Addendum to the post below: A new Vanity Fair piece amplifies my point below, and offers an explanation, which I'm still weighing. The piece also reminded me of a line I'd been meaning to use: the USA in 2011 feels just like the 1970's, only suffused with iPads instead of violent crime.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 12/11/11 00:08]
Another advantage of global warming -- more unfrozen mammoth DNA!
Your point is well taken -- at a time of generalized Carteresque malaise, most of the news that restores faith in the human spirit is coming from science. I mean, you've got your mammoth DNA, your Earth-like exoplanets, and ... quantum levitation? Are you fucking kidding me?
By contrast, I saw the New York Magazine "Year in Culture" issue on a newsstand yesterday. What does that even mean anymore? When I hear the word "culture," I reach for my dictionary ...
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 12/8/11 10:52]
Well done Deb, especially since (as Carl V points out) the clue is faulty since the "weapon of militant" is IED, not IDE. I was a bit too eager to post something from my new mobile phone in the airport and didn't double-check it.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 12/5/11 00:52]
Correct! The only reason I posted that is because I figured as a Classics guy you would immediately get Nestor. And because I like the image of Nestor expecting Telemachus to pay for his drinks. Otherwise it's not very good because "wine storage" is not a sufficiently common syntagm -- to put it colloquially, it's not "a thing."
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 12/1/11 11:35]
Good point -- I wasn't sure whether the e-less version of "signore" was acceptable, but some cursory Googling suggested it was (at least in English). Merriam-Webster gives the e-less version as the main entry, and the version with the "e" as a variant. But it looks like the risk of confusion is high enough that the clue should be scrapped. (Good job solving it, of course, and likewise to Carl V.)
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 11/28/11 11:31]
SIGN(AT)OR(Y)
But isn't Italian gentleman Signore, not Signor, or did I miss how you chop off the 'e'?
[Ben H.: 11/28/11 09:19]
The Mundell Lecture has definitely been making the rounds. I tend to discount the importance of it for a couple of reasons. First, the theoretical part is old hat. I remember my old boss KH explaining over a decade ago why he hated VaR as a risk model: it forces derisking after everything has gone to shit and pushes re-risking after periods of abnormal calm. Second, you have to discount BIS statistics a little bit. ANy set of international stats that operate at such a high level of aggregation usually are full of incomprehensible oddities. Nobody seems to be able to fully reconcile BIS data to national data, locational data to consolidated data. Third, on a flow basis the end of the European bank intermediation of USD flows has already happened. Stocks may remain high, but it's been a couple of years since European banks were adding marginal USD funding to make marginal USD loans. Fourth, the intermediation of the European banks was purely financial rather than operational, and therefore easier to replace. What do I mean? First Union Credit of Kentucky (for example) takes deposits through branches in all the hollows of its corner of Appalachia and makes loans to the same communities. It has specific knowledge about who of the Hatfields one can extend a mortgage to safely, which McCoy's cant be trusted not to run his business into the ground. If F.U.C.K. ends up bankrupt, that savings-gathering network breaks up and that knowledge is dispersed and the intermediation can't easily be rebuilt. Banque National de Singes-Laches-qui-Mangent-Frommage merely observes that prime rates in the 180-day CP market have been stable at 1% for ages and mortgage-backed securities with an AAA-rating trade at 3% and does the "arbitrage." They merely provide the small amount of capital to back this leveraged trade. No branch network or local knowledge is required. To the extent this arb is still there to be done (and makes sense to be done -- which apparently in the past it didn't!) other pools of capital will be organized to "close this circuit."
[Ben H.: 11/28/11 09:11]
I admit I can't make head or tail of that paper. I console myself with the thought that if humanity's future depends on a sizable core of people understanding that paper, we're all screwed anyway.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 11/27/11 10:29]
Seems Bad!
Here's a recent line of argument I find unnerving. It goes as follows: in the past decade EU banks have provided enormous support to US households through the shadow banking system, and thus as EU banks de-lever it will crush access to credit in the US.
Thanks, Doug, for giving me an incentive to write about MF. I've been meaning to. When the story first broke, I theorized that no money in fact would prove truly to be missing. The big banks, faced with a counterparty In distress, typically hold back payments and let the bankruptcy trustee sort it out. One suddenly finds margin payments slow to come back as positions get liquidated, accounts suffer "technical" issues rendering them temporarily inaccessible, and the like. These banks know how to protect themselves first and foremost and have little compunction about abusing their position to do so. That MF had made use of segregated customer accounts just struck me as literally beyond belief.
As it turns out, this is precisely what MF did. Now, people have come to assume (against a lot of evidence, actually) that in the wake of Wall Street scandals nobody goes to jail. Much of what has scandalized the public consists of behavior that is slimy, unethical, even shocking, but very often at the boundaries or within the interstices of complex law. What happened at MF is nothing like this. It is very simple and brazen theft, sort of as if Chase Bank opened your safety deposit box, pawned the jewelry inside, and used the money to make payroll. If you've ever read Dreiser's "The Financier", a very similar desperate act lands the main character, who runs a brokerage, in jail. We are not talking about an emerging area of financial practice with evolving norms. Taking segregated customer assets for house purposes is a nineteenth century no-no.
Will Corzine go to jail? The conspiracy theorists will point out that he's a Goldman alum, running a firm at the behest of a Goldman alum lead shareholder, regulated by a CFTC run by another Goldman alum, and moan that the fix is in. Others will suggest that as an ex-politician, he'll some how get given a pass. I'm not so sure. I think he'll use a version of the Ken Lay defense. He'll claim that he looked after strategy at a high level and had no hand in operations; that as MF fell apart, the firm was a whirlwind of confusion, with money flying every which way; that internal controls at the firm were weak when he arrived, and though he and his team had been working to fix them, the chaos of the last days proved too much for MF's systems. Overwhlemed mid-level employees caused the diversion of funds in error, or perhaps deliberately, but if so out of desperation and without sanction from above. Some funds controller from Joisey will be dangled out to propitiate the law's hunger for blood. Will it work? I think not. I sincerely doubt that any one mid-level drone had the power to divert customer funds undetected. Moreover, I doubt any cabal could have done so without one among them going to the bosses or the authorities. So i'll call it a 65% chance that Corzine ends up with a criminal record, and a 50% chance he ends up in jail.
[Ben H.: 11/19/11 11:11]
Hey Ben H, what odds are people giving that Jon Corzine will go to jail?
Let me put it this way. Let's say prosperity returns to these United States and we manage to send another space probe, another Voyager, past the limits of our solar system. We will once again have to decide what cultural touchstones to cram in among the sensors, so that any extraterrestrials who happen upon it should say: Here is a noble race, worthy of study, and even of brotherhood -- and in any case not of annihilation via our death rays. Luckily the decision is easy:
Glenn Gould's recording of the A-minor English Suite
You should not panic. Obviously, you, as a Glen Beck viewer, have stocked up on gold bullion and guns. What do you care about Italian bonds? Like the Pope ever intended to pay those back!
After considering, and rejecting, various Star Trek teleporter jokes, I realize I have nothing to add. But your line is a killer, Doug. I look forward to seeing you and Dao tonight! Do you need wine?
[Ben A.: 11/9/11 12:54]
Woody Allen, I think, once said something about there being only a few perfect days each year in NYC, all in October. [Addendum via Google: Maybe Garrison Keillor?] He [whoever he was] was right; global warming has since kicked a few of them into November. Today was one of those days where you step outside and instantly know that everything is right with the world. Or at least with the Upper West Side. I biked around Central Park and the trees are stunningly beautiful. Last year the wind blew all the leaves off early in the season. This year for some climatological reason they look exactly like those posters and stock images of Fall in Central Park whose colors seem photoshopped. Sorry I didn't take any pictures. My phone has a camera but I think it has all of twelve pixels.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 11/9/11 00:00]
Monsters of the Future
Reports claim that Lucas Papademos will soon take over as interim Greek Prime Minister. The Greeks should regard it as ominous that Papademos' current job is visiting professor of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In the Emerging Markets, the Harvard curse has great power. "Harvard-educated" as an epithet for a leader should be taken to mean "soon to default." In one regard, PApademos is re-writing the typical script. Usually, they only wind up teaching at the K-school after getting overthrown.
[Ben H.: 11/8/11 10:15]
Sloganeering
I want to see a Romney/Huntsman ticket, just so I can print up the bumper-sticker: "2x Mormon > 0.5x Kenyan"
[Ben H.: 11/7/11 15:11]
Robbed of our Future
The economic crisis is robbing American of its future, some say. This weekend brought another sad piece of evidence for this proposition. The maker of the Ice Cream Of the Future has gone bankrupt.[Ben H.: 11/7/11 11:40]
Monsters of Tomorrow
There's been a lot of talk, what with Libya, of monsters of recent history. What of tomorrow's monsters?
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. I don't know the first thing about her, and I don't mean to suggest that winning the Nobel Peace Prize necessarily marks one as a past or future mass-murderer. But that Nobel prize plus a degree from the Kennedy School? Watch out!
Gary Friedman. You may not know the name, but as fellow upscale urban homeowners, you guys surely know the face on the inside covers of the Restoration Hardware catalogs you get in the mail. The face always has a tan and impeccable stubble which, along with the designer jeans and the not-fully-buttoned dress shirt, bring to mind Sedona or Jackson Hole. He always signs off with "Carpe diem" at the end of the vignette on the next page, and that vignette is always a strangely over-earnest ramble that has about as much to do with the stuff he's hawking as the stuff he's hawking has to do with hardware. So in short he looks and sounds a lot like J. Peterman in his Seinfeld incarnation. But there's something off, something sinister, about both his looks and his words. It's hard to put your finger on it; maybe the best I can do is say that he is to J. Peterman what Beavis is to Butthead -- very similar to the casual observer, yet clearly over the line of pathology and mania, to those acute enough to see this line. You could see J. Peterman getting in trouble for fraud or sexual harrassment. The crimes of Gary Friedman are going to be far grander. I foresee terrible slaughter. The latest catalog's cover, and its first ten pages, are all about fur -- beanbags, blankets, and hats all made from mink, lynx, fox and coyote killed on an industrial scale. So it begins: will we be able to stop him in time?
Just attended a preview of the new Beavis and Butthead at the Austin Film Festival. Mike Judge, who is based in Austin, was there for Q&A. B&B holds up well after all these years. Interestingly, the legal landscape has changed since the show last aired. Bands no longer give MTV unrestricted rights to use their videos. Judge now needs to solicit permission to use videos, and for obvious reasons it is not always forthcoming. Of course, MTV is less about videos than reality TV these days anyway, and the show moves with the times.
One question I wanted to ask: how does the humor change when the show mocks reality TV rather than videos. Bands made videos in earnest, and part of the genius of B&B was the swiftness with which these two morons could deflate the bands' self-seriousness. reality TV shows exist to hold up cretins to the ridicule of the viewing public. So how is it different to transmute bad art into to comedy as compared to transforming low comedy into better low comedy?
[Ben H.: 10/23/11 22:55]
The Election We Deserve
Romney: I'm Mitt Romney, and I'm not black.
Obama: I'm Barack Obama, and I'm not Mormon.
R: I'm not secretly a Muslim.
O: My religion doesn't treat "Space Invaders" as a sacred text.
R: I don't want to rape your daughters.
O: I won't force them to become my sixth and seventh wives when they turn 13.
All credit due to a mysterious stranger. Surely not anyone in a position of public prominence. Surely not.
[Ben A.: 10/20/11 16:55]
Email Traffic
To: Assad, Bashar (thaforehead@syria.gov)
From: The Future (whathappensnext@gmail.com)
Re: You should check this otu
Dear Bashar,
Have a look at this, think you'll find it interesting.
It's always interesting to hear from Luttwak. His Coup D'Etat was a turning point in my education about politics -- focusing in one place and concretely many of my own fragmentary insights.
Here he is on Kissinger:
I know him personally very well, but he is such a deceptive person; he’s a habitual liar and dissembler. Although I’ve spent a lot of time talking to him, I have no insight on him at all. His book ends with a paean to U.S.-Chinese friendship and how every other country has to fit in. I have to review it for the TLS, but I’ve been delaying it by weeks because I don’t know whether it is a case of senility or utter corruption.
The nuclear plant at Three Mile Island gave the city of Harriburg, PA a serious scare when its core melted down in 1979. The city managed to survive. A few years back, the city made a foray into "Green Energy", borrowing heavily to build a waste-to-energy incinerator. The plant never managed to function properly, and Harrisburg staggered under a debt load of 500% of its annual revenues. Today, Harriburg filed for municipal bankruptcy. The city survived a core meltdown, but couldn't make it past a financial meltdown. Three Mile Island didn't result in major release of radioactivity. The incinerator, though, has spread financial toxic waste to creditors across the country!
[Ben H.: 10/12/11 10:28]
One-Sided Wind-Up
Palin vs the Media Elite is like a WWF Wrestling match, except only one contestant in the ring knows it's just a show: the "dumb" one.
[Ben H.: 10/10/11 16:41]
Frum Rips Me Off
I have been describing Palin as a grifter for years. But otherwise, yes, this is about right.
[Ben A.: 10/9/11 21:39]
Bank of Amerca's decision to impose a monthly fee for debit card use is the unintended consequence of Dodd-Frank, say those who opposed the bill. No, say the bill's supporters, it is a malign attempt by banks to evade D-F. I find the uproar hard to understand. BofA's policy is a direct, intended result of D-F and a good one, at that.
One of D-F's stated purposes was to get rid of hidden fees. Debit card swipe fees remain invisible to the consumer. They've now been massively reduced. Of course, it still costs a bank $200-$300 per year to service a bank account, including processing debit card transactions. BofA's $5 fee is as simple and transparent a way of covering the cost as can be. A customer sees the cost of a debit card and can decide whether or not the convenience recompenses that cost.
In general, markets in which consumers do not see directly how they pay for what they are getting, and conversely where producers earn in ways other than charging directly and visibly for their product eventually become dysfunctional. It's like those cheesy commercials for kludgy-looking in-home stair-lift systems -- "call now and Fraudulift can be yours at no cost to you!" One has no doubt that this business model is producing less than maximum social and private utility in exchange for what it charges. Transactional banking has in recent years slid into the Fraudulift model.
A transactional bank account offers payment services. You don't, however, pay for it in any visible form. Instead, the bank offers the service "at no cost to you!" Instead, the cost gets socialized via higher retail prices marked up due to swipe fees. The bank makes yet more by earning the spread from taking transactional deposits and lending them out for term. Or, even if you carry a low balance, the bank believes it can earn from the customer relationship by selling other products like credit cards, home equity loans, etc. Might the Fraudulift model have something to do with reckless expansion of consumer credit, with excessive maturity mismatches that accumulated on bank balance sheets?
I say, good for D-F that it has created incentives for unbundling and good for BofA for responding to those incentives. To the extent transactional services have value, customers will pay for them. Assigned a visible price, this service might see new entrants and innovations. Unbundling ought to go beyond the debit card. Why not pay directly for the entire package of services represented by a transactional bank account? Account interest rates should reflect true cost-of-money and credit-risk. An excellent provider of basic bank account services shouldn't have to get in the business of pushing home equity loans in order to monetize its transactional account business.
Dodd-Frank and BofA will both cause plenty of mischief in the years to come. Let's not pick on them when they actually do something right!
[Ben H.: 10/9/11 16:32]
Stay your mute-button finger! Terry Francona will be in the broadcast booth for the first two games of the ALCS. Why? Because Tim McCarver needs to take a few days off for a medical procedure. Sadly, not a larygectomy or the rewiring of the nerves linking brain and tongue, but only a minor cardiac procedure.
[Ben H.: 10/5/11 16:09]
Release The Hounds
If these "Occupy Wall Street" guys don't go home soon it could jeopardize my real estate value!
Seriously, I had to go downtown to pay this bullshit bike ticket today, and rode by the park they're occupying. I thought I'd have a quick look to see if media portrayals of it are accurate. What I saw was a bunch of what we used to refer to in college as "dirtbags," back before we became more benevolent and understanding. Basically, it's the same crowd you see protesting IMF/WTO summits, only a lot smaller. A lot of people (Kristof, Gerry from my office, etc.) are hoping to inject practical virtues into this crowd, or make it grow so as to include people with those virtues. I think it's a lost cause. This protest could be a spark that makes regular Americans realize that they can and should do more to fight economic injustice. But if that happens, it will have "been inspired by", rather than "grown out of," the clowning at this park.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the funniest thing I read the other night when reading lemonde.fr. Folks there are still writing about "la crise," which I still think translates pretty much exactly as "the crisis". In the context of Le Monde-type discourse, it means economic crisis, or maybe politico-economic crisis, or socio-politi-... well, I guess it's like existentialism, in that nobody can really define it, but it's very, very serious. But what makes this so much funnier than existentialism is that your "crisis" has now been going on without interruption for about thirty-five years![Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 10/4/11 00:40]
Biannual France Update
Every two years or so I like to check the internets to see what's happening in my former adoptive homeland. Apparently François Hollande, ex-domestic partner of ex-Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, has lost some remarkable number of kilos, and thereby his nickname "Flanby"; what with the brouhaha and/or contretemps involving DSK, Hollande is now the front-runner to defeat Sarkozy in 2012. I was going to say that this is like Al Gore having a political second coming, but now I think my recollections of French politics are all confused, and that Lionel Jospin was actually their analogue of Gore. Wasn't Hollande the smirking teacher's pet kind of guy, who in any other country would have had any political ambition beaten out of him in the alley behind the school? In any case, expect the brief French detour through Menschlichkeit (Libya etc.) to merge back into the great autoroute of feckless sanctimony and insufferability.
This reminds me too that Dao and I went to see "Midnight in Paris", the first movie we've seen in a theater in a long long time. I have a tendency, a prolongation of an early and unhealthy vigilance against coming in anything other than first in intellectual rankings, to take offense when people think they can blandish me with middlebrow cultural references and period dress. But this movie was so gorgeous and so well acted and put together with such a light touch that I totally gave in to it. Also it reminded me that, even if you've lived there for six years and are sufficiently aware of its drawbacks that you're not inclined to move back, Paris doesn't stop being staggeringly beautiful.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 10/2/11 21:41]
It was pretty bad! As soon as I'm an ftp-able location, I'll embed the graph at this link, which tells the story of a horrible, but objectively amazing-for-the-disinterested-fan, night of baseball.
[Ben A.: 9/30/11 12:20]
Epic Choke!
Was it as bad, Ben A., as losing 4 ALCS games in a row after being 3 up? No, probably not, I'll admit, but on the other hand almost certainly more statistically impressive.
[Ben H.: 9/29/11 07:53]
Scientific Arbitrage
So I hear some experimentalists are claiming to have found faster-than-light particles. If I could find a way to go long on that claim while shorting this other scientific claim that made the news today, I would. I actually think the latter claim is more likely to pan out, but this would hedge the relativistic physics theories I myself have been working on for years. If Einstein was wrong about this, my theories are even more inexorably bound for the trash can than they were previously, but if someone else takes the other side of this trade, I may be consoled by the wherewithal to trade up from my normal Chinons and Vouvrays to Pauillacs and Montrachets.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/23/11 22:28]
Doug's Theses Vindicated
While out in San Francisco this past week I was entangled in a 30 minute discussion of the best artisinal food trucks. This conversation occurred at a farmer's market.
[Ben A.: 9/22/11 19:22]
Good Line Not From Ben H
In the United States, Democrats’ endless promises of benefits, Republicans’ idea that funding the state is optional—these amount to promises that if you, the Western consumer, just sit in front of the television eating Twinkies, the Chinese will work to supply you with the luxuries to which you’ve become accustomed, just like back in the days when the coolies built the railroads.
I also liked "This being Europe, popular opposition normally poses few obstacles to the country’s governing classes."
[Ben A.: 9/22/11 16:52]
A toff affects what Trollope mocked as "a slashing style" for the tabloid audience :
Here[Ben H.: 9/22/11 08:57]
We finally had the merest threat of rain here in Austin. The skies got dark, a few drops materialized, but for hours we teetered on the verge of rain. The atmosphere was like an old man with prostate problems, leaning over a urinal. Colby suggested that she try a rain dance. It looked kind of silly, so I laughed. "I fear you're laughing at me, not with me," she said. She was also laughing. "No, I'm laughing with you... provided you're laughing at yourself."
[Ben H.: 9/19/11 10:28]
Trendy
Whenever I go to the Yahoo homepage I look at the top-ten "trending" topics, always hoping that some day I will recognize none of the topics, or at least none of the names. Today I did pretty well -- never heard of Jada Pinkett Smith, Frances Bay, Sofia Bergara, Minka Kelly, or Andy Samberg. You guys will be glad to know that what separated me from a no-hitter was Mariano Rivera.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/19/11 08:57]
Inadvertent Model Citizen
I've been freelancing for a client on a Microsoft project. Using a trial copy of Visual Studio (you can't really do Microsoft development without it). My trial ran out and I have some changes due today. So I looked into buying it: $800!! (Not counting $50 for Uncle Sam or his Empire State equivalent.) Poked around the web some more and found Microsoft's own site for students to get free/cheap software. Used my .edu address to score a copy of Visual Studio. But the install seemed not to work -- it still asked me for a product key. So I broke down and paid the $850 for a product key. It hurts me to type that! I try entering the product key: no dice, apparently because my trial version was for a higher-end version (how high? $11,000.00 high!). So I uninstalled that higher-end version. And noticed that Visual Studio was still registered as a program -- apparently the student version had been hiding underneath the $11K version. So now I'm out $800. But I guess I'm valiantly keeping our economy going, or something.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/16/11 16:27]
There are many ways to suffer a random and untimely death, and I don't suppose falling victim to any one particular way makes one's life more worthy of remembrance or death more worthy of mourning. Perhaps we all have intuited a bit of Parfit, because it does feel a little bit like a keeping a person in existence to think about him after he's dead. All the 9/11 hoopla does spur me to spend a few minutes thinking about Billy Martin, a very decent guy who covered me for Cantor, and who was a friendly voice every weekday morning for a couple of years.
I do believe also that it is worth remembering who, after the massacre, offered help and sympathy, and who, on the other hand, was cheering and celebrating.
[Ben H.: 9/12/11 09:11]
9/11
I haven't spent any time thinking about or commemorating 9/11. Hardly read any articles about it. No doubt I'd feel differently -- more, and worse -- if I'd known any victims. My impression is that this is a pretty common attitude in NYC. When I do think about it, I tend to come back to the line from Slaughterhouse Five: There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. ... Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like "Poo-tee-weet?". [Although I personally would add, in the Dresden fire-bombing case that Vonnegut was talking about, "Fuck 'em".] The concept of "war memorial" is more compelling to me -- we pay homage to courage and selflessness. So if we're talking about the police and firefighters, or the people on Flight 93, I salute them. Beyond that, and beyond the remembrances due to anyone who dies too soon, I just fear there's little to say.
Addendum: At least the memorial itself seems appropriately "silent". Just two dark abysses. I was kind of worried we'd get another massacre memorial like the one just across the river at Exchange Place:
If I might be allowed just this once to employ the acknowledged summum hilarium of twenty-first century wit: really?
Yeah, that sounds like something I would have said. Or no -- not I, some accretion of neurons whose closest continuer is the far less mean-spirited blogger what's talking to you now.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/11/11 19:33]
Geithner
I am reminded of the SNL cold open in which Geithner revealed the results of various bank's stress tests. Goldman Sachs (if I recall correctly) had answered every question with "Geithner's mom."
Parfit
Don't I recall Doug, you proposing many years ago that all of Parfit's thought experiments relating to the problem of personal identity should be conducted as actual experiments, with only one subject: Derek Parfit. Thus "what if you put a man into a star trek transported that annihilated his original body?" Only one way to find out!
[Ben A.: 9/9/11 16:51]
Three Easy Steps
I got a good chuckle out of Tim Geithner's "How To Save The World" piece in the FT. It's simple, if everybody pitches in together. Here are the assignments:
Europe: Solve your deep-seated structural problems.
China: Abandon the currency policy and export-oriented model that has generated 15-years of scorching economic growth.
America: Continue bravely spending beyond our means.
Tim knows it is going to be difficult, but if we ALL make sacrifices, we can assure the future prosperity of the global economy!
[Ben H.: 9/9/11 08:04]
1491
I also enjoyed that book, although I suspect he leans quite hard toward the "high-counters" in his presentation of the evidence for massive pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere population. I can't really believe there were any more than, say, 1480 Native Americans.
By the way, I cannot accept any jokes about Republican fetishization of Reagan until they take the Kennedy name off some of the, oh, I don't know, 5 bazillion pieces of public works named for this mediocre half-term president and his idiot brothers.
[Ben H.: 9/7/11 08:13]
1491
I started reading a book called 1491, published a few years back, which is a layperson's overview of the latest thinking about what the Americas were like before Columbus. There's a lot of fascinating stuff, especially the very alien-to-us things that the Aztecs and the Incas did. The author does a good job of putting these things into perspective, though. For example, all that Aztec human sacrifice. Sure it happened on a grander and gorier scale than in Europe, but public executions were very common in Europe too. (He gives some stats.)
Then there's the thing with the Incas mummifying their leaders and acting like they never died, carrying them around on the same golden litters, going through the same rituals with them. This seems foreign too, until you think about the current Republican attitude toward Reagan. E.g. Romney's new Reagan Economic Zone.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/6/11 17:02]
I told a friend of ours that the TV show our daughter watches most (on YouTube) is Peep and the Big Wide World.
Friend: I haven't seen that one, but we watch Phineas and Ferb all the time. A lot of the jokes are aimed at adults, and it's hilarious. The humor is very subversive.
I classified my sharing his mental disability as "bad news" because I shudder whenever I find anything that still links me to the sepulchral world of academic philosophy. If you saw the article I was referring to, you will have noticed that the guy even looks undead. But seriously, I think the question of personal identity across time is important, and from the synopsis in that article it sounds like I agree with Parfit's conclusions. Did either of you guys have classes with him or have to read any of his stuff? I had no classes with him and although I probably had to read a paper or two by him in grad school I don't remember doing so.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/5/11 21:33]
Of all the titles I could usurp through intrigue and revolution, the one I'd like most to have is The Sturgeon King. And yet it seems the least straightforward to obtain. Where is this so-called Mr. Greengrass anyway? Is he merely an Upper-West-Side Mayor McCheese, a fictional front for some nefarious cartel?
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/5/11 10:19]
Good News/Bad News
Good news: the latest New Yorker confirms that there's at least one other person who shares a mental idiosyncrasy of mine, whose importance I've sometimes speculated about. This person has an "... inability to form mental images. ... This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions."
It's been a while since I've beaten my dead hobby-horse of food crowding out all other cultural pursuits in modern America. Possibly because the trend has reversed somewhat. Rest assured that I'll trot it out again if anything close to this dream I had last night comes true: We were at a fancy restaurant, reading the dessert menu, each item of which took three or four lines to describe, and I asked the waiter his recommendation, and he suggested a complex dish towards the middle of the menu that he said represented the chef's expression of the tragedy of modern Burundi.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 9/2/11 08:33]
Agriculture is hard! I feel bad for these guys. I've never had my livelihood wiped out, but when I was on the board of the farm company in Argentina, I certainly experienced the frustration of well-laid plans falling apart in the face of too much or too little water at the wrong time.
You know what would help, though? Maybe if the USDA would send out some agents. Oh, not to help with sandbagging, but to raid the farm, guns drawn, in order to make sure no raw milk is being sold. Or maybe some EPA folks to check that the farm's efforts to recover aren't "disturbing" a newly created "wetlands."
Maybe these CSA guys should get savvy and get in the business of farming subsidies instead of crops.
[Ben H.: 8/30/11 11:41]
Moocher Update
Early this year we made a lump-sum payment to a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm, which brings vegetables to a local church every week. Yesterday we got this message:
… I hope that all of you stayed safe this weekend and were well prepared for the storm. Unfortunately there was no way we could have saved the farm from flooding. Its a complete disaster …
Great, so these moochers take our hard-earned money and then when we ask for the food we paid for, they whine about a "hurricane" -- and by the way has anyone ever actually seen one of these "hurricanes" that these so-called "climatologists" loot so much of my tax money to study???
An NYC-based friend asked me whether I would trade a hurricane against the 70 days of 100-degree highs Austin has endured this year. I replied that 100-degrees is a meanginful threshold only in the optical sense. A 100-degree high here leaves most of the day quite tolerable, if not exactly pleasant. Colby and I sometimes play a game where we eaoff propose how cold a day we would take in preference to the heat of that day in Austin. For me, a 100-degree day would not push me to accept anything less than low 50s. 104, I claimed, represents a cut-off grounded in my own experience. I'd go as low as the low 40s to escape 104. Today, the mercury hit 111. This, as it turns out, is a completely different level of hot. As I walked to the store just now -- at 5pm -- I experienced a completely new sensation of heat, in my eyeballs. They felt as if they were roasting. I would gladly take 30 degrees over roast eyeball.
[Ben H.: 8/28/11 18:36]
Attention Angel Investors
Seems like the economy is flatlining except for companies catering to the rich and the poor. With the right funding I think we would make a killing by setting up a company with two product lines, suede helicopter interiors and family-size cans of plankton.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/28/11 13:31]
Hurricane
The Upper West Side is no stranger to wind; I’ve had my cell phone ripped out of my hand by a gust here. Plus we’re on high ground. So I’m not overly worried about this hurricane. I guess people in other parts of the area might have more reason to worry, but in keeping with the spirit of the age, I’m not expending any thought on them.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/26/11 19:30]
Back When The Laws Of Marketing Were But Dimly Understood
Today in a restaurant I saw one of those poster reproductions of old French advertisements, which were so popular in the late 1990s. "Café' Brésilia: préféré de 60% des consommateurs!" The Europeans have a taste for understatement, I guess. Imagine what this ad agency might have produced for the UK market: "Not quite half of consumers shun our coffee!"
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/25/11 21:21]
Life In NYC
Yesterday the nanny arrived and announced that somebody had died out on the sidewalk. Immediately our 3-year-old starts saying, "I want to go see the dead person!" When I came back at 5:00, the kid said she had seen the dead person, but hadn't seen very much due to the blanket that was covering everything.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/25/11 21:13]
Anything for an Early Close
Nobody in finance willingly works the last two weeks of August. The market mysteriously shuts early half of the days. Today, post-earthquake, most of the salespeople and traders I deal with announced their departure. It's a safety issue, naturally. Because it makes eminent sense to flee your terrorism-proofed, modern skyscraper in order to wait around in a rickety 100-year old subway tunnel or to idle on an undermaintained, Robert-Moses vintage overpass. Genius!
[Ben H.: 8/23/11 14:38]
It seems to me that what could broadly be called desire has been the moving force of humanity, no matter how we might have window-dressed it with moral talk. By desire I do not mean sexual craving, or even only selfish wanting. I use the term generally to refer to whatever motivates us (...)
Hey, Bashar, you enjoying the Libyan tour courtesy of the Ghost of Ramadan Future?
[Ben H.: 8/21/11 19:08]
No doubt, Qaddafi is now ready to talk cease-fire. Yeah, I think we're just about ready for that, Muamar. Just let me use this one last bullet....
[Ben H.: 8/21/11 19:03]
Save Me, Monitor Consultants! What Best Practices Have The Thought Leaders Developed For Individuals In My Situation?
Yesterday our 3-year-old was doing simultaneous Spanish-to-English translation of a PBS show. It would be an occasion for great pride if the explanation were not that she had accidentally clicked to a dubbed version of a cartoon on YouTube whose English version she'd been permitted to watch so many times that she'd memorized it.
[Gombrecht the Irrefrugnable: 8/21/11 11:58]
No More Free Ride, Moochers!
This Jon Stewart clip was recommended to me as particularly good. I agreed.
