Unpacking Legislation

The health care reform debate has resulted in a bill that is so big and so complicated that hardly anyone knows what is being debated anymore. Such bills are nothing new in our earmarkable pork-barreling political culture, and such bills are repugnant.

I propose the obvious solution: pass legislation in smaller chunks. If each bill to be voted on consisted of just one action instead of a thousand, congress could be working its way through the stack of healthcare policy issues piecemeal and have made lots of progress by now and a clear record of all the individual steps that have been achieved.

Supporters of heathcare reform often see the legislation package as the bridge to France, where everyone has free access to healthcare. I don't know if something like France's system is applicable in the US, but the thing I'm really confused about is why we can't just move in that direction one step at a time.

For example, rather than deciding on whether to make healthcare free to all, we could start with specific medical procedures. We could start with something like free (or subsidized) vaccinations for all, followed by free emergency-room care, followed by free appendix removals. As the list of free things increases, at some point maybe we could consider a bill that provides for a free federal health clinic system, a federal health franchise that operates in parallel to the private sector system and offers all of the free services.

Introducing R

All statisticians know about R and most use it, but I think it could be useful for normal people too. So much so that children should learn math with R.

You can get R online at places like this: http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/

It's free and surprisingly intuitive, especially if you know someone who can get you started with the basics.

Here is my latest R project. Someone was building a zipline on a hill for people to ride. How steep should they make it so that the rider is not thrown off at high speed at the end of the ride, they asked? The following code took me about half an hour to put together. At the top, you set the length of the zip line and angle of descent. Then you run the program and it gives you how long the ride lasts and how fast you'll be going at the end:

#zip line speed
#enter the angle of descent in degrees:
angle = 10

#enter the distance in feet
distance = 200

#convert angle to radians:
rad = pi*angle/180

#here is the vertical acceleration due to gravity in feet/sec^2:
acc = 32.174

#the acceleration at an x-degree angle is
tangent.acc = acc*sin(rad)
perp.acc = acc*cos(rad)

#account for friction:
friction.coef = 0.03
resistance = friction.coef*perp.acc

#predict acceleration
final.acc = tangent.acc - resistance

#how long does the ride last (in seconds):
t = sqrt(2*distance/final.acc)
print(t)

#predicted final speed
speed.feet.sec = final.acc*t
speed.miles.hour = speed.feet.sec*(1/5280)*3600
print(speed.miles.hour)

With the above settings, the output you get is a 9-second ride ending at about 30 mph. If you make the angle 89 degrees, for a near-vertical free-fall, you end the ride at 77 mph. This analysis ignores wind-resistance, but possibly compensates somewhat with a fairly conservative estimate for the coefficient of friction, which is incorporated.

An Ad from my Community's Newsletter

Click to enlarge. Notice the book of life resting in the background.

Garfield, Pittsburgh

Prior to posting an offer on my latest house of interest, I biked there from work. It's thirteen minutes each way. The hill leading to the house is long and steep, but the view at the top is worth it.

According to Wikipedia,

Garfield's current residents have established some of their own traditions, including the "Turkey Bowl," a formal, full-contact football game on Thanksgiving Day played in full pads by teams called the Old Heads and the Young Bucks. But some of the neighborhood's current traditions are negative ones: drug dealing, prostitution, and illegitimacy are not uncommon in today's Garfield, and children attending the neighborhood's Fort Pitt School often fall behind their peers on national tests.

No wonder housing is cheap! But the article concludes:

There has also been some positive residential development: the East Mall and Garfield Heights Senior highrise was razed in 2005, and the townhouse units are scheduled to be demolished in 2007–2008, and replaced with mixed income units, as well as new replacement homes scattered through the neghborhood. Visitors to Garfield today will see a neighborhood on the rise, a formerly blighted community that is now becoming a vibrant community, with a focus on the arts, while not forgetting its roots.

Pittsburgh Estate

The idea of buying a house with cash-money is fairly new to me. Several years ago, I remember hearing a rumor of someone in Pittsburgh buying a house for about 25k, so I kept my ears open for those kinds of prices when I moved here. I didn't look very hard though, because moderate-quality homes near school were going for 100k. I couldn't imagine that prices would drop very quickly with distance.

Then I visited a house just a few miles out and she mentioned the price was only 18k a few years ago. Wow, I thought, I could do that.

Then a friend mentioned that her husband had bought a house for 8k, only about 4 miles out. I can bike 4 miles. I visited them. The house was a wreck, in the middle of remodeling, but it was still obviously a good deal. The neighbor man was there too. "I got my house for four thousand dollars," he said, "on eBay, sitting at my desk back in Vermont."

Buy or Rent

Entire webpages are dedicated to helping people figure out whether to buy or rent. However, my circumstances are unique.

Reasons to buy:

• I would buy with cash, so there would be approximately no closing costs.
  
• If I keep the purchase to just half my net worth, then the risk is not so big.
• I save about $6,000 per year in rent costs.
• I would have a home that I am free to play with, modify, practice my carpentry skills, paint murals on the wall, make lots of noise, be less bothered, totally pick my own housemates, accumulate possessions, etc.
• Option of renting to earn about $300 (fairly conservative estimate, say one housemate in a 2 or 3 bedroom).
  

Reasons to wait:

• Risk: Value could fall, or I could end up leaving so soon that the house is more hassle than benefit.
• Maintenance would likely be around $500/year. (excluding major renovations, whose value most likely would be regained in the sale)
• Taxes of about $1000/year.
• Hassle with roommates.
• Higher utilities if I don't get lots of roomates, maybe $200/month average with internet.
  
• Greater distance to school OR paying up $1500 per year for parking + maybe $500 for driving costs, which would make distance mostly irrelevant.
• Maintenance hassle.
• Any possessions I accumulate to furnish the house now could be a pain to deal with when I move to the next place.
  

Summary without a roomate:

• Annual savings = $6000, annual costs = $4-6,000, depending on whether I'm far enough to buy parking and drive much. Savings: 0 to $2,000.
• Lots of fun, a whole house to myself, easier to host people, throw loud parties, invite a friend in transition to live with me a few months, sleep in great peace and quite, play house.
• Lots of hassle: I won't always want to deal with maintenance.

Summary with a roomate:

• Annual savings of about $4,000, midrange estimate.
• Less freedom to rule the house, but necessarily less fun if the roommate is excellent.

Bigger investment picture: Chances are good that the housing market will rebound somewhat in the next few years. To be more abstract and specific, if I buy a house in a particularly crappy neighborhood, there is the potential for gentrification, led by me, to drastically increase the value. The value of a house in a swanky neighborhood, by contrast, has lesswhere to go but down.