The Power and the Money

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. 

On Cuban immigration, escalators, and helicopter parents

OK, time for me to vent.

President Obama did wrong by suspending the wet-foot Cuba policy. The United States and the Cuban Republic have a special relationship. Seriously, we do. Our histories have been intertwined more than any random pair of neighboring countries since at least 1898, and maybe earlier. Our intervention created Cuba; our internal politics kept it from becoming part of the United States; our intervention propped up governments; and our 1959 divorce was contentious and angry and contentious on both sides in ways that make no sense from purely economic or strategic standpoints. 

It makes perfect sense for the U.S. to treat Cuban migration differently than migration from, say, the Dominican Republic or Mexico or anywhere else. Cuba is, to coin a phrase, “domestic in a foreign sense.”

Sure, yeah, I understand, it was a quid-pro-quo to get Castro on board with normalizing relations. Still was wrong.

FWIW, I am not of Cuban descent and have no family in Cuba.

The London Underground did wrong by forcing people to stand on escalators. It may speed things up for the standees, but their own study showed that it raised times for walkers by 28%. If you’re too goddamned lazy to walk up a bloody escalator, then the extra time is what you should pay.

How about making everybody walk, huh? 

Middle-class parents in the DMV are weird by refusing to let their kids walk around by themselves. Seriously, it is weird. Somehow they have convinced themselves that all of America (let alone the Western world) is like them. But no. Frex this photo of kids scooting with no adults in sight on the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn:

Or these kids playing handball in Long Island City:

Or this pic from a playground in the Fairmount section of Philly, ditto, at least for the two older kids in the pic, who (gasp) walked five blocks unsupervised to Roberto Clemente park to play with our bambini:

Seriously, you people. Do what you want with your kids, but don’t kid yourself. It’s weird, out-of-ordinary, strange to hover over a seven-year-old like they were four, let alone somebody nine. Let the kids walk, scoot and bike without you! And do not get me started on the proper age to ride the subway alone ...

My entry in the children smartphone battles

There is a growing but completely inconclusive literature about young children and screens. I have nothing to add to that debate.

What I can say is that I honestly do not understand when people write things like this:  “For those who, like me, often resort to screens to distract children long enough to get dinner ready or siblings dressed, the news isn’t good.”

You need to resort to screens to make dinner or dress your children? I ... uh ... really? This is a bit like saying that you needed to use your refrigerator in order to start your car. I do not see it. Do I and all my acquaintances just have remarkably well-behaved children or is this writer just spouting off? 

Robert Shiller is a genius, but ...

... this essay is just weird.

I mean, he predicts that there will be a movement to abolish nation states, not from some right-wing spectre of angry foreigners bearing down on the gates, but from citizens clamoring for more free-trade agreements, the demand for which will ... uh ... “stem from daily interactions on computer monitors with foreigners whom we can see are intelligent, decent people – people who happen, through no choice of their own, to be living in poverty. This should lead to better trade agreements, which presuppose the eventual development of orders of magnitude more social insurance to protect people within a country during the transition to a more just global economy.”

I mean, okay. Moral impulses prompted by electronic interactions with faraway poor people will lead to a popular groundswell that will both usher in an era of global free trade and increase social insurance transfers by a factor of ten. Even ignoring for a moment that OECD social spending is already at 22% of GDP and is therefore unlikely to increase to 216%, it is hard to see the theory of human behavior that causes people with sympathy for faraway poor people to demand more trade with them. 

The irony? Shiller has done so much to demolish the idiocy of using some imaginary homo economicus to set policy. But now, suddenly, homo economicus is back and plotting revolution in the most off-base essay I have read in a very long time. 

Filed under 2016 election for lack of a better place. After all, without the current election I would not have bothered to write this response. 

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. 

Halloween horror story

 A strange and horrible thing happened on Halloween this year. 

Trick-or-treating in the neighborhood, as always, was awesome. If you live in D.C. and are looking for a place to send your children hunting for candy, I heartily recommend Friendship Heights. Nothing weird happened while trick-or-treating. We marched around everywhere and had a lot of fun, just like last year.

No, the weird thing happened at a party after trick-or-treating was done. We had come home. We put my little girl to bed. I watched the third inning of the fourth World Series game with my boy (ah, such a hopeful inning) then put it on record. The boy and I then got in the car to drive down to a halloween party at a friend’s house in nearby A.U. Park. It was one of those parties where most of the guests were families with children but adults without children were also invited, in costume if desired.

I was not in costume. 

So we walk in, and the front room is filled with dancing kids, ranging from three to maybe 10 or 11. And across the room, standing there, is a man in a Adolf Hitler costume.

I do a double-take, tell myself he must be dressed as Charlie Chaplin. 

I go up to him. He is standing next to his wife. Nope, it’s Adolf. No swastika, but lest there be any doubt, the woman next to him said, “This is my husband, Adolf.” (They were in fact married.)

Now, I have to note here that ten years ago in Mexico I got into one fight with a fellow wearing a swastika T-shirt on the street and angrily chased another out of a concert. (There was a weird fad for such shirts in Mexico; sometimes the place feels like the far suburbs of Western Civilization. I still don’t think I’ve told the story of the two middle-class women I met reading Mein Kampf at a bar?)  

But I am older and I was at a friend’s house with my young son. (Plus, I stopped wearing contact lenses around 2006.) So I go looking for the party organizer. I can’t get her alone, so I decide to leave. My boy and I get in the car and start driving home.

No, can’t let this one go. Not gonna happen. I turn around; we go back inside. I find the woman organizing the party and this time I insist that I need to talk to her. I ask if there’s a story behind Adolf and his blonde wife over there. (The wife was not in costume.) She says no, friends of a friend. I tell her that I am going to ask them to remove the costume or leave. She says of course, but asks me not to make a fuss.

I was surprised that there was no exculpatory backstory, because I would not have imagined that this friend would have permitted somebody into her house in an Adolf Hitler costume without one. 

So I go up to the gentleman with a sleepy three-year-old in my arms and tell him that he needs to remove the mustache or leave.

He does not seem to understand the question. He asks me where I from. I say “Brooklyn” and repeat my statement. To which I add,  “It would be completely acceptable for me to punch you in the face, but this is not my house and there are children here.” One of which I am holding in my arms. A few people are watching, but this cannot be called a “scene.”

At this point he claims to be Danish and tells me that the costume is fine in Europe. I tell him, “Tell that to Prince Harry.” I followed by saying that Germans would not tolerate this. (I do believe that it may in fact be against the law there.)

He says (really) that I have no sense of humor. I ask him to explain the joke, he says it’s Halloween. I say — truly, I am astounding myself with my adult patience — that I have seen many funny comedies depicting Hitler and Nazis, but he is projecting no humor or satire, especially being a blond man from northern Europe. 

Surprisingly, I am as calm as the above sounds. I am of course paraphrasing, but I am not translating from Brooklynese. If he had been able to give me an explanation of why he had a point that didn’t involve making light of the man who caused World War 2 and the Holocaust, I would have been happy to hear it. 

His wife say, with exasperation, “There are vampires here!” I point out, obviously, that vampires aren’t real. He says, “Neither is Adolf Hitler anymore!” That deserves no response.

In response to my silence, he starts to go about how many memorials they have in Germany to the Jews while we have none here in the United States to the slaves. I remind him that he said he was Danish. He says he has German cousins and goes back to his rant about slavery. (Note that he can see my son in my arms. I think he thought that this comparison was supposed to make me more sympathetic.) 

I interrupt. “That is true but irrelevant. Next time wear a sheet and see what happens. Or come as Colonel Sanders.”

At his point my patience has run out. I tell him that if he does not shave or leave right now I will ask one of the several black women at the party what they think. (There were no black men; the fathers, unlike me, were watching the World Series live.) He leaves.

I was then approached and thanked by several bystanders. We see the fellow’s wife come back looking for something. The wife comes up to me (I am standing in a small group now) and asks, “Do you know [the party organizer]?”

I say yes.

She says, “You should apologize to her!”

To this, I finally break. “Get out of here, Eva Braun.”

There is an redeeming addendum. After the man leaves, while I am talking with my thankers, my boy asks, “What are Nazis?”

“They were bad people, son. They made people work and beat them and killed them because they did not like them and took their stuff. Your grandfather shot Nazis.”

He thought about this for a moment and says, “I shoot tigers, when they are coming to eat me!”

And that is the end of my no-good horrible weird and unexpected Halloween night. It did not, oddly, occur to me to whip out my phone and take a picture. I sort of wish I had, but then again, I do not approve of internet mob justice and likely would have refused to post it. Instead I give to you a picture that is not one of the two Mexican gentlemen with whom I got into a physical altercation ten years ago, but which perfectly captures the scene immediately preceding both fights. (A close friend took this one, and went on to have a big argument with the fellow.) 

The lesson, if there needs to be one, is that neither Nazi symbols nor the Confederate flag should be taken lightly. A good rule of thumb is that if you are not in the Finnish Air Force nor a practicing Hindu, then anything resembling Nazi wear is best avoided. Unless you want to be politely thrown out of a D.C. Halloween party or less politely punched on a Mexico City street. 

I admit to being perplexed as why my friend did not tell the gentleman that he could not enter her house dressed as he was. I also admit to being perplexed as to why no one had told him to leave before I did.

Bloom County is back! Is Donald Trump to credit?

 As a teenager, Bloom County was one of my favorite comic strips.

But it went away in 1989, six years before the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes followed it into oblivion. So I was a little surprised to pick up Politico today and read, at the back of the print edition, what looked like a Bloom County comic strip about Donald Trump. 

And it was Bloom County! You can see the strip at the link. And according to this article, Donald Trump may actually deserve the credit! “This creator can’t precisely deny that the chap you mention had nothing do with it.” 

For those of you who did not follow the strip back in the day, the storyline that I followed over my freshman year at college involved Donald Trump’s decision to buy the strip and fire all the main characters. (His brain had also been transferred into Bill the Cat, but that is probably not worth explaining. Even if I remembered any more, which I don’t.) 

Anyway, I did mention that Politico is to blame for the fact that my boy can recognize the faces of Marky Rubio and John Boehner. But informing me that Bloom County was back more than made up for it. Thank you. Politico!

Now, please, stop hurting America.

Boston has monsters, which is a reason to dislike New Jersey

 Found scribbled on a notepad in my backpack (at least the parts in quotes):

“I was born in Brooklyn!”

You were?

“I was born in Boston and there were monsters in Boston. Mommy and Daddy had to protect me from the monsters in Boston.”

So you must not like Boston.

“I don’t like New Jersey.”

Why not?

“When I was in Boston I saw a monster coming to eat Tima and me.”

That sounds scary, but I don’t see the connection to New Jersey. Which state is your favorite?

“My favorite states are Trinidad and New York and Aper. Aper is a big city with a lot of people it doesn’t have no train. It has a train track. Trains drive on that train track. And it doesn’t have no station. And it doesn’t have no subway! You can go on the train tracks to New York. It just drives outside.”

Apparently, I did not follow up. Or I ran out of paper. This Aper sounds like an interesting place. (Unless he means Delaware.) And what is wrong with New Jersey? He must have overheard his parents complaining about the endless quality of the eponymous turnpike when we thought he was asleep. 

He is completely correct that Trinidad really should be a state.

The f--king dress

 OK, here is what happened to me. I called up the picture, not knowing anything other than that it was some sort of trick question about the color of the dress. It looked blue-and-black at first and then in a manner of seconds turned white and gold. I stared at it waiting for it to change back, figuring that was the illusion. When it didn’t, I figured that I was immune.

Apparently not. What seems to have happened is that my brain registered the true colors but took a moment to adjust to what it thought the ambient light was like in the photo. At which point it settled on an interpretation that my conscious mind could not undo, even when I saw the truth.

I would be curious to re-run the experiment. If I had known that it was really blue and black, would I have seen that bizarre color shift a few seconds into my stare regardless?

Ah well. The metaphysics are perturbing, so I am going to go back to working on Ecuadorian finances now. Happy viral meme.

Some context about American Flagg

 Why would the boy say, “I’m American Flagg!” you ask? I am not, in fact, reading him Howard Chaykin comic books, although we have perused Robocop versus Terminator and How to Tell if Your Cat is Plotting to Kill You. The answer, then?

Well, this is our house, built in 1941 but with back then with neither yellow paint nor flag:

Lest you think we too nationalistic, we are. And thus, the context around American Flag.

Which brings us to the obligatory not-that-nationalistic! part of the post. Which consists entirely of pointing out that our boy can also recognize what he first called the “Emergency Flag,” and later the “Egyptamin flag.” After some time, he managed to pronounce “Egyptian.” We pass said flag every working weekday as we walk past the Egyptian embassy on our way to-and-from the subway.

Which logically brings us to a discussion of my older child’s speech patterns. I am not surprised that he took some time to be able to correctly pronounce “Egyptian.” I am surprised how the boy appears to have a New York accent of the old Old school. As in, he turns “squirrel” in “skwoyel,” and “turtle” into“toitel.” So far, this is not fading.

I now have an explanation of how the old Old New York accent emerged. An accent that I do not share, I might add. Mine is more like this guy, an simple old New York accent. My sister and younger cousins, however, Adam excepted, speak with a more new New York accent. Which gives me an excuse to post a photo of Adam and me from four years ago.

Still, I have to wonder. Is this “er” --> “oi” thing common among toddlers, or is the boy channeling his paternal great-grandfather, born in Jersey City? Come on, parents, I beseech you. Has anyone else noticed their kids doing this?

Your post-Boxing Day shaggy dogg family story with American Flagg!

 My boy and I are reading With the Fifth Army Air Force. He picked it out along with Fighter from the sidewalk shelves of a bookstore on the corner of 20th and P Street. It’s a picture book; we’re following it along. Which led to this exchange this morning.

“Poppa. Are you Japanese?”

“No. Are you Japanese?” 

“No! I’m American Flag!”

But it didn’t end there. “You’re an American flag?”

“I’m American Flag! I’m a banana American.”

“You’re a banana American?”

“I’m a outside American!”

I would like to think that there’s some sort of deeper meaning to this particular early-morning exchange, but I doubt it. Other than that reading World War 2 photo books with a 2½-year-old is an interesting experience.

Of course, some people are more modern and believe that little children should never be told anything that might possibly intimate that violence exists.

My wife and I are not of that school. But then again, I thought that this column in the New York Times today had a point. And while I will be very angry if my little girl or little boy (or any future siblings) do what we saw three skinny preteen boys do on Christmas day, I also have to admit that I felt some gratification in watching them skateboard down the middle of East-West Highway with no helmets on. (Two of them were on the shoulder. The third? Trying for a Darwin Award.)

OK, that was your shaggy dog story of the day. Happy day after Boxing Day!

Fashion tips from a senior colleague

 I am advising the government of Albania, as you know. It involves private and public presentations. My presentation style can be a little gonzo, but it is effective. 

I received some much-appreciated (if unsolicited) advice on how to make it even more effective from a very senior (and very very smart) senior colleague. (Colleague in the broadest sense; the person does not work at HBS or GWU.)

“Your style would work even better, well, I understand that you are not as young as you appear, but you should look older.” 

“I was wearing a suit.”

“Yes, but on you it doesn’t look classy.”  

“I’ll die my hair gray?”

“Excellent.”

My working hypothesis is that suits don’t look classy on me because when I’m not playing with my children or in extremely hot weather I wear them all the time. (Albeit often with T-shirts.) They’re my leisure wear and I guess that shows.

Or maybe I just need to die my hair gray.

Louis C.K. hates third-grade math but I am completely lost as to why

 Louis C.K. put up some tweets blasting the math homework that his third-grade girls need to do in the New York public schools. You can find a list of them here.

He is an awesome comedian, a brilliant man, but this I just do not understand. The pictograph question was weird, but it seemed that some key words had been cut off. The other math problems seemed entirely reasonable for the third grade. What am I missing?

Never mind, nothing to see, do not read that essay in the Economist

It seems that I missed the last page of the essay entirely the first time around. It is shrink-the-state pablum. Save democracy by ending government. Or something.

Sorry, folks. I hope nobody took my advice on the first post. The essay has interesting insights, but ends on a sophomoric note, the kind of dime-store libertarianism I found convincing when I was twenty.

(Smacks head)

Being a parent is much more fun than being a not-parent

I probably shouldn’t write this down, but I’ve already copped to the fact that I’m reading Slate on this sunny morning in Queens instead of working on how to solve Albania’s energy problems. So why not?

There is a story in Slate by a self-described childless woman suggesting that the current trend of parents making parenting seem bloody awful just might have gone to far. She turns serious on page 2, pointing out how American culture has become less tolerant of true bad parenting (perhaps to dysfunctional extremes) while celebrating upper-class “bad” parents whom are actually quite good at it.

So let me say that I am really enjoying fatherhood. Now, there is a caveat: being married to a wonderful woman and able to afford good day care enables me to enjoy fatherhood: depending on the week, I get three to five days in which to sit at my computer and Get Stuff Done. (Well, get a little bit done, anyway.) And it really helps to live so close to the Island of Long where there really is a village.

Finally, I have to add that our apartment building in Cambridge has (out of 30 units) about 12 with families, so a “play date” means having Caesar from down the hall bang on the door or going down to the first floor to horse around with Mafalda.

And maybe we just have a great toddler.

Most of his shenanigans just reduce us to helpless laughter. Maybe that will change when his sister comes along. But thus far, with day care and have a partner I love, I haven’t come across any reasons not to have kids. And those aforementioned life-changes? They consist mostly of not getting drunk very often and no more cigars on the balcony. Both of those are good changes.

My only regret? That I didn’t find somebody as marvelous as my wife and who was willing and able to be a mother with me 15 years ago. And maybe that I have had to buy a whole new cheap wardrobe, considering all the gunk I get all over myself and the fact that the half-life of unripped knees is down to sixteen weeks. But while I miss wearing fancy creased pants and nice jackets every day, I very much like getting stuff all over and ripping the knees of my new ever-changing cheaper wardrobe.

Traveling for work is no longer as much fun, since I miss el Boy. I will likely never take another year to go to a combat zone, like Afghanistan, and will only go to non-combat-zones if my family is able and willing to come.

But that is a loss because I do not want to travel, not because I cannot travel. With the day care my wife is perfectly happy to have me take off for a few days. Maybe too happy ...

Seriously, go for it! Being a parent has been, for me, much better than not being a parent.

Singapore is not serious ...

... about raising fertility.

Over at Demography Matters, my friend and occasional co-blogger Randy McDonald brings our attention to the Singaporean government’s preoccupation with below-replacement fertility. They seem quite worried about it, to the point of calling for ever-greater immigration designed to keep up the population at 5.3 million.

The thing is, “seem” is the operative word. Judging from actions, the Singaporean government does not care that its native-born population is going to fall. And it is probably right not to care! But I find it mildly vexing that it makes so much noise while doing so little.

You can find the current natalist policies on page 72 of this population white paper. The highlights:

• 75% of the cost of fertility treatments;
• $4,800 (U.S., at an exchange rate of 80¢ per Singaporean dollar) for the first and second child, rising to $6,400 for the third and beyond;
• A deucedly vague “affordable” rental scheme for people with enough money to buy an condominium but are waiting to move in;
• $480 a month for day care;
• A tax rebate of $4,000 for the first child (doubling to $8,000 for the second and $16,000 for later ones ... but not refundable);
• A cumulative tax deduction for working mothers of 15% of earned income for the first child, 20% for the second, and 25% for the third.

So what does this all come to? Well, the median income in Singapore is $28,800 per year. For a couple with two children, you get a one-time gift of $9,600. Then you get $5,760 for day care ... which drops in half when the child is no longer an infant. (And does not get you much unless day care is much cheaper than in the United States. Unlicensed housefront operations in Queens Licensed home operations in Upper Manhattan cost more than about $480 a month.) Our hypothetical two-income couple has an income tax liability of $2,232 (calculated using this chart from the Singaporean tax authorities) which unless I am greatly misunderstanding means that the value of the subsidy is effectively capped.

Total annual payments for a first child in a two-income family, with both earning the median: a one-time first-year gift of $12,792, followed by $5,112 per year until the child enters school. Life-changing, this is not. And worse yet, if you needed fertility treatments, which most older couples do, you needed to think about the cost. (Israel does it differently.)

This is not serious.

What would be serious? Ah. Well. In 2011, the Singaporean government ran a surplus of $21.3 billion. There were 42,600 births in the country. A fertility rate high enough to replace the population (in fact, a bare tad higher) would imply roughly 70,000 births. $21.3 billion ÷ 70,000 ≈ $300,000 per child.

OK, then: offer $300,000 per child. Tweak as desired. That would be serious policy. Of course, I am not saying that paying a $300,000 child bonus would be good policy.

But it would be affordable. And it would live up to Singapore’s reputation for social engineering! So before they give up and say it cannot be done, they really should at least try. Or stop complaining.

Why we fight

 This story comes from Business Insider, a serious website. In it, they say that a drill sergeant asked his recruits to provide him with a written explanation of why they joined the Army.

Well done, soldier! (And intel, too! Word.)

By the way, here is the original Reddit thread. If you have ever been in basic training of any sort with any service, you gotta read it. Heck, even if you haven’t. Especially this subthread. (I am still laughing.) Note that Looney82 is in fact the drill sergeant in question.

Why learn a foreign language?

 Geocurrents is a fun blog. I recommend it.

But they can, like all blogs, post some ill-thought-out stuff. They have recently posted a putative takedown of Larry Summers’ argument that universities should cut the resources that they use to teach foreign languages. 

The argument: English is widely-spoken and pretty much all you need for business. Add that to the ever-increasing efficiency of machine translation, and the case for expending mass resources to teach foreign languages disappears. Thus, we should cut back. 

I was looking forward to a solid criticism of this argument. Instead, Geocurrents avoids Summers’ substantive points and then at the end undercuts itself. Since I think that Summers is probably wrong, I find this frustrating.

Let’s proceed, in a lesson about How Not To Build an Argument:

(1) The author points out that most of the world does not, in fact, speak English. Since Summers never argued that they did, it is hard to see the relevance of this point.

(2) The author then points out that a lot of immigrants to the United States speak a language other than English. Of course, their children lose those languages super-fast. Moreover, Summers never claimed that there were no non-English-speakers in the United States, and I have never anybody justify the resources spent on foreign-language teaching by saying that we need to communicate better with immigrants. If that is the author’s argument, then she needs to make it explicitly.

(3) Finally, after two non sequiturs, the author states that machine translation is imperfect. This is perfectly true. Some students of mine recently presented me with a Pemex integrated service contract machine-translated from Spanish: it was so incomprehensible that we went back to the Spanish and translated it ourselves. But ...

First, machine translation is getting better all the time. Summers’ argument is about the future. I want to know why the author of the Geocurrents post believes that translation will be as bad in 2050 as it is now! And I am superlatively annoyed that she does not tell me.

Second, the author then presents a frighteningly good and clear machine translation of a Russian poem. No, it isn’t as poetic as the human translations. But it is completely comprehensible. And since Summers is talking about “doing business in Asia, treating patients in Africa or helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East,” she needs to explain why the level of machine competence shown by her own example is not sufficient to those tasks.

At which point she also needs to explain why machine translation won’t become good enough by 2050. (Or, heck, by 2015!) But I repeat.

In short, the riposte does absolutely zero to grapple with Summers’ contention. It is an example of how not to construct an argument, because it doesn’t actually construct an argument.

Comments are more than welcome. How would you argue against Summers?

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.

Three charities

First things first: John Quiggin wants to know where to make his donation to charity. I’ll give him three choices! And I’ll make a post of it, in case anyone else is looking to throw a few dollars at a worthy cause somewhere.

One, he can make a donation to Kiva, which funds microfinance loans to the poorest of the poor. (Kiva also allows you to put money forward to be lent. You get an e-mail telling you to whom it has been lent — we funded a wheel for a potter in Peru — and then another telling you when the loan has been repaid.)

Kiva has a positive evaluation from Charity Navigator — it’s transparent, largely independent of outside influence, and spends relatively little on administration. Here’s how Kiva works and here’s the loan page. (When you make a loan, they ask if you want to make an additional donation to help cover administrative expenses. Interestingly, you can’t make a donation unless you first make a loan.)

Second option: ANERA, the American Near East Refugee Aid. Founded after the 1967 war, it focuses on Palestinian refugees around the Middle East. It gets an A+ for transparency and accountability from CharityWatch.  ANERA’s “about us” page is here (click through to donate). 

Third: the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood. It’s exactly what it sounds like — an umbrella group devoted to supporting maternal and child health around the world. You can donate to them directly, or click through to one of the various groups that they support. Their website is here. 

(For the record, while I work in development, I have no professional connection to any of these charities. I recommend them because I’ve seen their work in the field and/or have researched them and think they’re good.)

Pants on the ground! Pants on the ground!

 It has been a little harder to keep up the blog than I had thought. Work is quite pressing. But every so often, something comes up that the rest of the internets seem to be ignoring. So, in the interest of showing how Boston is changing, I would like to mention that Sunday was the fourth annual “No Pants Subway Ride,” in which people ride the T without any pants.

Of course, as you might expect, the “No Pants Subway Ride” didn’t start in Boston in 2007. It started in New York in 2002, and has since gone international. An example of the influence of the internet! I can hear some of you shouting. Well ... probably not. I mean, I’m sure that this idea in particular spread via the internets, but anyone familiar with the 1960s will find lots of similar events, and let’s not mention the decade after that one. Moreover, the participants physically rally before removing their pants. So please no conclusionamating about the awesome marveliciousness of our new interlinkeded planet. 

It isn’t really a surprise to find that it’s spread to Boston ... Boston has a giant 250,000 person college town laid atop the real city of 1.7 million. While Boston itself is not the sort of place that would smile upon pantless T-riding, the college town appended onto it certainly would. So no surprise there. And it has also spread to such unsurprising places as Philly. After all, the city that celebrates Mummer’s Day is not going to have a problem with pants-removing on the Orange Line. 

I have to admit that it was a bit more unexpected to find that it had spread to the Mexico City. But when you think about it, that reaction makes no sense. The D.F. long ago left behind its cultural conservatism. 

My excuse is that the rapidity of the cultural changes in Mexico between 1990 and today have left me reeling. Still, the United States changed even more between 1960 and 1980. So it is far from unprecendented. And why wouldn’t the chilangos take advantage of the opportunity to ride the subway without any pants?

My worry that it presages the end of Mexico’s unofficial ban on shorts.

Here is a much better photo of the Mexico City event, courtesy of El Pinche Holandés:

 

A depressing thought for a sunny Tuesday

 Below the fold, Brad DeLong argues that what he calls the “Barrington Moore problematic” is no longer a useful way of ordering the social sciences.

What is the Barrington Moore problematic, you ask? (Yes, I had to google the name.) In short, it is the search for the answer to why 20th-century states gave rise to regimes like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In an advanced industrial society and a backwards industrializing one, regimes arose which killed millions of people. And even without those horrible ideologies, the First World War showed modern states using nationalism to mobilize for slaughter on an unprecedented scale. Understanding why drove research agendas for a long time; it certainly provided a useful way to organize undergraduate education.

DeLong argues, with good reason, that this no longer dominates. Modern Western societies mobilize rapidly against even relatively mild forms of racism or authoritarianism. Other societies sometimes (but ever less) give rise to tinpot dictators or self-proclaimed socialists, but they are simply not the same.

Al-Qaeda is not about to seize control of any state. Hugo Chávez may be leading an increasingly authoritarian regime, but he is no Joseph Stalin: he isn’t even a Fidel Castro. (Heck, these days even Fidel Castro isn’t much of a Fidel Castro.) And for all the attention to the threat of chaos, embodied by nihilistic terrorists or drug cartels, neither has really been able to do much damage inside functioning modern democratic states.

We need, therefore, to find a new overarching question to bind together the social sciences.

Except ... well ... in one field, economics, a lot of people believed that we had achieved a Great Moderation. Depressions were a thing of the past. Well, not so much. In political science, many believed that we had a pretty good handle on what politics looked like under first-past-the-post. Again, not so much.

Do we really understand why the world hasn’t been turning up many Stalins lately? Are we sure that Communism and facism and future things like them are dead? Is it in fact time to abandon the study of dictatorship and democracy because things look like okay, right now?

Well, probably yes. That said, I worry that in a few years or decades the below essay (under the fold) just might (perhaps) look a little bit like the literature on the Great Moderation, or the Westminster system, or worse yet the positivism that preceeded the First World War. Maybe, just maybe, after the resurgence of problems that so many thought were dead, we just might not yet want to abandon the search for the roots of totalitarianism.

And it sure wouldn’t hurt to keep undergraduate education focused on it.

Have you ever wondered if Deadwood got it right?

 I spend a lot of time wondering about Deadwood and other shows set it past English-speaking environments. How do we know if people really talked like that? Well, there is some evidence. But the consensus is that Deadwood is full of it.

 

Will people in the future worry about these things? 

 

xkcd: Period Speech:

via delong.typepad.com

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.

A Randy McDonaldesque post

 Randy McDonald has a great blog. I have only one criticism: he tends to try to relate every story back to something in Canada. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it makes no sense. Thing is, it’s usually a justification to ask his readers about their home countries, and as a rhetorical trick, it’s pretty effective. 

So in the spirit of the kind of discussion he has on his blog, I draw your attention to this post about Askers and Guessers. (Hat tip: Kevin Drum.) It points up a big divide in American culture as it currently stands. Text below the fold:

Four out of nine ain’t bad

 So it’s Elena Kagan. I’m not going to get into the merits; I’m not particularly bothered. I’m much more bothered by the Attorney General’s statement that we need a bill relaxing Miranda rights. That said, there is something very important about the appointment: for the first time, we will have four justices from four boroughs: Elena Kagan (Manhattan), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Brooklyn), Antonin Scalia (Queens), and Sonia Sotomayor (the Bronx). Not only that, but all four of them have New York accents.

Note the way Ms. Kagan pronounces “thought.” Most excellent. Ms. Kagan grew up on the Upper West Side. Aged 50, she may be the last generation of children from that area to possess a distinctive New York accent of the older type. You can still hear the modern type in and around Manhattan Valley, but even there it is fading out in favor a more generic Northeastern accent.

Yeah, that’s Manhattan Valley in 1899! Somebody needs to add a soundtrack.

Random observations

 I don't do a lot of random observing on this blog. It may be time to start. So here are few. As always, comments and long involved arguments are desired.

(1) The internet and social networking are overrated. (I'm looking at you, Randy.) Way way overrated. Had computer technology been four decades more advanced, we would be pinning all the tumult of the sixties and seventies on the internet. Weather Underground, blame it on Facebook! Had it been six decades more advanced, we would have been bored. You know, like anyone surfing the net in the UAE can get bored. Click the link and tell me why I'm wrong. (That one goes to Charlie Stross. But how the hell did he manage to erase my post about meeting him in a bad bar in Boston?)

(2) Lay off my man from St. Lucia Saint Kitts! Alexander Hamilton is the hero of every muscular patriotic American pinko. He is why you can be a lefty Big Government type (with all respect to Alex Harrowell, I will have to disavow the term socialist, since it's become a curse word in my country) and still evoke the founding fathers. I will give props to libertarians (hey! Guy Tower! Why you don't read this, G?) but I will not let Dick Armey lie about the founding father of the nationalist American left.

(3) Basta with the Massa puns. (Scott? I haven't heard any from you, but I know you thinking 'em.) Seriously, people. Funny once. No more emails, please.

(4) You should all read more Alex Harrowell.

(5) I write this in Paris. Paris has a lot of white people. Really, the city is surprisingly chock full of 'em. But a major figure at a well-funded think tank says it ain't! Am I confused? So I looked up the figures. I was only able to find the 1999 results, which told me that 17.6% of the city's population was foreign born. Of those, 14% were Algerian-born, 13% from Portugal, 10% from Morocco, 6% from Tunisia, 4% from the madre patria, another 4% from the country that I often think really should be the madre patria, and 3% from Turkey. That comes to 54% of the foreign-born. Speaking as somebody who mistook the Moroccan fellow who drove him from the airport for an Eastern European and then asked his equally-Moroccan barber if he was from Italy, I leave any conclusions about Charles Murray's character (or my ability to identify accents in a foreign language) as an exercise for the reader. I do of course assume that Mr. Murray realized that people from Martinique, Guadaloupe, Guyana, Reunion, and (very soon) Mayotte are indeed as French as any blond German-speaking dude from Alsace.

(6) Man, there were a lot of cigarette butts in the gutter this morning when I took the metro in to the office. I ... like that.

I like France. I can't help it.

How to speak Mexican in 197 easy lessons

 I swear a lot in Spanish. My wife doesn't like cursing — public swearing is illegal in Trinidad, and her extensive time in Queens did nothing to change her (most excellent!) preferences — but I can't abandon the practice.  But what I can do is change languages.

Now, the groserías that I picked up as a kid came mostly from Spain (at home) or Puerto Rico (hundreds of different people and places). But my Spanish swearing really didn't come into its own until I lived in Mexico City. That town has developed it to a high art.

Now, courtesy of my old friend Tania Martínez, comes an excellent guide to swearing in Mexican, or, more properly, Chilangese.

I have had to insist that my wife not call me “güey” when she's talking to me, even though that's how she refers to her Mexican friends. When you understand why that sounds wrong, then you will be ready to advance to the next level. When you can explain the proper use of “cagado,” then you will be an expert. Until then, enjoy, learn, and feel free to exercise the Nicoll Doctrine of English language expansion.  You will be doing your country a mitzvah.

And it will come very much in handy while watching sporting events in certain parts of North America and most of Europe north of the Pyrenees. If not a Yankees bar in Boston. Trust me, and I speak from highly embarrassed experience, somebody will understand you.

What’s in a decade?

 Here’s a prediction:  the name by which the past decade will be known is the rather boring “two-thousands.”

Why do I say this?  Because that is the only name for the damn decade that sounds natural.  I didn’t come up with it, but it is the only one that doesn’t cause a brief double-take when I read it or hear it; a short moment of “What does that refer to?”  Not zeros, not aughts, not aughties.  Certainly not the “naughties.” 

It is boring. It is vague. It could refer to a century or a millenium. All that is true. But I make the prediction that it is in fact what people will use. “I was in grad school back in the 2000s.”  “When was the second kid born?  Uh, midway through the 2000s, sometime.” Etcetera. It really is the only shorthand for the first decade of the 20th century that sounds neither cute nor pretentious nor confusing nor fake.

The above, I want to reiterate, is a positive statement. The normative implications are left as an exercise for the reader. 

We now return to your regularly-scheduled blog subjects.

1.6 percent!

  Happy 2010, all!

 
It turns out that over the past five years, we have earned an annual return of precisely 1.6% on our savings and investments.  Hooray! 

Coincidently, that number is how much the IMF believes the Caribbean’s economy to expanded in 2009. Hopefully 2010 will be better. The Eastern Caribbean countries have just taken a proactive step forward, strengthening the OECS with the new Treaty of Bassaterre.  The treaty basically does three things.  First, it gives the OECS the authority to legislate on the creation of a full common market.  Right now, the OECS is a customs and currency union, but there are barriers to internal factor mobility between the islands.  Second, it gives the OECS the authority to enforce the legislation ... basically via national courts and, ultimately, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.  Third, it creates a quasi-executive  E.U.-style Commission headed by a Director-General to run the organization.  I say “quasi,” because the Director-General won’t have the ability to directly issue orders to the executive agencies of the various OECS governments, let alone act directly upon the citizenry, but he or she will have the ability to use the courts to take governments to task.  So as long as the OECS governments are in fact under the rule of law, the head of the OECS will indeed have quite a bit of de jure authority.

(Some time ago, Doug Muir and I had a debate about the E.U. that ran along these lines.  I think I convinced him, but it can be very hard to know.) 

So it isn’t quite a federation.  And the new OECS Authority (basically, an assembly of heads of government) will make legislative decisions only by unanimity.  But it takes the Organization about as close as you can get without crossing that line.  (Their security forces also bump up against the same limit, sharing training and commands.)  But it is a step forward for a group of islands that were already rather strongly united.

In theory, Trinidad is supposed to join in 2013.  Or maybe 2011.  It isn’t clear. I also doubt that it will happen.  Although it would be interesting if it did!

Thoughts on integration?

Explained!

  That Nobel Peace Prize for the President was a little perplexing.  My father, however, just emailed me the explanation.  It all makes sense now.

21st century something

  Now this is pretty cool.  It starts off as just a bunch of hardware rolling by.  Tanks, trucks, missile launchers ... although the blue digital camoflague on the missile launchers is a little odd.  What will they be defending, exactly?  Mongo?   Anyway, whatever.

And then comes minute 1:20. 

After which nothing is the same.  Watch it yourself.  But you want to put on your own soundtrack.  Rhythm-wise, “Tha Shiznit” is spot-on. 

China's 60th Anniversary national day - timelapse and slow motion - 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

I am speechless.  And highly entertained.  And sort of embarrassed for some of the participants.  What the hell was that with the hardhats and mirrors at minute 2:51? 

You can tell I had some trouble with the category tags here. 

A George Will moment

  Some time ago, George Will published an odd screed against blue jeans.  Gancho mentioned the column on this blog here, where he pointed out that I was, in fact, wearing blue jeans while travelling in Greece. 

But I have to say that I have my own George Will moment when it comes to male sartorial style in early 21st century America.  Below is a picture of the street outside the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City, where I met with some officials from the country’s Treasury department to ask some questions about the recent petroleum reforms.  What don’t you see in the photo?

That’s right!  Shorts.  Only one guy is wearing shorts, thankfully long ones, and yes, he turned out to be a European.  What about looking in the other direction?

What about out front?

None!  No shorts.  This is true throughout Latin America.  If you’re over the age of 18, standing on a hard surface, and cannot see the ocean, then you don’t wear shorts.  Not in Panama, not in Venezuela, not in Mexico. 

And I agree with that convention.  The only exception is if you are actively engaged in exercise.  Period.  Adult men in shorts look ridiculous.  I have felt this way since I turned 18; my high school graduation was the penultimate time that I broke this rule.  I ultimate time was while I was travelling in Trinidad, and I looked ridiculous.  It won’t happen again.

As for sandals?  Gimme a break.  At least shorts are comfortable.  Sandals and flip-flops don’t even manage that.  I found flip-flops useful in the Army for the prevention of athlete’s foot, and that’s about it.  They are not comfortable.  They flip, see.  And flop.  Sandals, meanwhile, manage to be shoes without the advantage of keeping your toes safe if you drop something on them.  So, WTF?

Ban ‘em.  End.  None of this.  C’mon Americans.  Get some dignity.  No more shorts.  And no more capri pants on men either, which have started to infiltrate the USA from Europe.  So all you shorts-wearing flip-flopping young people?  Get off my damn lawn. 

An idle thought from Pasig City

  Proposition:  As traditional written science fiction fades away as a popular genre, it becomes increasingly acceptable to cite it in intellectual and academic circles.

Proximate inspiration from Brad Delong, with secondary impetus from this event with Charlie Stross and Paul Krugman.  (What the hell did happen to my post about Charlie?  I swear, he has magically erased it from the internets.) 

I'm not sure this rises to the level of a great debate attempt.

Demography matters, and a music video

  There is an interesting (if rarely updated) blog called “Demography Matters.” It's hit a few interesting topics lately.  Randy McDonald is the driving force behind it.  For those of you who don't know him, he wrote the defining takedown of the whole “Eurabia” nonsense, aka the idea that immigration and differential birthrates will eventually give Europe a Muslim majority.  But the blog is a lot more than that.

Here is a discussion of Greenland.  Short version:  considering the country's dependence on Danish expats for skilled labor, even a non-independence independence of the sort negotiated by other microstates could lead to disaster.  The population is shrinking despite high birthrates.  Maybe they'll get lucky and find oil.  More likely they will remain a dependency of Denmark forever, most likely de jure but definitely de facto.

The blog also recently discussed Iran.  Short version:  looks like Europe!  Crashing birthrates could fuel an economic boom if only the place could get the policies right.  In comments there is an interesting discussion of the fact that American birthrates have stayed above replacement ... and that much of that difference is because urban birthrates in the U.S. aren't appreciably different from their suburban or rural equivalents.  The really weird fact?  Canadian birthrates are crazy lower than U.S. ones, even in such similar places as Washington and British Columbia. 

Finally, it presents a scary version of Cuba's future, in which the country enters a demographic death spiral.  All it lacks is a projection of the worst case scenario: what would Cuba's population and age pyramid look like in 2050 if it goes the way of Ukraine and stays there?

Below the fold is a music video.  It is for Randy, for reasons he understands.  Essentially, while not my cup of tea, it shows what can be accomplished in his preferred genre in both aural and visual terms when attempted by two rather accomplished artists.  Enjoy.

The great recession

  This weekend, my wife and I made our way up to Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport to grab a helicopter ride above ground zero for the real estate collapse.  It isn't just in marginal neighborhoods, as some observers have suggested.  Spot the foreclosure in this photograph.

In fact, if you look closely, you can spot a second distressed property in the picture. 

Nor is it only individual single-family houses.  South Florida is dotted with what Mexicans used to call “obras negras”:  stopped construction projects left to rot.  And in the South Florida humidity, they will rot:  unsealed foundations will flood and unprotected fixtures will erode.  They are calling them “ghost towers” down here. 

It was a Sunday, but note the lack of construction machinery around the site.

In fact, readers of this blog have already had contact with what became a pair of ghost towers.  Last year, we spotted my brother working on a high-rise located on the border of the Everglades, far out on the urban edge, near nothing but a ginormous shopping mall.  Now it is an infamously distressed complex in which, as far as the local papers can figure, no one lives.

Of course, the recession is also visible at ground level:

The new math

  I have a friend who is a professor of economics at Oxford. One of his students appears to have discovered an astounding new property of natural logs on an exam. It revolutionizes our understanding of, well, everything. 

I want one!

  Yes, it is an environmental atrocity.  Sure, the purported safety of all the extra power exists only in my imagination.  Indeed, while quite comfortable, the cupholders are in a weird place and the dashboard looks kind of cheap.  And it's noisy as hell.

But it is fun to drive, and that growl makes up for any and all inadequacies you might have.  Would it really be a problem to get a child-safety-seat in and out of the back?  The front seats fold way forward.  Hell, people, I'm under forty, recently married, and we don't drive enough for it to cause an appreciable increase in our gasoline consumption over, say, the Fusion hybrid or a Prius.  And it isn't a convertible.  Plus, my wife loved driving it around Maine last weekend.  So it wouldn't be that pathetic.  Would it?

I really am wondering about those child safety seats in a two-seater.  Hmm.

Bronx, accents, Supreme Court

  And it goes to the woman who saved baseball™!  Excellent.  But I want to discuss accents.  Sonia Sotomayor is from the Bronx, you see, and will bring a third New York accent to the bench, after Antonin Scalia from Queens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn.

Sotomayor has an accent of the older type, with modern elements, which many people (of all ages) in the New York region still speak.  The fellow who gives the New York speech lessons certainly does, as do I with my relatives.  But it is not a fully modern accent of the sort spoken by my younger in-laws.  See here at minute 1:52 (it is worth it) or here or here. 

What about the other two New York members of the Court?

Accents, Brooklyn

  Over at Randy's place, he's got a neat post on the survival of Dutch in New York City.  Seems like it held on for a couple centuries after the English took it over.  In the post, Randy suggests that the “Brooklyn” accent derives from Dutch.  Peter takes issue, debate ensues. 

Goin' Back To Brooklyn @ Yahoo! Video

Here, I'd like to say three things about New York accents.

1. There are no geographic variations.  None.  Zip.  Say-roe.  All of what seems to be geographic variation is due to race, immigration, or social class.  All of it.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is either confused or f*@king with you.  I have been asked this question every goddamned time I go to Britain.  It ain't true.  Somebody from New York, they say different, they probably be playing games.   
2. The traditional New York accent is dead.  (For a brief period in college, I tried to affect one, for reasons which are beyond me.  My natural speech is bad enough.)  Its more modern variations are also in fact dying, save for ...
3. ... the accent exemplified by Rosie Perez, held by most children of Latino immigrants in the New York metropolitan area, and now spreading throughout the Northeast. It is somewhat different from the previously dominant version of the accent, and it is replacing that version very rapidly.  Even among non-Latinos.

For your edification, click here for Ms. Perez on Letterman, with the new New York accent.  It's worth it.  (For some reason, the damned embedding won't work.)  My older sister isn't quite young enough to talk like this, although I have some very non-Latino in-laws in their twenties who do.  You can see two more examples of the same accent coming from the eyewitnesses in the below BBC report around minute 2:06.

Finally, here is a fellow who gives pretty good lessons in the older version of New York English, the one I speak with my siblings.  He does confuse class and geography, presumably ingenuously, when he describes his accent as a mix of Westchester and Staten Island.  There is no speech difference between a blue-collar dude from Rosebank or one from southeastern Yonkers, or between the child of Ivy League graduates in Todt Hill or in Scarsdale.  He is simply cottoning on to the fact that there are a lot more upper-class types in Westchester County than in Richmond County, and a lot fewer plumbers and police officers. 

Now that you been schooled in the Kings English, what sort of English do you speak? 

My return, I hope, plus some apparent nonsense

  I've been busy, what with the election and then finishing Work-in-Progress number 1.  It isn't quite done, but Carlos and I went through a frenzy of productivity (and three steak lunches, with wine) in New York last week, and the end is very near.

So I will try to get back to posting, although I can't promise anything.  Anyway, I began today with a brief discussion of the Typealyzer.  It purports to be able to analyze the personality type of a blog-writer using some sort of unspecified text analysis algorithm.  I heard about it on Kevin Drum, and then again on Language Log. 

Now, I usually like this sort of thing.  What British political party should I belong to?  The Liberal Democrats!  Of course!  What kind of movie is my life most like?  An action flick!  Obviously!  What South American country would I be?  Venezuela!  Uh ... well, yes, that does make more sense than any of the others, when I think about it.

But the result from the Typealyzer, well, it was just odd:

Doug in Burundi, part 5

More about Burundi, starting with the presence of the African Union, moving on to the rebels, and ending with a discussion of the country's really really bad transport problems.  It appears to still be raining in Bujumbura.

One point that I'll repeat on Doug's comment page:  narrow gauge isn't a problem.  Narrow gauge railroads can be upgraded to carry similar loads and operate at close-to similar speeds as standard gauge.  They simply lose most of their initial cost advantage.

Big day

My father and I (along with a slew of other friends and relatives) are in Trinidad at the moment for some very very very important business, after which I'll be travelling for a bit and posting only sporadically, if at all.

For those of you who don't know him --- and I plan to start posting a bit about his experiences when I return to the States --- here's a picture of the grand old man and myself:

See y'all later!

Counterproliferation

  It's obviously one of the biggest issues facing the next president.  In fact, it's one of the biggest issues facing any national leader, whether their government is deciding whether to proliferate or trying to think of a way to stop it.  At least it should be.

What is to be done?  And who can do it?

Once was Kings

This is increasingly hard to imagine, but Brooklyn wasn't always cool.  Once upon a time, the other name for Kings County brought up visions of overweight white men in tank tops, women with very big hair and very tight clothes, and people who actually said "neighbuhud" and "fuggedaboutit." Or, conversely, visions of howling wildernesses of burnt out buildings and blighted lives, someplace going the way of the Bronx.  In fact, you'd hear people say, "TheBronxandBrooklyn," as one combined place.  Hell, other than in bad World War 2 movies or good Mafia ones, you could probably have lumped Brooklyn in with Cleveland in the popular American imagination.  It was a great place to be from.  It wasn't really where anyone would want to go to, unless from happened to be someplace like Fujian or Tajikistan. 

But that's not Brooklyn anymore.  Nope, now Brooklyn is cool. And all those cool people in Brooklyn want you to know about how cool and special and hip Brooklyn is.

Which is why I have grown to appreciate Queens.  Queens is not cool.  The producers of Entourage picked Queens for their guys' home town because Queens is not cool.  And while rents have risen, thus far, thank God, Queens shows no sign of becoming cool.

So when two cars crash into eachother on Hillside Avenue, and the driver at fault gets out gesticulating wildly at the much calmer person he hit, and skateboarding local kids start cracking wise about the show, it's just another car accident and not a deep metaphor for the inassailable uniqueness of place or whatever.

Which is ironic, because nowadays Queens is hella more exotic than most of Brooklyn.  Just not in a cool, hip, attitudinal way. 

And it's still a good place to be from.

(Hat tip:  Marcia.)

Nobody likes my shirt

One way of telling a Boricua isn't always accurate.

My fiancee, my father, nobody else likes it.  No clue why.

Interlude: Obra blanca

I may have a little more to say about the Dominican Republic, including an answer to Will's original query.  But first, a report from Miami.

Financial collapses take some time, you see.  And so, this 28-story condominium is still going up within spitting distance of the Sawgrass Mills mall, on the very edge of the Everglades.  Turns out that the architect screwed up the specifications for the awnings, which needed to be bigger.  And so, who you gonna call?

Right!  My older brother, pictured above, in the sunglasses.  (You can also see the back of my cousin Larry's head.)  My brother runs a contract air-conditioning company based in Fort Lauderdale.  Larry and his brother Jesse started the firm and still own it:  South Florida in the 1970s was the right place at the right time to start installing AC systems; they soon moved into service followed by contract manufacturing.  (How d'ya think I found out about the Trinidadian air conditioning industry?)  When I was a teenager, I spent summers cutting fiberglass for them at $5.00 an hour; $9.37 in today's devalued money. 

And so, when you need to airlift a 2000-pound slab of concrete 28 stories in to the air, Thermal Concepts is the place to go.

That helicopter was built for the Army during the Korean War.  More below the fold.

Support the Troops

Like you have a choice.

A Geographic Inquiry

Is the greater Miami metropolitan area part of the Caribbean?

A Personal Warning from Che Guevara

The University of Puerto Rico could mostly be in California.  The architecture is not unlike that found on the campuses of Stanford, Santa Clara, UCLA, Caltech, and even parts of Berkeley.  But there are some things with little Cali equivalent:

Good advice?