Month: May 2006

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The varieties of diversity, or something

Timothy Garton Ash on the stultification of Europe:

In the great age of Renaissance Florence, diversity was indeed the dynamo of Europe’s extraordinary creativity. There’s a marvellous book called The European Miracle, by the economic historian EL Jones, that explores why Europe rather than China – scientifically and technologically more advanced than Europe in the 14th century – produced the scientific, agrarian and industrial revolutions that led the world into modernity. In brief, his answer is: Europe’s diversity.

But this was the diversity of a restless, often violent competition between cities, regions, states and empires. Florence and Siena, England and France, Christian Europe and the Ottoman empire – they did not resolve their differences by coalition agreements and endless negotiations in airless committee rooms on the Rue de la Loi in Brussels. To reverse Churchill’s post-1945 adage: they made war-war not jaw-jaw.

Many readers will remember the speech that Orson Welles put into the mouth of the gangster Harry Lime, in the film of Graham Greene’s The Third Man: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Has Europe today entered its age of the cuckoo clock?

Sorry to have been so light on the posts, dear reader. I’ve been pretty busy with the magazine. Have a good holiday weekend.

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Anti-Midas

Great (lengthy) article about the messed-up-edness of Paul Allen’s Charter Communications. I think Paul Allen’s greatest skill was his ability to be friends with Bill Gates back in the day.

From a financial perspective, Charter has turned into one of the ugliest U.S. companies still in solvency. Its $19.5 billion in debt dwarfs its market cap of $510 million. Its interest expense alone devours a third of its revenue; rival Comcast Corp., which has four times Charter’s revenues and subscribers, pays about the same. Charter also has a knack for posting nasty quarterly losses, including, earlier this month, red ink of $459 million, or $1.45 a share, for the first quarter, vs. $353 million a year ago. Charter’s quarterly losses per share now exceed its share price, which, at $1.20, has collapsed from a 2001 high of $25. It’s perverse, the realization that each of my $1.20 shares generates a $1.45 loss. It’s a wonder I don’t owe Charter money.

A company spokesman says Charter has ample liquidity and financial resources. But because so much of its cash flow is eaten up by servicing the debt, say analysts, it’s unable to invest in the things necessary to keep customers from flocking to satellite TV and the regional Bell rivals. It’s no coincidence that Verizon Communications chose a Charter cluster in Texas to pilot its foray into video last year. So easy were the pickings that Verizon says it quickly took 25% of the local market. (Charter does not agree with Verizon’s calculations.) And spending-constrained Charter, say analysts, is the cable provider most susceptible to AT&T’s competitive onslaught now that it’s in the process of acquiring Bell South Corp. The company says that its overlap with AT&T-BellSouth in major markets is minimal. Nevertheless, news of that deal sent my Charter shares down to 94 cents apiece — barely enough to get me in the door at a Taco Bell.

Sporting the fiscal soundness of a banana republic, Charter has every reason to erase its debt by declaring bankruptcy, finally wiping out long-suffering holders like yours truly. But it won’t, because Allen, who has billions of his own money plowed into the equity side of the ledger, refuses to cede control to creditors, who would pick through the choicest assets the way they did in the Adelphia Communications Corp. bankruptcy.

Even if you’re not business-minded, it’s an enjoyable read (I think).

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Market Down

Rachel Donadio at the NYTimes has an article about why literary fiction sucks. Okay, it’s not really about why literary fiction sucks; it’s really about why the market for literary fiction sucks.

It has the dumbest concluding paragraph I’ve read in a while (soon to be topped by the conclusion of my article on disposable components in bioprocessing), despite the promise of this opening:

The pride and joy of publishing, literary fiction has always been wonderfully ill suited to the very industry that sustains it. Like an elegant but impoverished aristocrat married to a nouveau riche spouse, it has long been subsidized by mass-market fiction and by nonfiction ripped from the headlines. One supplies the cachet, the others the cash.

Having run a mini-publishing house of allegedly literary fiction, I’ve taken a somewhat jaundiced view of the relationship between book and marketplace. I’m all for fantastic literary writing, but it’s pretty clear that a market relying on people with my taste is doomed to insignificance. I love great writing and wish it would sell better, but it won’t.

And, despite Jonathan Galassi’s bizarre non-sequitur, it’s not because we’re living in a “post-9/11 world.” Read all about it.

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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.