New House

Well, I finally got talked into buying a new house. Not just as in new for me, an actual new house.

I have been convinced for some time that we need to start increasing the density of Southern California. The primary thing that needs to happen is 10+ story residential and commercial buildings within a half mile of existing train stations. It is a whole lot easier to build interesting things near public transit than it is to expand public transit to meet up with already existing homes, entertainment and workspace.

Of secondary importance is building a whole lot more housing in Orange and Los Angeles counties. This can help stop more people from commuting from Riverside and San Bernardino counties. This should be done by tearing down existing buildings rather than destroying more of the already limited habitat for coastal creatures.

Buying this home, rather than an existing home, encourages this trend. Rather than bidding up the price on already over-priced assets I am assisting in modeling the future.

We better get working on that space program

We don't have long to escape from the robot army.



A far more impressive drone is the following. If you can survive through the bad dialog it is quite impressive.

Credit Score Scam

I have long known that credit ratings were a scam. They are more a judge of how much of a sucker you are than how much of a risk of default you are. Those who pay tons of interest on time will always have the highest credit scores.

I did not realize just how bad they are until today though:

In the past four years I have paid off around $20,000 in student loans and credit card debt.

I have no debt at all.

I have nearly a decade straight of paying utility bills of one form or another including many years of paying rent to large apartment complexes.

I have a credit card which is at least six years old (but I stopped charging anything to in the past year or so since the interest rates are damn near criminal.

I have three and a half years at one job in one of the more stable industries there is.

So I figured when getting a home loan my credit would be sufficient. I am obviously someone who can be trusted to pay back a mortgage.  No luck. When the bank ran my credit score it came back as inactive because I haven't had any debt for more than six months. Not only would they not send the bank a score, they wouldn't even send them all the information about the credit history they do have. The 20,000 in debt I payed off in the past four years? All kept secret as punishment for my refusing to play their game.

Fortunately I will have in excess of a 20% down payment. There clearly are banks with intelligent people who will go through manual underwriting, or some other procedure to take what is obviously free money to them. Still, this really makes me want to find a way to push for reform in this industry.

Engineers in a vacuum

It has become pretty clear to me that engineers are just way too isolated. They never get the feedback from reality which is necessary to actually learn to be a great engineer. Engineering school seems to be a lot more theory than hands on work but it just gets worse when they graduate. Engineers are asked to design things which they have never actually built relying only on their knowledge of abstract theories.

If I do a design, and it is wrong. I will never hear about it. A construction person will grumble a little bit when looking at the drawing, and just do it right. It is just easier than going through the trouble to fix the drawing. I thought that this was peculiar to utilities since they have dedicated people who do all construction and maintenance work. Because it is so dangerous engineers almost never get hands on experience. This  article in the Atlantic makes me think that this is a more general problem with engineering in America though. The factories are thousands of miles away, so the engineers never hear the grumbling.

But a problem soon became apparent. GE hadn’t made a water heater in the United States in decades. In all the recent years the company had been tucking water heaters into American garages and basements, it had lost track of how to actually make them.

The GeoSpring in particular, Nolan says, has “a lot of copper tubing in the top.” Assembly-line workers “have to route the tubes, and they have to braze them—weld them—to seal the joints. How that tubing is designed really affects how hard or easy it is to solder the joints. And how hard or easy it is to do the soldering affects the quality, of course. And the quality of those welds is literally the quality of the hot-water heater.” Although the GeoSpring had been conceived, designed, marketed, and managed from Louisville, it was made in China, and, Nolan says, “We really had zero communications into the assembly line there.”

To get ready to make the GeoSpring at Appliance Park, in January 2010 GE set up a space on the factory floor of Building 2 to design the new assembly line. No products had been manufactured in Building 2 since 1998. An old GE range assembly line still stood there; after a feud with union workers, that line had been shut down so abruptly that the GeoSpring team found finished oven doors still hanging from conveyors 30 feet overhead. The GeoSpring project had a more collegial tone. The “big room” had design engineers assigned to it, but also manufacturing engineers, line workers, staff from marketing and sales—no management-labor friction, just a group of people with different perspectives, tackling a crucial problem.

“We got the water heater into the room, and the first thing [the group] said to us was ‘This is just a mess,’ ” Nolan recalls. Not the product, but the design. “In terms of manufacturability, it was terrible.”

The GeoSpring suffered from an advanced-technology version of “IKEA Syndrome.” It was so hard to assemble that no one in the big room wanted to make it. Instead they redesigned it. The team eliminated 1 out of every 5 parts. It cut the cost of the materials by 25 percent. It eliminated the tangle of tubing that couldn’t be easily welded. By considering the workers who would have to put the water heater together—in fact, by having those workers right at the table, looking at the design as it was drawn—the team cut the work hours necessary to assemble the water heater from 10 hours in China to two hours in Louisville.

In the end, says Nolan, not one part was the same.

So a funny thing happened to the GeoSpring on the way from the cheap Chinese factory to the expensive Kentucky factory: The material cost went down. The labor required to make it went down. The quality went up. Even the energy efficiency went up.

Solar Cars

This is the only solar car I can almost believe in. Put solar cells on your roof than hook them up to a plug in hybrid car. The price of electricity from solar power is a couple times as high as the price of electricity from the grid. However the price of energy in the form of gasoline is about ten times the cost of electricity. So it is cheaper to put solar cells on your roof and run the first few miles of every trip on electricity than it is to run the car off gasoline for those miles.

Or it would be if the Volt and plug in Prius were not so much more expensive than any similar gasoline powered car. Still, this is cheap enough to actually be a reasonable thing for an upper middle class family of eccentric early adopters to actually do.

Lowest Birthrate Ever

Add this to the list of reasons to be skeptical about the housing market rise in California: The birth rate in California is the lowest it has ever been. This both encourages people to stay in smaller homes, and when combined with the amount of migration out of the state means that the long term prospects for housing are not particularly good.

Election Wish List

While I voted for Gary Johnson who I agree with more than just about any other politician, I really want Obama to win with Gary making up the difference in votes between the two so it is obvious to Republicans that they lost when they became the party of the police state. I have issues with the Democrats, but in the last 12 years the Republicans have gone off the deep end and need to be punished for it by losing to such a weak presidential candidate.

 Republicans win the house yet again. This might conflict with my support of Obama, but I don't trust either party with the presidency, house, and senate. With this sort of conflict it will be difficult for either party to pass some of their more wing-nut positions. 

Oregon, Colorado, and Washington state all have marijuana legalization propositions. At least one of these needs to pass. Preferably all three would pass, that would be enough to show Congress that they have a full scale rebellion on their hands and it would be best to back off.

Proposition 33 needs to lose. Will we really let corporations buy off laws so cheaply? There is rarely such a clear cut case of people trying to use money to influence politics in a way that is bad for most people.

Proposition 36 should pass. The reason we have no money for our schools comes down mostly to two things. Health care and law enforcement. The law enforcement is just not worth the money we are spending. It costs a lot more to put someone in prison than in school so I support any reasonable idea to lower the number of people in jail.

Elizabeth Warren would be a good addition to the senate. It is justice. There is no better way to pay back Republicans for blocking her appointment to a job she would be a good at than to have her take a senate seat from them. I can't say I agree with her on everything, but better decisions would be made with her in office.

I would like measure W and X in Fullerton to pass. Measure W would mean that a bunch of homes get built here. We need to increase density of cities in Southern California more than we need to build on fresh land, but at the very least this would construct many homes in an area I would like to buy. Measure X would legalize fireworks, another thing I always liked.