Extraordinary Observations

So You Want to be a Southwest Airlines Intern?

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:15:00 +0000

My personal website must have pretty decent SEO - because in the past year, I've received about two dozen emails from aspiring Southwest Airlines interns looking to draw on my experience in search of their own dream internship. In the past two weeks alone a few new emails have already started rolling in...

(from flickr user San Diego Shooter)

If you've found your way here, you might be hoping for the silver bullet; a secret tip that will propel you above the competition. Unfortunately, I do not know any inside secrets. I can only share my experience as an internship candidate about two years ago and, rather than responding individually to future emails I anticipate to receive, I hope that potential interns will find the information posted here valuable.

Understand: Southwest Airlines is a very unique company. The corporate culture at Southwest is truly unlike that of nearly every other company. But you probably already knew that, since it now seems mandatory for every management, human resources and marketing textbook to include at least one case study about the quirky airline that became a wild success story. But ask yourself this: how much do I really know about the company I want to spend my summer working for? I think there is a huge advantage to understanding the history of the company and the intricacies of how it operates. There have been dozens of magazine articles and several excellent books written on this topic. I would highly recommend that any potential intern get their hands on as much as they can read. Among my favorites are:

Magazine Articles

One Airline's Magic - TIME, October 2002
Southwest's Seven Secrets for Success - Portfolio, July 2008
The Hottest Thing in the Sky - Fortune, March 2004
Southwest: Dressed To Kill... Competitors - BusinessWeek, February 2005
Herb Kelleher Has More Fun Than You Do - D Magazine, August 1996
Southwest's New Flight Plan - Fortune, May 2005
It Must Be the Peanuts - CFO, December 2001

Books

Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success by Kevin Freiberg and Jackie Freiberg
Lessons in Loyalty: How Southwest Airlines Does It - An Insider's View by Lorraine Grubbs-West
The Southwest Airlines Way by Jody Hoffer Gittell

Realize: Summer internships are ridiculously competitive. Almost all college students take time off from school in the summer, and almost all of them are looking for something valuable to fill their time. If the numbers that my friends in Dallas tell me are correct, then Southwest will receive several thousand applications for about 75 internship positions. The truth is that I did my internship during the winter/spring semester of 2008 - a sort of "off season" as far as internships go. If you're applying in the summer, it will be competitive, so anything less than your best effort probably won't be enough.

Stand Out: A resume only goes so far. Most of the emails I receive from potential interns ask which careers skills they should highlight on their resumes. My response is typically that it won't matter if they neglect to stand out in other important ways. It's no secret that Southwest hires for attitude and trains for skill. And remember, these are internships, so it makes sense that the company would recruit individuals who are likely to be loyal and willing to stick around for the long-haul. My best advice is to use the application to highlight creative abilities and to do something to really stand out from the crowd. The last thing you want to be is one of thousands of dull black-and-white resumes. Back when I applied, all the applications had to be sent in the mail, which gave me the opportunity to send in some pretty fun stuff (and which, fortunately, the recruiter and hiring managers loved). Now that the applications are online, doing stuff like that won't be so easy, so you'll have to really try to think way outside the box.

Interview Essentials: It's about who you are. Congrats, you got a coveted call-back and you'll be flying to Dallas for an interview. What should you expect? I had three interviews before I was eventually hired as an intern: two group interviews and one interview with a recruiter and several hiring managers. I applied for an internship in the marketing department, but I was never asked a single question about marketing, advertising or sales. The questions were focused on me: what I'd done in the past, how I'd handled myself in certain situations, and why I really wanted to be a Southwest Intern.

Prepare: Living in Dallas can be a culture shock. I think the hardest part of the internship for me was the fact that I'd never lived in the south, didn't know a single person in the entire state of Texas, and had to arrange to pick up and move cross-country on about a month's notice. Southwest's headquarters is right next to Love Field Airport, which makes sense, given the nature of the business; but it can also be a difficult place to get to if (like me) you don't have your own car. When I was an intern, we were on our own to find housing and interns were scattered all over Dallas - some lived with relatives, others were out in far-flung suburbs. The good news is that you will make so many friends that you probably won't ever have to worry about finding something to do on the weekends.

Lastly, keep in mind that Southwest greatly values the opinion of its employees. If you're flying to Dallas for an interview, you'll encounter dozens of them... ticketing agents, gate agents, flight attendants, pilots, etc. Each of those people is a potentially valuable opportunity for you. The interview doesn't have to be limited to the hour session in a small room at the People Department in Dallas, after all.

RTA Ridership Model Update

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:55:00 +0000

Last month I built a statistical ridership model for Cleveland's RTA system. One major concession was that I excluded a service-level independent variable because I lacked sufficient data to include it in the model. Unsure how to resolve this issue, I recently received this email from someone at the Maryland Transit Administration:

The service level data not in your model is actually a huge factor driving ridership-if the system isn’t seen as robust due to meager service offerings, fare prices and population don’t matter. I think if you add service levels to your model, you’ll see that it adds a good chunk of explanatory power, and that it may even be collinear with population. As population departs, tax base declines, service has to be cut, and so on. For the share of transit system users that are transit-dependent, poor service means they will find other ways-ride sharing, moving, etc.-to get to where they need to go. Transit use is always optional, and the elasticity is different for different rider segments, but less service will always reduce ridership.

This explanation is actually more intuitive than one that high fares primarily drive ridership. And here is the worst news: next April, RTA will cut service more significantly than in recent memory.

So continues the death spiral of transit service in Cleveland...

Intelligent Urban Thinking

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:27:00 +0000

There are a lot of books out there about urbanism, city-living, sprawl and other such topics. Some are excellent, others have put me to sleep. Michael Sorkin's Twenty Minutes in Manhattan is one of my new favorites. Although the description on the inside flap describes the book as a story of the walk from the author's apartment in Greenwhich Village to his architecture studio in Tribeca, the book is so much more; from a history of zoning and tenant laws in New York to an analysis of street grids and the subway to the many parks that blanket the urban landscape. The book can be dense in parts and some topics seem very long-winded and without organization. Overall, it's a nice read for someone interested in New York City and the urban realm that encompasses it.

In particular, there are three topics that Sorkin got me thinking more about; things which I hadn't really paid much attention to before.

Rent Control - there are few topics that get as much bad press in economics circles as New York's rent control laws. Most economists argue that rent control creates an artificial shortage of residential space, and those paying low rents are cross-subsidized by new residents who wind up paying exorbitantly high rents or who can't find an apartment at all. Along these lines, they say everyone would be better off if we just let the market dictate rental prices. Sorkin suggests, on the other hand, that many with rent controlled residences make up the difference in cost by becoming more civically engaged, which ultimately benefits everyone in the community. A completely market-driven system could unintentionally alter those dynamics, leading to something like the suburban subdivision effect, where people don't even know their own neighbors and only care about the community to the extent that it benefits them personally.

Lessons from Disney World - much has been said about Disney World as a fantasy urban place. Between the density, the walkability, and the car-free midways, there are a lot of things to like. And every day, thousands of people pay top dollar to get into these places, but when it comes to the public places we use every day, the perception can be quite different.

The Birth of Cities - most of America's cities have histories going back at least a hundred years. A few have risen over the past few decades, but one interesting question is whether any new cities can emerge in the future? When we look at the sprawled out metro areas with very weak urban cores, it's easy to wonder if we can ultimately fix them? Or can we start from scratch? Sorkin thinks military bases can be easy converted into high-density cities. It's a valid theory, but it's challenging to wonder if we will ever come to something like that.

Why Internet Gambling Thrives

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:10:00 +0000

Now that the cool new thing in state politics is for voters to rewrite state constitutions and promote casino construction in their backyards, one question to think about is the impact the all of these new brick-and-mortar casinos will have on internet gambling. The answer, I think, is: virtually none; and the reasons are both political and economic.

(from flickr user .mw)

It's easy to understand why people think there will be a trade-off. We use the ambiguous term "gambling" and assume that casino games are interchangeable; but internet gambling is focused heavily on two games: poker and sports-betting. Brick-and-mortar casinos, on the other hand, dedicate more floor space to slot machines than anything else. This equation is unlikely to change anytime soon.

As far as sports-betting goes, federal law makes it effectively illegal in every state outside of Nevada. That's great for the bookmakers in Vegas and Reno, but it's annoying as hell for anyone who wants to make a bet on a game and who doesn't live in the desert. It's extremely difficult to imagine Congress ever changing this law. Professional sports leagues will lobby hard to keep sports-betting out of the mainstream; and internet gambling will fill in the void.

The key to understanding why poker doesn't get much attention at brick-and-mortar casinos is to consider the marginal costs of running a poker room. Online, the marginal cost is effectively zero. As long as the host company has surplus computing power, they can run as many poker games as people are willing to play. In a casino, the marginal cost is considerably higher - there is the opportunity cost of floor space where the tables go and the salary of the dealers and the supervisors who run the poker rooms. From the players' perspective, casinos typically take a higher rake (commission) per hand than do online poker sites, so the cost of playing is higher. Plus, the pace of play is slower and players can only play a single table at once. These all line up to give online poker a big advantage over casino poker.

And the numbers back up the theory. The poker room at the MGM Grand in Detroit, for example, has a capacity of around 100 players. At the moment I'm writing this post, Full Tilt Poker alone has tens of thousands playing online. Online, there are tournaments running non-stop around the clock online; brick-and-mortar casinos, if they offer tournaments at all, typically relegate them to the slowest times of the week, like weekday mornings, or Sundays at 3pm.

This dichotomy is actually one of the things that annoys me about all the hype surrounding new casinos. When it comes to gambling, I enjoy three games: tournament-style poker, craps (at low limits, since I don't have much disposable income), and sports-betting. There isn't a single casino outside of Nevada where I can find all three of those under one roof; and going to a casino where 90% of the floor space is covered with slot machines is definitely not my idea of fun.

Dear Sirius-XM, I Quit

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:35:00 +0000

After being a loyal customer for 2.5 years, I called and canceled my Sirius-XM subscription this week. It wasn't a spur of the moment decision, Sirus-XM has been getting on my nerves for a while and the ultimate result is that they lost my business. I went from thinking that Sirius Satellite Radio was one of the best purchases I've ever made to deciding it wasn't worth it anymore. How? The story begins in the spring of 2007...

The Honeymoon Period
I had just finished my second year of college and was on track to start my summer job. Back then, I naively believed that spending over an hour a day driving back and forth from work in a car was "completely normal" and that I might be able to make my drive pleasant. So I bought new car speakers from a friend and a Sirius car unit from Newegg.com. In May 2007 I activated my subscription.

The price tag was $12.99 per month and I was instantly hooked. The number of music channels was awesome and the fact that there were no commercials was pure gold. Plus, I occasionally enjoyed listening to the news and entertainment stations. It was a nice change of pace from the truly awful programming that AM/FM radio had to offer.

The Programming Starts to Go Downhill
I first started getting irritated with the programming on some of the "commercial free" music channels in the summer of 2008. See, Sirius-XM is true to their word that these stations don't play obnoxious commercials, but unfortunately, they hire the same type of arrogant DJs that I would expect to hear on any run-of-the-mill Clear Channel station.

My favorite Sirius station was Alt Nation, which plays a decent mix of new alternative music and some popular older stuff. Unfortunately, whoever Sirius hired to run the station in the afternoon, typically during the time I was coming from from school, was absolutely terrible. It almost seemed like this DJ browsed Google News looking for stories to make really ignorant and offensive comments about and proudly state his twisted political opinions in-between songs. It was exactly the thing that makes FM radio so terrible and the sort of thing I was willing to pay money to avoid hearing. After all, if I wanted to hear mindless political banter I would have tuned to one of the Sirius-XM stations dedicated to that, like Patriot Radio or Sirius Left.

Goodbye Online Access
My original subscription gave me access to most of the Sirius music stations through my online account. I didn't utilize it very often, since I typically listen to public radio on my PC if anything, but occasionally it was nice to tune into some music at work, if I was in the mood. At some point in the past year that little perk was canceled, and I wasn't willing to pay more money to get it back.

The Pricing Bait and Switch
The straw that broke the camel's back occurred right around the time of the Sirius and XM merger. I (like many) believed the merger would be great for customers because one of the terms set by the government meant that Sirius-XM had to open its service up to "a la carte" packages, meaning I could pick only the stations I wanted to receive and pay a reduced monthly rate for them. After the merger occurred and the new packages became available, I logged into my account to change my plan. Unfortunately, I discovered that I could not, because my Sirius equipment was "not compatible" with a la carte programming. If I wanted any package besides the one I was already paying $12.99 for, I would have to buy all new equipment. This was unacceptable, as the new hardware would take years to pay for itself with the money I would save every month. I grudgingly accepted defeat and kept my package.

Then in August 2009, I noticed that the charge to my credit card was noticeably higher than what I had previously been paying. Since I pay by the quarter, my new rate amounted to more than $16 per month. I didn't see it coming. I did a bit of Google research and discovered that Sirius-XM had sent a letter to its subscribers (I probably shredded it since it looked like junk) that blamed the rate hike on the US Congress and the greedy music industry:

Music royalty rights were established by the U.S. Congress as part of the Copyright Act. This Act requires payment of copyright music royalties to recording artists, musicians and recording companies who hold copyrights in sound recordings. These royalties have recently increased dramatically, principally as a result of a decision made by the Copyright Royalty Board, which is designated by the Library of Congress to set royalty rates for sound recordings.

Was I supposed to sympathize with Sirius-XM? Certainly they don't want to pay more for programming, neither did I. They could have opted to eat the cost, but they decided to pass on the cost to me, and I wasn't willing to pay.

Is Satellite Radio Doomed?
Sirius-XM has a serious customer service problem: they turned a customer who used to think they offered one of the greatest subscription services into a non-customer. I have to imagine there are many others who feel the same way as me. I understand that Sirius-XM isn't a profitable corporation and that investors can be pretty impatient people, but I really don't care as a customer. It's hard to pay more money for a worse service than what I used to receive.

What will I listen to if not Sirius? Well, I drive a lot less than I used to when I first subscribed, so I don't need the same amount of stimulation while wasting time in the car. There are tons of good podcasts that I can download to my iPod. Now that just about everyone else seems to have an iPhone, I imagine the availability of decent content will only continue growing. Sirius-XM really needs to figure out what it's doing if it doesn't want to continue dying a slow, painful death.

The customer service rep I talked to made me several offers I "couldn't refuse" - I refused them all; because the damage was already done, and I knew if I took one of their offers, I would just be calling back to cancel again in a few months.

The Danish Way

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:30:00 +0000

Last week's episode of NOW was pretty great.

I think the whole 'electric cars can save the world' attitude can be easily misinterpreted, because the reality is that in a city like Copenhagen, there will still be a sizable number of people who never own one. It's a unique city in the sense that it's both very expensive to drive and very reasonable to get by without ever driving. That's not true of most American cities.

So you could replace every SUV in America with an electric vehicle; for that matter you could replace every internal combustion engine vehicle with an electric one, and we'll still have a plethora of problems. Electric vehicles won't solve traffic or congestion, they won't slow sprawl, they'll still cause tens of thousands of deaths every year and they'll still need a place to be parked for 95% of their lives. Even this completely unrealistic "best case scenario" isn't really very progressive in the scheme of things.

Lastly, I've been skeptical of Shai Agassi in the past, and his interview with David Brancaccio doesn't inspire any new confidence. For instance, he makes this argument in defense of his electric vehicle business idea:

The thought process of ‘we need money for health care, so let them drive the cars that emit the gases that cause health care costs’ is the same as telling people, ‘force them to smoke, so we can collect the taxes on cigarettes so we can pay for the hospital afterwards’. That logic is convoluted in it’s design.

But it's Agassi's logic that is actually flawed. Who actually thinks that an excise tax on cigarettes amounts to the government forcing people to smoke so the state can collect revenue? If the state spends the money they collect from cigarette taxes on programs to help people quit smoking, that's a socially responsible action. Similarly, if government uses excise taxes on cars and gasoline to provide alternative means of transportation, that's not backward thinking, that's what makes a city like Copenhagen such a progressive city.

What Free Burritos and Traffic Congestion Have in Common

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:01:00 +0000

Occasionally Chipotle has promotions where they give away a free burrito to anyone who shows up. Apparently Halloween is one of these occasions, which I discovered last Saturday night when I showed up craving a burrito and found a line wrapping all the way around the store.

(from flickr user LSykora)

I took my business elsewhere.

Most highways in the United States suffer from the "free burrito problem". When I go to Chipotle, I expect to pay $5.50 for a burrito. I expect the line to be anywhere from no wait to a ten minute wait; but nothing like the line I saw on Saturday, which I suspect might have taken a little over an hour to maneuver.

Every morning people take their cars and curse the congestion on the "free highways" they use to get to wherever they're going, even though it's pretty much exactly what they expect. And there are strong political constituencies to keep things this way.

Of course, there are plenty of alternatives to Chipotle, so even though I would have preferred a burrito, I wasn't going to go hungry. But in some of the American cities with the worst congestion, there aren't many alternatives. The Chipotle with the insane line is the way of life.

The Weird World of Movie Piracy

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:29:00 +0000

Last Sunday's 60 Minutes took a look into the world of movie piracy. Take a look.

I have a really difficult time understanding how there is such a huge market for this kind of thing in the United States. I can understand why there might be a market for a product like music, even textbooks, because theoretically you can make a near-perfect copy of the original and the bootleg would be only marginally different (if at all).

Movies are a different beast. People listen to music on their ipods and in their cars; but they go to a concert to experience that music live. People go to the movies for an experience they can't get at home - watching a movie on a giant screen. The reason I wouldn never want to watch a bootleg DVD of a new movie is the quality gap. The 60 Minutes story describes bootleg movies being made by people sitting in the back row of the theater recording on tiny spy cameras . There's no way that the bootleg can even come close to the quality of the original.

I always thought the point of going to movies was to enjoy films, not to see them merely for the sake of it. I know there are a lot of people with more disposable income than me and it probably would be good for my budget if I quit going to movies, but there's no way I would substitute a bootleg instead. Watching a bootleg movie like that would be like listening to a live concert recorded by someone standing in the audience. What's the point?

Reverse "Crowding Out"

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:30:00 +0000

Daniel has a few interesting things to say about the plans for Chicago's North/Clybourn L station. First let me say that I think any transit improvement is worthwhile. But I also think we have to consider the potential risk that this could pose in the long term - a sort of reverse "crowding out" of public investment in transit infrastructure.

(from flickr user konomike)

Here's the concern: Apple might spend a few million bucks renovating the North/Clybourn station, but Apple itself might never see a direct financial return on its income statement. The net beneficiaries of the improvement will be the public, who will use the station, and other businesses in the area, who will free ride off of Apple's investment. For Apple, it will primarily be an act of corporate goodwill.

The risk is that transit systems become reliant on these acts of corporate goodwill, which are never guaranteed. A more reliable idea for transit improvement would be some sort of public and private collaboration. The private side would be administered by a business improvement district, to avoid some firms free riding off of others. This might not work so well for brand new transit systems whose goal is to drive development; but for older systems that already have development around stations or for potential in-fill stations, it could be the most efficient way to make improvements to crumbling transit infrastructure.

The Suburban Default

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:07:00 +0000

Joseph White has a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about switching from a suburban lifestyle to a city-dweller and doing it as a Boomer. This is one group that seems to often get written-off as extremely attached to big houses, suburban streets and cars; so this little anecdote caught my eye:

I got a 35-pound package delivered to my office. Old life: Stick the package in the trunk and drive it home. New life: Haul the package to the corner of K Street and Connecticut Ave. and hail a cab. Future life: Live without 35-pound packages.

A typically response here would be: see, look how bad life would be without cars. How would you haul around all your stuff? Which raises an equally good point, why do we even need all that stuff?

But I digress, because the reason for this post is really about Generation Y more than it is about Boomers. I was sitting around a poker table over the summer with a few people I'd known since high school. All but one of us grew up in suburbs, and the fact that we were in the basement of an unnecessary large house in a subdivision miles away from the closest city was brought up at some point. To my surprise, there was unanimous agreement that suburbs were really not great places to be.

I was supposed to graduate from college last May. That didn't happen. But a lot of my friends did graduate. Some of them moved to cities, but fewer than said they were going to.

(from flickr user pixelhut)

What happened? I think it has to do with the fact that, for a lot of young people, suburbs are literally all they know. Even if they want to become city-dwellers like White, it would require breaking more than two decades of momentum and denying what has always been the default in their lives. The default option can be a very powerful thing.

Digital Navigation

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 20:45:00 +0000

The Google Maps navigation tool is on its way. I've been skeptical of the value of GPS devices, but the new Google product looks pretty promising.

At this point, it's very auto-centric, but given the capabilities of Google Maps, I can only hope that the program incorporates Google Transit in the near future. If a person could input a destination and Google could walk you to a transit stop, tell you what time the bus or train is scheduled to arrive and then walk you to your final destination, that would be pretty cool. I don't know if it would actually induce people to ride transit who otherwise wouldn't, but it couldn't hurt.

Cross-Disciplinary Thinking

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 02:25:00 +0000

I'm reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book of essays from the New Yorker. It's excellent. One of the best books I've read this year. I'm typically not big fan of books of columns or articles or essays, but Gladwell is such a talented writer that makes up for it. I actually hadn't read about two-thirds of the essays in the book, since they pre-dated my magazine reading days, and it's nice to re-read some of his best pieces.

(from flickr user santheo)

Gladwell's interview with Time is also pretty interesting, particularly his advice to future journalists.

The issue is not writing. It's what you write about. One of my favorite columnists is Jonathan Weil, who writes for Bloomberg. He broke the Enron story, and he broke it because he's one of the very few mainstream journalists in America who really knows how to read a balance sheet. That means Jonathan Weil will always have a job, and will always be read, and will always have something interesting to say. He's unique. Most accountants don't write articles, and most journalists don't know anything about accounting. Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master's in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that's the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.

I'm going to take this one step farther because I don't think the issue isn't confined to journalism. Many academic disciplines seem to be suffering from a lack of cross-disciplinary thinking. Universities have their various departments, and the people in those departments do their own work, typically segregated from everyone else. The philosophers philosophize and the psychologists think about behavior and the economists do calculations about GDP and unemployment and none of them ever really work together to think about how these things interact or whether it even matters.

I know too many people who think they need a degree in some discipline in order to do any work there. Whenever I tell people I'll have a degree in economics soon, I usually hear "well, what are you going to do with that?" Depending on who's asking the question, I might give some canned response, but the real answer is, I could do anything I want.

When people go to get a masters degree or a PhD, yes, they are becoming "specialists" in their discipline, but they're becoming generic specialists if they lock themselves into a way of thinking that's narrow and limited in scope. If disciplinary specialists can open doors to views outside of their immediate world I think they will ultimately be "smarter" in the way that Gladwell describes.

SuperFreakonomics & Intellectual Consistency

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:04:00 +0000

Let me start by saying I really enjoyed Freakonomics and after seeing the slew of bad reviews for the sequel, my expectations going in were pretty low. Overall, the books is not a terrible read - it's quick and easy and Levitt and Dubner do tell some interesting stories. My problem with the book is that the arguments are intellectually inconsistent and the book essentially refutes itself.

Take, for instance, the point the authors make about drunk walking being more dangerous than drunk driving. The model they use has been well-refuted around the blogosphere (check out Ezra Klein or Tom Vanderbilt for more on the specifics). The problem with the authors' back of the envelope calculation is actually described in the third chapter of their book, which is all about the law of unintended consequences! Did the authors even consider what might happen when they tell thousands of people that you can statistically drive across the country and back, intoxicated, before getting caught, hurt or killed? Or that drunk driving is several magnitudes less dangerous than drunk walking?.. something most people probably already perceived as perfectly safe?

The book really starts to refute itself in the last chapter, the infamous global warming chapter. There's been tons of criticism that the authors got the science and the facts wrong. My issue is with the argument they make against climatologists' models. After spending a hundred odd pages making claims built on statistical models with dubious assumptions and drawing conclusions that seem absolute, the authors attack climate change models for, of all things, questionable statistics, dubious assumptions and claims that the results as absolute. If there is good reason to question global warming models, then there is equally good reason to question just about every one of the models described in SuperFreakonomics.

In the end you have to wonder what the motivation was to publish this book. Levitt was a generally well-respected economist and co-editor of a prominent economic journal. But enough of the book fails to meet the standards of academic rigorousness that any journal would call for that I can't stop coming back to the question, "why"?

Corporations and the Drug War

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:02:00 +0000

I've worked at four companies in my short career: three of them required a drug test before my first day of work, a signed document consenting to random drug tests, and an agreement that I understood drug use could lead to the termination of my employment.

Most articles and stories I've seen about the drug war and decriminalization are focused on the political side of the issue. It pits the "morally correct" social conservatives against the "laissez faire" social libertarians. It's obvious what the social right has to gain from keeping drugs illegal - the belief that it will stem the immoral use of them. To what extent these laws have a deterrent effect or stomp over our freedom is debatable, and I'm not here to debate it.

It's easy to overlook the role that drug laws play in Corporate America, or the fact that the biggest and most powerful corporations have a lot to lose if the laws are loosened. Strict drug laws give corporations a legal tool to hedge against legal responsibility for bad things that happen in the workplace.

Think about this: people are at work; something goes wrong and people get hurt. The first response for many corporations is to call for drug tests. If the employees involved test positive, it gets the corporation off the hook for a lot of liability and pushes responsibility for the accident onto those individual employees.

If Congress ever gets serious about changing these laws, it's not unreasonable to expect corporate lobbyists to get involved. The PR machines will spin it as a moral issue, family values, or whatever else they can piggyback off of the Christian right; but their real motivation will be the bottom lines of their income statements. For that matter, anytime corporations can get the government to protect their interests, I'd expect them to fight for it.

Urbanism's Rental Car Problem

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:15:00 +0000

The New York Times has a nice piece about the growing trend of car-free existence. This is a hot topic, and my opinions have been expressed many times here. But look, I understand that it's not something for everybody. From the article:

Millions of people face long commutes, along with ferrying kids to school and activities, and countless errands that cannot be conducted via bus or streetcar. Beyond that, there will always be a group of customers who want the latest, hottest, sexiest car that automakers put on the market.

So maybe you have a family or you locked yourself into a long commute by buying a house far away from work that you can't sell and your mortgage is underwater. Yeah.. those people are pretty much stuck, I guess. But what is one group that (in general) has the most flexibility, is least likely to have kids, and is most likely to be cash-strapped? New college graduates.

But there is the serious problem: many of those same young people, even if they are sympathetic to the benefits of not owning a car and live in a walkable urban area, they might buy a car anyway, simply for those "once in a while" trips that people tend to like. The obvious answer to this is to utilize rental cars for such occasions. Most of the non-airport rental agencies run deep discounts for weekend rentals to get their vehicles off the lot. And if you're only renting for one or two weekends per month, the cost should be entirely reasonable. Unfortunately, the big rental companies either won't rent to anyone under 25, or they'll rent to them at some exorbitant price.

(from flickr user Henderson Images)

If I wanted a car from my local Enterprise for next coming weekend, I could get a compact from Friday morning to Monday morning for $52.34 (including all taxes and fees) if I was over 25. But I'm not, so my rate would actually be $133.15. That's not a good deal and probably not worth it. Car-sharing services like Zipcar do rent to people 21 and up, but those rentals are best for short trips in town, not so much for long trips to other cities.

We need to think about a solution. Whether it's a certificate that good drivers acquire get based on past records or some ability for urban dwellers to socialize the risk that car rental companies pass on to individual customers. Rental cars are great tools for those over 25 who live car free; it would be nice to extend that privilege to people a little younger.

Stop!

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Christopher Beam has a nice article over at Slate about the question of whether bicyclists should be legally allowed to make rolling stops at stop-sign enforced intersections. He thinks they should - I agree. But this paragraph caught my attention.
Lawmakers tend to favor the full-stop, in part because not all cyclists are skilled enough to judge the safety of proceeding through an intersection. During a debate in the Oregon state legislature, one representative admitted that he doesn't like stopping at signs. "But I do it because it's the law," he said. Plus, if bikes can cruise through stop signs, why not cars? Why do bikes deserve special treatment?
Emphasis mine. Here is the reality: on-balance, motorists roll through stop signs just as much as bicyclists; but it's more difficult to notice.

Consider this: a driver speeding down the street at 35mph approaches a stop sign and slows to 5mph, looks left, then right, sees no cross-traffic, then re-accelerates. The casual observer would probably say that this person made a safe and rational stop, even if it wasn't a full stop. Many analog speedometers in cars don't even register below 10mph, further giving confidence to the driver that the rolling stop was sufficiently safe and appropriate.

Now consider a bicyclist traveling at 10mph, slowing to 5mph, looking left, then right, and pedaling through the intersection. To a casual observer, it looks like this person did not come to a full stop. It's not even obvious that they slowed significantly. I understand why its easy to think they just recklessly "blew through" the stop.

Even though both scenarios are functionally identical, the perception is very much different. The 1.5 mile route I ride to school uses secondary roads with 25 mph speed limits (frequently violated and rarely enforced) and about a half-dozen stop signs along the way. It's quiet, but there are usually at least a dozen cars that pass me during the ride. I can say with confidence that a majority of drivers who approach empty intersections roll though at a speed very similar to what I do on my bike.

Before the Storm

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:36:00 +0000

I've said it before and I'm going to say it again: public television and public radio have really done a tremendous job covering the financial crisis. No other television or radio news media can even claim to come in a close second.

This week's Frontline is no exception.

It's a well told story about Alan Greenspan, Brooksley Born and the politics of the Clinton Administration. Admittedly, it's a story that was mostly new to me.

Parking Games

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:25:00 +0000

I visited a grocery store with a friend last weekend. It was in a typical suburban strip mall - the kind of place with an excess of parking spaces that will never all be filled at any given time.

(from flickr user jgrimm)

I would expect the parking lot to fill up in a predictable pattern - the spots closest to the door filling first and then moving outward away from the store. But that's not exactly what I observed. All of the closest spaces were filled; but tons of spaces slightly farther out were available, and yet some people drove in circles, apparently waiting for one of those occupied spaces to become vacant.

This behavior baffles me. I can understand if someone is disabled. I might even be able to shrug it off it the weather was inclement. But these were fully-abled people on a clear, cool and dry Sunday afternoon.

And the other thing is, even the farthest parking space from the door isn't particularly far away. The number of steps that a typically shopper takes inside the store is probably a significant multiple of the number they take in the parking lot, regardless of where they park. And nobody carries their groceries outside at this store anyway - they push them in a shopping cart all the way back to the car.

A friend of the blog suggested to me that people behave this way because they are playing some kind of strange parking lot game. Taking any open space other than one right next to the story would be conceding defeat; but circling and waiting for that prime space to become available makes the person feel like a winner. It makes sense in a twisted way, although I'd like to believe we haven't devolved to that.

Coffee Shop Squatters

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:38:00 +0000

When I go onto Google Maps and type "coffee shop near my location" about half of the results are for places that no longer exist. On top of the fact that Starbucks keeps closing their stores, I'm led to believe that the half-life of a typical coffee shop is actually not very long.

I've heard it argued that coffee shop squatters are to blame. You know, the people who buy a coffee and then sit and read a magazine or surf the web for the next few hours... Admittedly, I'm guilty of being a coffee shop squatter. I'm writing this very post from my favorite coffee shop. I do it because it's so easy, and because sometimes I enjoy drinking a hot cup of coffee out in a public space more than in my own kitchen.

I have to question this theory on the grounds that many coffee shops actively encourage squatting. My favorite coffee shop, for example, has free wifi and power strips which allow more people to plug in laptops. On Wednesday evening there is open mic night and on weekends they often have acoustic musicians. All of these things encourage people to buy a coffee and stay for a while. And the coffee shop could at any time take all of them away.

I also question the assumption that a full coffee shop is bad for business. Psychologically, people like to patronize businesses that seem to be doing well. Having every seat in the room filled might actually help boost a coffee shop's take-out business.

Lastly, I think the situation is partially location-dependent. Where I live, retail space is cheap and population density is relatively low. I can imagine coffee shops in Manhattan having trouble with too many people trying to free ride on a single cup of coffee, but in a lot of places, I don't think it's as big of a concern.

Keep Up With Me

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 23:30:00 +0000

If you enjoy colorful charts and graphs and/or numbers and math, you may be interested in my new post over at Rust Wire about the relative bicycle friendliness of Rust Belt cities. I've also got a new post up at Brewed Fresh Daily modeling Cleveland's RTA ridership since the 1970s.

And because I know you loyal readers want to keep up with all my writing from around the internet, I went ahead and set up a delicious feed for all of my work that doesn't appear on this blog (subscribe using this link). I might not say it enough, but thanks for reading!

Capitalism: A Review Story

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:01:00 +0000

Yes, I know I'm a few weeks late to this ballgame, but I finally got around to seeing Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story. You can consider anything below this line a spoiler, so if you are interested in going in fresh, you might want to skip this post (you can still watch the trailer, of course).

My overall impression is that this movie is a mess.

I think Moore's goal is to track the historical movement of capital and wealth in America, connect it to the current economic crisis, and argue that the majority non-wealthy should overthrow the minority capitalists. I like to believe that I'm fairly educated on the crisis, and two hours with Moore left me feeling less confident about that than when I walked in.

Moore uses words like 'exploitation' and 'revolution' a lot - words similar to the ones Karl Marx uses in The Communist Manifesto. There is no explicit mention of Marx in the film; but there are a few examples of workers getting upset and fighting back against management and of evicted tenants fighting back against the banks that evicted them. Regardless, I think the self-selected clips are less mainstream than Moore might want you to believe.

If capitalism is undergoing a period of demise, I happen to think it looks much less like what Marx predicted, and more like what Joseph Schumpeter predicted. Here's a nice summary, from Wikipedia:

Schumpeter's theory is that the success of capitalism will lead to a form of corporatism and a fostering of values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals. The intellectual and social climate needed to allow entrepreneurship to thrive will not exist in advanced capitalism; it will be replaced by socialism in some form. There will not be a revolution, but merely a trend in parliaments to elect social democratic parties of one stripe or another. He argued that capitalism's collapse from within will come about as democratic majorities vote for the creation of a welfare state and place restrictions upon entrepreneurship that will burden and destroy the capitalist structure.

If Moore understands these subtleties, then he doesn't do a particularly good job explaining them to the audience. There is reason to believe he just doesn't get it, which is one takeaway from this Q&A he did at GWU.

Lastly, there are a few buzzwords that get tossed around during the film: capitalism, socialism and democracy. The problem is that there's very little discussion about what these words actually mean and whether they are mutually exclusive. Moore shows clips of people at a John McCain rally, for example, claiming that Obama would invoke socialism which would crush democracy. At the end of the film, after Moore puts crime scene tape all over Lower Manhattan, he says that the ultimate solution to capitalism is democracy. What?!

There were a few hilarious scenes, like when Michael Moore goes to the General Motors headquarters in Detroit and nonchalantly tells the security guard "hi I'm Michael Moore I'm here to see in chief executive." Or the scene where Michael Moore is trying to talk to some guys having a smoke break outside the New York Stock Exchange and he asks "does anyone have any investment advice for me?" and one Wall Street guy shouts back "yeah, stop making movies." There is also a pretty comical clip from a Ronald Reagen movie where the former-president slaps a woman across the face.

This was a movie that I wanted to be good - I was rooting for it to be good. But I walked out of the theater disappointed. It wasn't very good.

Bike Helmet Politics

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:30:00 +0000

TheWashCycle poses this simple question:

I wear a helmet. But let me ask this question, why is riding a bike without a helmet dumb?

I think a good answer is: it's dumb because in the United States, bicyclists are almost always assumed to be at fault in a car/bike collision. If the bicyclist doesn't have a helmet, it's all too easy to argue that the bicyclist is reckless and probably deserved what he/she got. Sad but true.

Journalistic reporting on car/bike collisions is particularly bad. Many authors revert to the "phantom driver" description or use third person passive to refer to the things "which had been hit by an out-of-control car". Check out any article reporting on the death of a cyclist and I'm confident that if the cyclist died, the language makes the counter-factual suggestion that if only that person had been wearing a helmet, they would still be alive.

I've seen pictures and videos of bicyclists in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and other European cities and it always amazes me that almost none of them wear helmets. It's basically the polar opposite of the pictures I see out of San Francisco or Portland, where everyone has helmets.

Ultimately, I think the primary value to wearing a helmet is a combination of culture and politics. Until American society is willing to accept that a bicyclist isn't automatically at fault in a collision, wearing a helmet is really one of the few things the cyclist can do to hedge their bets against being taken by a legal system that is badly biased against them.

Mexican Coke

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 21:04:00 +0000

Rob Walker has an interesting piece in the NY Times Magazine about the cult following of Mexican Coke in the U.S.

(from flickr user Adam Kuban)

I wouldn't consider myself a cult follower; I certainly wouldn't go out of my way to find Mexican Coke, but if I could choose between a Mexican or American cola beverage, I would undoubtedly choose the variety from south of the border.

When I lived in Dallas I shopped at a store called El Rio Grande Supermercado. The store had it's pros and cons... sometimes I loved it, sometimes I couldn't stand it. But they carried a wide variety of Mexican imported soft drinks - not just Coke and Pepsi, but a lot of fruity flavored carbonated drinks as well.

It's true - soft drinks made from cane sugar are just better tasting than drinks made from corn syrup. They do taste noticeably different, so I think some people born and raised on American Coke might not like Mexican Coke at first - not because it's worse-tasting, just because they aren't used to it. I think the phenomenon in similar with other drinks. Most people would consider what I think is "good" coffee different. They would recognize a distinct taste, but because they aren't used to it, might write it off as not worth trying again.

I think that's the power of eating and drinking a lot of bad-tasting stuff. Eventually you get so used to it that you have a difficult time appreciating the truly good things. When it comes to food, it's definitely happened to me.

On Extreme Commutes

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:33:00 +0000

Every time I hear a story like this one I feel like the piece is trying to evoke sympathy from the reader (or in this case, the listener).

I'm sorry, but I just can't feel bad for people who make these ridiculous commutes. I agree that they are probably painful and awful and incredibly unpleasant, but at some point the person doing it needs to step back and simply decide if it really makes sense.

Nick Paumgarten wrote a great piece about two and a half years ago in the New Yorker on this topic. Penelope Trunk gives a nice slap in the face to the very idea that it's a good idea. I can buy into the argument that people make these commutes because they are very bad at calculating costs and benefits, especially when abstract value is involved. The other day, for instance, I asked a simple question to some very smart guys: if you commute 30 minutes to work each day, how many work weeks would you spend commuting per year? Neither had any idea off the top of his head (a pocket calculator will tell you the answer is about 6.5 forty-hour work-weeks).

I also think the problem is self-perpetuating. In my mind, a 60 minute per day round trip commute by car is very long and probably very far; but you'll hear other people say that it's actually very short. Nobody is going to be shocked if you commute 2 hours per day by car. When society reinforces the idea that this behavior is normal and acceptable, it stops being extreme and starts becoming mainstream. When people think about where to live and where to work, they probably discount the cost of the commute, because if everyone else is making long commutes, there must be some awesome value to it, right?

Why I Said No to Ohio Issue 3

rpitingolo@gmail.com (Rob Pitingolo) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:15:00 +0000

It really has little to do with gambling per se, jobs, construction, tax revenue or even the equality concern I raised a few weeks ago. In fact, the primary reason I voted no is really quite selfish, in a way. If I am going to live in Cleveland after I graduate from college (and this is becoming a big if anymore), basically the only place in town I would have any desire of living is downtown. Do I think living blocks away from a full-service casino would be desirable? No. I do not.

(from flickr user John Wardell (Netinho))

Cleveland already has plenty of challenges facing its downtown. I was recently reminded of this while talking to a friend of the blog about my frustration with the fact that the public library in my current neighborhood closes at 9pm and my favorite coffee shop at 10pm. That's pretty generous, really, he reminded me, since where he lives downtown, so many places that don't have a bar attached close while the sun still shines.

I've been to my share of casinos. I've visited Las Vegas, gambled on Indian reservations in Oklahoma and observed all three casinos in Detroit.

My fear is that Cleveland's casino will turn into something out of Detroit, where people drive in their cars, park in huge garages, spend time and money in the casinos, and then drive right back out and right back home. Official statistics might show people "visiting" these casino neighborhoods, but it only requires a little observation to see that the neighborhoods surrounding the casinos aren't exactly major beneficiaries of this influx of visitors.

I'm partial to the Hiram College study which concludes that a downtown casino will siphon business from neighboring bars and restaurants and drive many out of business entirely. Frankly, if I'm going to be a downtown resident, I'm pretty sure one of the last places I'd want to spend a Friday or Saturday night is at some casino bar. The fact that many of downtown Cleveland's existing business owners oppose the casino is enough to convince me that the risk is real enough.

There are so many things Cleveland could do to improve its downtown. To suggest that the casino is the only option left seems to be an admission of defeat. And it's hard to gloss over the reality of what casinos are in Detroit. Proponents kept telling me that somehow the Cleveland casino would be different, that somehow Cleveland will do right everything that Detroit did wrong...

I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt. I just don't have the faith to believe them.