27. January 2010 by admin.

The Obama administration indicated yesterday that the President would call for a three-year freeze on discretionary spending as part of the State of the Union address tonight.  It’s official: he’s now just another politician, and not even a very good one.

Every President in modern memory, except one, has jumped up and down and insisted that the deficit be reduced.  (The only exception was Clinton: we were flush with the Peace Dividend and actually ran surpluses.)  And every President who jumped up and down about deficit reduction never actually accomplished it.

The freeze in discretionary spending affects less than $500 billion of a $3.5 trillion budget.  (Can’t anyone divide?  The press is reporting that the freeze affects 17% of the budget, but when I went to school, 500/3500 = 1/7 = about 14%!)  Of course, the sacred cows of defense and entitlements are off the table.  Projected savings from this measure in the first year are estimated to be $10 to $15 billion, or less than 0.5 %.  It’s like saying that I’ll balance my family budget by giving up magazines, books, and movies.

On the other hand, deficit spending (whether actual spending increases or tax cuts) is the government’s most useful tool for dealing with a bad economy.  The spending has to be chosen wisely, which didn’t happen with last year’s stimulus package (in which the Democratic Congress ran around like kids in a candy store).  Bad deficit spending is worse than flushing the money down the toilet, because the recipients of the money will have reason to expect more in the future. But good deficit spending (say, investments in infrastructure) can be genuinely useful.

More than I’m disappointed by the substance of the move, I’m disappointed that our President seems to be displaying no leadership at all.  He’s getting the buzz that people are worried about the deficits, so he’s serving up some old blather to suggest that people shouldn’t worry.

I wish President Obama would:

• Pick a direction.  For all that I railed against President Bush, he at least did this part right.  If Obama wants to temper his decisions to make them more acceptable to the opposition, it should be done before taking the plans to the public.  Setting forth a big plan, and then conceding later, looks wishy-washy.
• Articulate a clear vision of what he’s trying to do, going beyond the sound bites and addressing reasonable concerns from the other side.
• Do NOT then throw the issue over the fence and let Congress hash out the details.  Architects don’t draw up plans and then say, “OK, my work is finished, it’s now the contractor’s job.”  They generally have a role in managing the construction project, keeping things on track, and fixing glitches that pop up.

Obama also disappointed me with his remark that he’d ‘rather be a really good one-term President, than a mediocre two-term President.’  The only way you can get to be a mediocre two-term President is to get re-elected, and for that you have to be a good one-term President.

Looking back, when was the last mediocre two-term President?  Not Clinton: he presided over peace and prosperity, as well as bringing us the ongoing drama of the impeachment that wasn’t.  Not Reagan: he helped end the Cold War.  Not Nixon: he didn’t serve two full terms, and he resigned in disgrace: definitely not mediocre.  Not Johnson: he brought us civil rights and Big Government: the latter was perhaps not a good thing, but still not mediocre.  (Johnson also didn’t serve two full terms.)  Maybe Eisenhower, but that was before I was born, so I can’t really say.

But I’ll grant the possibility that someone might get re-elected to the Presidency, then go to sleep, and end up a mediocre two-term President.  Unfortunately, the only sure methods of being a great one-term President without running the risk of being a mediocre two-term President are to either (1) refuse to run for re-election or (2) die in office.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Money, Barack Obama | No Comments »

26. January 2010 by admin.

Seen in the subway station near my office:

1. If someone were running advertising extolling the virtue of being smart, we would think it a form of government mind control.  But extolling stupidity is cool.
2. As you go about your life, with food in the stores and power at the socket, consider all the people who make that happen.  Would you prefer that they be smart or stupid?
3. For my part, I think ’stupid’ (in the uncool sense) is spending over $150 for a pair of jeans.  But that’s just me.

Posted in Advertising | No Comments »

18. January 2010 by admin.

Sunday’s New York Post brought the story that Governor Paterson was seen in a New Jersey restaurant, being affectionate with a woman not his wife.  The governor asserted that it was a business meeting, but it didn’t appear that way to a reasonable observer.

I’m disappointed.  Not because the reporter didn’t get to the bottom of the governor’s relationship with the woman, nor because it’s yet another example of the stupidfication of the news.  Shortly after Governor Paterson replaced the previous governor, he reported, as a pre-emptive strike to the gossip columnists, that he had had affairs in the past, but the past was past, and he was now having a happy, or at least functional, marriage.  And now that seems in doubt.

But why should I care?

After all, if the governor cheats on his wife, she is the only real victim of the event, and it’s her decision as to how to handle it.  It really doesn’t affect the rest of us.

Well, maybe.

I expect my leaders to have integrity and a sense of personal honor.  Now I can’t follow the governor around and watch him make all his governmental decisions.  And even if I could, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to observe his actions and determine that he had handled every situation honorably.

But I can observe how he handles what is, for many of us, a deep personal commitment.  If he behaves honorably with respect to his marriage, I’m more willing to believe that he will handle his executive responsibilities with honor.  It’s not foolproof, of course, but it’s a useful indication.

But then again, he works in Albany.  What should I expect?

Posted in New York State, Navel-gazing | No Comments »

7. January 2010 by admin.

A few years ago, I was preparing training for electrical technicians.  I had written some multiple-choice test questions, and when I delivered the training, some of the trainees did not do well on the test, despite responding well in class.  On discussing the issue with the training staff, it turned out that even fairly short questions (two or three lines) were so hard for the trainees to digest that they could not respond correctly… even though they knew the answer.

Purveyors of the printed word have fallen on hard times, and the most successful newspapers seem to be the throwaways, mostly filled with advertising, that one picks up before one’s morning commute.  But now people listen to their iPods, or just sit there.

The latest computer gizmo, coming out this year, will be the ’slate:’ a non-folding laptop computer with a touch screen and no keyboard.   Since we don’t need a keyboard any more to maintain the computer (which has been true for a while now), if you don’t actually need to write anything, what good is the keyboard at all?  (You can pop up a virtual keyboard for the occasional Web address or credit card number.)

I write this blog mostly to vent, and to help me clarify things in my own mind.  I’m not sure if anyone reads it; what I understand about how people view the Web suggests that they probably don’t.  As a practical matter, I don’t really care.

But I worry about my son.  He finished college, but is casting about to find a job without success.   Although he studied something else in school, he’s a writer.  The market for writers has come crashing down like everything else.  But beyond that, what will happen in the future when we decide we don’t need the written word anymore?

Last week, I watched Fahrenheit 451 on the tube.  The film posits a world where the written word has been outlawed.  Not only do firemen go on runs to burn books, but there is no written advertising, no product names on packages, no safety advisories on public transit vehicles… nothing.

“Your file is incomplete, Montag,” his supervisor tells him, in the movie.  “We need twelve back views you your head, but we have only six.”

But I suppose that will never happen: people still write text messages and Twitter each other.

Posted in Language, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »

4. January 2010 by admin.

When I went into business for myself a few years ago, I expected that, at first, the business would not earn enough to cover my living expenses, and I’d have to go into debt.  And that, indeed, is what happened.  But I got past that, and now I earn a pretty good living, and I’m making progress at paying off the debt.

So I was taken aback when I got a missive from my bank today that they were refusing to renew my Visa card.  OK; it’s not quite as bad as that: they lowered its credit limit to just over the current balance,  so that I can’t make any substantial purchases.  They also didn’t send me a new card when the old one expired at the end of the year.

It isn’t an emergency: in the last few months, I’ve actually started saving money again, so I don’t need the card for current expenses.  But not having it is an inconvenience, and if something should happen that wipes out my savings, I’m screwed.

15 months ago, when we were worried that the economy was about to go off the rails, we were told that the problem was that the banks had become illiquid and couldn’t lend.   And we turned over billions upon billions of dollars in bailouts so the banks wouldn’t go kablooie.

And now everything’s rosy again, and the banks have mostly returned their bailout money, and now they cut me off, after I paid my bills faithfully every month for years.

Oh yes, we’re recovering, all right….

Posted in Money | No Comments »

1. January 2010 by admin.

“Why would you want to be in a relationship?” my son asked me.  “You can’t do what you want.”

I considered his remarks as I went out with my wife this afternoon to the Museum of Modern Art.  Left to my own devices, I’m not much of a museum-goer; when I was living alone in the early 1990s, and I had a free weekend, I would go to see a movie and prowl the bookstores for a couple of hours.

But if all doors stood open, and I had the choice of doing what I wanted to do by myself or going to the museum with my wife, which would I choose?

It isn’t even close.

Things go much better with a  companion.

Posted in Navel-gazing, Life Goes On | No Comments »

29. December 2009 by admin.

Last Friday, a young man from Nigeria attempted to set off a bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam shortly before it was due to arrive in Detroit.  The effort failed because the explosive didn’t go off as intended: it just lit on fire, and the man was tackled at that point by another passenger.

It wasn’t as if this guy was a total surprise: he was on a terrorist watch list, and his father, a wealthy banker in Nigeria, contacted the American embassy to warn us about him.  But somehow we didn’t recognize the problem in time, didn’t yank his visa, and didn’t stop him from boarding the flight.

The bomb itself was 50 grams of explosive powder packed into a condom and sewn into his underwear (this last resulting in a slew of really silly headlines: ‘Fruit of the Loon;’ ‘Pants on Fire’).  There was nothing to show on a metal detector, and one would have to do a very thorough pat-down to find the package (insert appropriate off-color remark here).

The response from our leadership has been singularly inept: Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, first asserted that ‘the system worked’ until confronted by overwhelming evidence that it hadn’t.  And Our Fearless Leader took a few minutes out of his Hawaii vacation on Monday to tell us what we already knew, because, after all, the President should say something about such an event.

There is talk about using full-body scanners to detect packages that one might carry on one’s person.  They’re effective, but they enable the viewer to look at the scanned person… naked.   I guess that’s OK, just as long as I can’t hear them snicker.

I’ll take someone in a remote location looking at me naked and snickering over some of the rules that came out after the incident.  For the last hour of a flight, passengers are to sit in their seats and do nothing.  No laptops, or blankets, or pillows, or even a paperback novel.  And no hints as to where the plane might be: the video with the map is out, as well as announcements from the pilot.  (Meanwhile, the terrorist can still look out the window!)

I understand that some of these rules may have been rescinded, so perhaps things are a little saner now.  And I’ll admit that I don’t know what the proper response to this event should be.  But adding yet another layer of aviation-security theater does not reassure me.

At least I don’t have any business trips for the next few months….

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Terrorism, Barack Obama | No Comments »

25. December 2009 by admin.

Just for the record, we had a good Christmas.  I didn’t start my shopping until the day before yesterday, but somehow it all came together, and my wife presented her Christmas program, as in past years, and it all came out well.

Yesterday morning, I watched the party-line vote on the health-care bill.  The last time I stopped what I was doing to watch the wheels of government grinding was when President Clinton was impeached and tried before the Senate.  I returned to my work that day feeling that justice had been done: that whatever peccadilloes our President had been involved in, they represented nothing even close to grounds for removal from office.

This time I was observing a travesty.  Health-care reform is bad for the country.  For myself as an individual and as a business owner, I see nothing but higher costs, worse health care, and fewer options.

The only good thing is that the vote is not the end of the road.  While we were led to believe that Obama would be signing the health-care bill into law while enjoying his Christmas turkey, that isn’t happening.  The House and Senate versions must still be reconciled, which won’t happen until February or so.

Perhaps this mess will be derailed, after all….

Posted in Health Care, Dysfunctional Government | No Comments »

22. December 2009 by admin.

The health care reform bill passed the Senate on Monday morning, and is close to becoming law.  The Democrats, by their numbers, have simply silenced any effective debate on the measure.

The poorer among us will be covered by an expansion of Medicaid.  Funding for Medicaid is provided jointly by the Federal government and the states.  As a result, most states will be mandated to support the cost of a broader Medicaid program.   However, Senator Nelson of Nebraska got, as part of the price for his support of the measure, that the Feds would pay Nebraska’s increased Medicaid costs so the state wouldn’t have to.   Meanwhile, with New York State going broke even without new Medicaid mandates, our esteemed senators, loyal Democrats that they are, didn’t get us one thin dime.  (Senator Nelson also insisted that the Federal government not pay for abortions through insurance subsidies, but that’s within the realm of reasonable politics.)

The rest of us will have to purchase insurance for ourselves or get it through our employment.  Those who don’t will have to pay a penalty tax.  Given that insurers won’t be able to decline coverage for pre-existing conditions, or adjust rates to the age of the insured to properly reflect the actual risk, insurance will become very expensive. New York has similar rules as part of state law, so insurance is already expensive here, but premiums are expected to rise still further.

As a result, insurance will be so expensive that most ordinary people won’t be able to afford it without help.  So the Federal government will subsidize part or all of the cost.

Meanwhile, the government will also define what constitutes an ‘acceptable’ health insurance policy.  As a result, when the cost of medical care goes up (as it certainly will, because there are no direct measures to contain costs), Federal regulators will respond by identifying ‘appropriate’ treatments that will be covered by ‘acceptable’ insurance policies.  And expensive treatments will be limited or made unavailable as a result.  The government may also institute a rule, similar to current Medicare, that a doctor who takes insurance money may not contract independently with patients for treatments that insurance won’t cover.

Yes, insurance companies will remain, and they will ‘compete’ for your business.  But with the benefits to be provided set by government, and the actuarial performance set by government, they won’t be able to compete on the actual attributes of their insurance.

So what we end up with is government control of the health care system, just like socialized medicine.  But instead of the government paying directly for health care, the control is accomplished through regulation of insurance, which everyone is required to buy.

And there’s nothing I can do about it.  I could write my Senators and Congressman, but they’re true loyal Democrats, totally in favor of the plan.  They didn’t even try to wheedle some extra benefits for their home state like Senator Nelson.

I should save my breath to cool my porridge.

Posted in Health Care, Dysfunctional Government, Barack Obama | No Comments »

21. December 2009 by admin.

Two news items this weekend:

• Friday night, five trains traveling through the tunnel under the English Channel became stalled, trapping over 2000 passengers for over 12 hours.  A sixth train made it through the tunnel, only to fail shortly after reaching England.   It was suggested that the problem was ice and snow that had accumulated on the trains’ electrical equipment while traveling in northern France, which then melted while the train was inside the tunnel, triggering short circuits.  It’s a charming thought, except that the Channel Tunnel trains have been in service for over a decade, and people have been running electric trains through tunnels for over a century now.  Service through the tunnel is still suspended today while engineers work on the problem.
• Yesterday afternoon, one of the escalators at Macy’s Herald Square caught fire, forcing the evacuation of the store for an hour.  We’ve known how to operate escalators for a few decades now, so why would this happen on one of the busiest shopping days of the year?

We should know better than that.

Posted in Things Falling Apart | No Comments »

20. December 2009 by admin.

When I was a kid, I didn’t really believe in Santa Claus.  I did write letters to him, and somehow most 0f what I asked for actually showed up on Christmas morning.  I figured that, most probably, my parents bought the presents, but still thought the Santa Claus story was charming.  I enjoyed the Tim Allen picture, The Santa Clause, when it came out a few years ago, as an interesting vision of the story.

Let’s consider, for a moment, what Santa Claus has to do:

• Compile a list of all of the children of the world;
• Determine whether each child is ‘naughty’ or ‘nice;’
• Identify one or more appropriate presents for each child, possibly taking into account the child’s own wishes;
• Build all of the presents, although this part could be outsourced;
• Deliver all of the  presents, across the entire world, in one night.

When I was a kid, accomplishing all of these tasks seemed beyond what the people or organizations around me could do, but I imagined that it might be possible for someone to do it.  And since the presents did arrive on Christmas morning, and my parents swore up and down that the presents really came from Santa, I contemplated Christmas with a sense of wonder.  Maybe that Santa stuff was true, after all.

But now, not only does Santa Claus have a Web site, but he also has an iPhone application that supposedly determines, in real time, whether one is naughty or nice.  The wonder is gone: Santa lives on the Internet, where it is obviously possible to keep track of everyone.  And if we track a parcel from California on its way to New York, tracking Santa on his Christmas Eve travels should be trivial.

When I was a kid, what was charming about Santa Claus was that the details of the process were left to our fertile childhood imaginations.  But now the process of Santa is now available for all to see, and it has become about as charming as, well, FedEx.

And as a result, it has become that much easier to realize that it isn’t real, after all.

Posted in Christmas | No Comments »

13. December 2009 by admin.

When I wrote my last entry, about three months ago, I had written some brief observations about the proposed ‘health care reform’ legislation, and said that I would write more about it shortly.

Three months later, the legislation has passed the House and is now under debate in the Senate.  The Republicans hate it, but since the Democrats have 60 of the 100 seats, how the Republicans feel about it doesn’t matter.

Basically, the scheme is that all Americans will  be required to carry health insurance that meets certain standards, either on their own account or through their employment.  If they don’t have a satisfactory plan, they will have to pay a penalty to the Feds.

In addition, health insurers will not be able to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.   That sounds really nice, but we already have a rule like that in New York, and one of the main effects of it is to make health insurance preposterously expensive, as it encourages normally healthy people to wait until something goes wrong before buying insurance.  I once priced health insurance on an individual direct-pay account for my family: it cost over $2500/month.  I was able to make a better deal than that, but it’s still very expensive.  Most assessments of the new legislation concur that it will raise health insurance  costs for most Americans.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t seem to do anything to actually contain health care costs, other than to cut Medicare reimbursements, something that has been on the books for several years, but is always overridden by Congress so that it has no practical effect.  And the heavy lifting of actually providing coverage for people who legitimately couldn’t afford it is accomplished by expanding Medicare and Medicaid.

I would have understood, and even supported, a measure that would bring a Canadian-style system to this country, complete with measures to contain costs, as long as such a system did not preclude one from purchasing health care with one’s own funds or private insurance.

But we can’t do that, because we want to have our cake and eat it too.

*          *          *

Friday night, I watched the movie Kate and Leopold with my wife on the tube.  (Silly question:  when I ultimately get a flat-panel TV to replace the big heavy Sony in our bedroom, will I still call it ‘the tube’?)  In the movie, Leopold, the Duke of Albany, is transported from 1876 to 21st-Century New York City to great comic effect.

What’s so funny about a guy from 1876?  He speaks contemporary English; his dress is overly formal by our standards, but not too outlandish.  But what makes Leopold funny is that he has what seems to us as an exaggerated sense of integrity and honor.

He speaks the truth when we in the 21st Century would issue jaded cynicism.  He is asked to promote a product, and when he discovers the claims made about it are false, he flatly refuses.  Most people today would either go forward with the promotion (one has to earn a living, after all), or make an exaggerated show of refusing (you see, people, I have integrity!).

Perhaps integrity and honor have beome anachronisms….

Posted in Health Care, Navel-gazing | No Comments »

19. September 2009 by admin.

I have been wanting to write something about President Obama’s health care plan, but have been having trouble getting all my thoughts in order.  I know:

• Government spending on health care in this country (at all levels) per capita is slightly higher than in countries with ’socialized medicine.’
• Private spending on health care in the US is about the same per capita as public spending, so we collectively spend a little more than twice as much on health care.
• In countries with socialized medicine, there are often shortages of doctors, and waiting lists for specialized treatments.  And sometimes people die from not having receive treatments that would be more readily available in the US.
• On the other hand, on general measures of public health, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, and obesity, the US is behind other countries with socialized medicine.
• The US is the fount of medical innovation in the world, chiefly because someone who comes up with a good idea can turn a profit from it.
• People in the US go bankrupt every day from the cost of health care.  An extended illness or cancer can easily wipe out an individual’s savings.  Insurance can help, but often has its own limitations and horror stories.
• The cost of health care is going up rapidly, much faster than the general rate of inflation.  My health insurance premium went up 20% this year, and that’s consistent with past years.  Back when I was an employee, my company would moan every year about how the price if insurance had gone up, and that they would absorb most of the cost, but our co-pays would have to go up.
• Medicare, the government insurance program for the elderly, tries to limit its costs by setting rates at which it will reimburse for services, but does not try to limit the services themselves.  This is called ‘not getting between the doctor and the patient.’

Some first thoughts:

• If the cost of health care continues to go up, it will upend not only the government’s budget, but everyone else’s as well.
• It would be tempting to believe that we could somehow ‘cut the waste’ and magically reduce the cost of health care without actually reducing the care that is delivered.  Perhaps we can trim a few percent, but not enough to solve the problem.
• It’s one matter for the government to take measures to control its own costs.  That’s entirely reasonable.  It’s quite another for the government to try to solve everyone’s cost problem.
• It would be spectacularly bad for the government to do something that would kill the innovative, capitalist component of health care.

More to follow….

Posted in Health Care, Dysfunctional Government, Barack Obama | No Comments »

12. September 2009 by admin.

Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center.  The site is still basically a hole in the ground, with construction proceeding at a glacial pace.

So how do we commemorate a day in which we got our ass whipped because we were unprepared?

It would seem appropriate to spend a few moments in quiet contemplation about the events of that day, those who died, the nature of our enemy, and the challenge that they represent.  But that’s not what what’s happening.

For two hours yesterday morning, they recited the names of those who died in the collapse of the Twin Towers, as they have done every 11 September since 2001.  That’s entirely appropriate.

But what is getting lost is how they died, and what we should do besides stopping the city for two hours to remember them.  The danger is still out there, biding its time, contemplating the next opportunity to strike.

It’s been contemplated to include an exhibit on the terrorist hijackers at the World Trade Center memorial.  Of course, we should: not to honor them, but to remind ourselves of the nature of our enemy, and to rededicate ourselves to the battles we face.  When we ultimately win the war against the terrorists, the exhibit can reasonably be turned into something else, as it will have served its purpose.

But I’m in the minority here: most have reacted with horror to the thought of memorializing the hijackers alongside their victims.   So how did the victims die?  Lightning strikes?  An earthquake?  Catastrophic elevator implosions?  Do we want to forget the people who brought about the destruction of 11 September–and are gathering their forces to do it again–even as we spend billions sending our young people off to war?

Or is it that in our politically correct culture, we can’t bring ourselves to identify a group of people as ‘the enemy’?

This brings us to the alternate, post-Bush, commemoration of 11 September: the ‘national day of service’ proposed by President Obama.  It’s a charming thought, and good things can get done, but it doesn’t address what happened that day and the danger that it still represents.

We don’t remember 7 December, ‘a date that will live in infamy,’ very much anymore.  But its time had passed: we fought the Japanese, we won, and now, two generations or so later, they are important allies.  Hopefully, the same will one day happen to 11 September.

But not yet.

Posted in World Trade Center, Things Falling Apart, Terrorism | No Comments »

3. September 2009 by admin.

As of this month, it is now illegal in the European Community to import or manufacture frosted or 100-watt incandescent light bulbs.  Stores that carry them can sell out their stock, and that’s what they’ve been doing: across the continent, people are running to purchase the last of the old-school light bulbs.

The incandescent bulbs are supposed to be replaced with compact fluorescent bulbs that, according to legend, last ten times longer and use one-quarter of the electricity.

I wish I could like the new bulbs.  Newer versions do a decent job of matching the color of an incandescent light bulb, and they do use less power.  But we need light bulbs in our house, and last night I went out and bought… incandescent.

My big problem with them is that besides allegedly lasting ten times as long, they also cost ten times as much.  It would be a fair deal if it were true.  But the compact fluorescent bulbs that I’ve tried actually last 6-8 months, about the same as incandescent bulbs.  So the amount of money that I save on electricity, which is supposed to more than cover the increased cost of the bulb, doesn’t break even.

And my experience in my home is not unique.  A couple of years ago, the management in our apartment building replaced all the light bulbs in the hallways with compact fluorescents.  More than half of them have since been replaced by traditional bulbs.

And there are other issues:

• Incandescent bulbs are light and simple to produce, and there could be an economic case for continuing to manufacture them in this country.  Compact fluorescent bulbs are electronic devices, almost universally imported from China.
• I don’t have the figures, but I believe that it takes less in terms of energy, raw materials, and industrial toxins to make and transport an incandescent bulb as compared to fluorescent.  It’s probably still favorable even if one compares ten incandescent bulbs against one fluorescent bulb.
• Fluorescent bulbs contain mercury, which is toxic.  In New York City, households can still throw them in the trash, but businesses must recycle them.  In the future, households may be required to recycle them as well.
• When an incandescent bulb fails, it goes out, and doesn’t draw any more power.  A failed compact fluorescent may still draw power: it just doesn’t out out any light.

So I’m off the fluorescent bulbs for now, or at least until the Light Bulb Police come after me.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

20. August 2009 by admin.

I never liked hot weather.

• When I was a kid, I never really liked summer camp, but the absolute worst was when we had a day at the beach.
• One of my mantras in my early twenties was, “Hang on baby, September’s coming.”
• When I got divorced, I surprised both my lawyer and my ex-wife’s lawyer when I proposed that, after Thanksgiving and Christmas, which we would share, I would get to see my son for the cold-weather holidays, and my ex-wife could see him on the hot-weather holidays.
• To this day, I still celebrate Retro-Rockets Day, the first genuinely cool day in late summer as a harbinger of things to come.

Until a few years ago, I accepted summer as part of the human condition.  More recently, I’ve become resentful with the hot weather, and annoyed with the TV weather reporters who make it seem so wonderful that it’s broiling out.

And now, I understand why.

Up until about 2003, my life slowed down for the summer.   Ultimately, some years after the divorce, my son moved in with me, but spent much of the summer vacation with his mother.  Work slowed down, too: ten years ago, I would commonly take a summertime Monday or Friday off as a vacation day, as everything was under control and there was nothing I urgently needed to do until the next ‘real’ workday.

But not anymore.  In particular, work doesn’t slow down anymore.  Business doesn’t have an off-season.

Posted in Navel-gazing, Life Goes On | No Comments »

16. August 2009 by admin.

I need to say, at the outset, that I’m not a car person.  I don’t own a car; I don’t feel I need one to be complete as a man or as an American; I consider them a means of transportation and not a member of the family; and I certainly do not want, as one recent commercial would suggest, to have a relationship with a car that smolders for a long time (the relationship, not the car).

One of the more successful government programs to stimulate the economy has been a grant of up to $4500 to people turning in old cars, for the purpose of buying a more fuel-efficient new car.  I’m not sure how much it is actually stimulating the economy, but it’s making people feel better, and I’ll grant that that’s worth something.

I accept, on an intellectual level, that the cars turned in under this program should be disabled so that they (1) can’t be turned in again, and (2) won’t appear on the roads of America (or anyplace else).

But the method for disabling the cars upsets me on a visceral level.  The engine oil is replaced with a solution of sodium silicate (brand name: Castle Clunker Bomb) and the engine is run at moderate speed to grind itself to destruction.

I can understand why the bureaucrats came up with the method: it’s effective, relatively safe, requires little mechanical skill, and doesn’t depend on the configuration of the engine.  But I can imagine myself as a mechanic, after a lifetime of training and experience in keeping cars running smoothly, having to listen to the sound of the engine destroying itself.  I’d want to tell my boss to go to hell; I’d rather drill a hole in the engine block (one of the methods that was considered and rejected).

When we kill living things of necessity, we try to do it cleanly.  I said at the beginning of this entry that I’m not a car person.  But the thought of enlisting a machine in the cause of its own destruction really bothers me.

Is the Clunker Bomb a metaphor for our world, in which productivity is turned to destruction?   Is it that my mother told me to ‘waste not, want not,’ and the thought of destroying thousands of car engines seems spectacularly wasteful?

Or is it that a society that destroys its cars–almost as near and dear to our hearts as Americans as our family pets–in such a horrendous manner will one day devise a similar method to destroy its people?

Posted in Automobiles, Dysfunctional Government, Money | No Comments »

27. July 2009 by admin.

Recently, the city has had its contractors running around painting the streets green in my neighborhood to designate bicycle paths:

But my neighborhood is just an instance of a larger pattern.  New bike paths are being set up all over the city.  In some streets in Manhattan, pavement markings call for cars to park in what seems to be the middle of the street, so that the curb lane can be given over to cyclists.

On the one hand, I’m a bicyclist, and I appreciate anything the city can do to make my trip easier and safer.  But given that the city supposedly has a budget crisis, there are other things that I’m sure would be a better use of scarce funds.

Maybe it’s stimulus money: our tax dollars at work.  At least it’s work and jobs for people.

Still, I’m suspicious of this flurry of activity.  Are there plans for gasoline to go up to $50/gallon next year so we’ll all have to ride bicycles?

Posted in Bicycling, New York City | No Comments »

23. July 2009 by admin.

I could give chapter and verse on how rotten I believe health care is in this country.  I had the devil’s own time getting health insurance when I went into business for myself, and the premiums went up about 20% when the policy renewed this spring.  Hospitals are most unpleasant places; most of them seem to run on the ragged edge of malpractice.

And the price of all this rottenness?  Governments (Federal, State, and local) in the US collectively spend more per capita than in countries with ’socialized medicine.’  Private payers spend again as much: in total, we spend more than twice as much per capita on health care than in other industrialized countries.

And the cost goes up and up, faster than the general rate of inflation.  My insurance company isn’t raising my premium by 20% to tick me off: they do it because their costs went up similarly.

This is the ‘unsustainable’ condition that President Obama is warning us about in his efforts for ‘health care reform.’  Unchecked, the costs will upend government budgets, and indeed the private economy as well.

Last night, Our Fearless Leader addressed the nation to address the issue.  He sounded all the right notes, but one thing troubles me:

The President noted that we pay more for health care than in other countries, and that lowering health care costs is a key goal.  He then asserted that two-thirds of the cost of health care reform is what is currently being paid in the existing system, and that one-third will have to come from cost savings or taxes or some other new funding.

So he’s contemplating a 50% increase in expenditures.

How, exactly, is this a savings?

Unfortunately, a real solution to this problem necessarily involves limiting the actual cost of health care, and nothing in the current plans seems to do more than nibble around the edges.

The problem is that the current system is an immense self-licking ice cream cone, and there are are politicial constituencies that earn their living from it.  Until an effort is made to actually contain costs, and not just find newer and cleverer ways to fund them, we’re still stuck.

Posted in Health Care, Dysfunctional Government, Barack Obama | No Comments »

20. July 2009 by admin.

Yesterday I finally got around to seeing the new version of The Taking of Pelham 123, the story of a New York City subway hijacking.  The original 1974 version, with Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau, was one of the touchstones of my adolescence, and the first R-rated movie that my parents took me to see.

The reviews of the new version were all similar: it’s a good movie, but don’t compare it with the original.  Alas, such a comparison is inevitable: the new version sucks.

When the original was made, the Transit Authority was afraid that someone might actually try to hijack a train.  While much of the movie was actually filmed on the subway, a disclaimer at the end indicated that the TA did not render any technical assistance. Nevertheless, the movie presented an authentic view of the subway and its operation.

The current version was made with the full cooperation of the TA, and they seemed to go our of their way to get the details wrong.  If you ride the real subway regularly, the version in the current Pelham will seem ass-backwards.

Some of the biggest howlers come from the abject rearrangement of the city to fit the script.  There is no Federal Reserve Bank in Brooklyn, and the police car delivering the money appears a half-block from its destination (Grand Central Terminal) before getting wrecked on First Avenue.  And a train can’t go from the Lex line to Coney Island without backtracking.

While John Travolta and Denzel Washington put in good performances, they’re done in by the script.  Travolta is Ryder, a former Wall Streeter who was thrown in prison for embezzlement and now sports a tough-guy tattoo.  He is violent, but strangely philosophical when he talks on the radio.  The real Ryder (like the one in the 1974 movie) would have known to state his demands and shut up.  (But then, of course, there wouldn’t be a movie.)

Denzel Washington is Garber, a manager demoted to the Control Center because of an alleged bribe.  At least the scriptwriters tried to make him a realistic Control Center operator: he talks the talk and looks plausible through the made-up procedures.  But we lose him, too, when he turns into an action hero.

In brief, the charm of the original Pelham is that it feels real.  The new version does not.  The original turns on crisp dialogue, much of which has been replaced with psychobabble.  Perhaps if I had watched it in another frame of mind, I could have laughed at all their stupid mistakes. But as it was, I just found it annoying.

Nevertheless, I’ll probably get the DVD when it comes out, and keep it as a benchmark of how far we’ve gone down since 1974.

Posted in New York City, Movies | No Comments »

9. July 2009 by admin.

I’m on vacation this week in the Berkshires, staying in a comfy bed-and-breakfast in western Massachusetts.

One of my colleagues asked me, “Why go there?”  It’s an escape from the heat of the city (although it’s been a cool summer so far); the people are friendly; and there are places and things to do that interest me and my wife.

So this past weekend, I rented a car for the trip.  I told the guy where I was going, and he asked me if I’d like to rent a GPS box for the trip.

Thirty years ago, if you had asked me what sort of gizmo I’d like to have in my car, I would have salivated at the thought of a device that established my location and displayed it on a map.

Alas, now that one can buy a GPS box for $200-$300, I don’t want one.  I still think the idea is cool, and I will watch the GPS display if I’m riding in someone else’s car.

I always thought that a basic element of driving is knowing where you are, and where you want to go.  I don’t like it when someone tells me to follow them; I want to know the way myself.

So when I travel by car to a place I’m not familiar with, part of the exercise is to get out the maps and understand the route.   And it works: I’ve never gotten lost.

OK, in fairness, I can’t quite say that: I’ve sometimes lost track of where I was exactly, but I knew I was heading in the right direction, and eventually came to a spot that I did recognize where I could continue onward.  I’ve never had to backtrack in such cases.

And last night, I did, indeed, go around in circles, but that was because the place I was visiting advertised itself as being located on one road, but was actually on an adjacent road.

But neither of those cases really counts as ‘lost.’  Navigation is part of the joy of driving, and I don’t want to give that up, least of all to a made-in-China, value-engineered, plastic turd.

Except that I’m sure that most people who buy GPS boxes do it for exactly that reason: to save themselves the trouble of thought.

Posted in Travel, Life Goes On | No Comments »

21. June 2009 by admin.

When Barack Obama was running for President last year, much was made of his statement that he was willing to negotiate with our adversaries.  Some thought he was hopelessly naive, while others (including myself) thought it was preferable to the policies of then-President Bush to reach for the blunderbuss whenever the opportunity presented itself.

In all of the discussions, nobody brought out the corollary of Obama’s position: that in being willing to negotiate with one’s adversaries, one must accept their  policies and actions.  If you say, “I want to talk, but what you’ve done is unacceptable,” you’ve ended the conversation very quickly.

So now we have the Iranian elections, in which the incumbent Ahmadinejad officially won with over 65% of the vote, despite pre-election data suggesting a close race.  President Bush, or any other President in recent memory, would have criticized the Iranian government for trampling the will of the people.

But not Obama.  He has described the election issue as the problem for a sovereign state, which should properly be resolved by that state without our intervention.  He has remarked that he doesn’t want the Iranian government to have any cause to blame us for their situation.

It’s a charming thought, except the Iranians are blaming us anyway.  Truth never stood in the way of good propaganda.

On Friday, the religious leader of Iran called for a halt to demonstrations, or else severe consequences would follow.  A curtain of silence has fallen across the country, as the government has imposed increasing restrictions on the foreign press.  We know that the demonstrations are continuing, and that the authorities are responding.  Whether this is simply riot control, or something darker, is unknown.

But our President can’t say anything about it, lest the Iranians use it against us.

Posted in Iran, Barack Obama | No Comments »

14. June 2009 by admin.

This morning’s Daily News brought a color casino advertising supplement: all the latest shiny places to have fun.  The charm of casino gambling, for those of us who can’t afford to lose $10,000 at a clip, escapes me.  I went to Las Vegas a few years ago with my wife, and was actually bored.  But if you enjoy it, go and have fun: it’s a free country.

I was idly turning the pages until I saw a picture of a vaguely industrial-looking casino building, framed by a vaguely industrial-looking steel arch.  It was the Sands Bethelehem, built on the site of the former Bethlehem Steel plant in northeastern Pennsylvania.

When I was a kid, I used to see construction sites in the city, many of them for skyscrapers, and many of them had signs that read, ‘Bethlehem Steel.’  I wasn’t quite sure about the connection between the steel in the buildings and Jesus’s birthplace, but it was clear that these were big buildings going up.

So it’s come to that: what was formerly a locus of productive activity has now become a facility for depleting thousands of people of their savings.  But the people keep showing up, eager to be depleted, and the community where the facility is located is happy to have it there, because it brings tax revenue.

Didn’t the United States used to be a nation that accomplished things?

Posted in Things Falling Apart, Money | No Comments »

13. June 2009 by admin.

Earlier this week, the Iranians held their Presidential elections.  The two major candidates were the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Iran has been troublesome for the United States for many years, and under its Ahmadinejad, those troubles have continued.  He has threatened to destroy Israel, pushed for the development of Iranian nuclear weapons, and Iran has been a sponsor of terrorist groups in the Middle East.

His opponent, Mousavi, wants to improve relationships with the West, improve the economy, and address some of the excesses of the morals police.  To be sure, he couldn’t go that far with it: Iran’s civil government is controlled by its religious leadership, who had to approve all of the candidates.  But at least it was a step in the right direction.

Preliminary polling data suggested that the election would be a close race: those favoring Mousavi, and his efforts for reform, would be closely matched by those favoring Ahmadinejad, his religious perspective, and the Iranian government subsidies provided under his leadership.

But the preliminary data were wrong: the incumbent Ahmadinejad swept the election with over 65% of the vote.

Either the election was rigged, or the Western pollsters and media somehow managed to disregard Ahmadinejad’s political base.

I don’t know which is the case.  I suspect that (a) the Iranians won’t be particularly anxious to investigate the results, and (b) they won’t let others investigate, either.  So we’ll probably never know for sure.

But why did we let ourselves believe that another alternative was possible?

Posted in Iran | No Comments »

10. June 2009 by admin.

It’s long been my contention that the Blackberry device, with its instant ability to send and receive e-mail, is a detriment, rather than an asset, to one’s professional abilities.  I’ve known too many people who fire off an instant Blackberry response to an easy question or to good news, but disappear for weeks when asked something requiring actual thought.  And I’ve had too many instances of confusion over someone’s half-baked Blackberry answer.  (For my part, I have a cell phone with Windows that can send and receive e-mails.  But it will only do it when I ask: it won’t poke me in the ribs when a message comes in.  And I usually wait until I’m at my computer to answer the e-mails, unless it’s genuinely urgent or the phone is the only device at hand.)

Now the Blackberry has tripped up the apparently former Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, Malcolm Smith.  There are 32 Democrats and 30 Republicans in the State Senate, and Smith is the leader of the Democrats.

But this week, two Democratic state senators decided that they would caucus with the Republicans instead, tipping the balance of the Senate.

And how did this happen?  Apparently some time in the recent past, Smith had a meeting with Tom Golisano, one-time candidate for Governor, who recently moved to Florida, amid considerable publicity, to avoid heavy New York State taxes.  And at this meeting, Smith apparently offended Golisano by paying more attention to his Blackberry than his guest.  So Golisano set the wheels in motion for a Republican coup.

As far as my reaction to the coup itself, I have none.  The New York State Legislature is a nexus of evil in the modern world, and I don’t believe that it matters which party is in power.  I can’t say that the Republicans are better or worse than the Democrats (within the NY legislature), and I can’t say whether the coup was a blow for democracy or an exercise in corruption.

But it’s good to see a Blackberry addict get what he deserves.

Posted in New York State, Dysfunctional Government, PDA | No Comments »

9. June 2009 by admin.

There’s a new TV commercial for the Lincoln MKZ: sleek visuals of the vehicle, set to the Shiny Toy Guns’ version of ‘Major Tom (Coming Home).’ It’s an appealing commercial: the music is propulsive and exciting in a way that most current music isn’t.

This is in fact the second Lincoln commercial set to a Major Tom song; last year they did one with Cat Power’s version of ‘Space Oddity.’

Did anyone notice that, in the Major Tom songs, the Major’s vehicle suffers some kind of fatal malfunction and never returns home?

Posted in Media | No Comments »

6. June 2009 by admin.

For about the last month, I’ve had a problem with the phone in the office.  The keypad works for making phone calls and checking its own voice mail, but not for checking other voice mail or accessing extensions or access numbers at places that I call.

A brief test confirmed the problem: I called my own cell phone and poked the keypad: the tones from the keypad weren’t getting through to the other end.

OK, I know at this stage I’m supposed to call for tech support, but I’m an engineer, and tech support is for losers.  The phone is an IP phone, so I started with the phone’s IP address.  Looking it up revealed a Web control interface.  I diddled around with a couple of parameters; no luck.

The next step was the instruction manual.  Rummaging around, I found the following passage:

The phone supports in-band and out-of-band DTMF functionality. It prefers out-of-band DTMF, but, if the other party does not support it, the phone falls back to in-band DTMF. This standard phone behavior cannot be changed.

Oh, so it ‘prefers’ not to send the tones down the wire with the audio.  So nice of it!

More practically, this suggested that the problem originated not with the phone, but with the network, as the keypad worked just fine in the past.  Perhaps a firmware upgrade might help, but that could cause further trouble, and possibly get me in trouble with the Phone Police.  Time to heave a sigh and write a note to tech support.

Fifteen minutes later, a smiling techie visited my office, changed out my phone, and all is well. “We’ve had a bunch of complaints about this in the last couple of months,” he told me.

So now I have a new phone in my office.  It looks sexier, with multicolored indicator lights and a more detailed display, and it doesn’t require me to push an ‘enter’ button after dialing a phone number.  Other than that, it’s still… a phone.  It’s not going to cook my breakfast, or write my e-mails, or do anything like that.

And so I wonder: why replace a perfectly good phone to fix what is properly a network problem?  Was it really less expensive to replace the phones for everyone in the space?  Do they replace the phone because it looks like customer service?  Or is it just the modern way of doing business?

Is buying new stuff really that much cheaper than actual mental effort?

Posted in Networking (computer), Things Falling Apart | No Comments »

23. May 2009 by admin.

Last Sunday, I went with my son to see the new Star Trek movie.  Visually, the movie is a masterpiece, although some of the special effects seem a little overwrought for my taste.  But there was something missing, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

My son thought the movie was wonderful: “There seems to be more action, more fun.  The older Star Trek was tied up in procedures, and the Prime Directive and such.”

Aha!  That was what gave Star Trek its satisfying snap, and what was missing in this incarnation.  Starfleet, we imagine, had its origins in earthbound military forces, and the earlier versions were bound to military traditions of respect and discipline.  The current version, striving to be more like Star Wars, cuts loose from the tradition: the leadership is a bunch of old fogies, and rules are for sissies.

While the current movie establishes a basis for a new generation of Kirk and Spock adventures,  they’ll probably follow the same pattern.  The older movies presented serving on a starship as something to aspire to; now anyone can do it if they can bend enough rules.

Rather the same thing happened with James Bond: the previous incarnations of the character, through Pierce Brosnan, presented a man who lived and worked by his wits.  The Daniel Craig Bond, in contrast, is an Energizer Bunny who dances through machine-gun fire, but doesn’t seem to have much to say.

No, I can’t go home again, except perhaps on DVD.

Posted in Movies | No Comments »

19. May 2009 by admin.

I woke up this morning in a foul mood, not sick, but not wanting to do anything.  The last few weeks have been frenetically busy, and this week is not so much a lull as a pause before the mayhem continues next week.

“Do you have any meetings today,” my wife asked me.

“No.”

“Why don’t you ride your bike to work?”

When the weather is nice, and I’m working in the office on Sundays, I like to bike to work, but not usually on a weekday.  But today was a gorgeously clear day, a little cool for late May: why not?

I left the house a little late, and missed the peak of the rush hour.  The traffic was there, but nothing too terrible.  In my previous trips I tried a number of schemes to avoid Houston Street, a horribly busy place with lots of trucks.  But the schemes usually involve an awkward left turn, which didn’t work in the heavier weekday traffic.  It turned out the Houston Street wasn’t so bad after all.

And, just like that, the funk was busted.  The endorphins were flowing, and all was well.  I had expected a calm day, but it didn’t happen that way.  Not to worry: the problems of the day were just targets to get blasted, nothing to get upset over.

So many thanks for the suggestion, Ducky.

Posted in Life Goes On | No Comments »

10. May 2009 by admin.

I have been terribly busy the last few weeks, and haven’t had much time to write.  But while I’ve been out, I note that a number of… entities… have signed on as subscribers to this site.  The names and e-mails addresses seem strange: not strange enough to have been obviously generated by a computer, but not like people’s actual names.

I have to believe that it’s a new form of spam, although I can’t understand to what end: if someone writes a comment, I have to approve it before it appears on the site.  And so far, I haven’t received any comments.

In any case, I’ve deleted all of the subscribers that have signed on so far.  If you meant to be a subscriber, I’m sorry; you’ll have to go back and subscribe again.  But for those who would subscribe in the future: after you subscribe, you have one week to submit a cogent comment on one of the postings.  If I don’t see a comment (I don’t necessarily have to agree with it!), I’ll assume that you’re some kind of bot, and will delete your subscription.

*          *          *

Last week, the state legislature passed a plan to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.  The plan will raise about $1.5 billion through a new payroll tax and  a surcharge on taxi rides.  As a result, the Draconian service cuts that were contemplated a few weeks ago will not come to pass, although there will be some cuts and a modest fare increase.

I should be relieved: while the fare increase is not a big deal for me, the service cuts are a problem, and part of my income as an engineering consultant is derived from the MTA’s capital spending.  But I don’t like it.

One again, the state has papered over the problem with taxing and spending, rather than addressing the real problems.  Why does operating the MTA cost what it does?  Can it work more efficiently?  Given that the operation of the MTA is vital to the economic health of the region and the state, why didn’t the state face the problem squarely in the first place, instead of coming up with half-measures later?  State spending increased by $11 billion this year: what did they spend it on?  And what happens next year, expecially if the economy is still sagging?

But the answers to those questions require thought….

Posted in New York State, Dysfunctional Government, Blogging | No Comments »

12. April 2009 by admin.

It’s a truism in this country that newspapers are dying.  On one level, it makes absolute sense.  A newspaper is a physical artifact: it must be manufactured, distributed, and sold before you read it.  That one can still buy a weekday News or Post for fifty cents is a modern miracle.  In contrast, electronic media are available instantly, often at no incremental cost, given that one has Internet access or cable TV.

And even in the newsprint arena, traditional newspapers are in trouble.  New York City has three major traditional English-language newspapers and two throwaway dailies, distributed for free at subway stations and from streetcorner boxes.   I’m sure the throwaways make money, or else they would simply disappear.

Alas, the throwaways and the electronic media don’t satisfy.  They report on the day’s events; they have pictures; they tell us about tomorrow’s weather.  But something essential is missing, at least for me.

Most of the media tell us what happened, when it happened, and who did it.  Sometimes they delve into how something happened.  But they don’t tell us why, or what the consequences might be, so that we could anticipate, and possibly prepare for, what might happen next.

When I read the paper, I skim the news and then head for the editorial page.  I study the editorials and the op-ed pieces.  I don’t agree with everything, but that’s part of the charm. When I encounter a columnist I’d like to throw rotten tomatoes at, I seek to understand his argument: what’s actually wrong with it?

Editorials in the throwaways are a sometimes thing, and they don’t run op-eds. And none of the other media seem to hit my news analysis spot.  Newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek come out once a week, dwell on whatever they care to, and last maybe thirty minutes.  Opinion magazines are generally on one side of the fence or the other.  Cable television news has nuggets of analysis, but how do you find them?  Sometimes a TV news program will analyze an issue in detail, but generally after an issue has been open for a month or so.  And too much on TV is event reporting or yammering talking heads.

I’m sure I’m in the minority here, wanting not just to find out, but to understand.  But what happens if, collectively, we don’t want to understand anymore?

Posted in Media, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »

11. April 2009 by admin.

An article in yesterday’s New York Post brought out an interesting point:  while we, and much of the world, tend to blame the economic mess on American bankers who over-leveraged themselves, the data suggest something different.

A year ago, when we were dithering with the question of whether or not we were having a recession, much of Europe and Asia was already in trouble.  While we retroactively place the beginning of the recession at December 2007, the wheels didn’t really come off the American economy until September 2008.

So what happened?  In late 2007 and early 2008, there was a huge runup in the price of crude oil, topping out at $150 or so a barrel in July 2008.  For us in the US, the price rise played out as an annoyance: ‘Pain at the Pump’ was a constant headline on the NBC evening news.

The rising price pushed the economies of Europe and Asia, and even Canada, directly into recession.  But we hung on for a while: perhaps our propensity to run up debt shielded us from the direct effects of the price rise.

And then we got in trouble as the price fell. Perhaps we would have hung on if the price had stayed up; perhaps our unregulated hedgemen had bet on the price of petroleum and lost their shirts, and that was the straw that broke our camel’s back.  Or maybe we just exhausted our capacity to paper over our problems with debt.

In any case, when all hell was breaking loose last September and October, nobody seemed to notice–or to assess–the effects of the high price of oil in the previous months.  It was just that the price of oil had dropped because of slack demand.

Yes, our bankers made a royal mess of things, and created an environment in which even responsible businessmen believed they could make money out of thin air by investing in real estate.  But the rising price of oil has more of the blame.

However, if we consider the price of oil, instead of our inept bankers, as a primary cause of our difficulties, our strategy for dealing with the problem should properly change.  In that case, we simply took a hit from a market force that is no longer with us, and should try to walk it off, with some modest stimulus efforts.  The ‘troubled assets’ would be secondary, best left for the market to deal with.

Of course, that’s not the approach we’re taking….

Posted in Money | No Comments »

5. April 2009 by admin.

This past week, the New York State Assembly passed, and the state Senate is contemplating, the state budget for the fiscal year that began… last Thursday.

At a time when the economy is reeling, and one would figure the need to cut back, the budget weighs in at $132 billion, up some $11 billion over last year, and $8 billion over the budget that Governor Paterson proposed.  The State Assembly news release indicated that the budget “closes a projected a $17.65 billion General Fund gap by implementing $5.1 billion in necessary spending cuts, raising $5.2 billion in revenue, utilizing $1.1 in non-recurring revenues and maximizing $6.2 billion in federal stimulus dollars.”

I’m afraid to ask how there can be a $5.1 billion dollar cut if spending is up by $11 billion, and I’m not sure how ‘maximizing’ Federal aid differs from spending it.

Somewhere in New York is $5 billion in State spending that is absolutely wasteful and stupid, and the State leadership was finally able to kill it.  But beyond that, it seems as if the State simply relied on Federal aid and tax increases to otherwise maintain the status quo.  What happens a couple of years down the road, when the economy has recovered and the Federal government is no longer handing out aid?

Meanwhile, the budget legislation also modifies the state drug laws to favor rehabilitation instead of prison.  The original Rockefeller laws from the 1970s were modified a few years ago to eliminate their supposed Draconian excesses, and it seemed to work: prison populations are down, and the streets are far safer now than 20 years ago.   Yet the state Legislature is changing them now, and allocating additional funding for drug treatment alternatives.

So the state has money to preserve the sacred cow of education, and can drop the pile of nuisance taxes that were part of Governor Paterson’s original plan, but they can’t come up with a way to provide funding for the MTA and deter fare hikes and service cuts.  (Perhaps the MTA was one of the stupid items that got cut.)

The distressing part of it is that there seems to be nothing that we as citizens can do to stop this madness.  The state election laws effectively favor incumbents by making it very difficult for newcomers to run for office.  Once in a while, someone makes it, gets sucked into the Albany machine, and turns into a Legislature droid.

And electing a new governor doesn’t seem to help, either.  A while back, we elected Eliot Spitzer on his promise to clean up Albany.  Within six months, he was in a pissing contest with Joe Bruno, leader of the State Senate.  Governor Spitzer had a legitimate question: was Bruno using State travel privileges for political gain?  But by pursuing the matter in a thoroughly inept manner, making it look as if he was using the State Police to spy on Bruno, Spitzer effectively shot himself in the foot.  Needless to say, no actual cleanup occurred.

And then Spitzer really imploded when it turned out that he was seeing prostitutes, and he left office, leaving us Governor Paterson, who has been a singular model of ineptitude.

What can we do (besides move to New Jersey)?

Posted in New York State, Dysfunctional Government, Money | No Comments »

29. March 2009 by admin.

Last week, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), our local mass transit agency, voted to raise fares and cut service.  The price of a monthly MetroCard for the buses and subways will go from $81 to $103 per month, and fares and tolls for other MTA facilities (they’re also in charge of the commuter railroads, and toll bridges and tunnels) will similarly go up.

That, in and of itself, wouldn’t be too bad: public transportation in New York works pretty well, and would be a good value even with the fare increase.  But the plan also includes a series of service cuts, including dropping two subway lines and about 30 bus routes, and reducing late-night subway service by one-third.

In good times, financing the MTA is not a critical problem: the agency is financed with transfer taxes on real estate and other similar transations.  But since the economy went kablooie, tax revenues are way down.

Historically, New York State has subsidized the MTA to some extent, but that’s difficult right now because the state is broke.  It’s not as if we couldn’t see the problem coming: Richard Ravitch, who ran the MTA years ago, was tasked last year with coming up with a plan to help finance the MTA under the current circumstances.  However, none of his recommendations have gotten through the New York State Legislature.  The Ravitch report included a plan to charge tolls on the East and Harlem River bridges that are currently free, but somehow the Legislature first decided that the toll could only be $2 (not the $5 proposed in the Ravitch report) and then couldn’t be done at all.

The only thing that the Legislature has apparently done, and isn’t specific to the MTA, is to crank up the income tax on higher brackets (above $250,000/yr).  While such a tax increase is a necessary component of dealing with the problem,  it can’t be the entire solution: raise the taxes enough, and the people who pay them will go elsewhere.

But then the Legislature seems to be on its own little planet, where there’s a shortage of funds, but never any need to do anything about it, and the Governor is on his own little satellite, apparently sucking his thumb while the whole mess unfolds.

The thought is that the Legislature will get off its rump and ‘do something’ to help fund the MTA.  The newspapers have been suggesting that we should all call the Governor and our legislators to get them to do something.

It seems pointless: I’ll save my breath to cool my porridge.

But watch: sometime late in May they’ll put something together, and the fares will only go up by 10%.

They always do stuff like that.

They’ll come through.

Won’t they?

Posted in New York State, Dysfunctional Government, Money | No Comments »

27. March 2009 by admin.

Today’s morning newspapers were full of righteous indignation that the Port Authority would henceforth call the tallest building on the former World Trade Center site ‘One World Trade Center,’ instead of ‘Freedom Tower.’  The editorial writers were in high dudgeon: how dare they strip the building of its proper patriotic name in the interest of… marketing?

For my part, it seems the most sensible decision the Port Authority has made about the site in years.  The name ‘Freedom Tower’ reeks of Orwellian doublespeak and pointless politically correct posturing.

Now, if they can just get the damned thing built….

Posted in World Trade Center | No Comments »

22. March 2009 by admin.

The big news last week was that failing insurance company AIG, despite receiving $180 billion in bailouts from the government, spent $165 million on employee bonuses, including some of the people who were responsible for AIG imploding.  There was an uproar in the press, and the House passed a 90% penalty tax in an effort to recover the bonus money.

But then it came out that our leadership knew about the bonuses and lad let them stand in earlier bailout legislation.  Moreover, the Constitution prohibits retroactive law.

I’d like to think that a prudent management, in writing contracts for employee bonuses, would include provisions for cancelling the bonus if the employee runs the company into the ground.  But then a prudent management would not have let itself be run into the ground.

In the end, even though it feels good to give in to the populist rage and try to take the bonuses back through one means or another, it’s probably better to let them stand.  We’re supposed to be a nation of laws and not of mob rule.  Moreover, some of the employees receiving bonuses might actually deserve them.

The bigger questions  are:

• Why did AIG management, over the years, applaud the very measures that led to their destruction?  The short answer is, ‘they turned a profit.’
• Why did the government so readily hand over billions to bail out AIG?  The short answer is, ‘AIG was, and is, too big to fail.’
• Why did nobody care to look beyond the short answers?

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Things Falling Apart, Money | No Comments »

21. March 2009 by admin.

There was some encouraging news this week: Citigroup reported that it had turned a profit.  Yes, they receved billions in bailout money, but it’s still encouraging.  And the Dow Jones average was up for the week, for the second straight week.

Has the market found its bottom?  In another time, the answer might be ‘yes:’  we would reasonably expect the market to take its time to recover, for the parties to take their losses and lick their wounds, and then forge on.

But yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office quantified ‘trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see’ to anticipate a cumulative deficit of $9.3T over the next ten years.

Who will pay for it?

For years, our deficits have been funded from overseas: from China and Saudi Arabia.  But they’re beginning to get worried.  Our own economy is now so oriented toward credit and consumption that we can’t finance it ourselves.

The only plausible alternative is inflation: the government watering down the money to make it go farther.

And the deficits aren’t just to fix the economy: they’re also for President Obama’s programs to remake the country in his own image.

And so what could have been the bottom almost certainly won’t be.

Posted in Money | No Comments »

8. March 2009 by admin.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to resolve the disconnect between Barack Obama’s speech on the economy a couple of weeks ago, in which he reassured us that we’d get through it together, stronger than we were before, and the facts on the ground.

Last Friday, the Labor Department announced the unemployment figures for February: a new loss of 651,000 jobs, and a current unemployment rate of 8.1%.  I remember the last time we had an unemployment rate of 8.1%, back in 1983.  Somehow we got through that in one piece; indeed, before that, in the 1970s, we had worse.

And everything in our society still seems to work: there’s gas at the pumps and power at the socket and food in the stores.  Yes, times are tough: my son, who is finishing college this year, is looking for work without success.  But the world does not seem to be coming to an end: in my work, I booked a new project this week, and the stream of business still appears to be flowing.

From those observations, I would expect continued unemployment, perhaps an increase in crime, and probably higher taxes, but the overall economy would start to improve in a couple of  years and we’d get out of this morass.

So why did Our Fearless Leader address us that night as if our cities were in ruins and the end of the world was at hand?  Have we really become a nation of crybabies?

Maybe, but I don’t think Obama is really the crybaby type.

My current explanation is rather more worrisome.

Our recent Presidents, Clinton and Bush, were masters of dissimulation.  They would happily tell us what they wanted us to hear, and disregard, gloss over, or simply lie about the inconvenient truths in conflict with their agendas.

Barack Obama is a politician, to be sure, but he does not have the talent of his predecessors.  Or perhaps he simply believes that it’s better to at least try to be aboveboard with the electorate.

In any case, I’m sure that he has been briefed on the dimensions of the economic situation rather more thoroughly than what we’ve been able to read in the newspapers.

He has said for the record that things will get worse before they get better, but he hasn’t said how much worse they will get.

He knows how close we are to a state of emergency.

And I suspect that it’s closer than we think.

Perhaps he believes that the stimulus package, and similar deficit spending, is our last, best effort to pull ourselves out of the whirlpool; perhaps he believes that the primal forces of our downfall have been set in motion, and can no longer be stopped.

In either case, he recognizes that to discuss this matter forthrightly would ignite a panic, and bring about precisely the emergency he is seeking to avoid, or at least postpone.

So he addressed us two weeks ago as if the havoc, chaos, and destruction had already been released, while things still seem relatively normal.

This does not look good….

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Money, Barack Obama | No Comments »

7. March 2009 by admin.

This week, the prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, arrived here on a state visit.  There was a minor flap when our relationship with the UK was referred to as a ’special partnership’ when it should be ’special relationship.’  Whatever.

But the gifts that were exchanged between the President and the Prime Minster were telling:

• The Prime Minister brought, for President Obama, a pen holder made from the wood of an old British warship.  President Obama gave a collection of DVDs of classic American movies.  (I hope, at least, that the DVDs were encoded for use in the UK….)
• The Prime Minster’s wife brought dresses and books for the President’s daughters.  Michelle Obama’s gifts for the Prime Minister’s sons were two toy Marine One helicopters.  (Made in China, no doubt….)

Doubtless, if the Obamas were buying gifts for friends of the family, their choices would have been reasonable.  But Barack is the President now, on the world stage, and needs to do better.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Clinton presented the Russian foreign minister with a yellow box with a red pushbutton to symbolize the President’s wish to ‘push the restart button’ on relations with the Russians.

The box was labeled with ‘Reset’ (in English) and ‘Peregruzka,’ which someone at the State Department thought meant ‘reset,’ but actually means ‘overcharge.’

Moreover, whoever made up the box did a rotten job: the Russian word is rendered in the Roman alphabet, and the labels on the box were written on tape (proper industrial control panels are engraved).  I’m astonished that with all the resources of the State Department at hand, our Secretary of State could field such a piece of crap.

A while back in my career, when I worked for a really large organization, we were all sent off for two days training about how to maintain a non-hostile working environment.  One of the points discussed in the training was to be mindful of cultural differences between yourself and the people around you.

This would seem obvious, not just in the context of a workplace, but especially in the context of our leaders, who are dealing with people from around the world.

We like to believe that former President Bush shunned diplomacy, and was inept in dealing with the world, but he got details like this right, which helped assure that even though the people we dealt with might disagree with us, they took us seriously.  In contrast, the Obama administration comes off as a gaggle of buffoons.  It won’t matter if they agree with us or not if they think we’re a bunch of clowns.

Surely we can do better….

Posted in Dysfunctional Government | No Comments »

2. March 2009 by admin.

• One of the local throwaway newspapers, AM New York, ran a survey with the question, “Do the subway disruptions ruin your weekend?”  Every weekend, NYCT rearranges the service on some part of its network in order to do construction of one kind or another.  They post a list of changes a week before, and while I’ve had some unpleasant surprises, I can’t say that it’s ‘ruined’ my weekend.  Evidently other people’s weekends are far more brittle than mine:  64% of respondents answered ‘yes.’
• The Dow Jones Industrials dropped below 7000 today, down over 50% from its all-time high, below where it fell when the Internet bubble burst, below where it was when the Internet bubble even started to inflate.  Citibank and AIG have been effectively taken over by the government, which means they’re probably dead.
• Hulu.com is a Web site with streaming videos of old TV shows and a handful of movies.  Alec Baldwin appears in a commercial promoting it as a space alien looking forward to gorging on softened human brains.  The commercial is very effective: you wonder, for a moment, if Alec Baldwin really is a space alien and Hulu really is a plot to soften the brains of the populace before the invasion.  Nevertheless, they have an interesting selection of TV shows, probably worth the risk of having my brain turned to a ripe banana.

Posted in New York City, Television, Money | No Comments »

1. March 2009 by admin.

A former colleague recently sent me a New York Times article from 1999 discussing how Fannie Mae was easing requirements for the mortgages that it would purchase from banks, in an effort to increase home ownership among minorities.

As far as I know, my correspondent is correct: the root cause of our current economic woes was the decision in the 1990s, in terms of government policy, to make it easier to get a mortgage, ostensibly to encourage home ownership.

Yet last Monday, in a series on the economic crisis, the NBC Nightly News overlooked this detail.  According to the report, the origin of our difficulties came after 11 September 2001, when, in an effort to prop up the economy, interest rates were held low, and mortgages were issued to anyone who was breathing.  No mention was made of what led to the easy mortgages.

Yes, it’s a case of biased reporting.

The editors at Nightly News probably anticipated that if they traced the origins of our problems to government policy in the 1990s, they would be deemed ‘offensive:’ how dare you accuse innocent minorities of ruining the economy!

But the New York Post, which points to the easy-mortgage policies of the 1990s and neglects what happened afterward, is also biased. It strains their world view to consider that businessmen might be motivated by greed, to the exclusion of common sense.

Ultimately, it is the responsibility of each of us to review the news and decide for ourselves.

Everyone has their own particular axe to grind.

Even me.

Posted in Media, Dysfunctional Government, Money | No Comments »

28. February 2009 by admin.

About a year and a half ago, I bought a shiny new laptop with the Vista operating system.  I had heard that Vista had gotten mixed reviews, and looked forward to experiencing it for myself.  I found that the oh-so-sexy windowing system, with translucent windows, was an annoyance when I was trying to be productive, so I shut it off.  I set up the machine to look like Windows 2000, and I was happy.

People made fun of Vista for User Access Control: the function of asking for confirmation when you were about to do something that could potentially reconfigure the system.  I lived with that function under Linux for a few years before getting the laptop, so I was glad to see it in a Windows system.  (As much as I like Linux as an OS, it’s a Microsoft world out there, so running Linux for business is not a practical option.)

So for a year and a half, I lived with Vista, and it seemed to work OK.  I had a couple of minor problems, but nothing too terrible:

• The Windows XP driver for the printer at the office would work, and then toss its cookies after finishing the print job.  I could tell Vista to restart it automatically, but that didn’t help my CADD application, which ran each page in a batch as a separate print job.
• Vista insisted on trying to figure out what sort of files were in each directory, and showing them to me in an appropriate format.  The result was that running Windows Explorer was somewhat of an adventure, as one directory would list details of the file, while another would show thumbnails.  I tried to force Vista to show me everything as a detailed listing, and it sort of helped.

Other than that, Vista was OK.  It ran my software and pretty much took everything I threw at it.  I had maybe two Blue Screens of Death in the eighteen months I had the machine, and they had fairly obvious causes.

And then, about a month ago for travelling, I bought a ‘netbook’ computer.  The newer machine has a pipsqueak processor and half the memory of my Vista box, but it runs perceptibly faster.  But the netbook runs Windows XP.

Anyhow, last Tuesday at 4:29 pm, my Vista box all of a sudden dropped dead.  I was writing a document when the screen went black.  Restarting didn’t help: it wouldn’t even access the disk, wouldn’t display an error message, wouldn’t even beep.  In a word, dead.  Fortunately, the disk was still OK, so I didn’t lose any data.  (But it’s much cooler to sigh, ‘Thank God for backups,’ when someone asks.)

So for a couple of days, I used my netbook as my work computer.  Everyone who saw it thought it was cool.  But I know I can’t go on that way forever: I couldn’t possibly do CADD on the netbook.

So yesterday, I bought a new Lenovo laptop.

It runs, and will continue to run, Windows XP, although it included a set of disks for installing Vista.

A machine cycle is a terrible thing to waste.

Posted in Computers | No Comments »

26. February 2009 by admin.

Last Tuesday, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, and the nation, about the state of the economy.  I was disappointed.

For a while now, I’ve been trying to compose some coherent thoughts about the $787B stimulus package signed into law last night.  In brief, I don’t like it.

But how can I fairly say that I don’t like it when I don’t know what’s in it?  I know that there’s something about tax cuts and money for states and localities and ’shovel-ready’ projects.  On that level, my problem is still the same: commentators will pull out some aspect of the package or another for discussion or criticism, but I still don’t have a coherent view of the whole thing.

There are, however, some things that I can point to:

• Our Fearless Leader, in fact, exercised no leadership in composing the package.  In the runup to his inauguration, he indicated that he wanted to see a stimulus bill on his desk, but kept his hands off while the Democratic party faithful went to work.
• The Democrats responded like kids in a candy store.  Since all government spending stimulates to some degree, they decided to try and remake the world in the moderate President Obama that we elected.  Some of the really stupid stuff got killed through the legislative process, but much of it is still there.
• One provision that particularly bothers me relates to welfare reform, one of the great successes of social legislation.  The package makes funds available to localities who abolish their requirements for welfare recipients to seek work or be placed in jobs.  (Mayor Bloomberg has wisely declined this aid.)  The thought is that in a tough job market, it’s pointless to press welfare recipients to try and find jobs that don’t exist.  But the real reason, I suspect, is to deter cash-strapped local governments from replacing union civil servants with welfare recipients.  You know what?  Times are tought all over!

Obama’s speech Tuesday night was somewhat of a disappointment.  He bagan and ended with an exhortation about how we would get through this crisis, and end up stronger than before.  President Bush said the same thing after 11 September, and it resonated: there was actual physical destruction that I could go and see if I really wanted to.  But while we’re told that there is a vast economic crisis, it’s a little hard to believe when there is still food (and everything else) in the stores and power at the socket.  Obama’s call, alas, rings hollow.

He discussed how credit is essential to the economy, and the measures to try and get banks to lend again. So far, so good.

And then he launched into a discussion that was a rehash of his campaign promises on education and health care.   Despite his efforts to tie these to addressing the current crisis, it all seemed a distraction.

At least he didn’t say ‘green jobs.’

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Money, Barack Obama | No Comments »

22. February 2009 by admin.

Last week, Our Fearless Leader signed the $787 billion stimulus package (a/k/a The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) into law.  I’m not sure how much good it will do: reports in the news about it seem to emphasize one detail or another, and I have yet to see a coherent description of the entire package.  Supposedly, I’ll get some more money in my pocket as withholding rates get tweaked, but I’m not sure if my taxes will actually change.

Together with that, there have been plans for further help to the bank, and Obama has forthrightly been telling us that our problems will take time to resolve.  While I dread what form of deficit spending will be inflicted on us next, I appreciate that our leadership recognizes the dimensions of the problem.

So I’m perplexed now when our leadership announced, yesterday, that the deficit will be cut in half by the end of Obama’s first term (i.e. 2013).   So is the economy a major, major problem, or something that will blow over in a couple of years?

For almost as long as I can remember, Presidents have promised to cut the deficit by such-and-such a date, and it’s never, ever happened.  Is our leadership being open with us, or are they reverting to one of the oldest tricks in the book, after barely a month?

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Barack Obama | No Comments »

21. February 2009 by admin.

Editorial Note:  I know, it’s been rather a while (over a month!) since I last wrote.  Once upon a time, I pretty reliably had at least a half-hour a day for contemplation and… blogging.  But it is a harder world out there, and one of the ways that it is harder is that one has less time for such things.

On Thursday, my work took me out to Queens.  Riding the 7 train, I saw the nearly-completed Citi Field.  But what had happened to Shea Stadium?

I had sort of expected that it would be demolished in a grand theatrical style, but I guess that Citi Field is too close for that. Or perhaps we’re still in shock over 11 September, and can’t stand to see something blown up.

Instead, it was quietly taken down, piece by piece, leaving only piles of rubble.  By April, it should all be carted away and replaced by a parking lot, as one cannot have a modern stadium without ample parking.

Citi Field, the new stadium, looks vaguely like pictures I’ve seen of Ebbets Field.  It’s charming, I’m sure.  But Ebbets Field doesn’t mean anything to me: it was gone before I was born.  My baseball memories all live at Shea.

And now it’s gone, in the name of… what?  A ‘more intimate venue for baseball’?  It’s baseball, dammit, not ballroom dancing!  One can only pack so many seats close to the field: for the rest of us, baseball is something that is inherently witnessed from a distance.

What else is Citi Field supposed to give us?  I’ve bought Mets tickets often enough that they sent me a flyer in the mail:

• Superior sightlines:  Does this mean, ‘you can see the field better’?  Shea had some really crappy seats with only a partial view of the field.  But from the rest of the seats, you looked out and saw… a ballfield.  Maybe you’ll be able to see it better now, but a billion dollars’ worth better?
• Wide, comfortable seats:  I never had a problem fitting in the seats, and I’m watching a baseball game, not flying to Europe.  (Or is it that the general population has gotten wider?)
• Spacious aisles and rows, with generous legroom:  OK, I’m 6′ tall and always can go for a little more legroom.  If you give me a foot more legroom, I’ll be tickled.  But from the pictures, it looks like only a few more inches.
• Wide concourses that invite fans to move around the entire ballpark:  Why, why, why???  When I go to a baseball game, I make one trip to the concession stand, and one trip to the can.  If I want to go wandering around, I can walk around the neighborhood with my wife: it’s much cheaper.
• Upscale dining options, including… a climate-controlled restaurant:  Spare me!  Part of the live baseball experience is the concession-stand food, eaten alfresco in the stands.  If you want air conditioning, stay home!  (And if they’ve gotten rid of the sausage sandwiches, my preferred downscale dining option, I may consider becoming a Yankees fan.)

At Shea, there were ten major categories of seats, not counting the really fancy seats behind home plate.  Now there are 26, a feat accomplished by zoning each level into ‘infield’ and ‘outfield,’ and further charging extra for the first few rows. The better to juice the fans, I guess.

Yes, I’ll go to see the Mets at Citi Field.  I may even like the new stadium when I see it.

But for now, I’m ticked.

Posted in New York City, Life Goes On | No Comments »

17. January 2009 by admin.

On Thursday afternoon, a US Airways jetliner encountered a flock of geese shortly after takeoff.  The geese fouled both of the plane’s engines, but the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, managed to ditch the plane in the Hudson River.  All of the passengers and crew were evacuated, with only minor injuries.

Mr. Sullenberger is a hero of the sort that we don’t hear about often enough.  It seems rare to read a story in the newspaper about someone who did something right: it’s usually the other way around.

But then, the world is filled with people who do things right.  They may not be heroes, but they keep the lights on and the trains running and the supermarket shelves filled.   It’s natural that in the normal course of events that the people who make mistakes make the headlines.

What I really worry about, though, is why the people who are in authority–the people that we should be able to count on to do things right–seem to make the biggest mistakes.

• Earlier this week, I watched part of the documentary No End in Sight about the Iraq war.  One of the ground rules of warfare is to know your enemy, but we blundered into Iraq reveling in our ignorance of the enemy, thinking that a two-week show of precision munitions would leave all of Iraq happy to go along with us.  Time after time, our plans blew up in our faces, and it was only after the surge (in 2007) that things began to move in the right direction.
• Aside from Captain Sullenberger’s heroic exploits, the rest of Friday night’s network newscast was a litany of dread: bank failures, bankruptcies, and layoffs.  Our current economic difficulties seem to be the result of astonishing lapses of judgement on the part of both our political and financial leadership.  Worse, today nobody seems to know what to do about it.

If the airline pilots and subway motormen and all the other people who build and operate our physical world were one-tenth as inept as our leadership, we would be living among piles of smoldering wreckage, having to kill rats for food.

Somebody send help….

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Life Goes On | No Comments »

15. January 2009 by admin.

It’s 15 degrees Fahrenheit (-9 C) tonight in New York City, and it’s supposed to go down to about 9 degrees overnight.  When I was a kid, every winter had three or four days like this, or even colder.  I simply assumed it was part of life.

It’s been getting colder as the week has gone on: time to accustom one’s self to wearing long johns and dressing in layers.  And once you get used to it, it isn’t bad: the cold weather is invigorating.

My work today took me to Long Island via Penn Station.  As I got off the subway, the effluvium of the pizza parlors, hot-dog places, and sandwich shops assaulted me: although some of the individual stores have changed over the years, the overall smell of the place has changed little.

It took me back to a simpler time, when one of the biggest stores in the station concourse was the Station Break arcade.  I could have gone for a couple of games of pinball if it were still around.

Those were the days….

Posted in Life Goes On | No Comments »

11. January 2009 by admin.

• Yesterday’s Daily News included a full-page ad from Macy’s, indicating that their one-day sale on Saturday would be extended to a second day on Sunday because of the ‘inclement weather.’  It snowed about two inches in the city over yesterday afternoon and evening, with probably more in the suburbs: not really what qualifies as ‘inclement.’  Considering the lead time in setting up a full-page newspaper ad, I have to believe that Macy’s was going to extend their one-day sale (which was a two-day sale to begin with, as it started Friday) to Sunday from the beginning, and was just betting that since it’s January, it must be snowing somewhere.
• Our New Fearless Leader released a report claiming that his recovery plan would create between three and four million new jobs.  Unfortunately, there’s no clear description as to just what this plan would consist of.  The same report includes a graphic indicating that the unemployment rate would top out at about 8% with the recovery plan in place, but 9.5% without it.  I’ll agree that a 9.5% unemployment rate is not good, but it’s hardly the end of the world, as everyone seems to make it out to be.
• I was watching the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man yesterday evening.  The movie is set in about 2020, in a US where, due to ‘the economic collapse of 2017,’ many Americans don’t have a pot to piss in.  Arnold is an honorable Army officer who disobeys an order, is jailed, and eventually can earn his freedom if he participates in The Running Man TV show.  Besides showing Arnold breaking things and killing people, the movie is a commentary on government and the media.  In 2020, the two have converged, and they’re both flaming liars. The really distressing part (sorry for the long setup) is that we’re now two-thirds of the way from 1987 to 2020, and television is very definitely two-thirds of the way from what it was in 1987 to the world of The Running Man.  The concept of gladiatorial combat on TV was radical in 1987; it’s a much smaller step from the state of TV today.  And there was an appetite for the details of politics back then, while today the public would rather do something–anything–than try to understand the real aspects and practical details of politics.

Posted in Life Goes On, Money, Barack Obama | No Comments »

10. January 2009 by admin.

As Our New Fearless Leader is developing his plan to spend hundreds of billions to help the economy, an op-ed piece in yesterday’s New York Post suggests an alternative: substantially cut Federal taxes to ‘energize the added investments, new hiring and extra risk-taking needed to move our economy’s pace from tepid to torrid.’

I’d like to believe that this would a better approach than Obama’s efforts to remake the country in his own image.  But the short answer is, ‘Isn’t that what our current Fearless Leader was pursuing for eight years, that got us into this mess?’

Either method involves Brobdingnagian (the word ‘huge’ simply doesn’t cut it) deficits, which will have to be paid for in the long run with higher taxes and/or inflation.  Moreover, the rest of the world, which has been subsidizing our deficits for the last few years, has been reluctant to continue, as they need the money for their own problems.

More specifically:

•  Added investments: in what? Nail salons?  If someone wanted to make a large infrastructure investment, in, say, a power plant, a transmission line, a factory, or a railroad, they would face a daunting gauntlet of regulations and community opposition.  Moreover, investors today want don’t want to wait years to see their profits.  This would be especially true if the tax environment would be expected to change in the next few years.
• New hiring: only fools hire employees these days.  It’s much cheaper to hire independent contractors or outsource. While hiring someone as a contractor is better than not hiring him at all, part of our problem is that employment is perceived as impermanent: if you believe that you can lose your job at any moment, you’re going to limit your spending to the necessities.
• Extra risk-taking:  It’s entirely honorable to try, and fail, and take your own lumps.  The problem arises when people take imprudent risks, don’t recognize the initial signs of trouble, fail en masse, and then expect the government to bail them out.

The basic problem underlying our difficulties–which neither Presidential candidate addressed–is that labor is seen as a cost to be minimized, rather than a productive asset to be maintained and developed.  In the modern view of business, employees really are disposable.  And until that changes–which Obama’s plans say nothing about–the outlook will continue to be dismal for those of us who are not on the ‘rich investor’ side of the equation.

All right, what should the government do?

• Tweak taxes higher for the wealthy:  The Federal government does necessary things that cost money, and someone has to pay for it.  The government also needs to be prepared for emergencies, like war or natural disaster.
• Act to moderate the very worst effects of the downturn: This includes aid to states and localities, on a limited basis, contingent on the beneficiary exercising its own fiscal restraint.  (The New York legislature, in particular, is off on its own little planet where everything is still rosy, and they can spend to their heart’s content.)  A modest stimulus payment will also help.  One aspect of Obama’s plan that I agree with is tweaking taxes to make them more progressive (lower rates in the lower brackets, higher rates in the higher brackets).
• Tweak tax policies to encourage business:  For my business, profits are poison: about half of them go up in taxes.  When I had a really good year, I was running around in December buying things for the business, because, as I told people at the time, ‘it’s either spend it or turn it over to the government.’ I can run my business to limit profits and pay less tax, but it keeps the business weak, as it can’t amass capital.
• Otherwise, sit tight and sweat it out:   We got into this snit as a result of our collective delusions, and it will take time to recover.  If we try to maintain our delusions through deficit spending, it will take us that much longer to get over them.  We did it before, in the 1980s, when we had both inflation and unemployment: under Reagan, unemployment surged at first, but things came back into balance shortly after.

OK, I still haven’t done anything about the bean-counters who see labor as a cost to be reduced.  I don’t believe that any reasonable government can directly change people’s attitudes.

However, it will lead us away from being fat, dumb, and happy, and will hopefully make us better and more productive employees.  If the bean-counters see labor as a better value for their dollar, they might be re-awakened to the value of employees as assets.

Of course, all of this will be painful in the short term, which is why it will never happen.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Money | No Comments »

9. January 2009 by admin.

No, I know that I can’t.

And I can’t say that it would make any difference if I could: New York is not a swing state, so even if I could change my vote, and get all my friends to change their vote, it wouldn’t make any difference.

And furthermore, even if McCain had won the election, I’m not sure he would be able to do anything different.

But I found President-elect Obama to be thoroughly distressing when he discussed the economy earlier this week and told us that we would be running trillion-dollar deficits for ‘years to come.’

Yes, the economy is in bad shape: the official unemployment rate in December went up to 7.2%.  I’ve written about various aspects of our bad economy in these pages before.

But Our New Fearless Leader looks like a kid in a candy store.  It’s not just an effort to stimulate the economy: he wants to remake the country in his own image.  We’ll have solar energy and computerized medical records and better education and broadband access for all and no rainy days on weekends.

Unfortunately, the government has tried to remake the country, or some facet of it, and failed miserably.  Alternate energy is an admirable goal, but after three decades (at least) of government meddling, we still import more than half of the petroleum that we use.  The Clinton administration tried to implement a national health care system.  It failed miserably.  For my part, I couldn’t understand how it was supposed to work: something about ‘alliances’ with ‘clout’ to get the lowest prices.

And a look back to our recent events is more troubling: in September, we allocated ~$700 billion to ‘unfreeze the credit markets’ by ‘buying troubled assets.’  Since then, about half of the money has been spent: none of it went to buy troubled assets, and the credit markets are still frozen.  (I’ve stopped getting pre-approved credit card notices, so I’m sure there’s something wrong.)

So I’m not convinced that the answer to our problem whose origins are in too much debt is to take out yet more debt, and to do it RIGHT NOW.  Let’s take the time to think things through: if we’re going to spend trillions, we need to make sure that we get it right, as we won’t get another chance.

Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Barack Obama | No Comments »