H1N1 Vaccines and Government Inefficiencies

Politics

I’ve started seeing a lot of people complaining about their inability to get the H1N1 Vaccine for themselves, their kids, and their pet cockatiel Roy. I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about the government munging this. And how the government isn’t making enough vaccines.

First off people, the government isn’t making the vaccines. It’s a company called Novartis. This is one of those private partnerships that Republicans like to talk so much about. Those partnerships that are far superior to anything the government could do. So here we are. This is (supposedly) better than the government can do. So quit your whining. Or not. Just direct it appropriately.

Novartis is delivering lots and lots of vaccines. The problem is that it’s not going to deliver vaccines for everyone who wants one. Why? Because they only have so much manufacturing capacity. And there’s no value to them of having extra H1N1 vaccine after flu season is over. They’ve done the math and exactly the number of doses that they’re making is what makes sense for them. A certain number of deaths is ok in their fiscal plan to not overbuild vaccines or manufacturing capacity.

So why isn’t the federal government that concerned? Because so far the deaths are pretty much on target with any other bad flu season. So realistically everything’s working the way it’s supposed to.

But it makes me concerned, and we should use this public outrage to do something. Does it really make sense to outsource vaccines? Isn’t this one of those things like having a military where the federal government should just have factories on standby ready to make vaccines for every American?

If we translated our vaccine policy to the military it would be like outsourcing the military, and having the private company decide that really it only made fiscal sense to have resources available to protect about 10% of the United States. The rest would probably get captured, probably some of the states would raise militias that could fight the invaders off, the wealthy would hire private security firms but we’d just accept that there would be some substantial loss of life and territory. A politician trying to sell that would have to be nuts.

And yet that’s basically our national vaccine policy. Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t use private labs to develop vaccines. I think that part of the equation is working well. We should just set it up where we pay some large chunk of royalties to the company that comes up with a viable vaccine and then the US government produces it. If anything it would get more players in the market as scientists could work on developing vaccines without having to have a massive manufacturing capability to build out what they produce. Essentially the US government pays for the development of open-source vaccines to use a software analogy.

Because frankly flu vaccines are small potatoes. It’s debatable if they really work at all (since what goes in each year is just best guess). What happens when we really need a vaccine to some new disease, that’s killing more than a percentage of a percentage? And we can only provide vaccines to 10% of Americans? It seems like we’ve outsourced a pretty important part of our national security.

On Ticket Prices

Ramblings

So, I don’t mention this enough on this blog, but currently in addition to writing plays and running a theater company I have a small internet startup called BuyPlayTix. One of the things I’m really trying to do with the software is start to build a way to analyze your audience and budget the way a for-profit business would. Granted, I’m no where near where I want to be with this, but the small amount I’ve built has provided some useful results.

The one thing that works is our BoxOffice software and Box Office reports. You enter all you ticket sales into the Box Office and you can look at some aggregate statistics in the report. I know this sounds ridiculously basic, but I would contend that most theater companies in Austin do not know what their average audience size is, or what percentage of tickets they sell at what price points.

On our last show, like many companies, we needed to come up with a ticket price. We’d already created a budget, which is based on historical averages and what we know things cost. Julie does a fantastic job with this and we’re never off by more than 10%. But when it came time to decide on a ticket price we just said $15. I guess because that seems fair? Or something. Market rate? Out of curiosity I decided to go back and look at our average size. I took our average paid tickets multipled by 15 and realized we couldn’t pay our rent if we charged $15 per seat. So we went with $18. And we had our standard house size, so we didn’t loose large numbers of our audience due to the cost increase. And we made our money back.

Which brings me to my main point. One of the main things that I’ve been reading are people complaining about not being able to make a living off of the arts. But how exactly are we supposed to do that if we’re just making up ticket prices that seem fair? How do we arrive at fair? The large regional theaters in town charge $30/ticket. Which is double what we think is fair. And you know what the kicker is? They’re heavily subsidized. So you’re really competing with a company that should be charging $60-100 per ticket. No wonder we’re having trouble competing. We’re pretending we can do the same amount of work for 1/4 of the pay.

I think we need to start committing to fair ticket prices, and knowing what that is. In version 4.0 of BuyPlayTix I’m going to have the ability to manually enter BoxOffice data for people who still take tickets the traditional way. I think it’ll be really interesting to see what ticket prices do if companies actually know what they have to charge to make money.

I think Pay-What-You can nights can provide for people who can’t afford high ticket prices, and we’re not doing anyone a favor by offering ridiculously cheap tickets to people who can afford to see touring musicals.

Google Wave

Ramblings

I’m looking at google wave, and wondering if it’s ability to record changes to a document and comments on it over time, might not be a great way to write a play with constant dramaturgy.

The editor seems a bit rudimentary, but I’ve already customized mediawiki to make playwrighting easy, so this might be doable.

Deer. Seriously.

Ramblings

So, we crested the hill near our house and were shocked to see this in our front yard:

Uh, yeah. Two deer. Just hanging out. Julie was pretty freaked out. I often turn a corner while running and happen upon a deer, so I’m a bit more used to them. But these were pretty big ones for the city:

Sorry for the dark pictures, but it was night.

Some Brief Writeups

Watching Theater

Theater

“There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom” UT Department of Theater and Dance – saw this last night. Well done show. One of those shows for 5th graders that really resonates no matter what your age. Like the kids movies from your youth that they don’t make anymore. It treats the kids in the play seriously and parallels their troubles with bullying with the adults in the play. There are some truly cringe-worthy scenes coming from parents where you just want to run up on stage and protect the kids.

The dramaturgy at the end of the show should be seen by anyone who has ever done a talk-back (and really anyone involved in producing theater). It was focused, funny, engaged the audience and ended at a set time. Really great work.

As with most UT performances their were some weak performances, but not from any of the kids or adult leads. And there were puppets which always make me happy. This is a dark horse to check out. I get burned out watching so much theater and this one really kept me engaged the whole way through.

Tickets (careful, they have no show tomorrow night due to the football game)

“The Collection” Hyde Park Theater – If you want to see this one you should probably get your tickets within the next few minutes. They’re pretty much sold out. And for good reason. The story revolves around marital infidelity. Or not. There are Kafka-esque phone calls and strangers showing up at the door. And yet it’s a great comedy. Joey Hood and Ken Webster are great. My only problem with the show is that I wasn’t sure at the end whether infidelity had occurred, and probably more importantly I wasn’t 100% convinced the actors knew. But all in all it was a concise, hilarious, and intriguing night of theater.

Tickets

“The Jungle” Trouble Puppet – Trouble Puppet’s production last year of “Frankenstein” was my favorite show of the year, so I had very high hopes for their production of “The Jungle”. By and large the puppetry was flawless. Trouble Puppet mixes puppetry styles, but it’s mainly Bunraku. In this case it was seamless. The puppeteers were dressed like the puppets as factory workers and renacted some of the puppets tasks in real life which really made it seem like their was no real barrier between the two. That said I felt like it didn’t have as much of the horror as Frankenstein (which seems odd considering the source material). Also, it felt like it was simply reaffirming the audiences views. It’s hard to find someone now who doesn’t feel like turn-of-the-century factory conditions were horrific. Their production of Frankenstein put a fantastic feminist spin on the story, and I would have liked to seen the same thing here. That said, it will probably still be one of my favorite plays this year. Can’t wait to see Connor Hopkins do the puppets for “Evil Dead: The Musical”!

Closed

Restaurants

Zoe’s Kitchen (arboretum area) – Had a Pimento Cheese Sandwich, Fresh Pasta Salad with Basil, Izzi Soda, and Chocolate Chip Cookie. My entree was free due to a promotion they’re running right now. The place was fresh, but not excessively healthy. The bread was toasted in some sort of oil. The pasta salad was a bit bland and dry. That said, for restaurants South of 183 and West of MoPac this is one of the best. Probably only beat out for me by the Hub.

Woodland (south congress) – Had two of their cocktails which were both fantastic. The Socu was nice and cucumbery (which is one of my favorite flavors in cocktails). It was not sweet and the cayenne did a great job of getting the scent of the drink into your nose (can you tell I don’t write food reviews). I can’t figure out what my second drink was anymore. For mains I had the woodland veggie burger. It is beet based, which was suprisingly tastey, but about 3/4 of the way through the burger I was done with the taste. The cocktails were good, but it didn’t inspire me to want to go back and try the rest of the menu.

La Reyna (south first) – great margaritas, and they have super tender ribs that fall off the bone and you can roll into a taco. Our new favorite Mexican place.

East Side Show Room (east 6th) – worth the trip just to see how built up East 6th has become. The drinks were good, but both Julie and my food were exceedingly simple. Mine tasted like beef that had come out of a crock pot, and Julie’s was merely good. Our chatucherie plate was like something out of a commercial making fun of gourmet food. It was a regular sized app plate with one tiny slice of pate, a tiny dollop of some sort of mouse, and various other tiny things. There was far more white showing than there was food. All in all, we were underwhelmed. We might go back for cocktails, but we were not inspired to try the food again.

Frank (Colorado and 4th) – tasty hot dogs. They have specialty sausages made daily. Definitely one of the food bargains in downtown Austin and just a really satisfying lunch. Kid friendly for well behaved children. They have Maine Root root beer on draft which makes them probably the closest to my vision of heaven that’s possible. I’ve had a sausage stuffed with portobellos and shallots, and one topped with daikon and they were both perfectly balanced dogs. Highly recommended. We’ve already been twice.

Taverna (2nd street) – pretty decent italian. Julie got a really tasty pizza covered with fresh veggies and I got a risotto. It was good, but at the end of the day it was a risotto. I don’t understand the fetishization of that dish, I wanted to try it somewhere upscale to see if I could figure it out. It was good, and it was nice to sit on the sidewalk and people watch, but I think we’ll probably stick with Primizie as our favorite Italian restaurant in Austin.

Uh… what’s for dinner?

Recipes

Kind of freaking out over here. Apparently Conde Nast is shuttering Gourmet Magazine. This is bad. That’s the magazine I use for recipes for everything. How am I supposed to keep cooking? You going to teach me to cook without recipes Conde Nast?

And what about my grandmother? She’s been passive-aggressively insulting Julie and me year after year by sending Julie a subscription to Gourmet and me a subscription to Smithsonian. I’ve cooked her Christmas dinner for the past two years. From recipes out of Gourmet. I have no clue what she’s going to do.

Or what I’m going to do. I might need to buy some paper cookbooks.

Why Variances Can Be Good

Politics

So there’s been a bit of talk lately about the Grayco Development along Lakeshore. Save Town Lake is against it because they believe that the 40′ height limit should be absolute. Chris Reilly (one of our new council members) has weighed in on why he supports it. His argument is that they are only asking for a height variance and they are offering a massive number of incentives to the city in return (public plazas, preserving trees, park improvements, sidewalks, etc).

I’ve become somewhat pessimistic about development in Austin. It seems that these initial offers are generally their best offer, and they tend to get to build what they want in the end. The Northcross debacle is just one of many where we were going to get something pretty nice from the developers, but in the end the city is quite a bit poorer and we’re getting a generic Walmart. As far as initial offers go, this is a great one, and is completely in keeping with the ideals of the new East Riverside plan. But while the pro/anti development track is a pretty common argument, I don’t really want to address it in this case.

I also don’t want to address it in the sense of ugly vs. nice developments. One of the things that being on a Neighborhood Association Board convinced me of is that you cannot create rules to avoid ugly. You can create rules for well-kept. You can create rules to effectively use space, but you can’t avoid ugly.

That said, I wanted to compare the two properties that are side by side. The Grayco Development and the Amli development next door. You can view a map at the Chronicle’s writeup on the issue. I want to compare them simply from a lakefront utilization perspective.

Here’s a view of the where the Grayco development will be from across the lake. It will be behind the second tree line (per the variance agreement those trees stay). There’s an existing two story apartment complex there. You’ll need to expand the picture and look very closely to see it.

Here’s a view of the area from the actual hike and bike trail. It’s taken from right next to the water fountain which is halfway between Lakeshore Boulevard and the closest the Hike and Bike trail gets to the water.

Next look at the Amli complex. This is a project that did not request a variance and is within waterfront overlay height limits:

That large concrete building is a parking garage. Don’t get me wrong. I actually like the Amili development. Looking at the way it integrates with Riverside you can imagine how Riverside is going to become a nice strollable boulevard of shops and apartments, rather than a bunch of run down strip malls:

But is “Save Town Lake” right to contend that the Grayco development is some sort of monstrosity that will destroy the spirit of the lake? That development is going to be behind the treeline. It’s going to have a lot of units, which means more people who can enjoy the lake, and it’s going to preserve the Hike and Bike trail (something the Amli development is not extending, you still get to run by it on the sidewalk). There will be a plaza to engage the public and bike routes and sidewalks through the development to make getting from Riverside to the Trail easier.

Is a parking garage really the best utilization of a waterfront view? Shouldn’t people be enjoying the view instead of a concrete wall? Shouldn’t we encourage developers to seek variances when following the rules would lead to something that is obviously not the best utilization of a site?

I think we need to take variances to get what we really want. Keep the views for the people. Keep density in the East Riverside area and bring in new commercial development to a historically under-served community.

Goodbye Affordable Housing in Austin

Ramblings

Check out the newest provision in the FHA guidelines. You know, the loans that make it easy for first time home buyers to buy affordable houses with little to no down payment. Julie and I bought our first house with one.

– Because of noise worries, FHA insurance will be unavailable when properties are within 1,000 feet of a highway, freeway, or heavily traveled road; 3,000 feet of a railroad; one mile of an airport; or five miles of a military airfield. Projects must take action to avoid or mitigate such conditions before completing the loan review process.

What does that leave? There are million dollar homes in Austin less than 3000′ from a railroad. Most of the affordable housing in Austin is that close. Have you looked at the affordable developments in South Austin? The ones that pretty much run along the tracks?

The major flaw in "No Child Left Behind"

Ramblings

So we went to a meeting about Becker, an elementary school in our neighborhood last night. We’re considering sending Stella there, due to the extreme overcrowding at our local elementary (> 120%, highest in AISD). Plus a lot of our friends are in the neighborhood. There was talk of a daul-language program, which was interesting, but one thing that struck me was their academically unacceptable rating and their small class size. Linder (the overcrowded school in our neighborhood) has been academically acceptable since the creation of “No Child Left Behind”. That seemed a bit odd to me. But first a word about averages.

Steve Crossland of the excellent Crossland Blog has often spoke about how useless averages are in real estate (and really in much of life). When someone asks you what the average home price is in Austin, you don’t actually tell them the average. You tell them the median. Thanks to the million dollar homes the average home price is probably around half a million. The median is probably in the high 100k’s. When we say average we generally mean median. And when we see averages we generally extrapolate them to the median in our head. When I was in school, if I saw an average grade of 75% in one of my classes, I would assume pretty much everyone got a C. Yet, depending on the size of the class it could have been 2 unprepared lunkheads who got no answers right, and the rest of the class aced the test. Averages tell you very little about individual performance.

With that in mind I decided to look at test scores in town. I decided to compare against 3rd grade, but the numbers are pretty consistent. Here’s Becker (all numbers are number of kids who failed the test):

Becker

Grade Average Class Size Reading Math Writing Science
3 12.8 4.1 4.22 3.2 3.07

I was shocked. So academically unacceptable in this case means that 3-4 kids failed the test in each class? That’s not so bad. And when you consider averages are at play here it’s possible that there are a few bad teachers dragging the rest down. So I decided to see what academically exemplary means. This is a school that does not have a lot of english profeciency problems, economic disadvantage, or section 8 housing:

Kiker

Grade Average Class Size Reading Math Writing Science
3 21 0.21 0.42 0.21 1.05

So the difference is 2-3 kids per class? Not as much difference as you would expect from the terms “exemplary” and “unacceptable”. I finally decided to look at Linder to see how it stacked up:

Linder

Grade Average Class Size Reading Math Writing Science
3 22.4 4.93 6.5 2.46 7.39

So, Linder, which is an academically “acceptable” school actually has more kids failing per class than Becker which is “unacceptable”. The law of averages at work. So this means that school districts are rewarded for having over-crowded schools. It explains why suburbs that can’t seem to build enough schools to keep up with demand don’t seem to have the same problems their inner-city counter parts do. And it shows me that realistically most of the schools in Austin are quite good and after meeting some teachers last night, I have to say they’re really dedicated to voluntarily go to meetings until 7pm on a work night. I’m looking forward to sending Stella.

Here’s my spreadsheet if you want to check my work.

A Neighborly Conversation

Politics

Just listened to “A Neighborly Conversation” on KOOP. A discussion between Jeff Jacks and Chris Bradford (Austin Contrarian). Not a lot of new ground. Jeff Jacks does appear to be absolutely against new development in neighborhoods which is interesting. I wouldn’t have thought he’d put it quite that strongly. But he did bring up that we’re not pushing for density in the new development in Austin that’s not in existing neighborhoods. South Park Meadows is suburban sprawl. West Austin is nothing but sprawl. 969 is sprawl. That’s a real failure. While we can’t change what Round Rock, Cedar Park, or Buda are doing, we can change what we’re doing as a city. We really need to view the entire City of Austin as being “downtown”. Because it will be shortly. The fact that all of our new construction within the city limits isn’t at least as dense as Mueller (which isn’t very dense) is a real failing on our part.

What do you think the solution is to getting more people into Austin without sprawl?