Move: To Madison, WI (8 Days Before Arrival)

Preparing for an interstate move is in many ways both fast and slow. There is only so much that you can do from web-searches.

Such as finding out how affordable housing in Madison can be. If you insist on having a house with a yard, you can easily afford it. Near the airport. Under flight paths. Or, near freeways or other limited-access high-speed roads. Or, major intersections. Picky picky picky. Or, you can be, um, liberal in your defining what “Madison” is; call pretty much every village within 45 minutes of the corporate limits of Madison as “Madison,” et voila, you have affordable housing.

If driving 45 minutes through scenic countryside, during a snow storm, sounds like a terrifying way to begin your day, then there are rather affordable apartments near the well-to-do office parks of Middleton or Madison. Seriously. If you don’t mind living in an apartment, and prioritize a short commute on plowed streets, then you have several options. If you’re willing to live among college students, and don’t mind leasing on a semester-ly basis, then you have a lot of options in houses with patina.

The downside is living among the well-mannered, sober, sophisticated, emotionally-resilient, experienced-in-life, oh-so-unique and charming 18-22 year-olds. And, there is nothing that they want more in their midst than a 30-something Texan aerospace-professional with a hunting license, who insists that the word literally is not its own antonym, uses math in making financial decisions, and thinks that How to Win Friends and Influence People is a really good book.

The 45-minute-or-more commute through dark, snowy weather seems wonderful, by comparison. Less complaining.

Anyways, web-searching can only go so far in helping you buy a house. There are probably ways to buy real estate sight-unseen, without interacting with another human. That seems like a bad idea when it comes to selecting a place to live. The depth of work that a professional provides in house-buying necessitates more time than browsing listings on Zillow. Naturally, the people that you need to do things have other customers to serve, who are further along in the process or queue than you.

The good news is that my mortgage pre-approval was completed. The real estate broker is finding houses, and arranging for a tour.

In the meantime, the car had its oil changed, tires rotated, engine air filter changed, and wheel alignment checked. Notwithstanding the move, this would have waited until mid-April. However, I would cross the mile threshold somewhere between Houston and Little Rock, Arkansas. No need to risk voiding the warranty, or frantically trying to get the car serviced while starting a new job and continuing the house-buying process.

As of tonight, I have only four more workdays left at the current employer. Co-workers and friends are graciously making time for final lunches and dinners. It is heartwarming and humbling to know that you were (and are) part of a community.

The final occurrences (for the time being) of certain events are happening: final visit to a particular dealership, final visit to the long-time dentist, final Open House at the CreatorSpace. The final visit to the Greenway Plaza-area CostCo was more than a month ago.

Meal planning is somewhat tricky. Two things had ought to be minimized: spending money, and buying food that will spoil before a chance to eat it presents itself. The last time I moved, restaurant spending spiked. Time that would go to buying groceries and cooking was spent on moving possessions. Plus, there would always be some cooking tool or dish missing, until everything was moved and unpacked. Plus, if you have friends helping you, you reward their helpfulness with pizza, beer, Chinese buffets, etc. The whole process can be so tiresome that the thought of yet another drive to someplace else, to then stand at a stove, or even wait for the pizza to finish baking, seems unreasonable in light of other options.

This move will be like that, except that recruiting Houston-area friends to follow me to the Madison has proven difficult. Offers of beer and poutine have not impressed them.

Move: To Madison, Wisconsin (17 Days Before Arrival)

Abstract: I start a new job on April 10, in Wisconsin. Whenever you relocate to a different place, cost-of-living is an important issue. Madison and Houston are comparable to each other, in that regard. Cost-of-living websites give contradicting information. Nuance is required to understand why a given website says that a certain town costs more or less to live in than the other. To buy or to rent is considered. Madison seems a better place to buy than rent, especially if you plan to live there longer than a year. Due to the short time scale, I will use AirBNB for short-term housing needs until a longer-term solution is found.

The long version: Sometimes, you have to move. Especially, if an aerospace company makes an offer that you shouldn’t refuse. I start on April 10. Having done the research on moving, certain things are clearer than others.

For example, the cost of living. I’ve not yet reached a point in my life where I’m willing to move to a town, then look for work. In the case of Madison, I am following the job offer. During salary negotiations, it’s important to know what kind of quality of life a given salary would allow in the new town. Well, I know what I make in Houston, and would prefer my quality of life to be similar, if not better in Madison.

So, is Madison more expensive than Houston?

According to BestPlaces.net and Bankrate.com, Madison costs 7 to 15%, respectively, more than Houston. According to Numbeo.com, Madison costs 8% less. The average among the three is 4.7% more expensive than Houston.

BestPlaces attributes most of the higher cost of living in Madison to an increase healthcare costs. Healthcare is more expensive in Madison, according to them. Fortunately, I’m in good health for now, and not paying for healthcare with the same kind of frequency as a mortgage. BestPlaces says that housing is less expensive in Madison than Houston.

Bankrate begs to differ. Average or median (not sure which) homes prices are much more expensive in Madison ($362,264.33) than Houston ($263,601.33). Rent prices, however, are slightly lower in Madison ($957 vs $998).

Numbeo goes further, showing that rent prices in Madison are 12% lower than in Houston.

I suspect that the cost of living in Madison is more like Houston’s than not. No dramatic increases as found in San Francisco or New York City.

To continue with the nerdiness, the next question is: buy or rent? This get really heavy into the math. Thank goodness that there are online calculators that will help you figure out how expensive of a house you can afford. The process that I used is as follows:

1) Gather or have available your gross salary offer and cost of benefits (health insurance, etc).

2) Use a paycheck calculator to determine your take-home pay. Whichever calculator you use should let you choose the State for Withholding, the pay-frequency, whether health insurance is taken out of your gross income (before taxes), and so on.

3) With the hopefully realistic estimate, find a mortgage calculator that includes taxes, property taxes, PMI, etc. Play with the numbers, until you find a house price that you can afford.

In terms of how much money one should devote to housing, Bankrate says that lenders suggest no more than 28% of your income before taxes. While property taxes and interest are tax deductible, they are only deductible if you itemize. Sufficiently low taxes and interest may not be worth itemizing. Personally, I maintain that until one can pay a mortgage with pretax income on a monthly basis, one should stick with post-tax income in these analyses. The income that actually pays the mortgage.

4) With the house price, go to a real estate website, and have at it. If and when you find something attractive, note its price, number of bedrooms, square footage, age of building, and anything else you find important.

Now, it gets really nerdy.

5) Go to the New York Times Rent vs Buy calculator. Enter in all the relevant information, guessing or Googling for information as you need or want. The calculator will tell you in no uncertain terms that if you can find a similar place (number of bedrooms, square footage, age of building, etc) at the indicated monthly rent, then you’re better off renting.

6) Go back to the real estate website, and look for rentals in that price range.

In my situation, it became clear that if one is sticking around in Madison for at least two years, then one is typically better off buying. If you plan on living in Madison for only just a year, then renting might make sense. But, squinting at the details, it’s not clear one way or the other (for 2017).

Until I talk with a real estate agent and a loan officer, the really fine, local, specific details won’t be known. In the meantime, I will be staying at an AirBNB. Much cheaper, and more interesting than hotels.

The summary: With the job start date known, find out all the numerical information that you can about your expected take-home income, cost of living, and housing options. Use online calculators to determine your financial boundaries. When it becomes clear that you need to speak with local people (real estate agent, loan officer, etc), wrap up your research with information that you find particularly important (maximum cost of house, maximum monthly rent, minimum amount of bedrooms, etc). The clearer you are with your requirements and limits upfront with the real estate agent, the faster the overall process can be otherwise.

At this very moment, I’m prioritizing making sure that I have a place to stay for at least the next month. I temporarily leave my house in Houston on April 5, and arrive in Madison by April 7. Housing should be ensured for at least the April 7 through 18 time period. Thank goodness for AirBNB.

Drive: In the Mud

Sometimes, the road ends. Sometimes, only the paving ends, and the road continues as dirt. This can be acceptable. Until it rains, then the dirt becomes mud, and driving becomes much more difficult.

Enter All-Wheel-Drive. There are websites that will go into great detail about how AWD works, how it differs from 4-Wheel-Drive, and how automakers go about making AWD systems.

Let's say you are driving in the mud, and one set of wheels loses traction with the mud. The other set still has traction, moving or trying to move the vehicle. The wheels that lost traction begin spinning. Energy is still being transferred to the wheels, but without traction, the wheels don't move the vehicle. They just spin.

Suffice to say, the AWD distributes energy to whichever (front or rear) set of wheels is not spinning. In other words, while driving, if one set of wheels spins, the energy that would otherwise be put into moving the vehicle with those wheels is transferred to the wheels that aren't spinning - the ones actually moving the vehicle.

As those wheels move the vehicle, the other wheels eventually rotate when they have traction with the ground. The now-rotating wheels begin to accept energy from the transmission. The amount of energy transferred, to the wheels with traction, is proportional to the amount of slipping of the other wheels.

The specifics of the AWD system, the transmission, and the surface that the vehicle is on affect the slipping of the wheels, the energy transfer back-and-forth to the sets of wheels, and the overall motion of the vehicle. This results in a continuously unpredictable affair.

You can still get out of the mud.

If you read and understand above, congratulations. You deserve to watch a video.

Visit: The Creatorspace

If you are within 20 minutes or so of Johnson Space Center, check out Creatorspace in Webster. We got a lathe, 3D printers, a vinyl cutter, and some of the smartest people in Clear Lake!

We recently staffed a booth at the 2015 Houston Mini Maker Faire. If you saw us there, stop on by around 7:00 pm Tuesday at 15502 Hwy 3, Webster TX 77598 - Unit #202, north of El Dorado. We have open houses every Tuesday at 7:00 pm.

If Tuesday is not a good evening for you, you're in luck! At 7:00 pm Monday November 16, Scott Milligan will present the Linux Command Line Interface at the Freeman Library Community Room, at 16616 Diana Lane, Houston, TX 77062. Laptops will be provided!

If you attended the Faire, but don't remember Creatorspace, I was the guy that kept beckoning guests to see the amazing all-electric motorcycle. It was made by Fitz Walker. If you didn't see Fitz near his motorcycle, he was probably taking K-9 for a walk around the George R. Brown Convention Center.

If you don't know what K-9 is, ask a Doctor Who fan.

If you are a Doctor Who fan, Fitz also built the K-9. Get excited, but not too excited. Fitz built a replica K-9, not the actual one from the show.

View: Zeitgeists through Science Fiction, Part Two

In the last post, I compared the world of District 9 to the world of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I now turn my attention to television: the difference between the worlds of The Prisoner and Lost.

First, one must realize the large scope of attempting to write about this coherently. I've changed the emphasis twice: not only the specific stories, but the medium as well. The Prisoner and Lost span several hours of programming (17 episodes and 100+, respectively), and can drag out multiple character development, and fully explore more complex themes. It is the difference between a short story and a full novel.

Part of this caveat is that the TV shows are not as coherent as the movies. While the ending of 2001 is certainly abstract, it lasts about 20 minutes. The TV shows drag out the weirdness for hours.

Indeed, one can charge that the TV show writers are being weird for the sake of being weird. That is, no coherent point or message is to be derived seriously. Nonetheless, I'm looking at the show's production-eras via the shows. Fiction as a view to recent cultural history.

First, The Prisoner. Essentially, the theme is the individual versus the system. A spy is kidnapped to an exotic resort, and all sorts of loony interrogations methods are made in order to get him to talk about why he tried to quit. The Powers-That-Be have enough organizational acumen to kidnap, house, and interrogate him, although they fail in getting him to talk. Like 2001, the message is (in a way) optimistic: no matter the trials, the individual shall prevail. "I am not a number, I am a free man", and so on.

Lost could care less about whether or not you're a number or a man, free or otherwise. Unlike The Prisoner, nobody, and by the time of season five, nobody, has any control or understanding of what is going on. Even the supposed omniscient characters are revealed to be as confused as everyone else. The Prisoner encourages the troubled individual to endure, keep going, never give up... Lost offers no such encouragement. Do your best. Do nothing. You'll never be happy unless you give up, like two minor characters did.

While the themes of optimism/idealism vs pessimism/cynicism are obvious, another one stuck out: faith in organizations to get something done.

Lost almost makes this point explicitly. In the story, a wealthy man established a society of secluded scientists, to pursue research in both the mainstream (meteorology, zoology, etc) and fringe (parapsychology). This society existed in the 1970s, through the 1980s, and was taken over during the 1990s. The new powers-that-be abandoned the research initiative, for reasons not yet made entirely clear. Both the original society, and the new one, are not successful in their aims. Maybe they set the bar too high.

Given this, I watched some of The Prisoner, and not only was it a trip back in time, but it might as well had been an alien planet. The effectiveness of the organization, in The Prisoner in creating a sophisticated masquerade to get one or few people to answer questions, is something that I have a hard time taking seriously. I kept thinking of the financial costs, and the resulting cost per prisoner, and it must be an amount that no budget committee would ever approve.

The sheer faith that the organization had in itself, to accomplish their interrogation task, in that exotic setting, must have been astounding. In that sense, it was like 2001. Space planes and space colonies and moon bases and expeditions to Jupiter and ascendance to a higher plane of existence. It is a can-do spirit that seems quaint and alien all at the same time, notwithstanding the surreal lack of ethics on the part of the organization in The Prisoner.

If this can-do spirit actually existed, how did it come about? Presumably a series of successful ventures were involved (the American and British victory in WWII, a big part). Surely this spirit can be made without war? Some people have the ambition, to keep on trying, to be optimistic in the face of great odds. Are these qualities inherent, or made? Does the answer vary among individuals? Can the hi-tech development in 2001 exist without sleep-walking zombies, or the oppressive interrogators in The Prisoner?

View: Zeitgeists through Science Fiction, Part One

I recently saw the movie District 9, and it has de-throned Battlestar Galactica and Lost as the movie/TV show for this, the first decade of the 21st century. The themes present in District 9 are themes not only for South Africa, but for the world as well.

Aliens arrive, and hover over Johannesburg in the 1980s. The South African government of the 1980s concludes that the aliens are, well, not white, and are partitioned from society in the epynonymous District 9 neigborhood outside Johannesburg. Twenty years later, the management company that runs District 9 decides to move the aliens to a new neighborhood. They send a bureaucrat in to do the job, and everything goes wrong.

The director of the movie, Neill Blomkamp, shows Apartheid explicitly. Other themes are present as well. The government of South Africa has essentially outsourced a civic responsibility to a private company. A refugee situation from nearby countries, complicates the situation. Several worlds collide, and English, the alien clicking language, Swahili, and Afrikaans are shouted. The bureaucrat can understand the alien's clicking language, and the aliens can understand spoken and written English. This mutual understanding proves essential to the story.

District 9 is not only science fiction for the current period, it is practically beyond the ken of the world that produced 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that movie, aliens are absent. Their interactions with humans are abstract and enigmatic to say the least. World society is distant, though presumed to have advanced enough to have rotating space stations, moon bases, etc., all by 1999. The 2001 book mentions a global food problem that affects even Americans, but this detail is not explored. Also, by 1969, the Green Revolution in food production had been underway for more than two decades.

Nevertheless, 2001 is way more optimistic about people and societies than District 9 is. Corporate entities in 2001 are benign, compared to amoral-at-best in District 9. Technocrats are smooth, subdued, nearly soporific Heywood Floyd's and David Bowman's. Technocrats in District 9 hook up guns to unwilling humans to practice firing alien weapons. Bear in mind that the former quality is a personality type, whereas the latter describes a specific act. People in 2001 sleep-walk through a space age, while people in District 9 go about their duties in a blunt, clumsy manner. Even the aliens are disorganized!

2001 showed a path to personal (and species-wide) enlightenment via the help of alien gods. The aliens reward various "stages" of human development by dropping monoliths in key points. If a hominid touches a monolith, they suddenly learn the ability to make tools. Millions of years later, the humans have equipment that can measure magnetic anomalies, and detect where a monolith sends a signal. Then, they build a spaceship for a trip to Jupiter, and give it a very smart computer...

District 9 promises nothing. Humans treat aliens, and each other, like garbage. Johannesburg has Houston-style hi-rises and suburbs, with miles of ghettos all around. The one positive aspect is that the races appear de-segregated (at least within the bureaucracies). One odd scene for this blogger was when the bureaucrat tries to buy food at a fast food joint called "Gunter's", which has a cheesy, vaguely German-looking cartoon character on the front of the building. The staff and clientele are almost all African-descendants. A TV set plays constantly near the order/pick-up counter, and staff equipment includes a shot gun.

2001 can be interpreted as a critique of what people were becoming - zombies with less personality than a computer. District 9 critiques many, many things - mostly short-sighted, narrow-minded thinking, that pervades all sentient beings - human and alien.

Debate: US Health Insurance Reform

While people are yelling in town halls, please remember that blaming "socialism" or "big pharma" is not enough to understand why health-care costs have risen so much over the decades. As the articles below indicate, it is not illegal immigrants, high-tech facilities (not directly), nor lawsuits (at least in Texas). The public arguments so far have trouble progressing due to the fact that much of the way that health-care is financed is invisible.

It is impossible to make rational expenditures without knowing what one is paying for -- where does the money go? Before you say, "to the CEOs and shareholders", read The Atlantic article -- the companies do not make enough money to justify the inflation.

These articles are long reads. The health-care cost issue is very complex, and trying to get one's head around it, as people who live, is something best done thoroughly.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

The Cost Conundrum

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

by Atul Gawande

"...McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns...

"...Yet public-health statistics show that cardiovascular-disease rates in the county are actually lower than average, probably because its smoking rates are quite low. Rates of asthma, H.I.V., infant mortality, cancer, and injury are lower, too. El Paso County, eight hundred miles up the border, has essentially the same demographics. Both counties have a population of roughly seven hundred thousand, similar public-health statistics, and similar percentages of non-English speakers, illegal immigrants, and the unemployed. Yet in 2006 Medicare expenditures (our best approximation of over-all spending patterns) in El Paso were $7,504 per enrollee—half as much as in McAllen. An unhealthy population couldn’t possibly be the reason that McAllen’s health-care costs are so high. (Or the reason that America’s are. We may be more obese than any other industrialized nation, but we have among the lowest rates of smoking and alcoholism, and we are in the middle of the range for cardiovascular disease and diabetes.)...

"...And yet there’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso offer comparable technologies—neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac services, PET scans, and so on. Public statistics show no difference in the supply of doctors. Hidalgo County actually has fewer specialists than the national average. ..."

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http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

Policy September 2009 Atlantic

After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

by David Goldhill

How American Health Care Killed My Father

"...About a week after my father’s death, The New Yorker ran an article by Atul Gawande profiling the efforts of Dr. Peter Pronovost to reduce the incidence of fatal hospital-borne infections. Pronovost’s solution? A simple checklist of ICU protocols governing physician hand-washing and other basic sterilization procedures. Hospitals implementing Pronovost’s checklist had enjoyed almost instantaneous success, reducing hospital-infection rates by two-thirds within the first three months of its adoption. But many physicians rejected the checklist as an unnecessary and belittling bureaucratic intrusion, and many hospital executives were reluctant to push it on them. The story chronicled Pronovost’s travels around the country as he struggled to persuade hospitals to embrace his reform. ...

"...Keeping Dad company in the hospital for five weeks had left me befuddled. How can a facility featuring state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment use less-sophisticated information technology than my local sushi bar? How can the ICU stress the importance of sterility when its trash is picked up once daily, and only after flowing onto the floor of a patient’s room? Considering the importance of a patient’s frame of mind to recovery, why are the rooms so cheerless and uncomfortable? In whose interest is the bizarre scheduling of hospital shifts, so that a five-week stay brings an endless string of new personnel assigned to a patient’s care? Why, in other words, has this technologically advanced hospital missed out on the revolution in quality control and customer service that has swept all other consumer-facing industries in the past two generations? ...

"...Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value. ...