Author: Gil

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Big Sleazy

Going into this weekend, I wasn’t sure if the re-election of Ray Nagin as mayor of New Orleans would be tantamount to Marion Barry’s re-election in Washington, DC after being caught smoking crack cocaine.

Then the city’s member of the House of Representatives got caught on video taking $100,000 in cash to facilitate bribing Nigerian officials for an internet venture (evidently not this one), and I thought, “Well, at least Nagin’s not part of the political establishment.”

Will Collier at Vodkapundit has a good take on the need to revamp politics in New Orleans and Louisiana:

Louisianans in general and New Orleanians in particular made too many bad choices for too long. They acquiesced to governmental corruption and incompetence with a shrug and the inevitable, “that’s just Louisiana.” They allowed an unfettered criminal class to fester and thrive, until it literally took over the city. They put too much trust in luck and “the great elsewhere,” as local author Chris Rose puts it, to bail them out when things were at their worst.

And so they lived and died with those choices.

Now it’s time for them to choose again.

Read the whole shebang.

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Time is Money

Nested in this NYTimes article about the principles behind the Geek Squad computer repair service is a passage about how much people value their time:

Economists say industrialized societies are spending less on the basics of life — food, clothing and shelter — and more on leisure pursuits. Indeed, Robert Fogel, the Nobel-winning economics professor from the University of Chicago, has gone so far as to predict that by 2040 it will take the average American household only 300 hours of work a year to supply its basic needs.

As leisure time becomes more valued, Americans are loath to give it up. We spend money to get more of it. How much we are willing to spend depends on what we make as well as a more intuitive process of how we measure what our leisure time is worth.

The results from two online calculators that determine what your time is worth may surprise you. Try this or this. First, your hourly rate may be lower than you think. For instance, someone making $70,000 a year, but who puts in 50 hours a week and commutes an hour each way, may discover the hourly rate is not $33, but about half that.

So does that mean you hire a handyman only when he costs less than $16 an hour? It’s more complicated than that. With only about 12 hours of true leisure time a day, each precious hour is bought with more than 5 hours of work. According to the calculator, each hour of spare time would then be worth about $85.

How an economist measures the value of leisure time is inexact because do-it-yourselfers sometimes have a stronger motivation than saving money. They enjoy the process. Because seeking joy is less understood than seeking money, economists are still struggling to decide whether growing tomatoes or making drapes is rational.

My boss once told me that the first time in his life that he really felt he’d made it was when he looked out his window and saw some Mexicans mowing his lawn. I now pay a local lawn care company $35/week to take care of my grass. On the other hand, I assembled a dresser and two nightstands from Bo Concepts because I foolishly was too cheap to pay for delivery and assembly. The lost evenings and the frustration of the incomplete instructions more than offset the money I would have saved. But that’s hedonics for you.

I was a lot smarter when we bought our new buffet from Crate & Barrel last week, scheduling assembly/delivery for a Saturday. The Salvadoran delivery guys showed up early (8:45 for a 9-noon window) and were out the door in a few minutes.

Today, Amy’s planting tomatoes. Maybe I can pay someone $25/hour to have witticisms for me, so I can watch more basketball and keep this site up to date.

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Big Apple

The new Apple store in Manhattan looks gorgeous. Read the BW article about it, then check out the slideshow.

Of course, tastes change. BW has a neat article today about landmarks that were once reviled, and an accompanying slideshow for that, too. While the Eiffel Tower took a long time to grow on people, I don’t believe the Tour Montparnasse will ever be anything but an eyesore.

Bonus: the landmark article includes the rumor that Francois Mitterand worshipped Satan!

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Let them eat broadband!

If Eliot Spitzer has his way, someday we’ll all be able to download porno, regardless of race, color, creed or economic class. The NY state attorney general believes that universal high-speed internet access is a necessity for NY. (Presumably, this will allow him to utilize the Marshall Law to force phone and cable companies to make a deal to provide this at a loss, causing them to raise rates in other parts of their business.)

As one analyst quoted in the article points out, providing internet access doesn’t mean jack for families that can’t afford a computer:

That’s a much bigger reason for the lack of broadband penetration in low-income households than service accessibility, argues Bruce Liechtman, principal analyst with Liechtman Research Group and a former chair of the editorial board for the Cable & Telecommunications Marketing Assn. journal. “Broadband adoption really correlates directly with household income.” If Spitzer wants to solve the digital divide, Leichtman says, “he should be giving everybody a computer.”

Spitzer tells us that poor kids in NYC have it tough: “If you’re kid growing up in South Korea, your Internet access is 10 times faster at half the price than a kid growing up in the South Bronx,” he said.

On the flip side, kids in the South Bronx don’t share their northern border with a nuclear-armed country filled with bark-eating zombies.

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Cadzilla vs. Cancer (and Diabetes)

My dad has a tendency to give me “presents.” These generally consist of things he has no use for (see: massage chair, undersized bicycle, wobbly office chair). A few years ago, this present consisted of his old Cadillac, a 1986 black Fleetwood Brougham that I promptly nicknamed Cadzilla. It still ran fine, but the AC was dead, the stereo didn’t work without a Rube Goldberg attachment, and it could cost around $75 to fill the tank.

I drove it for a while as a second car to balance out my old Saturn, but gave up on the thing a few years ago. Since then, it’s been sitting in my driveway, or in the yard beside the house. I kept meaning to donate the thing to charity, but never got around to it till two weeks ago.

I started out by calling the Salvation Army. I figured they’d appreciate rolling out in a giant black Caddy on their way to fight damnation or whatever. They might even trick it out and make it a hopper, I thought.

Only problem was, the Salvation Army wouldn’t come out to pick it up. They insisted that I drive it to their drop-off point. In Newark, NJ.

Now, there are a number of factors that mitigated against this, starting with: the car needed a new battery and tires; the insurance and registration were expired; there’s no way I’m going into Newark in a big black Cadillac and making it out alive.

So it was on to Plan B: googling “donate car to charity”.

This led me to the American Diabetes Association. Two weeks ago, I filled out their online car donation form and figured I’d hear back promptly.

A week later, I decided to call to check on the status of my donation. Their rep said they’d received the donation-form, sent it on to the local tow company they use, and had no idea why I hadn’t been contacted. They gave me the number of the company and asked me to arrange the pickup.

I called, and was told to call another number. That led to an answering machine. I left my message, waited a day to hear back, and called again. I hung up on the answering machine this time, peeved that it was such a hassle to give something away.

So I went on to Plan C: the American Cancer Society.

I filled out their online donation form, and got an immediate e-mail response that they’d be in touch to schedule the pickup. Well done, I thought.

Then the tow company for the American Diabetes Association called back to schedule their pickup.

Did I feel a little trepidation over saying, “Between Saturday and Tuesday is fine”? Yes, I did. Did I tell them that I’d just re-donated Cadzilla to the ACS? No, I didn’t. In the off chance that the ACS actually sent a tow truck without calling to schedule it, I figured they could duke it out with the ADA guys, tire-irons a-flyin’.

Yesterday, I got home and found that Cadzilla was gone. There was a letter from the ACS in my mail, with a form to fill out to get a tax writeoff for Cadzilla. Now, I’m pretty sure that the ADA guys took the car, if only because there was no call back from the ACS, but the ADA guys didn’t leave a receipt for the car, as they mentioned on the phone.

At least Cadzilla’s gone to charity, but I feel bad because I’m going to have to lie to one of the groups about why the car is already gone. Maybe I can tell them that the Salvation Army took it.

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Way to rule the 21st century

It’s stories like this one that keep me from taking China seriously. A U.S.-educated Chinese researcher returns to his homeland to develop innovative DSP chips for China’s internal market, in hopes of breaking China’s stereotype of a being a great at manufacturing and crap at innovating. He ‘develops’ a line of DSP chips called Hanxin, and gets regarded as a national hero.

What happens?

But late last year, according to these reports, the whistle-blowers came forward. Some colleagues who had a dispute with Mr. Chen began contacting the government. They claimed, according to the news reports, that migrant workers had simply scratched away the name Motorola from a chip and replaced it with Hanxin. Presumably, that early version of Hanxin was a foreign company’s chip, the specifications of which Mr. Chen or an associate could give to manufacturers to mass-produce under the Hanxin name.

Repeat: He hired migrants to scratch out “Motorola” and write in “Hanxin”.

Update: Looks like BusinessWeek is with me on this one.

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Indy 000?

When I tried my hand at literary publishing — I’m in recovery — I received almost zero support from any of the major chains. Amazon, on the other hand, had a program in place for me to sell books through them and have the same potential for exposure as just about every other book (notwithstanding co-op payment to get on the front page of the site). It’s one of the reasons that I still use Amazon for most of my new book purchases.

I’ll go to the Borders around the corner from my office, but it’s quite rare that I spend any money there; it’s more for general browsing. There’s a Barnes & Noble with a massive used book section a few miles away that I’ll trawl every few weeks or months, but that’s the extent of my chain-shopping, unless there’s some sort of immediate priority (like forgetting to get a Mother’s Day present).

The closest worthwhile independent bookstore is the Montclair Book Center, but I don’t think I’ve been there for at least eight months. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that there are 1,200 books downstairs, most of which I haven’t read. I’ve been on a book-a-week pace for few months now, which means it’ll only take me around 40 years to finish reading everything, provided nothing new comes out.

Anyway, over at Slate, Tyler Cowen has an article about the superfluousness of independent bookstores:

But with the advent of the Internet, the literary world has more room for independence — if not always in its old forms — than ever before. Amazon reader reviews, blogs such as Bookslut, and eBay — the world’s largest book auction market — all are flourishing and are doing so outside the reach of the major corporate booksellers. Print-on-demand technologies and self-publishing are booming. Along with Google and other search engines, they will allow niche titles to persist in our memories for a long time to come. This is the flip side of the same computerization that elevated Wal-Mart and Borders: Information technology brings more voices into book evaluation and supply.

Unfortunately, many virtues of the new order are relatively invisible. Consider the used-book market. It was much easier to find a good used bookstore 20 years ago. Yet it has never been easier to buy a good used book, with the aid of, among others, Abebooks, a superb central depot for used booksellers.

Enjoy.

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Simeon

I was cleaning my basement last weekend when I found the program from Simeon’s memorial service. It was in a pile of ephemera: friends’ wedding invitations, tickets to Nets games from 2001-2002, photos of my driveway after the 1996 blizzard, a Volkswagen postcard, the brochures for a Lorenzo Mattotti exhibition in Milan and a religious painting exhibition in Bergamo. Virtual memories.

The program isn’t much: an 8.5″ x 11″ sheet, folded into four pages, a color photo of Simeon printed a little blurrily on the front. It reads:

Memorial Service for Simeon Georgiev Popov

May 5, 1974 – January 20, 2002

“I someday hope to be part of the largest orchestra so that I can share my love and compassion for music with others.”

Simeon came from Bulgaria to study music (trombone) as a graduate student at Syracuse University. Bill Harris, the uncle of my girlfriend at the time, took him under his wing. I met Simeon at a Thanksgiving dinner, since “the kid” (three years younger than me) had become part of the family. He was a little shy, very pleasant, had wonderful manners, and his English was a lot better than that of the last Bulgarian I’d met. He was good company.

In January 2002, Simeon walked in on an armed robbery in an off-campus apartment. He was delivering an order of chicken wings for his night-job. He thought the robbery was a joke, and tried to leave the room to make his next delivery. The robber tried to shoot him, but the gun jammed. They scuffled, and the robber fired again, shooting Simeon in the face and killing him.

So much in life hinges upon accidents, and who we are depends on what we make of them. We walk into each other’s worlds without a clue, sometimes walking right out again, “the moment” lost. Sometimes those accidents are cataclysmic. We could build a chronology of how and why Simeon walked into that room, and lament all the choices that could have been made, all the decisions and accidents, little and big, that could have kept him from being murdered. None of them would bring him or his music back.

The murderer’s name is Dominic Dennard, Jr. He liked to go by the nickname “D Murder.” For his crimes, he’s been sentenced to 75-to-life in state prison. At his sentencing, the judge said, “None of us now will ever know what beauty Simeon Popov might have created in this world. We will never know whether he might have been the next Bach or the next Beethoven. You snuffed out his talents and creativity, and you left this world a darker place as a result of it. My only regret this morning, Mr. Dennard, is that I cannot sentence you to life without the possibility of parole.” According to the NY prison system’s site, “D Murder” won’t be eligible for parole until 2067.

The lawyer for “D Murder” said, “Dominic Dennard is one of the most courteous, gracious, pleasant people I ever represented. It is irreconcilable with the person you’re about to sentence.”

Simeon’s parents left a letter for Bill to read after the sentencing and, even though it’s the saddest possible sentiment I could post on Mother’s Day, I’m going to share it with you:

“We remain on this earth, parents, who are neither alive nor dead, who have nothing left. Our home is now turned to dust, and the most sacred place in the world that we can call our home is our child’s grave. We live in pain and die little by little every day.”

* * *

SU started a scholarship fund in Simeon’s memory. The fund’s original purpose was threefold: to purchase basic equipment (like instrument stands) for the Music Academy Pancho Vladigerov in Sofia, Bulgaria; to provide a new instrument as an award to a promising young trombonist at a competition at the Music Academy; and to sponsor an annual prize to a graduating student at Setnor School.

Bill Harris and his wife Karen headed back to Bulgaria about a year ago for the music competition. Their first trip was to bring Simeon’s body back to his parents. I haven’t found out if the competition was a one-time event; a school rep wrote to tell me that the fund is devoted to providing assistance to music students at SU, but I’m not sure if that’s the sole use now.

If you’d like to donate to the scholarship fund, you can send a check to Angela LaFrance, 820 Comstock Ave., Womens Bldg., Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244. Make sure you note on the memo portion of your check: “Simeon Popov’s Memorial Scholarship Fund.”

Thanks.