The Roads I Left..

I am sitting here in the United section of O'Hare, waiting for my departure to Hartford. Browsing Autoblog to pass the time (hard to do heavy Guidewire work here, not being able to find a free power plug, grr..), I found a story on a contest to find some of the worst potholes in Michigan.

When I hit a particularly rough road in Texas, it's rare enough that it really stands out. I always forget how common really potholed, cracked roads are back up in Michigan. Ones like this:



If I had to pick a day to not be on American (where all of my miles live), today was probably as good a day as any, though. It looks like American has had to cancel a ton of flights today as it brought MD-80s (what I am overwhelmingly flying on with them) out of service to inspect wiring harnesses.

Postwar Tax Rate Trending

The content of this editorial in today's WSJ is pretty standard fare. The part I found particularly interesting was the tax burden as a percent of GDP (the italicized distinction would surely be seized upon by both sides arguing the merits of the content) as it has varied over time since WWII. The authors (Cogan, Hubbard) argue that if the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are allowed to lapse, the resulting tax load increase would put the tax rate as a percentage of GDP at its highest level in the postwar era. The article is worth a read (especially for those who may not realize how small military spending is in comparison to entitlements), but here is the key trend graphic:

Female Inequality -> High Performing Kids

This post over at MR is interesting. He's summarizing the analysis of a final version of a paper that came out in an earlier form in 2004: that male inequality lends support to polygamy, but female inequality girds monogamy...with the conclusion hat female inequality seems to be the more powerful factor in the West:

Economic growth means that some women have higher human capital than others and thus they are better suited at producing and rearing high quality children. Wealthy men with lots of human capital will start to bid for these women and they will have to offer them exclusive status; these men also wish to invest in a smaller number of higher quality children.

In other words, male inequality encourages polygamy while female inequality discourages it. Apparently female inequality has been winning that race.

The hypothesis also helps explain why polygamy unravels so decisively at some point. Since monogamy itself encourages children (including daughters) with higher human capital, initial tendencies toward monogamy are self-reinforcing.

This Is Awesome

I'm not sure how I hadn't seen this before, but LaBate pointed it out to me yesterday: the Stuff White People Like blog.

Not all posts there specifically cite things that white people like. For a consolidated list of those posts, you can see this list.

Erin On Perez Hilton

Perez Hilton is pointing people at Erin!

She's reppin' TU2K well!

Weight Contest Over!

You can see a few months ago a post detailing the Weight Wars contest with Jen and my sister. It ended yesterday. Yours truly was the victor. All of the travel towards the end (NJ, SF, SF, Tokyo) put an end to my continued drop, but I avoided backsliding too much, and ended up at 185.6 (-5.0%). I think I got as low as -5.2% or -5.4% before the travel halted the drop.

I need to keep dropping; the absence of weight will be definitely felt if I make it through the lottery for RAGBRAI.

Complexity Reduction: I've Heard This Before

I think I've heard this pretty much every year in the automotive press, especially from Ford. The domestic auto manufacturers (in general) offer far more permutations of each of their vehicles for sale -- orders of magnitude more than some of the Japanese makes. If you try to configure a Honda or a Toyota, you'll find your choices limited to a very small number of broad packages ('sport package' and so on), and that's about it. The US manufacturers offer packages, but also offer a ton of options entirely standalone (including many that are not optional in or out of a package from other OEMs), as well as many that can be obtained via standalone or package content.

The net result of this product offering strategy is that the US manufacturers offer for sale (and thus must be able to build) many more variants of their vehicles than their foreign competitors, leading to additional complexity in the manufacturing arena. Every so often (every new CEO, every new PD head, etc.), the US manufacturers say that they are going to reduce the complexity of their offerings (more closely mimicking the Asians) as a route to cost savings via reduced a engineering and manufacturing burden. The referenced link shows that they're talking about it again; they are targeting a 99% reduction in the offered permutations ('buildables') of the meaningful features on the vehicle for the 2009 Focus, for example.

I'm sure some would view this as 'bad', since it is reducing the choices available to customers of Ford/GM/Chrysler. However, just because those choices are available does not mean that people actually make use of them. Just because the F-150 is offered in a zillion ways, there really a small handful of common configurations that people ordering the F-150 as a work truck end up settling on. Similar clusters of configurations hold true for other use cases for the F-150 (and for every other such vehicle).

Back when I worked on a team dealing with Ford's global product definition (1999-2007), this was definitely the case. I was able to empirically verify this for specific vehicles, using data and configuration functionality available within our system. One quick study done out of curiosity used data for the Transit (a European market commercial van; you can see Sabine Schmidt drive one around the Nurburgring at this YouTube video). I had our system enumerate all buildable combinations of the 'defining features' (all of the important feature families in the vehicle: 'transmissions' is one such feature family, for example...'engines' is another) on the vehicle. Then, we took historical sales data (represented by a list of specific vehicle combinations for that given calendar year) and binned each of those against the theoretical possible buildables. The finding: something like 99%+ of the buildables had no sales volume. Of the tiny percent that had any actual sales associated with them, a tiny handful of that tiny handful accounted for nearly all of the sales. Being a commerical vehicle (commerical vehicles tend to have more options) offered in many markets, the Transit has more buildables and thus more complexity than most. However, the same story is true for all of the vehicles: more choices are offered than actual customer purchases seem to ever merit.