Category Archive

Here are some slides that I wrote on the current UC budget crisis — what it is, how we (and the state of California) got to where it is now, why you (the student) should care, and what you can do about it.  My goal is to be informative rather than polemic — the underlying issues are complex.

Over the past several weeks there’s been a lot of talk in the media and at the University of California about the origins of the current budget crisis.  One of the prime suspects has been Proposition 13, which passed in 1978 and capped real estate taxes by limiting appreciation of the base for property taxes (the “assessed value”) to 2% per year.  I spent a bit of spare time this week quantifying how much this cap has actually cost California.  Using data from Los Angeles Almanac (http://www.laalmanac.com/economy/ec37.htm), we can visualize this loss within San Diego:

The black line is actual median housing prices in San Diego since 1982; the dotted magenta line is the appreciated assessed value of a home that was median-price in 1982. The area between the two lines is the value of the home that was immune to taxation due to Proposition 13.

Prop 13 also capped property tax at 1%. Dividing the area between the two lines by 100, we find that the state has lost $31,220 (not accounting for inflation) in property tax on a median-value home over the last twenty-seven years. (Because most of the rise in housing prices happened recently, inflation isn’t so important; the inflation-adjusted figure is $40,000 in 2008 dollars.)

Now for the caveats:

1. This estimate is probably biased upward by the fact that Prop 13 inflates housing prices — in an alternative reality with out Prop 13, people would have less incentive not to sell houses they’ve held onto for a long time, which would increase supply and presumably push prices down.  It’s hard to know the size of this effect.
2. The median home sale price isn’t the right statistic: it’s based on a different set of homes every year, whereas the correct statistic involves changes in prices to a fixed set of homes over time.  I don’t know how to get data for this correct statistic, however.  I believe that the effect here is most likely to bias the estimate downward, because between 1982 and 2006 (thus excepting the recent downturn), the set of homes being sold was probably becoming an ever lower-quantile sampling from among San Diego homes.  This is because there was lots of new property being built and sold, but it was being built disproportionately in lower-cost regions (=far from the coast), and catered largely to families who were being priced out of the booming market.

Here’s a shout-out to Nathaniel Smith’s xpra. I’ve managed to get it working with a remote Debian server and my Mac laptop as a client. I have at least the following packages installed in support of xpra (all installed using MacPorts):

• python25
• python26
• py26-pyrex
• py26-gtk
• xorg-libXtst
• py25-gobject
• py25-gtk
• py25-nose
• py26-nose
• xorg-libXdamage
• xorg-libXcomposite
• xorg-libXtst
• xorg-libXfixes

No guarantee that all of these are really necessary. I suspect that all the py26-* packages are necessary because it seemed that I needed py25-gtk even after installing py26-gtk.  On the other hand, there is no py25-pyrex.

I currently run OS X 10.5.6 and my TeX distribution is TeTeX from MacPorts.  I recently found out that my pdflatex is generating A4 paper by default, even if I use the letter option with \documentclass.  Solution: call texconfig-sys and choose Paper -> Letter.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to write locally to my home directory — I set TEXMFCONFIG to $HOME/Library/texmf but texconfig-sys didn’t seem to care.  That’s unfortunate, but I am the only user of the computer so I just set it locally.

I’m a big fan of Sweave for writing LaTeX documents with R code embedded inside.  But there is a really annoying gotcha, which is that if you use statements that return R objects inside a figure, the resulting latex won’t compile

Examples pending…

I usually write my presentations in PowerPoint, but I use LaTeX to generate good-looking equations.  I’d been looking for a way to generate equations from LaTeX that are trimmed to a tight bounding box, so that they paste into PowerPoint properly (uniform size and transparent background).  And I found what I wanted: pdfcrop.  Yeah!

OK — I have a new favorite app: Air Sharing.  Allows you to use the iPhone as a wireless hard drive.  What’s the first thing I do with it?  Naturally, put a bunch of my own PDF papers on it   Powerpoint file viewing still has some issues.  But that’s just one more reason to go with PDF as universal standard, I guess.

Way cool.  Now I’d just like to be able to save files downloaded from Safari directly into Air Sharing.

I just received a Goldtouch ergonomic USB split keyboard for the Macintosh. It’s really nice, but it has only one Control key and it’s tucked away in the lower left corner. For Emacs addicts such as myself, this is unacceptable.

I have dealt with the problem by remapping the right-hand Alt key to Control, but this is suboptimal. Goldtouch, if you’re reading this, please redesign your keyboard with a more traditional Mac Control/Alt/Command key layout (one of each on both sides of the space bar)!