It looks remarkably like Africa, but it’s not — this is Texas
60 Minutes did a segment on African animals, some on the verge of extinction in their natural habitats, thriving on Texas ranches that offer the opportunity to hunt some of the animals in exchange, I guess, for the economic incentive to protect the rest. Embedding was disabled, but you can watch the video on YouTube.
(via marginal revolution)
from the comments
I thought this was really sad at first, but in thinking it through, it also makes sense. In a country that no longer makes things, I suppose one of our last commodities that can be bought and sold is our attention.
dueling banjos
Drank a half bottle of wine tonight that cost $28 (for the carafe) and tasted EXACTLY like Kool-Aid dosed with brandy. Yes; I’m back in NYC.
— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) January 29, 2012
Spent too much money tonight on books, booze, and pizza. In other words, happiest guy in the world.
— Frank Chimero (@fchimero) January 29, 2012
All that’s left here are the remnants of what was
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the directors of the documentary Jesus Camp, produced a short video at The New York Times about the dismantling of Detroit.
One freezing evening we happened upon the young men in this film, who were illegally dismantling a former Cadillac repair shop. They worked recklessly to tear down the steel beams and copper fasteners. They were in a hurry to make it to the scrap yard before it closed at 10 p.m., sell their spoils and head to the bar.
Surprisingly, these guys, who all lacked high school diplomas, seemed to have a better understanding of their place in the global food chain than many educated American 20-somethings. The young men regularly checked the fluctuating price of metals before they determined their next scrap hunt, and they had a clear view of where these resources were going and why.
dear clusterflock
I don’t mean to go around hawking my wares, but this seemed so relevant and useful to you personally that I thought it would be wrong not to share it. Please keep in mind that I am financially involved with this offer, but even so I think you’ll find I was right to share this marvelous opportunity with you today.
Well now here I’ve wasted a lot of your time with technicalities and jibber jabber, I’ll come to my point quickly. Let me ask you just one question:
Have you ever wanted to have a spleen named after you?
headline of the day, III
Candidate Tells Supporters He Majored in ‘Economics;’ Actually Majored in Home Economics
The Lockheed Lakester
This 1917 beauty, known as the Lockheed Lakester, will be up for auction at Barret-Jackson later this month.
The car, registered for road use as a 1917 Crow Lakester Custom, was hand-built from the wing tip tank of a Lockheed Super Constellation and uses a mix of automotive and aircraft parts. Wedged inside the tank is a 1.8-liter turbocharged Hemi four-cylinder mated to a five-speed manual transmission, and the two-person cockpit features gunner seats and an air-speed indicator in lieu of a speedometer.
nobody understands debt
This has been passed around for a few days, but here is Krugman on the American deficit:
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
headline of the day
Daddy’s Plane
My daddy went to work at the aircraft firm of Chance Vought in 1935, I think, when he was nineteen or so. Jobs were hard to come by, but he was smart and mechanically inclined and he had a high school degree.
When the US entered WWII, my daddy was exempted from the draft on account of his working in a ‘critical industry’. Vought’s biggest customer was the US Navy.
After the war, Vought’s military contracts must have dwindled. Or maybe moving operations inland seemed like a good idea. Anyway, the company transferred 1300 key personnel from Connecticut to the right-to-work state of Texas. It was the biggest-ever US corporate move at that time. A Hollywood film inspired by the move even went into pre-production, and Spencer Tracy was said to have been cast. I imagine my mother in a Katharine Hepburn role.
The F4U Corsair (1940-1952) was Vought’s triumph.
The Japanese are said to have called the plane Whistling Death.
quote out of context
“What I can promise you is this – when you get out of college, if I’m president, you’ll have a job.”
from the comments
And I should point out that the Lego Technic sets that I had as a kid are still actively developed, you just wouldn’t know it walking down the lego aisle at your local toy store.
And that brings up an even bigger point, which is that the internet has freed the long tail to go live in cheap ecommerce space, rather than cutthroat toy store shelves. If there’s a particular brick you need, there are official and unofficial places to get it. Whole communities of people online trade designs for their new transmission gearbox.
I’d argue that there’s never been a better time to get your kid interested in legos, male or female.
the most disturbing thing I’ve read today
When things blew up, we didn’t say to ourselves, “maybe it’s not possible to engineer a low-risk 6% annual return on assets” or “maybe it’s not possible for everyone a demographically mature population to expect to spend as much time out of the workforce as in it.” Instead, we search for the fault in the system: were pension fund managers too incompetent? Bankers too greedy and clever about searching for loopholes? Regulators too lax? Did we write the rules governing bank risk capital wrong?
Discovering that we can’t all achieve higher risk-free returns by piling into mortage securities, we do not question the premise that there is some way to achieve attractive risk free returns on a mass scale; instead, we direct the banks to pile into OECD sovereign debt. Having created a bubble in OECD sovereign debt that is about to end disastrously, bankers and regulators are undoubtedly even now searching for a “truly” risk free security that they can use to backstop their deposits.
Let us instead consider the possibility that this thing may not exist. There may be no way for us all to enjoy steady, low-risk capital appreciation, or to exit the workforce whenever work becomes difficult. There may be no way to engineer these possibilities into being.
And that’s counting Cher’s twitter feed.
Last Words
Among the last words my mother spoke to me: “I wish money had never been invented.”
headline of the day
Financial crisis forces Berlusconi to delay release of latest love song CD
quote out of context
We’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well positioned to exceed expectations with an I.P.O. baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.
Sheila’s Oak Park Walking Tour
Called to mind by the Where we are today thread.
Friend #1: I can’t believe these are all single-family houses.
Friend #2 (sotto voce): Ah, the voice of the eternal proletariat. “Why, five families could live in that house!”
Nailed It
Discuss: Calvin and Hobbes succinctly explains the reality of American capitalism nearly two decades ago better than just about anyone. [via TSO]
1884 De Dion Bouton Et Trapardoux Dos-A-Dos Steam Runabout
The world’s oldest running car sold at auction last Friday for $4.62 million.
The Runabout had been in the same family for 81 years prior to the sale, and is one of six De Dion tricycles known to still exist. A total of 20 of the three-wheelers were built. When new, the trike had a top speed of 38 mph and a range of 20 miles on one tank of water. The vehicle that sold last night was the only car to show up for the world’s first auto race, where it averaged 16 mph over a 20-mile course.
From streetbonersandtvcarnage.com
A reflection on #Occupywallstreet by a twenty-something hipster-ish business owner:
To make ends meet while my business grows, I work at a wine shop and that nets me a whopping $12.50 an hour. As a bonus for my ears, I am privy to humoring whatever bat-shit crazy political stance my customers offer up as they wait for me to ring up their booze. Lately, I’ve been getting customers buying hooch on their way to Occupy Wall Street. Funny, because I don’t recall seeing any of the Little Rock Nine being armed with flasks of Evan Williams. Anyhoo, today this British girl with legs that nearly scraped the ceiling strutted into the shop wearing a see-thru dress. She was particularly amped because she was on her way to the protest and asked if I would like to go. I said no thanks. Without skipping a beat she asks, “Why not? Don’t you hate the banks?”
And there my friends lies the problem with Occupy Wall Street. There is a considerable lack of education on what caused the economic crises and therefore we are playing the blame game. To make matters worse, there seems to be no clear resolution being offered by the protest’s organizers. And if you are reading this and saying, “Well, the giant corporations could just give us the money,” then you sir are a jackass. That mode of thought is reserved for friends of successful rappers who thought that they’d be getting a free ride out of the hood.
I don’t think people shouldn’t be angry, but this feels more like a mood than a movement.
quote out of context
Behind its flower box framed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.
(via marginal revolution)
@Walmartlabs
You think of large tech companies like Google or Apple having extensive R&D labs, but Wal-Mart opened one after its low-cost advantage began to disappear.
In one experimental project expected to debut for the holiday season, @Walmartlabs has been recruiting people to test Shopycat, a Facebook and web app that uses people’s social-media profiles and comments to generate gift ideas.
“Most of the recommendation systems you see today in online shopping are based on prior transactions,” said Mr. Harinarayan, who worked for Amazon in the late 1990s when its system was developed. The system works well for books, where people tend to buy in the same genres, he said, but so much not elsewhere.
“It’s our belief that more than past transactions, your interests and what interests of yours are trending are better predictors of what you’d be interested in buying,” he said.
(via @tcarmody)
from the comments
Speaking of cons, as a college freshman I decided I was a talented hair stylist. I announced that I could cut anybody’s hair. I had never done such a thing, except to cut some bubble gum out of my bangs as a 5-year-old. So, three friends with beautiful, long straight hair sat down, one by one, in front of the dorm mirror. I draped their shoulders with towels. And I cut their hair into long shags. They looked fabulous and were very pleased. I continued to give them trims for a while, but eventually got bored with it.
I wish, at the time, I had announced that I was an entrepreneur amassing my first billion dollars…
(Im)possible Chicagos is a series of hallucinatory joyrides through one hundred and twenty five asynchronous Chicagos.
Alexander Trevi‘s first joyride through (Im)possible Chicago traversed Acer Necropolis.
Trevi recently completed his nineteenth, wherein:
At night when you’re out driving, you can tell which neighborhood you’re in by the light of the streetlamps, because each ward basks in its own different hue. For instance, if the streets are all aglow in azurite, you’re definitely joy riding around Marquette Park.
Zoning codes require that windows are tinted according to the neighborhood’s chromatic identity, so no matter how the interiors are lighted, houses, skyscrapers and 7-Elevens do not give off wayward wavelengths.
Even your car lights beam out the same color. But when you cross over into another ward, they instantaneously switch filter to match that ward’s assigned spectrum.
He could have set the Guinness World Record for people who wanted to kill him
The story of Edgar Valdez, aka La Barbie, an American citizen who rose to the top of one of Mexico’s prominent drug cartels.
Like many Texans, Barbie grew up right across the border from Mexico, in the city of Laredo. The place feels like something from a Mexican postcard, with cobblestone plazas and picturesque waterfalls – except for the massive, multilane bridge to Mexico that cuts straight through town. Until the drug war, everyone in Laredo saw the two sides of the border as one; many families, after all, had blood ties in both Mexico and the States. As a kid, Barbie loved to visit Nuevo Laredo, a border town bustling with donkeys, food carts, girls in little embroidered dresses, shoeshine boys and the smell of roasting corn. It was like stepping into another world, and all you had to do was cross the bridge.
In high school, Barbie was in the popular crowd, horsing around in the breezeways outside of class and waging egg wars after school. On weekends, he went to keggers on ranches, played elaborate scavenger games and hung out with his steady sweetheart, Virginia Perez, a bubbly, blue-eyed blonde. He grew up in a middle-class development on the outskirts of Laredo, a kind of no man’s land where Burger Kings didn’t begin to sprout up until the Nineties. Even the people of Laredo considered it “Indian territory,” an area rife with dope and illegal immigrants. Barbie’s parents raised him and his five siblings in a tidy, orange-trimmed home with palm trees in the front. “They’re regular Ozzie and Harriets,” says Jose Baeza, a spokesman for the Laredo police department. “They’re business owners, PTA, morning-jog people.”
Here’s a link to the printer friendly version.
(via the browser)
