Apr 30
lindsayrgwattRandom amphora, slide
Sorry for the title; I just wanted the opportunity to put those two words together. The reason they can legitimately go together is that the other day I bought a pair of (new) pants and this was in the pocket:
That’s right – inside my pocket was a slide of amphoras/vases in some Mediterranean market. After getting over my shock of:
a) Finding something inside my new pocket
b) Discovering that that “something” was an archaic thing that my kids will almost certainly not understand
I found myself wondering where the actual photo was taken. Was this a fleeting memory of someone’s Moroccan vacation in the summer of 1950, transposed to my pants in 2009? Perhaps instead it is actually a photo of a movie set in California where they’re filming a Roman movie. I’ve definitely never had a pair of pants make me think this much before…
Apr 27
lindsayrgwattRandom
I snapped this photo today as I watched this nutter outside the now-closed Balducci’s at 8th and 14th. I don’t know why, but I thought he kind of captured the moment:
Apr 27
lindsayrgwattNYC flint, prosperity, urban planning
There was an interesting piece in the New York Times last week talking about how civic leaders in Flint, Michigan are considering a radical plan to reinvigorate their city: they’re thinking of shrinking it. Flint used to be a gleaming mini-metroplois of 200,000, but with the decline of the auto industry (it is, after all, where Roger & Me was filmed) it is now down to 100,000 inhabitants or so.
Here’s the gyst of what’s being planned:
Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.
The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.
For your typical American city, this is a step-change in how they think about their future. Everyone has always assumed that something new will come along to reinvigorate their city – maybe a tech company or two, or something in the alternative energy or healthcare sphere. But sometimes (frequently) it doesn’t – and that’s a reality that Flint is coming to deal with (Of note – it’s not just Flint; only two of the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. in 1950 have a higher population today).
This weekend I was out in East New York (a part of Brooklyn) volunteering and couldn’t help but think that I’d seen this happen – in NYC. East New York used to be a veritable slum (now it’s just poor) and full of crackhouses. Those were torn down in the 1990s and replaced by urban farms and gardens. For instance, I was helping out at the East New York Farms: half an acre with more than 35 plants grown in 70 varieties. In the summer, they supply a local farmer’s market.
East New York has seen it’s Flint and survived. Interestingly enough, so too has Alphabet City. It too was full of slums and flophouses, which were torn down and turned into community gardens (now it’s a trendy hotbed of fancy restaurants and coffee shops). It’ll be interesting to see what Flint actually does – good luck to ‘em.
Apr 21
lindsayrgwattRandom, Uncategorized customs, driving, maps
Yesterday I had to drive up to the border to renew my visa. (For technical reasons, you need to apply from outside the country and I’m too cheap to fly). It was one helluva drive: 658.6 miles (or 1,060 km for my metric friends).
This got me wondering: if I had only gone one way, where could I have made it to? Fortunately, the interpipes are here to answer this.
According to Google Maps, I wouldn’t have made Chicago, but would be in Fort Wayne right now. I would have blown past Detroit and gone all the way to Flint. If I was feeling Appalachian, I could have almost made it Knoxville, Tennessee. If I’d wanted a some Southern comfort, I could have gone down to Myrtle Beach.
Alternatively, I could have headed north to North Bay or Jonquiere (where, I’ve been told by my bro, the cheapest house in Canada is available for $4,000 – caveat emptor). Alternatively, I could be on the Bay of Fundy today, feasting on fish & chips.
Here’s the rough map:
Here are a few random things I learned on the trip:
- If you turn on the maps on your iPhone and drive fast you can actually see your location move. I do not condone this and only found out by accident. Definitely do not try this and claim you heard it from me.
- The Customs Service only got the new photos of Barack Obama about three weeks ago; they’re still waiting for a Biden (next time you’re at the border, glance behind the agents – there are always photos of the President & VP plus possibly a cameo by the Secretary of Homeland Security). However, they don’t show a Cheney in his place; it’s a vacant frame waiting to be filled.
- Hitting blinding rain just outside the city after thirteen hours in a car is not fun.
Apr 19
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random Central Park, photos, Spring
It’s now officially spring in NYC. Here are some frustratingly small photos of what you’re missing if you don’t live here:
Apr 15
lindsayrgwattBusiness behavioural economics, decision making, Economics
Behavioural Economics is all the rage these days. It recognizes that we are not fully rational and tries to to ‘nudge’ us to make positive changes in their lives (for instance, creating systems where if you get a raise it is automatically saved in a 401(k) unless you opt out).
But what if you wanted to create a system that instead preyed on people’s irrationality? You’d probably create an auction site like Swoopo. Swoopo offers products (usually high tech) starting at $0.15. A timer then starts counting down, and if it hits zero, whoever bid that price gets the product at that price. As the timer’s counting down, you can nudge the bid higher by $0.15 by clicking a button – and now you’re the highest bidder.
What’s the catch? It costs you $0.75 to place a bid.
This is the perfect ‘crazy’ machine. Users think that they’re buying the product for a low price (say, 80% of what it would cost at Amazon), but the system is designed so that everyone who has bid has massively subsidized the cost of the prize. It’s like a Ponzi scheme where everyone’s agreed to the rules beforehand and is actively competing to be the last sucker.
Don’t believe me? I watched the site for a few seconds today and a Wii + Wii Sports was bidding at $85.80. If it sold at that price, Swoopo would get $85.80 + 571 (the number of bids) * $0.15. That’s $428.25. A Wii currently sells for $249.99 on Amazon; Wii Sports is about $50.
Even crazier: it didn’t go at that price. I watched the bids rise to $103.35 before I couldn’t stand to watch any longer. At that point Swoopo was going to get at least $619.35 in total cash for it.
Congrats to Swoopo for creating the perfect machine for converting human greed into cash.
Apr 14
lindsayrgwattNYC, Random nypl
I spent part of Saturday working at the NYPL branch on 5th & 42nd (it’s the best place to get a desk to work at in the entire city). Here are a couple of ramblings:
- In the morning, the reading hall was filled with tourists and people working with Mac computers. By mid-afternoon there were no more tourists and lots of people using PCs
- The library has a massive room (100′ x 30′ with 20′ ceilings) that contains exactly one book – but what a book – a Gutenberg bible:
- In that room the walls are covered by paintings of long-dead Americans, with the exception fo a corner where there are four landscape paintings. One is of the library itself and two are of random American scenes. However, the third is out of left field: it’s a Krieghoff of Quebec City circa 1850
Apr 14
lindsayrgwattUncategorized debt, deflation, depressions, Economics, fisher
Way back in 1933, Irving Fisher outlined what it took to make a depression or recession really nasty. In a nutshell: too much debt, followed by deflation that is brought on by everyone selling to reduce their debt. This creates a vicious cycle where you can sell everything you have but you still can’t cover your debt – and therefore you either go bankrupt or need a bailout. Sound familiar?
You can read it all in his paper “The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions” [pdf]. (Note that economics paper from that era are quite approachable, unlike now)
There’s a fascinating tidbit in this paper where he reflects on the preponderance of scandals to come to light during these scandals:
The public psychology of going into debt for gain passes through several more or less distinct phases:
(a) The lure of big prospective dividends or gains in income in the remote future;
(b) The hope of selling at a profit, and realizing a capital gain in the immediate future;
(c) The vogue of reckless promotions, taking advantage of the habituation of the public to great expectations;
(d) The development of downright fraud, imposing on a public which had grown credulous and gullible.
When it is too late the dupes discover scandals like the Hatry, Krueger, and Insull scandals. At least one book has been written to prove that crises are due to frauds of clever promoters. But probably these frauds could never have become so great without the original starters of real opportunities to invest lucratively. There is probably always a very real basis for the “new era” psychology before it runs away with its victim. This was certainly the case before 1929.
You could swap out “Madoff, Leland, and Dreier” for “Hatry, Krueger, and Insull” and this could pretty much be 2009, not 1929.
There is a bit of sunshine here: we can rest assured that we’re not the first to go through something like this (and I’m sure my great-grandkids will go through this too) and therefore we’ll get through it. The bigger question is: can this sort of thing even be avoided in the first place, or is it just human nature?
Apr 12
lindsayrgwattNYC Chelsea, nypd
When Colin Powell was getting ready to fight the Gulf War, a bunch of journalists branded his opinions and views as The Powell Doctrine. It stipulated the criteria required for the U.S. to enter a war, plus, that once the U.S. entered a war, it would use all of its resources to overwhelm an enemy and force them into capitulation.
Most of us will never get a chance to see the U.S. government direct overwhelming force at anything – and that’s a good think. However, every now and then, even in civil society, it pops up. Last night as I was walking home at 2 in the morning, the NYPD was practising their brand of overwhelming force.
I have no idea what happened, but out of nowhere on Ninth Ave at 21st, police cars just began to appear. Three paddy wagons came flying down the street. Two unmarked SUVs appeared out of nowhere. A black mustang morphed into a cruiser and at the same time both highway and street patrol cars came rushing to the intersection. Little three-wheeled police scooters popped up in intersections and secured streets. Tires were squealing, engines were revving and adrenaline was flowing.
And then it was all over. Within 30 seconds of congregating on the street corner, the cops were leaving again. One squad car was flying up the bike lane against traffic. On the other side of Ninth the mustang was also raging against traffic with its lights blazing. In seconds, the intersection looked like nothing had happened.
I went in to the local bodega, bought a bottle of pop and turned back to 23rd. When I rounded the corner, the whole street was lit up. It felt like the entire NYPD was there. I counted at least 18 police officers surrounding a captain barking orders. The “quality of life taxi” was there, with undercover officers lurking and looking. The street was littered with every type of vehicle haphazardly parked with lights blazing. Young cops were flying about asking anyone if they’d “seen someone running that way”. Here’s a photo:
I’ve no idea what happened, but as I got up this morning, the city has once again swallowed any trace of the night’s action.
Apr 12
lindsayrgwattNYC adel abdessemed, Art, revulsion
I ended up having Friday afternoon free (thank you Easter!) so I decided to walk home and stop off at a couple of art galleries in Chelsea. As I walked down 19th and passed the David Zwirner gallery, I was stopped in my tracks by this:
It literally looked like somebody had turned a small flock of planes into worms and parked them inside a gallery. Here’s what it looks like from another perspective:
This is not the sort of thing that one sees every day and I was impressed that anyone would come up with this concept, let alone sucessfully execute it (I mean, really, who is going to buy this art? This is a gallery-only piece. There really aren’t too many folks who have space for a 100′ by 30′ by 20′ sculpture in their living room).
I had to learn more about this artist, Adel Abdessemed, so I went into the adjoining gallery. And that’s where my admiration quickly turned to revulsion.
Why?
Well, he’d taken a huge white room and projected a massive video on the wall. The video consisted of a small concrete pit where he had thrown in dozens of iguanas, giant frogs, pythons, dogs, scorpions, tarantulas and roosters. What happens? They all start killing one another. Last I checked, dog fighting was considered savage and illegal (see: Michael Vick), so I don’t know what inspired him to try to play god with his little cast of creatures.
Also, it turns out that Adel derives true pleasure from killing animals and photographing them. His 2008 exhibit in San Francisco consisted of him quickly killing six animals and was cancelled due to complaints.
Here’s hoping that this exhibit gets cancelled too. Never before have I gone from admiring to despising someone so quickly.
Older Entries
RSS
Recent Comments