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20. May 2012 by admin.
In 1979, when I was finishing high school and starting college, I read Howard Ruff’s How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years. I was aware of inflation, was starting to understand what it meant, and I remember a few perilous months in early 1980 when the price of gold shot up, and it seemed at one point that the economy might go off the rails.
Now we face the same problems as back in 1979, only worse. Howard Ruff has updated How to Prosper. But we got through the last thirty years in mostly decent shape. There was no hyperinflationary collapse.
Why is this time different?
More specifically, the bad things that we feared at the end of the 1970s never materialized. Why should I worry this time?
Two thoughts:
In 1979, we had margin for error. That margin has been relentlessly squeezed out over the last 30 years.
Yes, it’s different this time.
Posted in Navel-gazing, Things Falling Apart, Money | No Comments »
25. March 2012 by itsallmadness.
I moved from Germany to Colorado a couple of months ago, and have been buying a house and getting settled. One of the disappointments of my house was that I had to replace the bathroom floor. It cost me $800, including a new flange for the toilet. Carpeting in a bathroom is a huge mistake, particularly when one of the residents uses a commode. I’ve been tearing up the carpeting to be sure that there are no more surprises. So far, so good.
Did I create a job? I hired two people to do the work, one for the plumbing and the onther one to put down linoleum, which made me think that jobs are not so much created as demanded, and companies are not willing to keep a stock of people on hand for work that MIGHT need to be done. The “nice to have” tasks are falling by the wayside, and this can be tracked in many occupations. The one that I see most is the decline of adminstrative personnel. Had I had the time (and another bathroom to use while I made the repair), I could have done the work myself. I might have saved $400 or so, but I didn’t have the time to do the work immediately, because I had to pick up my car in St. Louis.
Another point about hiring people is that I took referrals, because I didn’t know anybody in town who did such work, and I may well have gotten hosed on prices. No matter. What I do know is that the sinking feeling when I sit on the toilet is now gone. I won’t end up in the crawlspace under my house unless someone puts me there or I go there voluntarily.
When one moves from overseas, their vehicle goes to a “vehicle processing center” (VPC) , and there are about 10 around the country. I was told that the closest one is St. Louis, but it’s in Dallas. I could have had my car shipped to me for $650, but I was given a week off to get the car, so I went to get it. The St. Louis VPC is in Pontoon Beach, IL, which gave me the pleasure of getting from the St. Louis airport to there, which required a train, a bus, and a taxi ride.
I usually bring something to read wherever I go, and one of the statistics that I came across is that we have on average 150 things that need to be done. I came up with 50 things for my “things to do” list when I first arrived. I know that I missed a lot of things, but these were the tasks of highest priority. I don’t believe that it is possible to multitask. We can be aware of certain things and that gives you an edge in getting things done, but that isn’t the same as doing them.
I consider “economic stimulus” to be the big lie of our time. I paid cash to get my bathroom floor fixed, and we can argue about what the multiplier effect will be of the money that I spent. The only money that gets spent that has a positive economic effect is money that comes from savings, not money from debt. It takes over a dollar of debt to get an increase of a dollar in GDP. Withdraw the stimulus and GDP collapses by the amount of the stimulus.
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25. March 2012 by admin.
Last week, I was having a chat with a conservative friend. He was my boss, years ago, and since retired.
“The conservatives say that one of the reasons we’re not doing so well is excessive government regulation,” I said. ”Supposedly, if we ditch all these rules, we’ll unleash growth and create jobs.”
“Right.”
“But there are vast enterprises, with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of workers, associated with these regulations. Not just the government bureaucrats, but private-sector consultants and others, all associated with the maintenance of and compliance with these regulations. What happens to them?”
“That’s not my concern. They’ll just have to find work for themselves in the new environment. Did you expect the government to help them?”
No, I really didn’t expect the government to help them. In fact, however onerous and pointless they may seem, most government regulations have a political constituency behind them, which will make them hard to get rid of.
But as much as I’d like to believe otherwise, it seems more likely that cutting government regulations will destroy more jobs than it creates.
Oh, bother.
Posted in Politics, Dysfunctional Government, Things Falling Apart | 1 Comment »
29. January 2011 by admin.
Last Tuesday, I had wanted to watch the President’s State of the Union address, but my wife wanted to watch a Korean soap opera. I deferred to my wife: I find the Korean soaps entertaining, or at least the ones with English subtitles. And I could watch the address later, or at least read a transcript.
This morning, I finally got around to watching the speech. I’m genuinely disappointed:
Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Things Falling Apart, Barack Obama | No Comments »
22. January 2011 by admin.
My wife is a member of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and as a result, we get advance DVD copies of movies so that my wife can watch the movies and vote in the SAG awards. I had wanted to see The Social Network, but missed it in the theatre, so now was my chance.
I’m glad I saved the $25 that two movie tickets would have cost.
It’s not that The Social Network is a bad movie: it has a compelling script, is well-photographed, and has excellent performances. The cast and crew have more than done their job in bringing the story of Facebook to life. But I very quickly came to the realization: I don’t like these people.
I remember old movies about how great enterprises came to be. Their founders struggled with practical problems, overcame them, and proudly succeeded. But we see nothing about the practical problems of creating Facebook: instead we see how its founder promptly got embroiled in lawsuits.
In fairness, perhaps I’m biased. Facebook, we’re told, is the social experience of college wrapped up in a Web site. Alas, I had no social life to speak of in college: we were all engineering nerds, and what few girls there were in class quickly got snapped up by the guys who were better at that sort of thing than me.
But if Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be what a modern captain of industry looks like, we’re all in deep, deep trouble.
Posted in Computers, Media, Things Falling Apart, Movies | No Comments »
28. February 2010 by admin.
Usually, February is one of my favorite months. The cold weather invigorates when I get out; the distractions of summer are absent; it’s time to buckle down and accomplish something. But not this year. I’ve felt tired and cranky most of the month; things have gotten bogged down at work; I find myself, too often, in the state of not wanting to do anything.
I can point to the economy and the health care bill that refuses to die (and as a result stifles my plans to expand my business) as causes, but there’s something deeper.
Today’s businessmen, and women too, aren’t like Hank Rearden of Atlas Shrugged: they aren’t out to exchange their best effort for the best effort of others. They aren’t even like Henry Ford, who paid his assembly-line workers twice the prevailing wage to assure himself of the best possible labor force. Today’s business leadership wants to achieve the greatest return on its money with the least effort.
This is why manufacturing in the US is a shadow of what it used to be: if you want to manufacture something, it’s easier and cheaper, in many, many cases, to do it elsewhere.
But there are, or have been, domestic opportunities that have resulted in growth in the recent past.
One such example is residential construction. When we had easy mortgages, many people wanted to live in new houses. Since there was a ready market for these houses, and residential construction is fairly simple, the market responded with an abundance of new houses, many of which can now be acquired for a fraction of the original price.
Once upon a time, banking and finance was relatively boring. It existed to support other, more visibly productive sectors of the economy. But in recent years finance, and the art of the deal, became an end in itself.
A generation ago, health care was about 8% of the economy, close to most other industrialized countries. Today it’s about twice that in the US, while in the rest of the developed world it hasn’t changed much.
Why the growth?
Health care was another easy place to get good returns. On one level, health care is a maintenance function: it doesn’t make new things possible in other domains; it just helps keep people alive. And it’s an easy sell: after all, one’s health is ‘priceless.’ Moreover, most of us don’t pay directly for our health care: either the government or private insurance pays for most of it.
This isn’t to say that modern American medicine hasn’t accomplished wonderful things. But the growth in the health care sector was not accompanied by growth in other sectors. As a result, it is starting to take over the economy.
Basically, as more visibly productive sectors of the economy, like manufacturing and transportation, have shriveled or remained static, money and investment have flowed to other sectors that represent support functions, like finance and health care. But these sectors can only thrive, in the long run, if there’s something productive going on to support them.
Ultimately, to get back on track, and build real jobs, we need to rediscover the basics: that in order to ‘add value,’ we need to actually make or do something valuable.
But what?
Posted in Things Falling Apart | 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 »
21. December 2009 by admin.
Two news items this weekend:
We should know better than that.
Posted in Things Falling Apart | 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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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:
Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Things Falling Apart, Money | No Comments »
6. January 2009 by admin.
…but nothing on!
I’m working nights this week, which leads me to try and sleep at irregular hours, and when I want to sleep, somehow I can’t. So I turn on the tube, but I find myself bitterly disappointed.
Last year, I found myself interested in some of the reality shows that showed people doing real jobs, like Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers. But those have mostly disappeared in recent months, with nothing appealing to replace them.
I found myself watching Crime Scene Investigation in all its flavors, but that began to pall after a while. The writers and directors of CSI took my seventh-grade English teacher’s dictum to ’show us, not tell us’ literally, so that as someone explains how the crime might have been committed, we see the process unfolding in all its gory glory. And I’m really not into stories that revolve around criminals.
This week I’ve hit rock bottom, in that the only thing I find semi-interesting is the History Channels ‘Armageddon Week,’ filled with pseudo-documentaries about how the world is imminently coming to an end, as predicted in the Book of Revelation or by Nostradamus or whatever, coupled with scientific explanations of how all these horrible things might occur.
If I were a kid, it would give me nightmares.
But now, it’s just tedious.
Posted in Media, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »
15. December 2008 by admin.
I was out on another business trip last week, to the same place I went in November. It wasn’t practical to write, chiefly because the people there are given to working long days: on average, we started a little after 9:00 am and finished around 7:00 pm. They’re aware of the economic crisis, and that it will befall them eventually, but it hasn’t quite seeped to their part of the world yet. Some companies have made cutbacks, but life is quite clearly going on.
Meanwhile, the big question in this country is the bailout for the old-line American automobile manufacturers. A bailout plan passed the House last week, but stalled in the Senate. The Bush administration contemplated using money from an earlier bailout scheme for financial institutions to help the car companies, but then decided to hold off.
From my perspective, General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler have been basket cases for years. An infusion of cash will only prolong the agony. And Federal aid with strings attached, in the form of requirements for gas mileage or environmental protection or something similar, results in the government trying to run the automobile industry, which is probably the only thing worse than the current management. (A big part of the crisis now befalling us has its origins in regulations to get banks to open up lending to minorities, in the name of civil rights.)
Consider: if the price of gasoline stays low, people will want bigger cars. I don’t like sport-utility vehicles: they drive like buses and are hard to park in the city. But it’s a free country, and if people want them, and are prepared to pay for them, it’s their privilege to own and drive them. The natural response of an automobile company would be to make bigger cars to match the demand. The non-Big Three car companies, unconstrained by their bailouts, will happily comply.
For GM, Ford, and Chrysler, and their government handlers, the question then becomes whether to do what is economically prudent, but politically incorrect, or to press on with more efficient cars that nobody really wants.
Beyond that, the most compelling reason that anyone can come up for ’saving’ the Big Three, after the effects on the economy, is that they are icons of American industry. Alas, the icons did it to themselves. The GM, Ford, and Chrysler that we knew are gone: refinancing their shadows won’t bring them back.
So part of me wants to simply pull the plug on them. If they went broke, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. It would hurt, but the wheels of commerce would grind on, and their assets would go on to bigger and better things.
And yet….
It’s true that the other car companies are have productive advantages over the Big Three: they have newer factories, a better capacity for innovation, and lower labor costs. But what about the unproductive advantages?
The Big Three built their factories generations ago, on land that they bought, either with cash on hand, or by borrowing on their own account. They pay taxes, when and as they are profitable (maybe not now, but the principle is there). They considered themselves corporate citizens, with generally the same responsibilities as ‘natural person’ citizens. While they lobbied against taxes and regulations that affected their operations, they accepted whatever was ultimately resolved into law.
A company that wants to construct a large industrial plant today will comparison-shop among the locations where it might build. But beyond that, it will negotiate with state and local governments for tax abatements and benefits for its operation. After all, only damned fools pay full price.
And once the abatements and benefits are gone, the modern company is free to pull up stakes and start the whole process over.
To what extent does this difference resolve into the survival or the failure of the Big Three? If it really does make a difference, then perhaps some measure of government help is called for. If, however, the tax abatements and other goodies represent only a minimal investment of ’seed money,’ as the proponents of such measures suggest, then whatever rescue we might prepare for the Big Three will only be throwing good money after bad.
But does this mean that the old-school approach of the Big Three to build a factory, stay put, and be part of the community, as we expect of good corporate citizens, is one of the quaint practices that led them to ruin?
Perhaps….
Posted in Things Falling Apart, Money | No Comments »
23. November 2008 by admin.
Last week, I was on a most remarkable business trip. I was sitting in a park there, starting to write up my observations, when something happened that caused me to reconsider everything I was thinking. I’m going back again in the near future, and will write about it then.
But since returning on Monday, and in spite of the business-class seat on the airplane on which I could actually sleep, I’ve been in a funk. I’ve been tired and not wanting to do very much. And in all, it’s been a crappy week:
This week can only be an improvement!
Posted in Networking (computer), Life Goes On, Things Falling Apart, PDA | No Comments »
18. October 2008 by admin.
It’s been another week where one needs a barf bag to follow the stock market. Perhaps the market is beginning to stabilize, and the reality may be sinking in that the party is over, and we’ll have to go back to earning a living. I hope so, anyway.
The rightist New York Post blames the economic crisis of the past weeks on Democratic politicians who encoursged banks to make mortgage loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Both of the Presidential candidates lay the blame with greedy Wall Streeters who profitied from financial instruments that they didn’t really understand.
And both of those are true. Those who say that Wall Street should be hoisted on its own petard, instead of being bailed out by the government, conveniently ignore that the government does not have clean hands in this matter. Part of what genuinely worries me about this issue is that since everyone (politicians who encouraged bad lending, irresponsible borrowers, the banks that lent the money, and the Wall Streeters who believed that they could engineer the risk out of the whole affair) got us into this mess through their bad judgement, who will have the smarts to get us out of it?
But underneath it all, with 20/20 hindsight, it seems that everyone forgot a basic rule of economics: that the value of something, over the long term, determines its price, and not the other way around. When the price of something becomes separated from its value, bad things happen. It led to the Dutch tulip panic of years ago, to the stock market crash of the 1920s, and to the current economoc crisis.
Yes, the politicians encouraged banks to make loans to questionable borrowers in the 1990s, in the name of civil rights. But if that was all that had happened, it would not have resulted in the situation before us.
But these loans were available to everyone, and many people took advantage of them, driving up the price of real estate. It’s a funny thing: when the price of a loaf of bread or a gallon of gasoline shoots up, people get upset, but when the price of houses goes up, everyone’s happier because they think they’re getting richer.
Meanwhile, the underlying value of the property hadn’t really changed: the houses didn’t grow new bedrooms. They were the same buildings, still where they were before, in neighborhoods that hadn’t really changed. But somehow everyone believed that the rising prices reflected rising values, and that wealth was therefore being fabricated out of thin air.
Ultimately, even bankers and businessmen with normally good judgement bought into the charade, putting up new real estate developments into an overextended market.
And then the music stopped, and prices moved back into alignment with the underlying values. Beyond the irresponsible borrowers who couldn’t pay their mortgages, even more responsible people might simply walk away from a house with a $500,000 mortgage if the property is only worth $300,000.
And now we have to pick up the pieces….
Posted in Dysfunctional Government, Things Falling Apart, Money | No Comments »
2. July 2008 by admin.
Yesterday’s newspapers reported what we, as New Yorkers, had already understood for a long time: that the plans for the new structures that were supposed to replace the World Trade Center were irretrievably screwed up, and that, without several months of further analysis, it would not even be possible to make a reasonable projection about when they might be finished.
We used to be a city, and a nation, of big plans and big achievements: the first New York subway was designed and built from scratch in eight years; we won World War II; we went to the moon in a decade; the original World Trade Center towers were built in eight years.
After the attacks of 11 September, we rebuilt the necessary pieces of infrastructure pretty quickly: the power grid got fixed in a few months; the IRT subway that ran through the site was reopened in a year (it would have been sooner, but Governor Pataki wanted to preside at the reopening ceremony); the PATH terminal and the tunnels to New Jersey were back in a little over two years.
And then, when it came to properly rebuilding the site, the wheels fell off.
What happened?
There are lots of things that one could point to, but an obvious one is the difference between leadership and management. The Port Authority in the 1960s, had a vision of how they would improve the city by building two really tall buildings. They held on to their vision, despite some measure of public opposition, and the original Twin Towers were built.
Today, the management of the project is fractured. The Port Authority owns the site, but is subject to direction from the state, the city, Larry Silverstein (to whom the World Trade Center site was leased shortly before 11 September), and a cast of characters. Worse, nobody seems to see anything wrong with this.
A project like this, with many competing interests, needs leader whom everyone trusts, who has a reasonable understanding of the interests involved, who can fairly decide when someone won’t get exactly what they want, and who has the authority to make his decisions stick,
But that isn’t the modern management style. There are no heroes; there are no ‘lone wolves.’ Instead there is management by consensus, a thoughtful balancing of the interests of the ’stakeholders.’
The problem is that leads to decisions that are ’safe,’ but really crappy:
More tomorrow, or whenever I have some time to write….
Posted in World Trade Center, Dysfunctional Government, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »
29. June 2008 by admin.
I haven’t been writing for the last few days because my Internet connection at home has been flaky. (Even though I’m in business for myself, and don’t bill for unproductive time, I still can’t quite bring myself to write posts at the office.) I’ve lived at the same place since 2003 and had Internet access through the local Cable TV company. Up until this past week, we’ve had maybe one or two brief interruptions per year. But now it’s really hit or miss.
I was about to give up this morning when I decided to give the setup one last kick in the pants. I disconnected and reconnected power to my cable modem, and everything started working again. I can’t say how long it will last, though.
* * *
“I have a terrific idea,” my wife said on Friday night.
“Should I be terrified?” I asked.
“I want to go to a Polish restaurant for lunch tomorrow.”
Technically, I’m a Polish-American, but I have no desire to learn Polish, or eat Polish food, or go to Poland. I wasn’t terrified, but I was a little ticked off: I wanted to have my Saturday lunch at Bar Tabac, a French bistro place on Smith Street.
“I don’t know any Polish places.”
“Do some research.”
The Internet was working briefly yesterday morning, and I found a couple of plausible spots. I had no reason to be terrified: they generally served what one would recognize as ‘American’ food, as well as some distinctly Polish items. So we went to Christine’s in Greenpoint (the Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn) and had a good lunch.
After lunch, we went to the Union Square Greenmarket and bought some vegetables. There is one place that sells vast piles of bright magenta radishes: fresh and juicy and spicier than the tepid red balls one finds in plastic bags in the supermarket. They disappear in November or so; we’re glad to see them back.
We went to Madison Square Park and sat there for a while, contemplating the line that was waiting to buy hamburgers at the Shake Shack. I’m sure they make good burgers, but I couldn’t bring myself to wait a half-hour for one. Is part of the charm of part of the Shack Shack burger the ability to moan about waiting on line for it?
And then we went home and took a nap. I run around like a maniac the rest of the week; I need a day off.
Posted in Life Goes On, Things Falling Apart | No Comments »
8. June 2008 by admin.
Last Thursday, they started painting the corridors in the apartment. While the building where I live is generally kept in good order, the corridors could use a paint job: they haven’t been painted since we moved here in 2003.
Aesthetically, I wish they hadn’t: the old paint was a light yellow, which was pleasantly warm originally, when lit by incandescent lights, and still decent when the lights were replaced with fluorescent bulbs. The new paint job is a blue-gray color, dismal and cold. Did they choose such a grim color so that we’d all know they had been painted?
And then, in the lobby, someone posted a notice that the apartment doors were being painted with (gasp!) oil-based paint. “Oil-based paint is a paint whose primary component is oil,” the notice reminds us. (As opposed to, say, peanut butter?)
“Do you want your children to breathe these fumes?”
At this point, my son is old enough that I can no longer control what he breathes. But if he were younger, while I wouldn’t take him to a paint factory, I can’t get upset about the paint on the apartment doors.
When I was a kid, oil-based paint was common enough as a wall paint, and the smell of a freshly-painted apartment was part of its charm. But I have to wonder if the people who are fear for their children from freshly-painted doors ever change their shower curtains: the funk from a new plastic curtain can make a bathroom uninhabitable for a week.
* * *
On my way home this afternoon, the trains were screwed up: a blackout in Brooklyn. I feared for the worst as I took an alternate route home. But the lights were still on when I got home. Whew: I had loaded up on groceries this morning.
I have to wonder, though: we never had to worry about blackouts in New York City until a few years ago. Electricity in the city was expensive, but reliable. Now, some part of the city loses power every year: a couple of years ago, part of Queens was in the dark for over a week.
Maybe if electricity got cheaper, one might consider it a fair trade. But it’s still expensive, and Con Ed has asked for yet another rate increase.
Posted in Things Falling Apart, Fearmongering | No Comments »