馬庭正's Journal

4:01am: From http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/88b42742-6fd2-11de-b835-00144feabdc0.html:

Employees of the engine parts maker New Fabris have rigged up a series of gas canisters inside a factory workshop which they say will be detonated on July 31 if the two carmakers fail to pay €30,000 to each of the 366 workers facing unemployment.

Earlier this year France was hit by a wave of boss-nappings, where workers held factory managers hostage, sometimes for several days, to force better redundancy payoffs or protest at factory closures. Most ended without violent incident.

However there is real concern within the government that tensions could rise in the autumn, when unemployment and company failures are expected to increase sharply, especially in the car parts sector - hard hit by the automobile crisis. There is already widespread resentment at bailouts for banks and carmakers, while the government has refused to consider a fiscal stimulus package to boost consumer spending.

12:20am: “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.” -- Russian proverb, quoted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in Warning to the West, 1975.

(I can't find it in Russian, though. If you can, please comment?)

4:39am: Plus ça change...
From http://mpettis.com/2009/06/china%e2%80%99s-loan-growth-isn%e2%80%99t-boosting-my-confidence-in-china%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cgreen-shoots%e2%80%9d/:

I know I have made a number of references to the 33 A.D. banking crisis in Rome as one of the first recorded cases of a banking panic. I often get questions on it, so just for the fun of it, and because I have wanted to do this for a long time, let me post here a portion of Chapter 15 from Will Durant’s History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to AD 325

The famous “panic” of A.D. 33 illustrates the development and complex interdependence of banks and commerce in the Empire. Augustus had coined and spent money lavishly, on the theory that its increased circulation, low interest rates, and rising prices would stimulate business. They did; but as the process could not go on forever, a reaction set in as early as 10 B.C., when this flush minting ceased. Tiberius rebounded to the opposite theory that the most economical economy is the best. He severely limited the governmental expenditures, sharply restricted new issues of currency, and hoarded 2,700,000,000 sesterces in the Treasury.

The resulting dearth of circulating medium was made worse by the drain of money eastward in exchange for luxuries. Prices fell, interest rates rose, creditors foreclosed on debtors, debtors sued usurers, and money-lending almost ceased. The Senate tried to check the export of capital by requiring a high percentage of every senator’s fortune to be invested in Italian land; senators thereupon called in loans and foreclosed mortgages to raise cash, and the crisis rose. When the senator Publius Spinther notified the bank of Balbus and Ollius that he must withdraw 30,000,000 sesterces to comply with the new law, the firm announced its bankruptcy.

At the same time the failure of an Alexandrian firm, Seuthes and Son due to their loss of three ships laden with costly spices and the collapse of the great dyeing concern of Malchus at Tyre, led to rumors that the Roman banking house of Maximus and Vibo would be broken by their extensive loans to these firms. When its depositors began a “run” on this bank it shut its doors, and later on that day a larger bank, of the Brothers Pettius, also suspended payment. Almost simultaneously came news that great banking establishments had failed in Lyons, Carthage, Corinth, and Byzantium. One after another the banks of Rome closed. Money could be borrowed only at rates far above the legal limit. Tiberius finally met the crisis by suspending the land-investment act and distributing 100,000,000 sesterces to the banks, to be lent without interest for three years on the security of realty. Private lenders were thereby constrained to lower their interest rates, money came out of hiding, and confidence slowly re-turned.

Except for the exotic names (I was delighted to see that there was a banking firm by the name of Brothers Pettius - maybe an ancestor of mine?) and the spice-bearing ships, this story has a remarkably contemporary ring to it, as do nearly all historical accounts of financial crisis, by the way.

8:50am: "That's why I like Welsh girls. They sound wet." -- digitalemur

1:38am: For bedfull_o_books, who says she hurt herself laughing when I read this bit to her.
From Midnight Poutine, a Montreal blog:

Every Monday on my street, there is a parking ban from 9:30 - 10:30am. Ostensibly, during this hour the streets are cleaned. In reality, the chances of seeing a street cleaner on our street during that window of time is about as likely as seeing a dodo bird and unicorn filming a porno in front of our apartment. However, the chances of seeing a meter maid come by to dole out parking tickets during that time is about 110%. The city is great at fining people for not following parking signs; it's just not so great at using that revenue to follow through on the infrastructural purpose of those signs. Only Alanis Morrisette could sift through the multiple layers of irony.

10:25am: So, according to Wikipedia, that unimpeachable source, the only subway systems in the world that operate 24 hours, 7 days a week are the New York City Subway, PATH, the Red and Blue lines of the Chicago L, and PATCO between Philadelphia and its New Jersey suburbs.

Anyone know of any others? Night bus networks, while nice, don't count.

(I thought of this after a conversation with bloodstones about Chicago's Blue Line, in which she said, "All-night transit service is a mark of civilization. Sorry, Boston.")

10:20am: Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his Atlantic column, June 23rd:

You must understand that my Dad, in his time, actually carried guns, and from the time I fully knew what it meant to serve in Vietnam, to come home and become a Panther, to point a rifle at a cop, I was fascinated. I still am. I think part of it is knowing that while you may one day write for the Atlantic, you will never knuckle up on the streets of West Philly, fly off to Vietnam and take a lover, come home toting guns, talking Fanon, and then say, "Meh, I've got kids. Time to work at a library."

Paul Coates, on Tavis Smiley's show last year:

Do you know, I never think about it, Tavis, as sacrifice.

I'm particularly blessed and gifted. I went to library school, Atlanta University. I went to get a master's degree so that I could come back and hopefully work at Howard University, work in their Black history collection, and thereby satisfy the inner part of my soul, you know, see? And in doing that, the way was made for Ta-Nehisi and for my other kids to go to school.

So it wasn't a sacrifice at all. I loved going to work every day, working at Howard University.

Both the column and the interview are worth reading, and are about very different things from the bits I quote, but those parts were the ones I wanted to post and juxtapose.

9:21am: When Gloria Vanderbilt writes a BDSM novel, she gets a New York Times book review...
...and a blurb from Joyce Carol Oates.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/books/18gloria.html:

“Obsession” is written in stylized literary prose that owes something to Pauline Réage’s “Story of O,” and is set in a world that’s partly fantastical. It’s erotica, not porn. But it nevertheless uses vocabulary and describes activities of a sort that readers of The New York Times are usually shielded from. There are scenes involving dildos, whips, silken cords and golden nipple clamps, not to mention an ebony, smooth-backed Mason Pearson hairbrush purchased at Harrods. As the book explains, spanking with a Mason-Pearson is a “serious matter,” not the kind of thing that is rewarded with the “luscious afterglow of warm cocoa butter.” Mint, cayenne pepper and a fresh garden carrot are deployed in the book in ways never envisioned by “The Joy of Cooking.” And there is also a unicorn, though, blessedly, it remains a bystander.

Ms. Vanderbilt’s son Anderson Cooper, the CNN newscaster, who read “Obsession” in manuscript, said: “The six most surprising words a mother can say to her son are: ‘Honey, I’m writing an erotic novel.’"

Mason-Pearson will be selling a few more of their hairbrushes this year, I think.

12:46pm: Occasionally, I get really angry on behalf of some of my friends because of appearance privilege.

Here's what I mean: I have a number of friends who are really sweet, wonderful people. They often get treated badly, however, in part because they don't fit the societal definition of what people (women, particularly--most of them are women) should look like.

On the other hand, there are a few acquaintances who get away with truly obnoxious behavior because they're conventionally attractive. (I can't think of anyone who fits that description who is actually a friend, for the obvious reason that sufficiently obnoxious behavior tends to drive me away, even when I haven't been directly affected by it.)

There's not much I can do about it except try to be a good friend, but it still rankles.

2:31am: Do they let second graders walk over a mile alone to and from school nowadays?

I just Googled my walk to school in first and second grade. 1.1 miles through suburban subdivisions. (I don't remember walking to or from kindergarten.)

6:59pm: wineinacan.com
E couldn't resist the four-pack of 250mL cans of Barokes Shiraz at $5.


http://wineinacan.com/our_range/us

1:08pm: Terrible money-making idea of the day.
So, we were driving along in the typically annoying traffic around here when a money-making idea struck me.

Contractors often drive like jerks. They do around here, at least, and I imagine this isn't the only place where they do. One of my friends explains it's because they're constantly late, and that's because the only way to make money is to overbook clients. At any rate, they often drive in obnoxious ways.

Anyway, it occurred to me that an interesting, if short-lived moneymaking scheme would work something like this:

Lease a whole bunch of panel vans. Hire a bunch of really obnoxious drivers to drive them around the city. Put a variety of fictitious company names on the vans, along with a number to call to complain about their driving.

The number is a premium-rate telephone number.

Each van driver gets paid on commission from the premium-rate telephone number, which is answered by a (single) staff member (also paid on commission) who takes complaints in exhaustive detail. Obviously, the van driver has an incentive to cause as much road rage as possible, and the person answering the call has an incentive to keep people on the line as long as possible.

Drivers might coordinate through a central office to go to the places where they would annoy the most people. There might be more competition for days like the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and Memorial Day weekend.

The company would not be responsible for tickets drivers incurred, of course.

It wouldn't last long before one was shut down, but one might try doing something like this as a performance art piece, and film the results.

---

It occurs to me writing this that it might actually be a variation on Ryanair's business model, since they have notoriously bad customer service, and charge to phone them up: http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/faqs.php?sect=CONTACT&div=call_ctr

But then they do actually provide a service, so maybe it's not that similar.

3:21am: I was good, I could talk
A mile a minute,
On this caffeine buzz I was on
We were really hummin'
(1989)

5:40pm: "The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market." --Randall Munroe, rollover for http://xkcd.com/592/

1:33pm: Chinese students laugh at Geithner.
This isn't a particularly surprising occurrence, but apparently much of the American media have chosen (or been asked) not to say much about it.

From http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/5423650/Geithner-insists-Chinese-dollar-assets-are-safe.html:

In his first official visit to China since becoming Treasury Secretary, Mr Geithner told politicians and academics in Beijing that he still supports a strong US dollar, and insisted that the trillions of dollars of Chinese investments would not be unduly damaged by the economic crisis. Speaking at Peking University, Mr Geithner said: "Chinese assets are very safe."

The comment provoked loud laughter from the audience of students.

I searched around for a video of this, but I couldn't find one.

12:48pm: PSA [United States]: Border documentation
Today is the first day Bermudian, Canadian, and United States citizens must show "documents that comply with the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI)" in order to cross into the United States either by land or by sea. http://www.getyouhome.gov/html/eng_map.html provides a list of compliant documents.

In practice, this means a passport or other similar document. Earlier requirements which allowed American and Canadian citizens to cross the border with ID and proof of citizenship have now been superceded.

More information is available at http://www.dhs.gov/xtrvlsec/crossingborders/

Just FYI.

12:34pm: I didn't think Macs entered the blue screen of death...
...but mine somehow managed.

Removing the battery and disconnecting then reconnecting the power got it back to a place where it would reboot.

Not happy about losing my work, though.

2:58am: [Connecticut Area Codes 203 and 860] Public Service Announcement
Today is the first day of permissive 10-digit dialing in area codes 203 and 860. In other words, today is the first day in which you may, but are not required to, dial ten digits to call someone within your area code, if you are calling within area codes 203 or 860.

On November 14, 2009, permissive 10-digit dialing ends and mandatory 10-digit dialing begins in both area codes 203 and 860. On that day you will be required to dial ten digits in order to call someone within your area code, if your area code is either 203 or 860.

This change is being made in order to facilitate the overlay of area code 475 over area code 203. Even though area code 475 will only be overlaid over area code 203, callers in both area codes 203 and 860 will have to dial all calls with ten digits beginning on November 14th.

Area code 959 is planned as an overlay over area code 860, and has a planned activation date of 2011.

Details at http://nanpa.com/pdf/PL_388.pdf.

6:24pm: Interesting.
I just noticed that if you edit a post originally from dreamwidth, it attempts to change the corresponding crosspost(s) from it.

This is arguably a feature, but I was just surprised by the behavior.

1:42pm: From "What Makes Us Happy?" in the June 2009 Atlantic magazine:

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Edit: nafe pointed out that the article was in the Atlantic, not Harper's, and I corrected.

4:23pm: I just got robo-polled.
The call started by claiming it was connected to Yale University, originated from 203.745.0045, and asked me for my opinions on two pieces of legislation before the Connecticut legislature: death penalty repeal, and a prohibition on smoking at Indian casinos.

The recording sounded legitimate, so I did my part for opinion research.

12:44am: I am assembling a tasting flight of Shiraz wines.
bedfull_o_books prefers Shirazs. I figured it'd be fun to offer her a tasting flight of them. (There was no particular occasion for this, but I suppose we could break them open for her birthday.)

Anyway, I'm doing this by the simple expedient of buying piccolo bottles (187mL, a quarter of a regular 750mL bottle) of various Shiraz wines. This is one and a half regulation UK mini-glasses of 125mL each, or a bit more than what the Americans and Canadians consider a standard glass of wine (5 oz and 150mL, respectively).

There are some fun advantages to this: the bottles are small and cute--always a consideration with bedfull_o_books--and what's more a large variety of wines can be assembled for a very reasonable price. Most of the wines which are available in piccolo bottles are rather cheap wines, but that's not a problem; I'm just having fun with the idea of assembling a tasting flight.

The only difficulties I've found so far are that a) this packaging tends to be hard to find and is often relegated to the "wine cooler"/box wine section when a store carries it at all and b) when one can find these bottles, they're generally sold in four-packs, which kind of defeats the purpose, at least for what I'm doing. Supermarkets, where this packaging is easier to find than in actual wine shops, often won't break up four-packs.

This evening, for example, I found a single bottle of Black Swan Shiraz, one of a few stray bottles in a display of four-packs, and Foodmaster wouldn't sell it to me. They lost a sale but I failed to find the wine elsewhere before closing time. So we both lost.

I suppose I could mail order but the shipping gets truly silly on individual piccolo bottles. I've been content to make the scavenger hunt a part of the process.

Thus far I've found shirazes from Fisheye Winery (California), Alice White (Australia), and Lindemans (Australia). (Well, I did find the Black Swan, which is also Australian, but I couldn't buy it.) All of them really quite inexpensive.

I'll keep looking. I have a list of fifteen wines, some Shiraz/Syrah blends with other varietals. If I find them all I'll be quite surprised, but it'll be a fun search.

If you know of any places that sell wines in these piccolo bottles and are willing to sell individual bottles out of their four-packs, I'll be glad if you let me know!

3:39pm: I'd wondered who paid if you got quarantined...
In Hong Kong at least, the government offers to pay for your hotel room, feeds you, and sends you a box of chocolate in thanks.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8032753.stm:

Travellers in a Hong Kong hotel have been speaking of their frustration and boredom as they endure a week-long quarantine imposed as a precaution against swine flu.

Officials cordoned off the hotel on Friday after it was discovered that a Mexican who had been staying there had tested positive for swine flu.

[G]uests who had been taken to hospital for tests following the discovery of the Mexican man's case had all tested negative.

Authorities are offering to cover the cost of rooms and expenses while Hong Kong's health secretary sent a box of chocolates to each of the guests to thank them for their patience, reports said.

Guests also noted that the staff and officials had been trying their best to keep guests happy.

1:37am: Envisioning the End of ‘Don’t Cluck, Don’t Tell’
From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/nyregion/30towns.html

In the modest backyard of Rosemarie Morgan’s 1890-era house, about a half-mile from Yale University, there is a small Buddha, azalea and forsythia, Japanese cherry and plum trees, and an Amish-made chicken coop with five residents — four who lay eggs and Gloria, who is barren but one heck of a watchdog.

The fowl are technically illegal under New Haven’s zoning code, which prohibited raising hens and other livestock when it was updated during the 1950s. But these days, many dozens of backyard hens are generally tolerated under the city’s informal enforcement program — call it “don’t cluck, don’t tell” — that mostly looks the other way. With urban fowl increasingly common, Alderman Roland Lemar has introduced legislation that would allow residents to raise up to six hens.

Seattle recently allowed residents to have up to three goats. Minneapolis just legalized beekeeping.

At the center of the Brave New World of urban ag is the humble hen, whose care and keeping is the subject of Web sites like thecitychicken.com, urbanchickens.org, backyardchickens.com, or Just Food’s City Chicken Meetup NYC, which has 101 hen-friendly members in New York.

Most municipalities are much less hospitable to roosters (consider that next door every dawn) than hens. But the clear trend is toward being more permissive. Jennifer Blecha, who did a doctoral dissertation on people’s attitudes about urban livestock, surveyed the zoning codes of American cities and found 53 allow hens, 16 prohibit them and 9 make no mention. In general, Ms. Blecha said, cities are much more tolerant of domestic livestock than suburbs.

Owen Taylor of Just Food, which promotes local agriculture in New York, said the key is for people to explain their plans to their neighbors, so they know what to expect. He praised New York’s codes, which deal with potential bad behavior (smell, noise, rodents) rather than the existence of the hens, for allowing responsible fowl behavior and punishing those who create a nuisance. Citing New York street wisdom, he added, “You deal with it on a coop by coop basis.”

6:51pm: Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital
From http://baselinescenario.com/2009/04/27/geithner-wall-street/:

France in the 1960s and 1970s was the source of a tremendous amount of new philosophical, literary, and critical thinking - Foucault, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Baudrillard, Barthes, etc. But in my opinion, the most important member of that intellectual generation was the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Distinction, Bourdieu’s best-known work, he described how economic class is reinforced by cultural capital: economic elites create cultural distinctions, and pass on to their children the ability to make those distinctions, in order to use cultural sophistication as a means of perpetuating class dominance. This may sound abstract, but think about the example that is the subject of Bourdieu’s The Love of Art: museums. Upper-class parents take their children to fine art museums and teach them how to talk about Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso; later in college, job interviews, and cocktail parties, the ability to talk about Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso is one of the markers that people use, consciously or unconsciously, to identify people as being from their own tribe. (Note that democratizing museums - making them open to anyone - doesn’t undermine cultural capital, because the key is not looking at paintings, but learning how to talk about them.)

We used the term “cultural capital” in our Atlantic article as a way of describing the influence of Wall Street over Washington. By this, we meant that one of the primary means by which Wall Street got its way in Washington was by creating and propagating the understanding - among sophisticated, educated, cultured people, as opposed to “populists” or the “rabble” that showed up at anti-globalization protests - that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country as a whole. We didn’t mean to say that old-fashioned campaign contributions and lobbying did not play an important role. (We did, however, say that we thought out-and-out corruption of the Jack Abramoff variety was probably a minor factor - not because we have any insider knowledge one way or the other, but simply because such criminal behavior was simply unnecessary given the other levers available.) But I don’t think that implicit quid pro quo bargaining is a sufficient explanation, because I believe it entirely possible that there are honest politicians and civil servants who really, truly believe that they are acting in the public interest when they come to the aid of the largest banks.

Tim Geithner may very well be such a man.

I don’t know Tim Geithner. But I have no reason to believe he is corrupt. Instead, the simplest explanation of the Times article is that he has internalized a worldview in which Wall Street is the central pillar of the American economy, the health of the economy depends on the health of a few major Wall Street banks, the importance of those banks justifies virtually any measures to protect them in their current form, large taxpayer subsidies to banks (and to bankers) are a necessary cost of those measures - and anyone who doesn’t understand these principles is a simple populist who just doesn’t understand the way the world really works.

(Note: I moved the link to the Times article referenced so that it is linked from the section I quote.)