The Power and the Money

More evidence that Trump caused the peso to fall

First, pray for Miami. I have a love-hate relationship with that city, even deeper than my love-hate with Texas. I would not want to live in that entire metro, not in Miami-Dade, not in Fort Lauderdale, not in Palm Beach. But my family is there along with seven million other people. They have not evacuated. But my brother is sheltering the families of two of his daughters at his house outside the flood zone; the third is an R.N. and she is on call, along with her police officer husband. 

Second, allow me to present some evidence that Donald Trump was indeed responsible for most of the weakness in the Mexican peso since he arrived on the political scene in mid-2015. The Mexican peso has strengthened over the past year. When we were there this summer, the peso rose above 5½¢ and stayed there. It had plunged below 5¢ after the election. This was good for Mexicans who wanted to buy imported goods, and I have to admit that Mexico City is still very inexpensive, but still. 

The rise means that the peso is all the way back to its level of January 2016, before Donald Trump began winning any primaries. It is not quite back up to the 6¢ level of June 2015, when Trump rode down that escalator. That is probably due to residual uncertainty regarding the NAFTA negotiations: markets are partially pricing in the chance that the negotiations will fail, thereby exposing Mexican producers to WTO tariffs when exporting to the United States. 

And so, a prediction. If NAFTA comes out intact from the negotiations, then the real exchange rate of the peso will return back to the level it had back in 2015. 

Do note that candidate Trump could move the market with his words; President Trump much less so. Bets are being hedged, but nobody believes that White House words carry any information anymore. 

The power of propaganda

We may be in Mexico, but sometimes you get pulled back into discussing home.

Donald Trump just gave two very disturbing speeches. In one, he portrayed Long Island as an embattled paradise turned hellscape by violent Latino immigrants. In the other, he called for more police brutality. It is a continuation of a theme he started during the campaign.

What’s crazy is that Long Island is safer than it’s ever been. If you look at juvenile homicide arrests, you get basically nothing save for three in 2014, another one in 2016 and six this year. It is true that MS-13 recently carried out some horrific crimes in Suffolk. But that is not a crime wave.

So how does Trump get any traction? Sadly, I know the answer. I have family on Long Island and in South Florida.

These places are similar, heavily populated by the descendants of white Ellis Island immigrants, the generation of people who shaped America’s liberal version of itself. Jews, Italians, and Irish all turned into Americans by the melting pot. Yet current segregation, presidential propaganda, and the folk memory of the genuine crime explosion of the 1960s and 1970s, combines to make them all ready to believe things that just ain’t so.

Consider two anecdotes. I was in Broward County with my daughter at an outdoor zoo, where save for the bear and panthers the kiddos can walk around and interact with the animals. At one point, my daughter sprints out of the bathroom after we wash her hands. I’m not worried, not least because I’m there with family: her cousin, uncle and great-uncle are all outside. But this older white guy next to me, he says, “You ought to get one of those child leashes.” I say nah, why? 

“Crime. It’s crazy out there. Worse than ever.”

Me: no, not really, I grew up in New York in the 1970s and it was far more dangerous.

“I’m from New York too! Really, you think it’s safer now?”

Me: I know it. Look at how the city has changed, look at how Miami has changed. And then I show him some graphs (available at the Marshall Project). And he gets sort of quiet, as if he never expected a middle-aged white guy to take issue with what seemed to him to be an anodyne comment about an obvious truth.

Then the same conversation happens with my (very liberal) brother two days later.

With my brother, I showed him news stories from the 1980s when he lived in Miami that drove the point home. He was a little abashed: despite his own experience regularly travelling to neighborhoods that would have given him pause 20 years ago, despite his own daughter living in a formerly n0-go part of Plantation, and despite his knowledge of overall crime trends the incessant propaganda of the past two years had convinced him of something that just was not true.

Maybe the internet really has made the creation of alternate facts easier than in the past, but the alternative fact of “American carnage” has been created by just a presidential soapbox combined with the predilections of white people to believe the worst about their non-white neighbors. 

In short, as long as that predilection exists, demogogues will be able to make hay by making stuff up. The internet has affected American politics for the worse. But this is not one of the ways.

Some benefit to the Great Sloppification

It is fairly well undeniable that sartorial standards have collapsed over the past half-century. It has been hard for me to see the benefit. I understand that most people I know in Florida disagree that a long-sleeved lightweight cotton jacket or shirt is more comfortable than a terrible looking T-shirt in the heat. But that does not mean that I understand their disagreement. 

And when it comes to the collapse in standards in more temperate climes, I am utterly befuddled. At least in cold weather people still look somewhat dignified when being sloppy. But once it hits about 60, well, it is possible to dress informally and look good but most Americans do not bother. 

Plus, you really can look quite good and be comfortable in the Miami heat if you know what to buy, even in dark colors:

But finally now I have found a possible benefit! In 1965, women spent 48 minutes a day on laundry and men spent ... uh ... one. By 2012, that was down to 19 minutes for women and up to ... uh ... five minutes for men. (Table 2.1.) So it is possible to argue that the Great Sloppification freed women from the drudgery of washing men’s clothing and allowed men to get away with increasing their laundry time from basically nothing to merely risible. 

Might it be just the spread of washing machines what let people spend less time on laundry? Nope. Household penetration in America hit 75% by 1950. (See Table I.)

Clothes dryers, on the other hand, might account for some of the decrease: they were introduced in 1950 and only hit 50% in 1972. (Same table.)

Still, while I cannot eliminate the hypothesis that the fall in joint laundry activities from 49 to 24 minutes a day might be due to cheaper clothes dryers, I have my doubts. I suspect that the effect is indeed due to the Great Sloppification. 

So there you have it. The world is an uglier place, people no longer show each other respect when going out in public, and is damnably hard for young up-and-comers to signal seriousness. But assuming that men should be spending at least 19 minutes a day on laundry, all those people wandering around in T-shirts with logos on them have a little more than 1½ extra hours a week that I am sure they are spending very well on personal advancement and societal improvement. 

What makes a nation?

Florida is a bizarre state. Not only is it different in extreme from the rest of the country; different parts of Florida are different in the extreme from each other. It just should not work. But somehow it does. Every so often somebody idly proposes splitting the state, but it’s never gone anywhere. Ditto secession. Despite the enthusiasm with which non-Americans jump on news of secession movements in California, Texas, Hawaii and Vermont, none of them show even the slightest sign of going anywhere.

Why then is the European Union in trouble or the United Kingdom under threat? It isn’t political oppression, despite what the people in England (regards Europe) or Scotland (regards England) might tell you. Both polities are acceptably democratic, no matter what objections you might have to the constitutional particulars. Is it language? Obviously not in the case of the United Kingdom, and almost-certainly not in the case of the people demanding Brexit, since the European Union has done nothing to weaken English. (Nor any other language; quite the reverse, by demanding full translations from everything into everything.) 

So what is it? Why is the U.K. under strain and why is the E.U. under strain? The obvious answer is that the cultural splits in Europe are much bigger than their equivalents in the United States. 

Alberto Alesina (Harvard), Guido Tabellini (Bocconi), and Francesco Trebbi (U. of British Columbia) decided to answer that question. What did they find? Well, simply put, cultural differences within Europe are less than within the United States. You got that? Texans and New Yorkers differ more in their beliefs about family, religion, trust, sexuality and the state than do Castillians and Dutch or Greeks and Germans. Moreover, cultural differences within European states are bigger than the differences between European states. 

(Amusingly, you can use their methodology to compute the most European part of Europe. You get Germany and Austria. But you also get the Belgium, the Netherlands, and oddly enough big chunks of Spain and Portugal. So much for stereotypes.)

In summation:

A comparison between the E.U. and the U.S. suggests that fundamental cultural differences among Americans are not bigger than that amongst Europeans. Along this dimension, if Americans can share a well functioning federal union, so could Europeans. Needless to say, the United States had 250 years of nation building and 150 years have gone by from the Civil War. Europe has had a much shorter common history and only 70 years have gone by since the last inter-European war. Americans share a common language and geographic mobility in the U.S. has been much higher than within Europe, or even within individual European countries. Mobility helped creating a melting pot and thus a common identity, but apparently did not dampen cultural heterogeneity.

In other words, you are left with nationalism as a defining force by itself. Which leaves you with two possible implications:

1. It might be easier to build a European polity than the current troubles imply;
2. Building any multinational polity is impossible. Two political communities can be identical in every respect, but as long as they define themselves as nations then it will be very hard to create a shared polity;
3. We are reading too much into all this. The stability of the United States and the problems of the United Kingdom are both contingent. Give the U.S. a few bad breaks or give the U.K. better politicos and none of this would be happening. 

Thoughts? It certainly seems as if nationalism has a mysterious strength of its own. But maybe not! Maybe it is all on (3): political communities grow and disintegrate in hinky contingent ways; nationalism follows (or doesn’t.) Frex, you can’t get the near-identical West Indies to unite but you have no problem holding the unbelievably diverse United States together. 

Stop, renovate, and list ‘em

I am not sure why the New Yorker thought it germane to satirize Vanilla Ice as a business consultant. Is he making some sort of comeback of which I am unaware? Still, the satire is funny. 

But as my friend Guy Tower pointed out to me, Vanilla Ice is actually a moderately successful businessman in real estate.  He buys homes in Florida, fixes them up and flips them. You can get his advice on TV! If you really want to know, go to vanillaicerealestate.com. 

“Stop, renovate and list them,” quoth the Tower.

Orlando is horrifying

 I am in Florida. What happened this weekend horrifies me. I hope all the friends and relatives of the victims can put their lives back together as best as they can. And I hope the State of Florida and the United States of America will take the necessary actions to make it harder for homicidal maniacs to get their hands on the weapons that make such attacks possible. 

The statements of certain politicians have also been (albeit far less) horrifying. (At least as long as said politicians lack power.) All I can add to the debate being conducted in living rooms, bars, social media, television, and among politicians is that America has seen similar cries before ... and we have reacted far worse. Admittedly, the threat during the first Red Scare and World War 2 was far greater. But while one particular fearmongering crybaby has not been earning any respect ... in general, thus far, the reaction of the American public has been good. Even if not all their elected leaders have been profiles in courage, few have openly piled on.

I pray that continues.

Help one American colony, and you gotta hurt another, or something, plus Maryland drivers suck

 Speaker Ryan may be helping the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico against the wishes of his caucus, but man is he letting them fly their freak flag when it comes to the District of Columbia. One Republican basically said that if Washingtonians did not like it, we could go join Maryland.

Bah. I do not like the idea because of a profound culture difference: Maryland drivers are terrible. And I mean terrible in a unique nowhere-else-in-America kind of way.

I just got into a yelling match with an asshole in an SUV who pretended to threaten to run me down when my kids and I were walking in an alleyway that he had turned into illegally. Fucking idiot, by the way, had a goddamned parking enforcement vehicle behind him when he revved his engine and lunged at me and my kids as we were walking. Pendejo. It ended poorly for him, as you can imagine. 

I have had conversations with Marylanders in bars who admit to thinking pedestrians should get out of their way in crosswalks. Add that to the way they honk at anything, and it makes you almost long for Virginia. Really, the craziness drops a lot among cars with District plates and dries up across the Potomac. Unfortunately, I only live a few blocks from Maryland, so I have to deal with them.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with drivers in that state? Disrespecting pedestrians and honking at everything. Where are we, Egypt? Brazil? Mexico City is becoming better than Maryland in this respect.

Note that I have lived in Boston and Miami. Marylanders do not drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. I drive badly the way Bostonians and Floridians drive badly. (Well, not Floridians.) Marylanders drive fine when it comes to signalling and stop signs and situational awareness and speed limits and respecting other vehicles ... well, except for the bloody honking. 

But while the honking is annoying, Marylanders deserve their own circle of hell for the way they treat pedestrians. WTF?

But despite these strong cultural differences with Maryland (do not get me started on their traitorious racist anthem) the actions of Congress are beginning to make me think that maybe retrocession would not be such a bad idea. 

Misleading headline award: American business do not face a “culture gap” with Cuba

 Despite the criticism, the New York Times is better than it has ever been. And it is still the best newspaper on the planet in any language that I read. (Which would, if you insist, cover English, Spanish, Portuguese and French. I do not understand spoken French.) But its headline writers have been falling down on the job lately.

First they suggest that Nicaragua is fighting an insurgency. But when you read the article, it becomes immediately clear that is not what’s going on. 

Now we learn that “Culture Gap Impedes U.S. Business Efforts for Trade With Cuba.” Fascinating! I would have imagined that the U.S. would have had the smallest possible culture gap in the world with Cuba. After all, we have Florida! And they have baseball. Perhaps they are talking about some Communist mentality? Fascinating! After all, Cuba experienced one the few genuine Communist revolutions not imposed by the Red Army. It might have altered the mindset deeply! In fact, it almost certainly did. So I started to read with fascination.

Only to learn that the problem is that “threading the needle between Cuba’s rigid rules and the restrictions that the United States continues to impose is tricky.” They do toss in one paragraph about Americans baffled by slow Cuban official decision-making.

Uh ... legal problems and a slow bureaucracy do not a culture gap make, fellows. 

Marcocare

 Was that not an amazingly entertaining debate? I am tempted to put up my hand-written notes as I watched. 

But I have a question. During the debate, Senator Rubio said that he wanted to replace Obamacare with a refundable tax credit. (The link defines refundable tax credit; Rubio gives his plan here.) How is that different from Obamacare subsidies? You take away the simplicity of the Obamacare exchanges, but you might even wind up increasing the subsidy.

Me, I think getting rid of the clear comparability of the Obamacare bronze, silver, gold and platinum plans would be a bad thing, but this plan is politically brilliant. It hits the mandate, which hurts the system, but it provides a ready-made answer to the people who already have insurance. Given status quo bias, you could easily keep those people on the rolls. Then give them a refundable tax credit bigger than their current subsidy. Brilliant! You move the United States a bit away from the Dutch health system that we are trying to emulate, but you do not piss anyone off and you keep the spirit of the Affordable Care Act ... while getting to say that you killed “Obamacare.”

Fear the man from Florida in the general. Although I do not think that he will get there.

Unless my analysis is wrong. School me, folks!

3-D printed houses are not ready for prime time

 Courtesy of Will Baird, I learn that a company in China is breathlessly promoting its 3-D printed houses. A revolution! The future is here! Not robots, but the next best thing.

Or not. There are some numbers in the second link. At first you’ll see a claim of $4,800 for a 2,100 square foot house. That is ... hard to believe. It is also contradicted later on in the same article, where they claim a total construction cost of $161,000. So the $4,800 is probably the cost of the printed construction materials.

$4,800 is not a dramatic decrease in materials cost. In South Florida, your typical concrete construction costs about $6 per square foot of living space. (That is not the cost of the poured concrete; it’s the cost of the concrete needed for the walls in a house of that size.) That comes to about $12,000 in total. Now, $4,800 is less than $12,000, but it isn’t clear how much of that reduction is due to the technology and how much is due to other things. Consider that in California, concrete walls cost about $11 per square foot of interior space: almost twice their Floridian cost! Building codes matter a lot. I suspect that a Miami builder could halve their costs if they built to Shanghai standards.

The article reports a “total cost” of $161,000 further down, which is a far-from-revolutionary $74 per square foot. And it isn’t clear if that’s the total construction cost or just the cost of the printing materials when you make the correct all-in calculation, although given cheap labor in China I would guess the former.

I think this is either a publicity stunt or a marginal improvement. Maybe both.

Another turn in the South

 In 2004, a good friend and I drove around Georgia, Alabama and the Florida panhandle. I had just gotten back from Fort Huachuca, he was getting leave from Fort Benning, and we both had family in Broward County, Florida. (And in my case, Miami-Dade as well.) We had been to the region quite a bit ... but rarely outside the confines of an Army post. So why not take my old Ford Focus and tool around the deep southeast for a few weeks before heading down to Fort Lauderdale? 

It was a great trip. The South is definitely different. The first thing you notice is how the countryside is intensively farmed. In fact, there is this ah hah moment when you realize that most of the woods you have seen are actually tree farms. My buddy said, “We’re not in New England,” after which we started yelling “Niner niner!” every time we spotted anything really alien. For example, take Quitman, Georgia, with the decaying mansions set back from the streets and its obvious poverty and extreme segregation. Neither poverty nor segregation are alien to New York or New England, of course, but once-rich and now-poor all black small towns are not particularly common. The only thing not “niner” in that town was the small market catering to Mexican immigrants.

Or consider Dothan, Alabama. The town depends on Fort Rucker for its existence, but that was not what made it not like New England. Nor did the suburban sprawl around the town; most American towns look like they’ve exploded across the countryside. What made Dothan southern was the way the sprawl had sucked all the life out of the center of the town, leaving it mostly a vasty expanse of parking lots. There was none of the quaint cuteness that would have filled a similar town in New England; but even California towns have more life in their centers. (In that sense, Quitman was actually more like a northeastern town than most Southern ones.)

The deadness of the centers applied to the larger cities, as well. (Birmingham was a partial exception.) We arrived into Montgomery at night, so it was less than surprising that the central city seemed deserted. We did find a nice little brewpub next to a retro-style minor league ballpark. It closed early, but the patrons suggested two other nearby bars. We went to one on the first floor of a motel on a hill at the edge of downtown, where the buzz-cut bartender sold me a $15 contraband Cuban cigar (putatively) that I then got to smoke right at the bar. (Some differences, they are awesome.) But the difference really showed up during the  day, where the downtown seemed to never open. It was an expanse of parking lots, vacant storefronts and drive-through banks, punctuated by the piles of government buildings and frighteningly devoid of traffic. And I don’t mean just pedestrian traffic. Kids could have played hockey in the middle of Dexter Avenue at 10am, if there had been any kids. And lunch didn’t change anything. Did all those government workers stay holed up in their offices?

Now, it is not like the northeast did not have abandoned urban centers when I was growing up. Central New Haven circa 1990? Ugh. The once-great “Hub” of the South Bronx? Awful. Baltimore? You have seen the Wire. And my first visit to Buffalo in 1990 can only be called depressing, along with my second, third and fourth. 

No, what was weird to a northeastern sensibility was that downtown Montgomery felt abandoned but not decayed. The streets and plazas were spotless. The empty storefronts were well-sealed and well-maintained. It all looked as if it had been suddenly abandoned in the face of an invading army. It was strange.

But that was just weird. What made Montgomery downright eerie was all the Confederate memorials. Sure, Rosa Parks had her plaque. And there were no slaveowning banners. But you couldn’t escape the oddly-respectful memorials to the Lost Cause. Statues of “The Statesman,” e.g., Jefferson Davis. Murals in the state capitol (which the legislature no longer uses) celebrating horseback-riding antebellum aristocrats. A memorial to the Confederate dead who served in the “War of Southern Independence.” 

The monuments to the Civil War were even more common outside the big cities: the below picture is from Havana, Florida, and it captures just how strange the monuments are:

Consider exactly what those soldiers were defending their families, communities, state and nation from. And then consider that the term “nation” is in that sentence. Wait ... what?

In southeastern Georgia we saw many more slaveowning Battle Flags than in Alabama, including a bumper sticker on a truck bearing the ominous slogan: “It’s Not Over.” A Shell station off of I-75 right over the Florida state line flew a gigantic Third Flag of the Confederacy. The design of the Third Flag is sufficiently obscure that it leaves little doubt that whomever put it up knew exactly what it stood for; no pretending to hide behind “southern heritage” here.

It completely weirded me out. As I wrote at the time, “It’s not the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, it’s slavery, dude. I can see memorializing the poor bloody soldiers who suffered and died for the CSA, but the CSA’s leaders should be treated the way the Germans treat the Nazis.”

Now, this was late 2004, so some of the strange atmosphere was supercharged from the recent election. In Georgia, an angry pickup driver threateningly tailgated us on a rural road, probably incensed by my Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers. He pulled up next to us and looked like he was about to start something when he noticed my friend was wearing BDUs. He got solemn and suddenly sped off. In Gainesville, we overheard loud laments about the war in Iraq from hospital workers eating at a Japanese steakhouse made up to look like a pagoda. And in Birmingham, Alabama, a diner did in fact serve us “American fries.”

And while not directly election-related, we kept running into angry demonstrations against the use of “Happy Holidays.” This was not a new thing by 2004, but I had lived in Mexico from 1996 to 2002 and spent most of 2002-04 in New Haven, various Army posts, and overseas. So the angry demonstrations against a completely anodyne phrase that had been used in the more Jewish parts of America since before I was born took me completely off guard.

But for all that, the real strangeness had to do with the war. The war that had ended 139 years ago by that point and will reach its 150th anniversary this year. 

Which brings us to a recent comment by Dave Evans of Georgia, who took issue with my characterization of the Confederate flag as the “slaveowning banner.” In the next post, I will lift my response to him from the comments. I think it is worth highlighting. But for right now, I just want to leave it with the statement that driving through the English-speaking South is a far stranger experience for a New Yorker than anywhere in English-speaking Canada west of Quebec. 

Cohorts v. cross-sections and you are not your grandparent

 So there is a report out that “Digital savviness peaks sometime between the ages of 14 and 15, and then drops gradually throughout adulthood, before falling rapidly in old age.”

Your alarm bells should immediately start going off. Do people just suddenly start forgetting how to push buttons (or yell at their machines) once they reach a certain age? Is using simple information technology a skill more akin to catching a fastball, in that if you don’t develop it by the time you’re a teenager you’ll never get good at it?

Probably not.

So that has to rank up there as a highly highly misleading sentence. Moreover, the tech-savviness that they’re measuring has to do the use of digital applications deliberately designed to be workable by a total idiot. Like, say, myself. It isn’t coding, or fixing a busted keyboard, or chip-design skillz what they’re measuring; it’s knowledge of Kik and Snapchat and Vine and all that.

My father, who really could be called digitally-savvy in that he not only used the for-morons applications like Skype but learned to program in his sixties, he would not have been amused by this article. 

Thumbs down from Lenny, may he rest in peace.

Oh, Miami, and an arrest in New York

You are probably aware that a woman in Miami named Filomena Tobias flipped off Joakim Noah after last night’s game against Chicago. Ah, Miami. You may not, however, be aware that ... oh, just click the link. It’s fun, trust me.

In other news, the NYPD arrested a man in Astoria, Queens, for firing a plastic pellet gun and then handing it off to his kids.

The law against realistic toy guns is a good one and it should be enforced. When I was a boy, we would shoot BB guns down by what  is now called Dumbo or across the bridge on Wards Island. We would also sometimes take them into buildings or on city streets in Brooklyn or, even more stupidly, Stanley Isaacs and 1199 Plaza in Manhattan. In 1994, that very game resulted in death when a police officer shot a boy holding a toy gun. 

I strongly support the law banning realistic toy guns.

And I double-support keeping BB guns out of parks: they can hurt people! This guy was letting his three year son and five-year-old daughter point a loaded pellet gun at other people. That is a recipe to blind somebody. (I have every intention of going target shooting with my boy and letting him learn all about firearms. I have no intention of letting him fire even low-velocity projectiles in crowded areas.) I am glad that other parents stopped this moron before anyone got hurt.

There is, however, something confusing. The story says that the other parents quickly realized that it was a toy. One went up to the guy and told him to stop. According to the news, he did so and left the park.

Why then did they call the police? Or did somebody else call the police?

Anyway, this guy was pretty damn stupid. I will cut 10-year-olds in 1980 some slack. A 54-year-old in 2013, not so much.

One of the things that is wrong with America is ...

... that people can actually stop the construction of high density apartments in Little Havana in the name of historic preservation.

Preserving “historic residences, including bungalows and small apartment buildings”? In Little Havana?? Are you kidding me?? Words fail. Seriously, folks, if the market wants to tear this crap down and build anything else, especially high-rises, we should let it.

He would agree were he still with us. And that is actually Coral Gables, which would also be well-served by being rebuilt from scratch. The construction bubble in Miami did many things, but destroying stuff worth preserving was not one of them. People, there is no place in this city that would not be improved by plonking a 30-story high rise on top of it. Caray.

Hot tea is unpleasant in the Miami heat, I think

 Regardless of my own opinions, I have to admit that this is clever political messaging:

 
My wife and I spotted it heading south on I-95 yesterday, right before the exit to Opa-Locka Boulevard. The phone number goes to a voice message saying, “Please leave any comments about the billboard after the tone.” The mailbox was full when we called. Some googling revealed reports that the number belongs to somebody called Robert Núñez, but that name is not particularly useful in most of America, let alone Florida.

Anyway, we found it amusing. Not as amusing as the Miami Heat player with his basically naked entourage of three women eating outside at Smith and Wollensky, or the dolphins cavorting in Government Cut, or the little black stray kitten that high-fived my wife (I am not exaggerating that last: she stuck out her palm to introduce herself and the kitten lifted up a paw, tapped her hand, and strutted off) or the children playing on the rocks (with the stray cats), but amusing nonetheless. Ah, Miami. Whenever I develop a good hate for the place, it does something weird enough to charm me back.

Off to a birthday party for a two-year old cousin. Hasta.

Cars of Februaries past

  After World War 2 ended, pent-up consumer demand meant that the auto manufacturers could pretty much sell whatever crap their factories could churn out.  It took, in fact, four years for the carmakers to start selling new products incorporating all the technological advances of the Depression and war years. 

Oldsmobile kicked it off with the restyled Futuramic Rocket 88.  It included the Hydramatic automatic transmission and a brand-new V-8 engine.  Now, neither was new.  Olds introduced the automatic transmission in 1940 and it had been building V-8’s since 1932, but the two things hadn’t been put together in a designed-from-the-chassis up vehicle.  In addition, the Rocket V-8 was the first overhead-valve design, allowing the engine to take up much less space and producing less vibration when accelerating.  It also had an AM radio that could sorta kinda be heard with the top down at cruising speed maybe if you had lots of imagination. 

My father, therefore, wanted one.  But they were hard to find in February of 1949.  Yet the above pic from 1949 shows that he got one.  (Well, actually the Rocket 76 with the Big Six engine.) Only wanting is not having.  How did he make that leap? 

El Caribe americano

  Lots of Stars-and-Stripes on the Mall of course, a few Texan ones, two French tricolors, one Ghanaian Black Star, a Californian red-star-and-bear ... and multiple Trinidadian, Jamaican, Haitian, Grenadine, Grenadian, and Guyanese flags. 

The Commonwealth Caribbean has an interesting emotional relationship with the United States, all the more so with this inauguration. 

P.S.  Why is Washington overrun with the Miami P.D.?  Dude.  Miami??

P.P.S.  Did Governor Paterson just call Hillary Clinton the best senator that New York City has every had?

P.P.P.S.  That's a lot of booing for the still-President.  I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.  I much prefer the singing, "Hey hey hey, good bye."

Miami Dice

Congestion pricing.  The idea makes total sense.  Why allocate road space the way the Soviet Union allocated everything?  It makes total sense to charge for the privilege of taking up space on the road, and it makes even more sense to charge more when more people want to take up that precious space.

Which is why Florida is building the I-95 Express.  I-95 in Miami-Dade and southern Broward is currently five lanes:  four regular, and one HOV lane, which can only be occupied by cars with more than two people in them during peak hours.  The Express plan expands the freeway to six lanes, for "local," just like now, and two "express."  The express lanes are separated from the regular lanes by these little rubber tubes, with entrances and exits from the local lanes several miles apart.  In a few months, the Express lanes will be electronically tolled, using the Sunpass system. 

So this week they open this thing in Miami-Dade.  No charging, yet, it's a "test period," to get drivers used to the new set-up.  And why a "test period"?  Because, well:

Mayhem on I-95 as new lanes open
I-95 toll lanes cause chaos, crashes
New Express lanes on I-95 Causing Chaos For South Florida Drivers
Northbound I-95 Bedlam

 

 

Miami drivers, you see, are a little, well, self-centered.  And not very good.

Bienvenidos a Miami

It will be a nice city when they finish it.

Amma and I were there for Thanksgiving.  Most of my family on my father's side lives scattered between Coral Gables and Deerfield Beach; this particular holiday, a few even came over from California.  And so, I was reminded, yet again, that I actually spent a significant part of my childhood (before age seven, I should make clear) in the (not so) wonderful (un)scenic town of North Miami Beach.  A warning for Claudia:  apparently I gave my mother a horrible case of separation anxiety when I charged off to kindergarden without so much as a look backwards.  She'd been expecting fear and tears, not "Other kids!  Much chido!  Outta here."

No pictures of my mother or North Miami Beach.  But here is my father outside the best cigar shop in South (Miami) Beach. 

He moved back down in 2005, but he had previously lived in Miami in the late 1940s, some of which involved ... let's give that another post.

I end on a warning and a request.  The warning is that should any of the Europeans on this blog choose to visit Miami, do not bother to go to Little Havana (including Calle Ocho) unless you rent a car.  You will be very disappointed otherwise. 

The request is for holiday family get-together horror stories.  Any holiday, any get-together.  Anyone?

A Geographic Inquiry

Is the greater Miami metropolitan area part of the Caribbean?