Tumblr Update

A decent amount of my energy that I would normally devote to this blog has been going towards my Tumblr. I started it not knowing exactly what I wanted to do, but I think I have a clearer picture now. I've always used my photos as a sort of extension of my memory; basically a digital photo diary. To that end I've started to upload somewhat random photos once a day from the past. I change their post date to that of the day I actually made the actual. Maybe I could change the time too...

Here's the first one I added. I plan to start uploading some that are significantly older.

Links

The average compensation of architects, from the AIA... seems inflated (ht: Jason).

Facebook and Twitter attract narcissists. I'm shocked. Study.

The death of trees has been linked to increased cardiovascular and lower respiratory deaths.

Buy/rent calculator from the NYT. Very well done.

The tricorder is here. A small relatively inexpensive device called the Scanadu can now take all your vitals.

A Studio Gang project, the Clark Park Boathouse, that I worked on the mechanical drawings for (geo-thermal exchange system, ventilation, cooling, etc.) is nearing completion.

Links

Turns out no one died because of the Fukushima Power Plant Disaster. In fact, no one even got radiation poisoning. A nearly perfect example of neglect of probability when compared to other sources of energy.

Finland gives all new mothers a box full of essential supplies. "It's a tradition that dates back to the 1930s and it's designed to give all children in Finland, no matter what background they're from, an equal start in life."

The Obama Administration now judges the negative externality associated with carbon emissions as 60% higher than last year. Climate change is starting to grow some teeth.

Humans of New York - the Chess Hustler.

A different perspective on the Obama administration "scandals" of the last few weeks.

Cornell West is classy as hell.

I've been ranting for a while now about how full adoption of solar will change our world. Well, the utility companies think so too.

Government Agencies Hiring Architects: Kind of a Waste of Time

Disclaimer: This post represents my views and not that of the firm I am employed at.

Recently the architecture firm I work for submitted what is known in the Architecture and Engineering (A/E) community as an RFQ (request for qualifications) for the City Colleges of Chicago's new Malcolm X College. An RFQ consists of sheets detailing relevant work that the firm has engaged in recently, proof that the firm is insured, forms signaling that the firm doesn't have conflicts of interest, financial statements going back several years, etc. You get the point. It's a lot of information. I was in charge of putting together the RFQ for my firm along with the fifteen other firms we partnered with.

The project itself is an educational facility that has a teaching hospital component and a budget of $251 million. My firm designed two of the three hospitals that Malcolm X College has a partnership with, so we're familiar with the area and its stakeholders. We specialize in healthcare, teaching hospitals, high rises, corporate centers, and higher education.

The A/E team that won the contract can expect to see maybe 4.5%-6.5% of the $251 million budget, so the design fee will be roughly $12-$15 million which gets split between more than a dozen professions - structural engineers, architects, geotechnical engineers, etc. It's the kind of money that allows you to expand your office and hire additional staff.

Submitting for these RFQ's is a gamble. They consume a lot of time and energy that could go towards billable work. I personally put in well over 160 hours for this proposal and there were multiple people who worked with me. The document we produced is 290 pages and was coordinated between sixteen separate consulting firms. The submission required multiple physical copies in addition to electronic copies that had to be couriered over to the CCC's headquarters. All of this is done at our expense. We aren't reimbursed for anything. I would conservatively place the cost to my firm, not including the cost to our consultants, at well over $10,000 and probably closer to $20,000 or more. To be clear, we are aware that this is a gamble and typically only go after jobs that we think we are highly qualified for and have a good chance of winning.

We were selected for a call back after the initial submission, so we had to produce yet another set of booklets and show up for an interview. This requires more preparation, more printing, and more hours. We then had a second call back that was followed by more questions:

"Does your firm have enough people for a job of this size?"

"We have nineteen people in our office and we've partnered with another firm that is similarly sized. We also plan to hire additional staff." And the truth is that today's software (BIM, Revit) is so powerful that really this project could be done by maybe less than ten people in our office if they worked on it full time. We've designed buildings that were many times this size (Water Tower Place, Prudential Plaza/Tower, Old Orchard Shopping Center, etc.)

"Your team is very diverse but what about your firm?"

Crickets. How do you tell a review committee that your firm went from roughly 65 people to nineteen in the matter of a couple years? Architecture is feast or famine and right now we're starving. We used to be diverse and to some degree we still are. We're just not the kind of diverse they're looking for.

It was announced (source) that Moody Nolan, a firm based in Columbus, Ohio, won the contract. Their Chicago office has nine people (related). They also happen to be the largest African American owned architecture firm in the US; a fact that both the mayor and CCC are very proud of.

Moody Nolan is qualified to do the work and I harbor no ill will towards them, but why did the CCC pick a non-Chicago based firm? Especially since they keep touting how many jobs the project will bring to the Chicago area. Why did they question our size if they picked a firm that's local office is less than half of our size? This contract is for design development and construction documents (the design was done by Canon Design) so it will have to be handled locally with feet on the ground. Why did they question the racial makeup of our firm if we exceeded the MBE/WBE requirement (25% minority, 7% female) by almost three-fold? Are you really telling me they couldn't find a qualified architecture firm in Chicago?

I call shenanigans.

Many of the RFQ's we submit for are to some extent a ploy. The agencies asking for them are largely going through the process to satisfy legal requirements, but then choose not the most qualified firm but the one that fits whatever profile it is that they're looking for. And that's to be expected, but don't drag us along and waste our time and money. We don't have any to spare.

After the announcement my firm had a very terse Monday morning meeting. We were told that five people would be laid off by the end of the day and everyone else's hours would be cut by 20%. Just fourteen more people and an almost century old Chicago architecture firm will be out of business.

Fosters Quantified

My wife and I were concerned that one of our foster kittens, Mustachio, wasn't gaining weight so we started weighting all three of them at regular intervals.

We have enough data points now that I figured I could get a fairly reliable slope of best fit, so I entered them into a Google spreadsheet and made a chart.



Mustachio seems to be doing just fine now, but it's interesting that his weight change is essentially the inverse of Tree Trunks (forgive me, I named them in about five seconds like an American Indian). Even though Tree Trunk isn't gaining weight as quickly as the others she's still gaining weight, so mild foster kitten worry allayed through some basic analytics.

The Biggest Mistake of Our Generation

I haven't posted much on economics in the last year or so. The news is overwhelmingly depressing and I feel exasperated on the subject. The missteps of our politicians, most of which were entirely preventable, continue to cause enormous suffering on the parts of millions of people - especially young workers looking to start their careers. The cumulative effects of these errors will be felt for decades. People's lives are being destroyed and few seem to consider it a big deal.

The worst part of it all is that many people truly believe that there must be suffering for the situation to improve, but this is how people felt during the Great Depression too. "The weak must be culled!", but there's an aspect of moralization to that argument that I'm uncomfortable with. This is macroeconomics, not metaphysics. The Great Depression can largely be explained as a money supply problem (there wasn't enough money/liquidity in the economy much like the babysitter co-op problem); an answer which makes many uneasy as it's a somewhat simple technical fix. People believe that it must be more complex, but it simply isn't.

This morning the New York Times ran this piece: Defecit Reduction is Seen by Economists as Impeding Recovery. No shit? Every respectable economists knows that reducing government expenditures during an economic downturn is inadvisable and they've been saying so all along. The article goes on to rationalize what happened. This is what's been so frustrating over the last five years, giving credence to ideas that have been proven demonstrably wrong - repeatedly. Few people will step up and say "Yeah, I've focused on the national deficit and reduced government spending but it turns out I was wrong. Let's focus on unemployment." Not going to happen, so they obfuscate with rhetoric and the suffering continues.

In the meantime the American public thinks there's an actual debate going on. There isn't one. Textbook New-Keynesian economics has been validated. We've all been screwed and my generation is fucked. If anything this is an understatement.

The data that's been coming in over the last five years is in line with typical macroeconomics textbooks that any econ 101 student is exposed to. If the following were a test question to me in undergrad:

The current economic indicators are as follows (May 2013): 

• Unemployment: 7.6% 
• GDP Growth: 1.7% (2011) 
• Inflation: 1.5% 
• 10 Year Treasury Bill: 1.8% 
• 10 Year Treasury Bill Inflation Protected (TIPS): -0.5% 
• 30 Year Treasury Bill: 2.98% 
• 30 Year Treasury Bill Inflation Protected (TIPS): 0.62% 

Describe the most advantageous course of action which a central government could, through fiscal and monetary policy, increase GDP growth and lower unemployment in both the short and long run.

My answer would be something along the lines of:

Short answer - The government should borrow money and invest in itself because there are many idle workers, slow economic growth, and financing costs are zero or negative (!). Although politically it may be unpopular to borrow money to spend, no other entity is large enough to assume this role, so the federal government must.

Longer answer - Monetarily the Fed should reduce rates (done, it's at 0%) and increase the money supply (done) while the Federal government should increase its expenditures (it's done the opposite) and encourage state and local governments to do similarly (they've been the worst). Although it would be advantageous to spend on infrastructure, education, and other areas that produce long term benefits, where the money is spent is somewhat irrelevant (although politically unpopular, Keynes burying money in jars). This spending can be financed by the historically low interest rates (negative rates on a 10-year bond, who wouldn't want to get paid to borrow money?). Further, the federal government should reduce taxes on those who are most likely to spend additional income, the poor, as the multiplier effect is larger  (it's done the opposite). To add to the last point, social safety net programs should be expanded (they were for a while but they're being cut back now) as those with little money are most likely to spend any additional income which would create a larger multiplier effect.

Woodshop Update #3

I finally got the bulk of the wood off the floor and inventoried. So far it's over 1,600 board feet (12" x 12" x 1") of boards. I've been there everyday that I didn't have work plus some weekdays. I'm in the process of moving the sheet goods, arranging the machines, figuring out how to run power, and finding storage for all the hand tools and clamps.

You can never have enough clamps...

Rockwell Delta 5HP, 3-Phase, 12" table saw. #1000

Rockwell-Delta 3HP, 3-Phase, 20" throat bandsaw

24" x 20" work table on the bandsaw.

Rockwell-Delta 6" jointer. This makes the faces of the board square to one another. I only use jointers for the edges and not the faces of boards so I haven't found a need for nice large one yet. Maybe when the opportunity presents itself. I'm thinking about having my machinist friend mill some attachments to make the infeed and outfeed tables larger. This is what really matters.

Tumblr

I started a Tumblr. It's linked in the sidebar too. I've been posting a photo almost everyday that shows some small part of my day.

I had a photography professor at IIT who I was a TA for say that if you don't have a purpose/concept when you're making photographs then you're engaging in photojournalism, not art. I wanted to say that that wasn't the case but for me it mostly is. I'm okay with that.

Gasoline Prices, Cheap as Ever

I can't bear to hear people make statements that are demonstrably false.

"Gas prices are so high!"

No, they're low compared to the rest of the world and adjusted for inflation they're about the same as they've ever been in this country, so stop saying it. You're lying.

Source

Average is EUR 1.39 per liter.

1.39 x $1.30 (conversion to USD) x 3.78 (liters in a gallon) = $6.83 / gallon (premium grade)

The current average in the US is $3.85 / gallon of premium, so about half of what Germany pays ($7.76).

Same as it ever was. Source: NYT

Woodshop Update #2

Actually got out to start working at the shop now that it's not below freezing. Just welded some 1-1/2" square steel tubing up overhead for board storage and to hold the electric, lights, and ventilation equipment. Lots to do.

Update #1

My dad welding while I do layout.

The amount of lumber is staggering. Good problem hopefully.

Misleading Statistics

On my Facebook feed I found this from MoveOn.org:

This is a description of my thought process:

Wow, 1.38 million dead since 1968... but aren't there roughly 10,000 gun related homicides a year in the US? So about 450,000... where are the other 2/3's?

Wait, you're twice as likely to take your own life as to be the victim of a homicide. Are they counting suicides? I mean, I know a gun makes one more likely to succeed at suicide but surely they're not counting that.

Let's check their sources. What? I have to type that crap in... ugh.

But they're misrepresenting the numbers!

I know, I know, I'm typing.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3
Source 4 < That's my favorite

They counted suicides. I get the logic, but this is a gray area and to be fair if you're going to count suicides in that number it needs to say so. It's misleading.

Oh, and I looked up the war deaths too. Suicide was not listed as a cause of death in any of the tables cited, but it very well may be counted. The chart does appear to take into account all deaths caused by war and not just those in battle. That's good. However, they don't count Confederate soldiers' deaths from the Civil War. Which is strange because more Americans were killed during that war than every other American war combined.

Kind of disappointed MoveOn.

Sunday Reading

Long reads this week:

Wired's Q & A with Mark Zukerburg reveals a more thoughtful person than expected.

Philosophical Landmines on LessWrong.com

There's a legal drug called modafinil that many productive people seem to be exploiting.

The Bitcoin bubble.

I've been looking for this for a long time now - Loevinger's stages of ego development. Backed by good research, but I'd caution understanding this in hard science terms.

This Atlantic article places much of the economic blame on Baby Boomers.

Psilocybin, the active chemical in psychadelic mushrooms, may improve personality in the long term. What's interesting about this is the credible source.

And a random quote from Noam Chomsky:

Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt they can’t afford the time to think. Tuition fee increases are a “disciplinary technique,” and, by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the “disciplinarian culture.” This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy.