that would fit there. All of the collets, of course, would have the same outside diameter, since they had to fit in the same lathe. In this case (all of these collets are labeled “2J”, or perhaps “2U”), there is a screw fitting on the bottom to attach them to the machine. The old machine was hauled off to a warehouse where it would be stored for its new owner; the same person should be getting this cabinet, too.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , ,