Sorry about the lack of posts, dear readers. This issue is really eating up all my time. I promise there’ll be some good Unrequired Reading tomorrow!
Creative Creation?
A few years ago, I wrote about the American Jobs Creation Act (here and here), a bill passed in 2004 that permitted U.S. companies to repatriate overseas funds at a reduced tax rate (essentially 5.25%). It was a one-time act, and made some sense, given that the U.S. has one of the largest corporate tax rates in the world (essentially 35%). The joke I discovered about “jobs creation” was that, in the pharma business, this act overlapped with the onset of massive layoffs in this industry.
Today, the NYTimes writes about the bill, how the amount of money that came back to the U.S. was 50% higher than government estimates ($312 billion to $200 billion), and how the tax revenues generated were six times higher than a congressional committee anticipated ($18 billion to $2.6 billion). It’s great that tax revenues got a big boost, but the it looks like the biggest “creation” was in the creative accounting department.
Companies were told by the government that the repatriated funds had to be dedicated to R&D, employment, and other “jobs creation”-y domestic investments. Of course, there was no provision stating that funds previously allocated to those needs couldn’t be shifted away to other activities.
“It basically worked out to be one big giveaway,” said Robert Willens, a tax and accounting authority in New York. “The law never took into account the fact that money is fungible.”
Mr. Willens said while companies did make investments in their domestic operations, the repatriated money also freed up a corresponding amount of cash to pay out to shareholders or buy back stock — moves that do not generate job growth or investments. “We know that a lot of stock was retired during this time,” he said.
While you read all about it, I’ll get back to last year’s financials and letcha know what neat accounting tricks I come across.
Which way to the gun show?
Sometimes, I get a little punchy from writing these Top Companies profiles all day. That’s when I blow off steam . . . by dressing my dog in my clothing:
I admit that I consider work-at-home sessions to be “No Pants Days,” but I resent the implication that people and their pets tend to resemble each other!
What It Is: 6/23/08
What I’m reading: I finished Endless Things
What I’m listening to: Boxer
What I’m watching: Sumo marathon on ESPN Classic.
What I’m drinking: An awful lot of Hendrick’s G&Ts; that’s trade show life for ya!
Where I’m going: Nowhere. In fact, I’ll probably be working at home much of the week.
What I’m happy about: That my flight home from San Diego was only 40 minutes late. Oh, and that my wife and my dog were waiting both for me at the top of the stairs when I walked in the door at 1:45am on Saturday.
What I’m sad about: George Carlin died last night.
What I’m pondering: Which of my neighbors left a Jack Chick tract in my mailbox entitled, Love the Jewish People. Don’t get me wrong; it’s pretty awesome, even if it doesn’t reach the heights of Dark Dungeons. That’s the problem the history-oriented tracts have when they match up with the comic-narrative ones. Of course, this was the all-time awesomest. (I’m pretty sure I know which neighbor it was.)
Towering! Folly?
A few weeks ago, the NYTimes published a magazine supplement about architecture or something. It included this meandering ramble about building cities that have no history. Written by the paper’s starchitecture critic, Nicholas Ouroussoff, it glowingly describes the miraculous super-projects to be designed by Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl and others. The elephant in the room that Ouroussoff fails to mention is that all of these places that are offering these opportunities “happen” to be dictatorships (to be fair, he does mention that most of these “new cities” appear to be built as playgrounds for the rich, with no opportunity for interaction among classes).
While the architects celebrate the openness that these nations have, and the willingness they have to undertake massive top-down projects designed to show off their wealth, we’re able to read between the lines:
Take [Steven] Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing, for example, which has a surprisingly open, communal spirit. A series of massive portals lead from the street to an elaborate internal courtyard garden, a restaurant, a theater and a kindergarten, integrating the complex into the surrounding neighborhood. Bridges connect the towers 12 to 19 stories above ground and are conceived as a continuous string of public zones, with bars and nightclubs overlooking a glittering view of the city and a suspended swimming pool. “The developer’s openness to ideas was amazing,” Holl says. “When they first asked me to do the project, it was just housing. I suggested adding the cinematheque, the kindergarten. I added an 80-room hotel and the swimming pool as well. Anywhere else, they’d build it in phases over several years. It’s too big. After our meeting, they said we’re building the whole thing all at once. I couldn’t believe it. We haven’t had to compromise anything. . . .”
“We haven’t had to compromise anything”? Great! Because the building’s the thing!
Today’s NYTimes offers a balance to that morally idiotic sentiment, as architects discuss whether to take jobs from dictatorships. The article by Robin Pogrebin takes as a starting point Daniel Libeskind’s statement that he won’t work for totalitarian regimes (Singapore excepted) and, while it humorously tries to contrast Robert A.M. Stern with Rem Koolhaas —
Architects face ethical dilemmas in the West too. Some refuse to design prisons; others eschew churches. Robert A. M. Stern, who is also Yale’s architecture dean, drew some criticism last year when he accepted an assignment to design a planned George W. Bush Library in Dallas.
— it gets to the point about exactly the compromises that Holl avoids seeing:
Architects readily point out that dictators — or powerful central governments like China’s — can be among the most efficient in getting architecture built, as the boom in China attests. “The more centralized the power, the less compromises need to be made in architecture,” said the architect Peter Eisenman. “The directions are clearer.”
Sorta makes me want to read The Fountainhead
Scenes from San Diego
I’ve noticed that I take far fewer photos in places where I make repeat visits. Since this was my zillionth time in San Diego, and it was confined to the Gaslamp District, I didn’t take too many shots at all. If you’re looking for some, just click “more”!
Continue reading “Scenes from San Diego”
You’ve read the epic poem, now play the arcade game!
“Paradise Lost: They told him to go to Hell. They should have finished the job.”
Unrequired Reading: June 20, 2008
Billion-dollar baby
Today I shook hands and exchanged business cards with a gentleman whose personal worth exceeds $2 billion.
Kindle, part 1
Ahoy, dear readers! I’m awfully busy at the BIO show in San Diego. But rather than leave you without your daily dose of my ramblings, I thought I’d post this e-mail I wrote a pal in response to his query of, “How do you like your Kindle
I like the Kindle, but I’m a strange person. The screen is just fine for reading, and battery life hasn’t been an issue. Some people may have issues with the fact that all books are in the same typeface, or that they can’t tell how long a book is (there’s a row of dots on the bottom of the screen that show your progress in the book/article). I experienced that with Lord Jim, which I thought was a brief novel (Heart of Darkness length), but which I eventually realized was around 300 pages long.
The great advance is the Kindle store, which lets you buy books on the fly. On Sunday, at 5:30am, waiting at the gate in the Louis Armstrong Airport in Louisiana, I decided I’d like to read Netherland, the new novel by Joseph O’Neill. I looked it up on the store, bought it, and had it on the device within a minute. The store selection isn’t good enough for my oddball tastes (they have very few of the Pevear & Volokhonsky Russian translations, for example, sticking instead to the old Garnett or Maude ones), but for new(ish) books, it’s perfect.
Even better is the “try a sample” function, which sends the first chapter (approx.) of any book in the store to your Kindle. You can access the store either from the Kindle itself (kinda clunky, but fine when you’re not around your computer) or through your computer, since the Kindle is synched to your Amazon account. I can’t say enough about this sampling function. It’s similar to the 30-second samples you’d find on iTunes, but 30 pages is so much more worthwhile in figuring out whether a particular book is up your alley. Plus, the sample remains on your device; that is, it’s not a streaming, time-limited sample.
Pricing for new books is generally $9.99, with older ones much cheaper. There’s also a huge selection of public domain books at manybooks.net, formatted for Kindle. You can download those to your computer free (they accept donations), and then put them on the Kindle via USB. I picked up a bunch of classics that way, so I’ll never get trapped in a foreign country with nothing to read (you can’t access the Kindle store outside the U.S.). Last year in Milan, I got caught bookless after finishing books by William Gibson and Tom Stoppard, and the only bookstore I had time to get to had a minuscule English-language section, mainly of Penguin Classics. The upshot was that I finally read Middlemarch. Now, I’ll have a ton of choices waiting on the Kindle.
I don’t have to travel as much this year as I have in recent ones, but I’m still quite happy that I won’t have to lug multiple books in my carry-on anymore.