the SNOB

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:34:00 +0000

El Globo Does Enterprise Reporting

Food-safety violations at greasy spoons in city buildings? I'm shocked! Here is your spinach pie, inspector.

Meanwhile, no word out of Morrissey Boulevard whether any of our local officials might have received a Friends of Angelo special over the past few years. This is the sort of reporting I expect from the 10pm news, sandwiched in between the lotto numbers and a piece about a dog that can ride a skateboard.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:15:00 +0000

Bittersweet Surrender

Bill Gates will retire from Microsoft this coming Friday, marking the likely end to a uniquely American career that scaled the heights known only by a very few--Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford--and yet which ends on a distinctly somber note.

Gates, after all, is not yet an old man. Warren Buffett hasn't retired yet, and is old enough to be Gates' father. Of course he's not retiring--he's moving to run his vast charitable foundation, made twice as vast by Buffett's contribution--but that too is telling. This popped up as a line in one of Whit Stillman's movies when one of the poor little rich kids remarks on how all of their parents, who had inherited sizable fortunes, spent their time on the boards of museums and running charities, because they were deathly afraid of failing, and when your job is giving away money, it's hard to fail.

Gates lived the dream, from dropping out of Harvard all the way to creating and redefining the pivotal industry of his time, in the process becoming the richest man in the world. But as he heads off to pursue future endeavors, it is possible for the first time to imagine the technology world without Microsoft. The Web's basic shape was set while Microsoft still denied its significance, and has defied Redmond's every attempt at strong-arming. While still strong in the enterprise, business computing has reached a saturation point of sorts in the things that MS is good at. Even on the desktop, Microsoft is for the first time looking truly vulnerable in the face of a highly-organized competitor and their own failed execution of Vista.

And yet one only needs to look at Yahoo, which was fortunately (for MS) dumb enough to spurn their advances, to see how much of a failure Microsoft isn't--not yet. While no longer the indispensable behemoth it once was, Microsoft still has a broad portfolio of individually-lucrative properties. The best thing that could happen now--for shareholders, customers, and employees alike--would be for Microsoft to break itself up into at least four individual entities:

Platforms: Operating systems and development tools. Microsoft still makes amazing development tools, and a smaller, leaner OS group might be able to move more decisively to build a viable successor to Vista and competitor to OS/X and Linux.
Business Applications: the Office suite, Exchange, and SQL Server are all still market-leading tools. The greatest threat they face right now is being chained by the ankle to a rapidly-sinking OS division.
Entertainment: The original XBox was Microsoft's boldest move ever into an established market, and they have ultimately proven the doubters wrong. Of course, they were going up against Sony, which has an even worse proprietary mindset. Gaming is one of very few areas with potential for sustained multi-billion dollar growth and needs to be set free to maximize that potential.
Online Media: MSN, Hotmail, Live Search, all the online properties except XBox Live--gather them all up into one mangy, flea-bitten pack, and sell it to Yahoo. Or maybe News Corp, or Time Warner, anybody--just get rid of it. Consumer media is not something Microsoft knows how to do, and the longer they keep trying, the more shareholder value they are going to waste.

Barring this scale of change, the future for Microsoft will rapidly become grim. Gates' departure sets the stage to make this type of transition credible, and perhaps even infuse employees and customers alike with a sense of real excitement again.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:36:00 +0000

An InconvenienT Truth

Imagine if the subway fare was $5.

It's a simplistic analysis, but looking at the MBTA's P&L statement, fares would need to be 2.95 times their current level in order to cover all expenses. The claim that it's all going to debt service is a red herring--over two-thirds of those are operating expenses--so even if we exclude the $230m in interest payments for 2008, we would still need to more than double fares just to keep the lights on.

Of course it is more complicated than that. But the easiest thing is to get lost in the complexities. Looking at this simple number tells us that even with the fare doubling over just the past seven years or so, we're still not even close to covering actual costs. In fact, it's merely kept pace with the increase in expenses over the same time period.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:54:00 +0000

What Ethanol Tells Us About Global Warming

In short: barring technological breakthrough, we're screwed.

Ron Bailey's Reason article gives some sense of the magnitude of the carbon-emissions challenge by putting the numbers into meaningful units. An 80% reduction of US emissions means the amount of CO2 the US emitted in 1920, when our population was 1/3rd the size it is today, and 1/4 the size it will likely be in 50 years. Globally, we need the equivalent of 37,000 500 megawatt power plants that emit no carbon. This could be easily done, if by "easily" you mean "15,000 nuclear power plants," or a few million wind turbines, etc. Now you know why GE thinks going green is such a fab idea.

Where ethanol fits into this is as a parable for the challenges that lie ahead. We are barely a few years into trying to use it to make a serious dent in oil imports and already there are massive global calls to put a halt to it due to the perceived impact on food prices. Even the most "market-oriented" greenhouse gas reduction policies start by imposing substantial costs on conventional means of energy generation.

We can agree that ethanol is a bad idea, but in the end, taxing coal and oil will have the same effect on food and broader commodity prices. Conservatives and environmentalists alike have been railing against ethanol for decades as "liquid pork" and an environmentally-unsound process. Nobody listened to any of that, but when food prices went up 5-10%, the public roared, and this in the richest country in the world, with some of the lowest prices on food in real terms.

There is no easy way past this. The most optimistic view is that high energy prices will drive technological breakthroughs in clean power. But even these will rely on perhaps a decade or two of expensive energy before the lines cross again. Will the public tolerate government policy that can be demonstrated to be reducing their standard of living for the achievement of an ill-understood future goal? Especially if China and India are completely screwing the pooch on emissions because any less would precipitate violent revolt? Doubtful is an understatement.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:41:00 +0000

Cap-and-Pillage

Robert Samuelson states a number of unpleasant truths in his "Just Call it Cap and Tax" column yesterday. Cap-and-Trade was a good idea on paper, or as physicists like to say, "on a frictionless surface in a vacuum."

Carbon emission credits would by very definition have economic value, which is to say they would be money, only unlike cash money, which is at subject to at least a few customary limits on blatant scheming, carbon emission credits (or Tears of Gore, as I like to call them), would be set up explicitly for the purposes of manipulation of behavior. To the extent that energy underlies almost every part of the economy, and that the production of carbon goes hand-in-hand with the production of energy, cap-and-trade would create an opportunity for rent-seeking and outright looting on a scale not seen since the deeply flawed privatization of state businesses in Russia 15 years ago.

Against this, a plain old tax on CO2 emissions seems vastly more sensible, especially if the proceeds are used to offset capital gains or income taxes. Carbon-advantaged energy sources would have price incentives built into them, and offsetting other taxes would alleviate some of the economic damage associated with higher energy costs. This is especially important given that neither China nor India, who will within a decade's time likely dwarf US emissions, is going to do anything that actually stunts their economic growth. My most optimistic vision is that algae biodiesel or solar or something as yet unimagined becomes commercially practical on a large enough scale to make the issue moot.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:06:00 +0000

When the Comments are the Story

The Comments sections on most newspaper websites are usually complete train wrecks filled with so much gap-toothed, mouth-breathing trash flinging dung at each other that you need hip boots to get anywhere near it. Maybe it's just the fact that it's my town, but the Herald's comments section often cracks me up. Witness this thread from this morning's story on the seven-alarm fire that burned down the James Hook lobster building on the waterfront.

It's the sort of raucous scene you get in a bar between two crowds of guys tossing insults at each other, right on that line between "all in good fun" and all-out brawl. While often nasty and cruel, the comments are usually properly spelled, punctuated, and well-informed, if terrifically biased. It's the sort of shit show that would simply make the Globe look even more pathetic, but with the Herald, it actually feels right.

Several commenters questioned why over 130 firefighters responded, and how they got so many to show up so early. One responded earnestly that they showed up purely to help their brothers; this being Boston, such sincere emotion was invariably met with 200-proof sarcasm:

JonCarry
How come all 130 Jakes arrived with little metal pots full of butter? And bibs?
#297319 - May 30, 2008 10:41 AM EDT

The real prize, however, goes to this commenter, who asked a very good question indeed:

CommAve
I hate to sound cynical, but a fire in an old building in a dramatically rebuilding part of the city does make one go "Hmmmm. . . . " I'm with Donnamonroe - I suspect that Hook will not be back on the site and that after cashing the insurance check, they'll sell the property for big bucks, even in this down real estate cycle.
#297182 - May 30, 2008 8:56 AM EDT

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:24:00 +0000

Say It Ain't So!

The second-biggest loser in Ted Kennedy's tragic turn of fate is Deval Patrick, who, thanks to a 2004 law change designed to prevent Mitt Romney from nominating John Kerry's replacement to the Senate, gets to do nothing but sit back and cast his one stupid vote just like the rest of us schmucks.

Take the rumor that Uncle Ted would like to pass his seat to wife Vickie a la Sonny Bono or Jean Carnahan for what it's worth. Either way, I want to doubt that it's possible, but I have this gnawing, groaning pain that says it could.

Imagine the scene: one one side, a pack of feuding vultures. Marty Meehan, Chris Gabrielli, Tom Reilly, and God knows who else. Mike Capuano? Bill Delahunt? Barney Frank? You have more chances to run for POTUS than an open senate seat in Massachusetts, and barring the unlikely (an Obama cabinet post?), Jawn Kerry has at least two more terms in him. Hey, I like Ogonowski a lot, but if he breaks 45% he's doing great, and getting from 45 to 50.1 is like crossing the Pacific ocean in a rowboat. But I digress.

On the other side, you have the regally-fading presence of Ted Kennedy, Lion of the Senate, and his Faithful and Forebearing Wife. Yeah, I know, wattaloadashit. But that's what you're going to get. Just so you realize, this thing is going to be covered like the death of Pope John Paul II, complete with waving from balconies and puffs of smoke. Heck, the sympathetic side of me says the Kennedys deserve to have at least one son die slow, old, and in bed.

In any event, none of the above will dare to bury Caesar until he's dead, but the minute he's gone, all hell will break loose. Against that backdrop Vickie's quiet dignity might still bring in the votes, but I wouldn't bet on it. The calculus ahead is gruesome yet fascinating. My guess is, if Vickie really wants the seat, and Ted really wants her to have it, he resigns soon to force the election to occur while the odds of him still being alive are good. I've always thought that Ted Kennedy would be more likely to leave the Capitol office building in a hearse than a moving van, and for a man who's made politics his life as much as he has, what better way to go than taking one more lap around the track?

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:21:00 +0000

Peak Paranoia

This FT story was linked on Drudge this morning as "oil futures near 130" but by the time I clicked through the headline said $140. Perhaps later this week, or today, it can reach $150. Peak Oil, until quite recently denounced as the sort of thing that you hear from people who grind axes about ~~the Jews~~International Bankers and the Bilderberg Group and how they are shifting their savings into Krugerrands. But, just as I now regularly hear people making mid-six figures speculate about how the world is really run by richer bastards than them, the Peak Oil meme has gone mainstream.

The problem today is not the supply of oil--gasoline inventories in the US are at their highest levels in years, and imports have actually declined for several months now and are forecast to continue doing so for the next five years. The problem is honest information, the supply of which is never high, and is currently almost nonexistent. We don't trust Wall Street, we don't trust bankers, and we certainly don't trust Washington.

T. Boone Pickens is quoted in that article as saying that the world demand is for 87m BBLs daily while production will not exceed 85. People assume that this means disaster and chaos will necessarily ensue. Upon reading that, two things came to mind. First, that is not quite like saying there are ten zombies approaching, and we have a shotgun with only eight shells. The overwhelming majority of oil consumption is for energy which is far more substitutable than it is assumed to be.

But more importantly, why shouldn't T. Boone Pickens try to scare the shit out of people as much as possible? A friend of mine happens to be a pilot on one of Pickens' jets and flew him up to Boston a few months ago. Pickens asked what the price of jet fuel at Logan was, and my friend remarked that it had just broke through seven bucks a gallon. "Well," Pickens said, "I hope it goes to $12." I'm not saying that Pickens doesn't know far more about the dynamics of the oil business than I do, I'm just saying that he has one of the strongest incentives known to man to present the situation in the worst light possible.

I'll reserve my strongest disdain, however, for the Democrats who are, dishonestly or foolishly, trying to play both sides of the issue. On one hand, a consensus has formed that energy independence is a Good Thing, and with this, there's a strong sense that renewable/environmentally-superior forms of energy are our best bets. On the other, we see Reid, Pelosi, Obama et. al. crying for the heads of oil companies for 'artificially inflating the price of oil.' Silly industrialists, don't they know that's the government's job?

Bottom line, if you believe that energy independence and environmentally-friendly fuel sources are strategically important, then high oil prices are an unalloyed good. I realize that the Democrats would strongly prefer that the federal government raise the price of gas by a buck a gallon through taxes so that they can dictate what substitutes ought to be researched, but even assuming that this process was completely straight pool--I hesistate to write that for fear of inducing fatal hilarity--there is simply no way that it will happen as efficiently as it is right now. I have dealt with businesses that were once bringing in hundreds of millions a year in revenue and are now struggling to get above ten. If oil is indeed running out, that is what the oil companies will become, and it is a well and truly pathetic sight. The fear of that future will do far more to spur ExxonMobil in new directions than anything the government can do.

More to the point, nothing concentrates the minds of consumers and entrepreneurs half so well as the price of a stupid commodity going through the roof. For the past few decades no one with half a brain or more went into the energy business because it was about as dull as the postal service. Oil made for such cheap energy that looking for alternatives was a mission only for fools and idealists. Now even guys like me are starting to wonder whether maybe finding new ways to produce and manage energy is the place to go. I still think oil may yet see $200--and it could happen before this Christmas--but I think that will be the last hurrah.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:39:00 +0000

I'm a Loser, Baby...

Give me a break. Tufts' (my alma mater) commencement speaker this year was Meredith Vieira? I mean, come on, Bryant [Frickin'] College got George H.W. Bush, and the best we could do is a professional leg model and TV chatterbox who hosts a show that nobody under the age of 40 has ever watched once in their lives? Were Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Star Jones booked?

This was preceded by my 10th reunion, held at the Joshua Tree in Davis Square, which achieved a certain sort of platonic perfection: people I couldn't stand 10 years ago, hanging out at a place I avoided like the plague 10 years ago. Having attended the 5th, which reminded me of nothing less than a trip to the dentist's, I decided to sit this one out and regretted it not a bit.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Tue, 20 May 2008 01:30:00 +0000

Like Hope for Apathy

Watching Joe Keohane at Boston Magazine is a bit like seeing Dita Von Teese do the Today show: wonderful to see a talented person reach a wider audience, but sometimes you really lose something in the (admittedly necessary) vanillification. His column this month is a case in point.

I was going to try and start by making the point that young people today are choosing independent volunteerism over engagement in electoral politics because it's more fun. After all, you get to work with people even younger than you, and maybe meet sociopolitically simpatico folks of the gender you find appealing. A city council election, on the other hand, means banging on doors, being told to go bleep yourself, and hanging out at every senior citizen's center in the district. But that would be missing the point, even if it would be fun to make.

What Joe's column hints at, but for some ineffable reason flinches from saying flat-out, is that there really isn't any reason for anyone to give a high hoot in hell about local elections. Boston's political history isn't storied for its resemblance to the Athens of Pericles, but to the Italy of the Medicis. Like Iraq in the waning days of Saddam, there is an opposition to the Menino administration, but it's fractious and petty and will shatter into a Hobbesian nightmare the minute Hizzoner's unifying force is removed.

Every election year I get papered by every Finnehan and Bomboza running for office, and time and again, I find myself struggling to understand why I should bother. I understand why the Finnehan-Bomboza race matters a great deal to Finnehan and Bomboza, but for my part, I don't see any difference whether Finnehan's or Bomboza's buddies are the ones who get jobs. I've been a caustic critic of Menino at times but to his credit, he's at least repaid the city for investing him as Dictator by holding slightly-more-than-petty corruption at bay to a degree that is simply remarkable.

And there is the baseline competence. Sure, that Deval fellow sounded awfully inspiring 18 months ago, but who wouldn't happily hot-swap him right about now for Chris Gabrielli or Tom Reilly? Menino rhetoric soars like a beagle, he is about as elevating as a footstool, but my trash gets picked up just as consistently as the fuckers tow my car, the roads eventually get plowed, and crime is some other neighborhood's problem. If I want to be entertained by politics, I can watch the West Wing or the O'Reilly Factor, but when it comes to city government, I don't want artists, I want plumbers.

Come to think of it, maybe I do like Menino after all....

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Wed, 14 May 2008 21:50:00 +0000

I Was Against Sean Penn Before I Was for Him...

He may be the leftist crackpot di tutti leftist crackpots in Hollywood, but at least he remains willing to flick ash in the face of one elitist, nanny-state piety.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:19:00 +0000

But this is madness!

No! This. Is. WASHINGTON DC!

Let me get this straight: at a time when oil prices are surging, the mideast remains about as stable as Britney Spears at a custody hearing, and hurricane season is around the corner, the Senate votes 97-1 to stop putting oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

This is sort of like saying, "well, I may get laid off into the start of a recession pretty soon, so let's blow the savings on a trip to Vegas before I need that money to spend on rent and groceries."

You could argue--wrongly, I think, but honestly--that we ought to be using the SPR to buffer a short-term spike in prices. Otherwise, this is rank foolishness. Yes, buying 70k barrels a day at $120 is expensive, but it will be a lot more expensive when it's $150, which I won't be surprised to see before the election. The whole point of the SPR is to be there as a strategic reserve, in case the excrement really hits the impeller. Granted, the SPR is 97% full, so stockpiling another two days' worth of imports probably won't make that much difference, but it's the thought that counts. As is usually the case, any bill of substance that gets 97 votes is probably a bad idea.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:05:00 +0000

Eat the Rich

State rep Paul Kujawski's initiative to increase taxes on "exorbitant" university funds refuses to die the quiet death the presidents of the state's many universities clearly wish it would. Kujawski, last seen pissing on the shoulder in front of a statie at a DUI stop, epitomizes the depth of the threat.

Having similarly micturated away the goodwill and deference conservatives ordinarily afford to venerable endowed institutions run by old men in colored robes and pointy hats, university leaders now must face a much baser challenge from the populist left. While Jim Manzi writes in the Corner that "giving lots of money to Democratic politicians very well might" stop the drive, I'm considerably less sanguine. When Charles Grassley and a well-marinated Democratic hack rep from Webster agree on the basic outlines of something, it's a fair sign that the wolves and sheep dogs are preparing to put their differences aside and crack open a jar of mint jelly.

There are two big problems here. The first is that any discussion of the issue will necessarily focus on Harvard, even though it is an extreme outlier. I haven't run the numbers, but if one takes into account the number of undergraduate students, I suspect Harvard, Yale, and perhaps Princeton and Stanford will stand very much alone.

The proposals bouncing around Beacon Hill are as mongoloid in their economic reasoning as a great cynic like myself could possibly hope. Imprimis, a tax is proposed on any endowment over a billion dollars, just like that. Perhaps an enterprising rep can propose to have Kujawski pay the same taxes as John Kerry, seeing as they both call themselves "senator." Like the Alternative Minimum Tax, Kujawski's Narrowly-Tailored-Exorbitantly-Rich-Ivy-League-Schools-Ought-To-Pay-Their-Fair-Share-The-Bums law will, with the benefit of inflation and time, eventually grow into a broad revenue stream that can't be touched.

Compared to this, Sen. Grassley's suggestion that universities ought to spend at least 5% of their endowment on students annually strikes even me as quite reasonable. This is where the second big problem rears its head: none of the proposed "solutions" are likely to accomplish anything like what we want.

The assumption here is that requiring universities to be slightly less stingy with their endowments will achieve a social good by reducing the cost of higher education. Michelle Obama's complaints aside, it is unclear to me why the government should care in the least how much it costs to attend Harvard. I would be fascinated to know how many students were admitted to Harvard over the past decade and chose not to attend due to the cost. One could argue that just as much benefit to society is accomplished by funneling these future luminaries off into public colleges, who years later benefit from their largess and the glow of their reputation (c.f. Jack Welch and UMass).

Given that most universities (and certainly all of those likely to be hit with a luxury tax) are able to fill their student bodies at current prices, why should we assume that if Harvard and BU are forced to spend $5000 more per student on aid, they won't simply find a way to raise the cost of attendance pari-passu? Indeed, this is arguably one of the most significant effects of the availability of large amounts of cheap credit in the form of student loans, without which the number of students able to pay would be far smaller.

One of the things which must be borne in mind throughout is that colleges generally, and especially the elite ones, are not in the business of admissions nearly half as much as they are in the business of rejections. Harvard could, at today's high prices, fill up every dorm room on every campus inside Route 128 with Harvard freshmen, and still not exhaust the demand for a Harvard degree. They could probably still do so at triple or quadruple the price, at least for a few years. At some point, "Harvard" as a brand would join Cadillac and Budweiser in the pantheon of brands that used to imply the utmost in American-made quality.

As with the economy at large, once you get below the top several dozens of schools, the payoff from increased endowment payouts shrinks rapidly. Harvard could realistically afford to forego tuition altogether, while Bentley could perhaps hand every freshman their choice of a free hat and T-shirt. To the extent that Grassley and others are talking not just about absolute cost but about access, it's not clear any of these bills would do any more than slightly alter accounting procedures for the lucky few. The vast majority of students, attending mediocre institutions with endowments to match, would probably see little, if any real change.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:53:00 +0000

Sea Change in Britain?

Early returns now suggest that the infamous mayor of London, "Red Ken" Livingstone, is set to be replaced by Conservative Boris Johnson. I'm reminded of 1992, when Rudy Giuliani defeated a reeling David Dinkins to become the first Republican mayor of NYC in as long as anyone could recall. In the same year that Bill Clinton completed the federal trifecta for the Democrats, Giuliani's stunning victory was a more accurate indicator of where the country as a whole was headed in the years to come.

One of the most remarkable shifts to take place in politics in my lifetime has been the near-disappearance of crime as a key domestic issue. In the mid-80s, I remember going to see a horse show at Madison Square Garden; as we approached Times Square, my father told us to roll up the windows and lock the doors, and we heard two gunshots on the way back out. The murder rate peaked at over six a day. When Giuliani was elected, gunpoint muggings were happening in midtown Manhattan in broad daylight and reasonable people wondered whether New York City was governable. "White yuppies buying real estate in Harlem" would have made a good headline for an entry in The World's Most Dangerous Places travel guide.

Today, violent crime remains, but it is largely a silent problem that afflicts only the poorest and blackest of us. So long as you don't live in Indian Country, you have little to fear, even in many of the the largest and formerly most violent cities. When a pretty white girl from a good family gets murdered, it's news for weeks or months, because it doesn't happen nearly so often as it used to. For the middle class and above, violent crime has become akin to the genocide in Darfur, an awful thing that we really ought to do something about, but it's something that happens to other people.

This goes a long way to explaining why shysters and demagogues like Al Sharpton are permitted to get away with being spokesmen for "their community." If you're White America and you're in charge, why bother taking on Revvum Al when you can pay him off? It's not like kids are getting shot on the school bus in Wellesley.

Ah, but in Britain, this is all completely backwards. It is true that we have more gun crime and murder here, but it is concentrated in some very narrow and sad places. The vast majority of the country is a practical paradise, the worst public disorder being a few loudmouths bobbing and weaving on the green line after a Sox game. Across Britain, ordinary upper-middle class people find themselves surrounded daily by public drunkenness and thuggery that would be surprising on West Broadway after the St. Patrick's Day parade; muggings are everyday occurrences that the police respond to by telling the victim to "be more careful next time." This is exactly the sense of crumbling of the most basic foundations of civilized society (freedom from random violence) that led to movies like "Falling Down" in the early 90s.

So, perhaps we are seeing the beginning of a similar change in the UK. The assumption that Europe would keep progressing leftward is held as apocalyptically by the American Right as it is held hopefully by the Left. With Berlusconi's victory in Italy earlier this month, we have center-right governments in power in the majority of the EU. Something tells me David Cameron will make it four in the UK before long.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:17:00 +0000

I Was for Obama before I Was Against Him

Like TV weathermen, pundits are usually very good at describing what is going on right now, but not to be relied upon for much else. Bob Novak's piece today on Obama Republicans is a perfect example of the "if the election were held today, X would happen" manufactured non-information.

Between today and the general election lies the sea. The Internet has become such an everyday thing that we fail to reflect on its unique impact. The volume of information, and the speed at which it is delivered, are vastly greater than ever before. To understand this, let's look at another context.

Not so long ago, if you were a movie geek, you might have to wait 4-8 weeks for a movie-geek magazine to print a rumor about something that happened on the set of a particular picture. People who lived in a large enough city to get daily delivery of Variety were alpha-geeks, but even they were subject to the whims of the editors. Today, tens of thousands of blogs, many dedicated to a single movie, scour the all-seeing web for the tiniest tidbits to broadcast instantly to everyone from the hipsters in Brooklyn to pimple-riddled kids in Moline, Illinois.

And yet, what do I know about what's going on with the latest Joss Whedon production? Absolutely nothing. Don't get me wrong: I think Joss Whedon is brilliant, but I'll wait for the movie to come out, then I'll get a little interested, but probably end up getting it from Netflix since I've got about 19,342.65 things contending for my attention. The Internet has contracted what used to be a relatively long and slow supply chain into virtually nothing--but it has not changed the fact that 99.99% of people are not interested in 99.99% of the information available.

Six months ago, I thought Obama was an interesting, vaguely heroic American archetype in the Teddy/JFK/Reagan mold, and contemplated the thought of his possible election with a placidity that did not apply to Hillary, Kerry, or Gore. I no longer do, but I am also an admitted extreme politigeek, and consume more news in a day than most people do in a month. I fell out of love with Obama long before he lost his inner monologue about clingy Pennsylvanian rednecks, on the basis of relatively pure substance, or "the issues," as reporters like to call things they don't think people pay enough attention to.

Elections are funny things, and can be redefined by small slips--c.f. Bosnia for Hillary, bitter and glingy rednecks for Obama--so predicting a McCain blowout now is risky. But if the race were to unfold in a relatively straighforward matter, which would be the ultimate in unexpected events, that's the scenario I'd bet on.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:29:00 +0000

BostonTHEN

A year or so ago I was bitching to my business partner about the fact that we had to, you know, actually sell our product, that it made me feel like just another damn peddler as opposed to the artiste I much preferred to consider myself. To which he responded, "You think this is bad? I was walking past South Station this morning and there was a guy there in a chicken suit handing out Metros. Now that's humiliating." Point taken.

The question for BostonNOW is, if your competition has a guy in a chicken suit handing out free product, what do you do? It's like getting an invitation to a Halloween party at Marilyn Manson's house and trying to figure out what to wear. If you show up in lipstick and fishnets (and are male), it's a sure thing everyone else will be wearing J. Crew. No matter which way you play it, you're going to lose.

On one hand, I am delighted to hear of the paper's demise, solely because there will be at minimum three fewer hawkers trying to stuff the damn thing down my shirt on my morning commute. One by the bus stop at Maverick square, one ten yards away at the T station, and another coming up out of the ground at South Station. I do hope those people find other, less annoying work, because it was an honest job, but until one of them mugs me to pay for his next round of scratch tickets, I'm putting it down as a win.

Likewise, this is probably good news for all the other papers in the city. All of them depend to varying degrees upon mindshare and advertising dollars, and BostonNOW did nothing but dilute what was already getting more watered-down than the seventh-inning beer at Fenway. It's not a good thing to have members of your herd dying off due to famine, but make no mistake: better them than you. That said, if I could have chosen, I'd much rather have seen the Metro go.

Make no mistake: BostonNOW was a laughingstock of a publication, the best argument I've ever seen for government licensing of writers, and a general offense to trees everywhere. But at least it took a run at personality, locality, and a needed break from the stupefying vapors of professional journalism that have over the past half-century utterly ruined an entertainingly disreputable business.

If Hell is English cooks, German policemen, and French mechanics, then the Metro is its newspaper, where "content" functions solely as a numbing lubricant to ease the entry of the real product, i.e., the ads for tires, online degree mills, and outpatient medical studies. If you think the Globe is a bit dull now, you have not even begun to imagine the possibilities yet to be exploited in extreme blandness in the service of ever-more-efficient distribution of promotional materials. I have seen the future, and it is a thousand monkeys, sitting at a thousand typewriters, rewriting press releases for Associated Press bureaux all over the world.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:13:00 +0000

Didn't Work for Mitt

John McCain will probably be the first Republican to be outspent by a Democrat in a long time. So what? The medium matters, but so does the message it delivers. McCain's campaign had the plug pulled out and stuck back in more times than Terri Schiavo. Romney outspent him by enough to name a few buildings in Harvard Yard, and yet, Mitt's the one looking for the right shade of lipstick to compliment the grumpy old man's cheeks.

This isn't to say that either Romney or McCain are or were perfect candidates, but neither is Obama. He lost Massachusetts on his merits, and since Super Tuesday he's fallen from the heights of Mount Olympus by failing to rid himself of a turbulent priest. Had Hillary not scored the most devastating own goal since Michael Dukakis hopped into a tank, Obama would likely be looking at a resounding enough beatdown in Pennsylvania to give the superdelegates pause (under GOP winner-take-all primary rules, she'd be ahead), but instead they've all been reminded of the one thing about the Clintons that we were all glad to be rid of eight years ago.

Nor does the path become easier for Obama as Hillary is forced into the rear-view mirror. Hillary pokes him with the tiniest of sticks and is called a murderess; the strongest arguments against him (he's an inexperienced pinko) are ones she can only make through third-cousin surrogates on public-access cable on nights with a crescent moon. Money buys you the chance to frame the debate, but what you put in the frame matters too. Just ask Mitt.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:20:00 +0000

It's Not About Money, it's About Class

Inside Higher Ed yesterday brought us the debate over the widely-quoted "a degree is worth a million dollars" in lifetime earnings. All parties agree that the million number is a little funky, and that if tuition were to keep increeasing at the current rates, college would eventually become an economically bad choice. They're only half right.

One of the more worried-over trends of the past decade has been the drop in male college enrollment and graduation rates, trending towards a 60/40 female-male ratio with no end in sight. These developments are not unconnected. College was traditionally more of a class-training mechanism than an economic one--certainly the boys who went to Harvard in 1920 were not doing so in order to improve their career prospects.

As the cost of college continues to grow relative to its economic return on investment, those who decline to take the bet of "pay now, earn more later" are by definition taking an entrepreneurial sort of risk. Anyone whose brain has not been heavily marinated in gender studies will agree that women as a group are less inclined to take risks than men--which applies to the smart risks as well as the stupid ones. But that's only half of it. Women are also far more class-sensitive than men, and have been for thousands of years. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of evolutionary biology, perhaps we can change it by marinating in more gender studies--regardless, it is an obvious fact to anyone whose eyes are at least half-open. It is thus clear that women would place more value on the noneconomic benefits of a degree than men.

In any event I am not so sure that I buy the line that college has become less affordable over time any more than I buy the notion that coffee has become less affordable since 1970 or whenever. Not so long ago, a venti chai latte didn't cost $4 because it didn't exist. Coffee was something the waitress poured into your cup at the diner and nothing more. Cappuccino and espresso were exotic treats you might find at an especially good Italian restaurant. A small drip coffee today costs about the same in real terms as it did twenty or thirty years ago, which is the fair thing to compare.

College, meanwhile, has undergone a similar sort of lifestyle makeover. While University of X has always been more prestigious than X State, the difference in perceived value today is larger than it has ever been. Get into an Ivy League school and you will get a job at a hedge fund, marry a European aristocrat, and hang out with Richard Branson and Bono; go to community college and the best you can hope for is a job complex enough to be outsourced to Bangalore rather than somewhere really embarassing like Sri Lanka.

The result of this is that every college has acquired more of the costs and trappings of elite schools in order to maintain their appeal. You will hear college administrators protest that the new $40m student center-cum-Disneyland amusement park costs only a penny or two on the dollar in terms of tuition, just as we heard dot-bomb managers explain away the cost of all those Aeron chairs. The obvious extravagance you see in a corporate budget is rarely the end of it; more often the pennies on the surface conceal nickels and dimes deeper below.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:03:00 +0000

A Strange and Wonderful World

I am tempted to buy one of these just to have it around in the hopes of someone asking, "what's that?"

Why, it's a left-handed Veeblefetzer. Duh!

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 21:19:00 +0000

As Goes BusinessWeek...

When BusinessWeek starts to agree with me, I start to doubt myself.

While I do think that Google faces some very steep challenges over the next 24 months, I'm starting to feel that the stock price reflects the negatives more than sufficiently. Last I checked they are at a forward P/E of ~19, which is by no means exceptional for a company still very much in growth mode.

The most interesting comment I heard about search in a long time was something Bill Gates said at a conference a year or so ago. When asked how he felt about Microsoft having 'lost the search war to Google,' Gates responded that MS had 'only lost the first battle, not the war,' and that "we are still in the command-line era of search." Those of us who use search a lot know its shortcomings very well, and they are even more acute (though in some ways different) for those who do not use it a hundred times daily. The implication is clear: Google's core business remains vulnerable to being innovated around and over.

I no longer believe this to be the case.

The most fundamental feature of a search engine is the volume of content it gives you access to. An engine that gives the ideal result on page 5 is better than the one that gives you nothing because it never spidered that item in the first place. The volume of information on the Web is growing at such a rate (something like ten hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute) that simply keeping up with it, even in relatively specialized niches, is a capital-intensive operational challenge.

On the flip side, getting people to pay attention to your wonderful specialized search engine is in many ways an even costlier nut to crack. Going direct to consumers means spending bazillions on branding. Other companies have tried to create "professional" versions with much more specialized tools and deeper data mining, and sell them on a subscription basis, which requires spending a lot of cash on sales and marketing, though break-even will arrive sooner than in the previous option.

Some have done well for a while--ZoomInfo comes to mind--but they feel brittle to me, like Indiana Jones scampering through a tunnel ahead of a boulder. Only in this case the tunnel probably ends only if the boulder wants it to, i.e., buys them out. Google is reaching a point where, like Microsoft in 1995, mediocrity is enough. Indy has to be an Olympic sprinter and gymnast to stay ahead--the boulder just needs to keep rolling downhill.

And therein lies the question--is Google today the Microsoft of 1985, 1995, or 2000--while mediocrity at the top may make for an interesting career choice, it's not a rewarding place to invest. My bet is on 1995.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:19:00 +0000

Paging Hollywood

The beginning of a screenplay for an Iraq War movie that would probably gross a few hundred million, minimum. It even has the obligatory female.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:14:00 +0000

Sane Dogs, Mad Englishmen

The economy is presently in a troubled state, has been for some times, and I will be the first to say that I do not know whether we are closer to the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, or anywhere in between. Nobody else knows, either, or if they do, they're keeping their mouth shut (see previous post) and placing their bets.

That being said, I do feel confident of a few things:

1. It has been a long time since this many people were praying for a recession. Call it the Bush Factor: well over half of our own chattering classes, and probably north of four-fifths of Europe's, will happily seize upon any grim event with which to club the U S of A and its hated Bush regime. Quite simply there are too many people eager to grind too many axes to take seriously coverage such as that seen to the right.

2. As uncertainty grows towards infinity, all possible outcomes are not equally likely. Events do not take their direction from the spinning of a cosmic roulette wheel. The economy is the aggregate of billions of small decisions cascading their way up and up, and in hindsight, clear patterns can always be discerned. Just because we cannot say for certain that a dollar collapse will not occur and precipitate a general unraveling of the current economic order, does not mean that this is anywhere near as likely as a recession of average duration and severity.

3. When the map fails, follow the compass. Every recession of my lifetime has included its own set of utterly unprecedented events: the 70s featured stagflation and the collapse of Bretton Woods, the 80s the S&L crisis, the 90s the amazing runup in stock prices and mass ownership of equities, and now, the subprime debacle. During every bubble, the bulls say there will never be another bear market, and when the bear comes, all the erstwhile bulls say it will be twenty years before anyone is dumb enough to let a bubble like that happen again. It's all bullshit.

The same things were being said in late 2001, with the added uncertainty of the 9/11 attacks still very fresh in our collective minds. Forget speculative investing--we would be lucky to still be alive in five years' time. Google's IPO was still over two years away*, and the conventional wisdom held that it would be a decade--or more--before any company bought computer hardware or software again.

And yet we can see now in the perfect clarity of hindsight that even as the dumptrucks were carting the still-smoldering wreckage of the Twin Towers out of Manhattan's financial district, the helium tanks for the Great Residential Real Estate Bubble were being trucked back in. We moved from one bubble to another almost without pause, but of course, this was totally different because these were houses people lived in, so it would be Nothing Like It Was the Last Time.

Anyway, the point here is that trying to keep up with the headlines is almost sure to lead you to complete and utter panic and insanity, while steering a steady course that assumes that the economy will recover, and that quality assets will return to their long-term values, is as close to a sure thing as this crazy life offers.

* Which happened just under four years ago, in case you need a reminder of how quickly things have been moving.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:22:00 +0000

Sitting Pretty

There are life lessons to be learned from the actions of Deval Patrick and Al Gore right now. Both men are widely considered to be contenders for a big career move, depending on how the Democratic primary plays out. Patrick continues to deny what is almost a certainty, that he would take a cabinet post in an Obama administration if offered, while Al Gore declines to take time from polishing his halo to address silly rumors concerning his non-candidacy.

Naturally, no one believes Patrick and everyone wants Al Gore to take a stand, meaning, rule it in or out. But as is almost always the case in life, the people demanding answers don't have their subjects' best interests at heart when they make the demand. It's not just that some answers are better than some others when these sorts of questions arise. It's that nothing is almost always a better answer than anything.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:58:00 +0000

Please Sterilize My City

The Globe's story today on the Barfing Crab's latest woes is a disturbing reminder of how close this city is to eradicating every sign of non-committee-approved life. Shockingly, the Crab's kitchen is a biohazard and the beer lines are moldy. In more surprising news, the property's owner and the City are conspiring to burn the place to the ground and pave over the ashes. Or, to use their words:
A Barking Crab spokesman told The Boston Globe yesterday that co-owner Scott Garvey wasn't aware of developer John B. Hynes III's proposal to relocate the restaurant off the water and into a new building as part of his waterfront project, Seaport Square. Hynes said he spoke to the eatery's other co-owner, Lee Kennedy, about the move.

Hynes said city officials favored relocating the Barking Crab because its site could then be used to extend the HarborWalk along the channel for public use.

Long before the city decided to put shore up some rotting old piers and give it its own branding campaign, the Barking Crab *was* the public waterfront. If Hynes wants to turn it into Luxury Loft Condos or offices for hedge funds, that's his right. At least those would be used by actual living, breathing people, as opposed to the committees and "constituencies" composed of statistical samples rather than actual human beings for whom the Harbor Walk seems to be designed.

People today look at City Hall plaza and ask, "who the @#$! let that happen?" The answer is the same people currently suggesting that an apron of fancy granite paving stones is a better direction for the city than a noisy place full of people drinking cheap moldy beer and taking their chances at the raw bar half a mile from anything resembling a residential neighborhood.

noreply@blogger.com (The Snob) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:48:00 +0000

James Frey is Her Co-Pilot

Oh, SNAP!

For all the talk about how the 'net has dis-empowered the mass media, there's another side which this story shows--the power of the echo. If a story doesn't gain immediate traction in the old broadcast model, it basically ceases to exist. As more gets archived, though, the opportunities to keep it alive, and resuscitate it, grow exponentially as people pass YouTube links around.

I'm also reminded of Lincoln, who in a speech to Congress discussed his own meager military record thus:

If General Cass went in advance of me in picking huckleberries, I guess I surpassed him charges upon the wild onions. If he saw and live fighting Indians, it was more than I did; but I had a good many bloody struggles with mosquitoes, and although I never fainted from the loss of blood, I can truly say I was often very hungry.