Your Idea Is Probably Already a Free App February 28, 2013February 25, 2013 FUNNY I assume you’ve seen this clip — wherein gay men threaten to marry your girl friends if you stand in the way of marriage equality (“do you even know the difference between hummus and baba ghanoush?” they ask dismissively). If not, be warned. COOL Actually, coolest First Lady . . . EVER. Have you seen her dancing with Jimmy Fallon? HOW FAR HAVE I WALKED? So I’m doing my power walk wondering just how far I’ve gone and realize that would make a great app! Just click START and let the GPS track your distance until you click STOP. I’ll be rich! And then I realize this is such an obvious idea, someone must already have had it. And there it was. Minutes later it was mine. For free, of course. Not in any way to minimize the squeezing of the middle class — these are tough times (make a note to watch or record “American Winter” on HBO March 18) — but how do you measure the quality of life improvement of being able to imagine something useful, find it in seconds, own it in minutes, and then use it for free? I walked 4.7 miles.
Car Math February 27, 2013March 7, 2013 Which has more of a positive impact — your trading a vehicle that gets 11 miles to the gallon for one that gets 18? Or trading a 20 mpg car that gets 20 mpg for one that gets 50 mpg? Obviously, it’s the former. Say you drive 15,000 miles a year. You use 1,364 gallons of gas if each one gets you just 11 miles, 833 if each one gets you 18 — so you save 530 gallons a year with the switch. But if you are already getting 20 mpg, requiring just 750 gallons, and move to a 50 mpg vehicle, requiring 300, you save “just” 450 gallons. One of the things we should do is get everyone who drives just a little — I drive maybe 400 miles a year — to swap his or her ride for a gas guzzler. I am currently car-less; but previously I owned an eggplant purple 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee, bought used, cheap, because it was old, gas-thirsty, and eggplant purple. Perfect. Because I barely drove it, I had effectively taken a gas guzzler off the road, short of actually junking it. Junking inefficient vehicles is not environmentally sound, because if I had bought a Prius or a Smart car instead and driven that 400 miles a year I would have saved maybe 20 gallons of gas per year, total — but added to the world all the environmental costs of making a new car. Which are enormous. Better to put the gas guzzlers in the hands of people like me who rarely drive, or else in the garages of people who like to have a rarely-used back-up vehicle. Another good thing, of course, is simply for folks to drive frugally: “hypermiling” as best they can. This is not news; but always bears repeating. Another: riding a bike. Or walking. Good for your health, your wallet, and your planet. BTW: If you’re an affluent New Yorker who keeps a car in the city, for heaven’s sake get rid of it. You save: $8,000 a year on parking, $3,000 a year on insurance, plus God knows what on gas and maintenance — and a fortune on the actual car itself, which could have been invested to make you money — plus endless amounts of time from the moment you start hassling over the price with the dealer, to the time you spend hassling over registration renewals and the faulty brake light, to the stops for gas and getting it washed and all the rest. We have subways. We have buses. We have cabs. And now we (and many other cities) have Uber. I’ve written about this before, but Uber is sensational — and you and I each get ten bucks if you use this link to sign up. And it’s efficient: all those otherwise idle sedans that previously had been in between jobs, simply taking up parking space? Now the parking space is freed up because both the previously idle driver and her previously idle (or, worse, to keep it warm or cool, idling) vehicle, is taking you where you need to go. Pure win-win-win if you were definitely going to take a cab anyway. (Indeed, Uber now offers cabs, too, in some cities as well as sedans and SUVs — more efficiency, as its GPS technology matches cabs looking for passengers with passengers looking for cabs.) And because of its one-touch feedback mechanism — you touch your iPhone to rate each ride — the drivers have an extra incentive to provide a top-notch professional ride. I walk when I can, and, yes, take the subway from time to time (I have been to Brooklyn!), but even with Borealis at only $8, I have my own round-the-clock car and driver (minus the $100,000-plus, all in, that would cost me). I have Uber! Can I say one more thing? This no-car logic can even work for New Yorkers and others spectacularly fortunate enough to have “summer places.” I spend $150 to be driven out to or back in from the beach. (Not sure what Uber would charge for that; I use a regular car service.) I do feel guilty not taking the subway to the train to the bus to the ferry to the beach lugging all my stuff (at a cost of $40 or so, if there are two of us, instead of this $150) — instead, I just get picked up at my door and dropped off at the ferry. But compared with driving myself? I save a fortune. I spend roughly $5,000 a summer on the car service, versus all the above-enumerated costs of owning my own car and having it sit idle almost all the time. And while friends are inching along the Long Island Expressway going the exact same place I am, their shoulders tensed up from the traffic, their right legs twinging with . . . could that be the onset of sciatica? . . . trying desperately to stay awake after a long week at the law firm or on the way home after a great weekend in the sun . . . I am sleeping or reading or gabbing on the phone or with a friend in the back seat, sprawled out like a king. And — compared with driving my own car, as I say — saving a fortune.
A New Speculation February 25, 2013August 11, 2013 [WORDPRESS FEATURE] This post was supposed to go live just after midnight Sunday, to be up all Monday. WordPress lets you schedule them that way — a nice feature. But it will sometimes simply “miss the schedule” for undisclosed reasons and, rather than try again a few minutes later, or at the very least send an email alerting the blogger to its failure, it . . . does neither. I just noticed now, 23 hours after the scheduled post time, when I got off a plane, that WordPress had decided not to post Monday’s column — oops! — so I post it again, now. Anybody know someone at WordPress who might want to fix this? HANUKKAH AND THANKSGIVING . . . . . . fall on the same day this year, November 28, as noted here last week (“plan ahead“). Turns out, this as has happened only once before in the history of the world — 1888, according to this and this — and then only then because Thanksgiving had not yet been changed from the last Thursday of the month to the fourth Thursday. And it actually will never happen again. Unless you imagine we will still be celebrating both holidays more than 3,000 generations from now. WATSON Jeff Schwarz: “Re your post that ‘Watson may soon take over your medical care‘ . . . Is Watson going to be paid by the procedure or will he (or she — it?) get a fixed salary to keep me healthy?” ☞ The latter, for sure, if enough folks read my pal David Goldhill’s brilliant book, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father — And How We Can Fix it, or my pal Steve Brill’s game-changing 24,000-word cover story in this week’s Time — well worth the full read. (Guess who turns out to be the efficient penny-pinching hero. Medicare!) ETRM Here’s a new speculation, completely risky, only for a little money that you can truly, truly afford to lose. ETRM was $4 when its minimally invasive but surgically implanted weight-loss device was pending approval from the FDA. Presumably, people were hoping the data would be good, the device would be approved, and the stock would rise. Instead, the trial missed its primary end point and the stock crashed immediately to $1.30, drifted down to $1.12 in the ensuing week or two, and then dropped finally (or perhaps not finally, which is the risk) to close Friday at 90 cents. That might normally be the end of the story, but as I understand it — distilled from smart people who actually DO understand it — the company may submit their data anyway, and for a variety of reasons apparent to at least some FDA watchers, the FDA just might approve it. In other words, this could be a situation where the broad market sees failure but could be surprised by success, if the FDA decides that, in hindsight, the primary endpoints were set too high, and the attained results are actually “good enough.” If this were to happen — a huge IF — the stock probably goes back to $4 and perhaps a good bit higher. The company probably has the cash to see this through — the reason ETRM dropped that extra leg down late last week was announcement that cash had been raised at a price that, giving weight to the value of warrants that were attached to the deal, was in the 80-to-85-cent range. This is purely a gamble. Heads, the device is approved and we make several times our money. Tails, it’s not, and we lose it all. As I often repeat, this is for money you can truly afford to lose . . . perhaps as one of half a dozen little speculations that in the aggregate make up $30,000 of the $350,000 (say) you’ve chosen to expose to the stock market, with the rest invested via, for example, equally-weighted or fundamentally-weighted index funds. The advantage of this $30,000 carve-out being, first, that you get to control the taxes, which means you can come out ahead even if you just break even: selling your losers to lower your income tax; using your winners, once held for a year and a day, to fund your charitable giving via the Fidelity, Vanguard, or Schwab charitable gift funds. And the second advantage being that, who knows? We could get lucky and do better than break even (or unlucky, and do worse). Speaking of which, how have we done so far? The answer would not be easy to pin down, even if you had all the time and data needed to do it. What methodology would you use? Well, for you personally, it would be easy: you’d just look to see how you did with all the hare-brained suggestions I’ve scattered through four thousand posts. Some of you are reasonably pleased; others have long since fled. But a collective score? One of you, with my encouragement and profound thanks, has put in a great deal of time building a spread sheet to try to answer exactly that. But the assumptions he will use can sway things quite a bit. How much of each item does he assume you bought? Did you buy more each time I mentioned it? When and how much did you sell if I was less than explicit? (“It would be reasonable to make profits here but I’m holding much of mine for the long-term” — what the hell does that mean?) We had hoped to have at least a first pass of this months ago, but there are a slew of somewhat obscure questions he’s tossed back to me to answer before he can finish. For example: “I have the initial Calton Homes buy and sell but what about the subsequent ones? Did the buys of 8/22/2000 and 6/1/2001 get the $5 dividend? What happened after that? Maybe a chance to sell at some price after that?” Yikes. I have a feeling each of the queries could take an hour to research, and I keep not finding those hours. SO HERE’S A THOUGHT — AND STOP READING UNLESS YOU ACTUALLY HAVE BOUGHT SOME OF THESE THINGS! — MAYBE SOME OF YOU CAN HELP. IF YOU KNOW THE ANSWER TO ONE OF THESE, PLEASE SHARE. In addition to Calton Homes, Patrick asks: + What happened to El Paso Energy Partners? Did they get taken over? Any dividends/splits/spinoffs in the meantime? + I have that you said sell most of your TXCO on 2/7/2006 but did anything happen to the rest of it? Any dividends? [NO!] Also do you have a price 3/15/2007 when you re-recommended it? + Purchase price for ARC the reit? And while we are at it, dividends and the price where you sold it 1/3/2006? + I don’t get what happened with Korea Fund. Was there a split in there somewhere? My data seems faulty on this one. Help! + The Commerce Bancorp recommended 9/30/2005 got bought out. Any dividends between the purchase date and the sale date? + I have a note that you bought more Lear at 18. Do you have a date for that? Sometime in 2005/2006? + What happened to Landry’s Restaurant? I see a buy price but no sale. Did it get taken over? Any dividends? + Did JAV go bust? If so when? Any dividends? + Same question for BRCI. [Ooo! Ooo! I know this one! It was a total bust. No spin-offs, no dividends, just well-intentioned disaster.] + I think I am missing something about CRME. The prices and dates I see look totally different from what you describe in the recommendations. Do I have the wrong stock? What happened with CRME. Price paid? When did you sell and at what price? Any dividends? + Help me with AMRN. I was finding completely conflicting info to what you talk about in the recommendation so I’m afraid I have the wrong stock. Can you give me everything about this one? Buy price, sell price and dates. Any dividends? + What happened to the DNDN 2011 $20 puts recommended 10/19/2009? Did they get exercised at expiration? + I can’t find anything on MYGLF. Can you give me prices for the 4/11/2011 and 3/21/2012 buys? Any news on the stock? Is there a price on May 4 2012? + Can you walk me through the price paid and what happened to some of the warrants? The Aldabra warrants became GLDD warrants and stock but I don’t have a ratio. Can you give me what happened there? + What about the HAPN warrants? Price? When they were bought? What happened? Did they get sold? + Aldabra 2 became Boise warrants/stock? Can you help me with the purchase price and what happened to them? + The NRDC NAQ? Became ROIC warrants/stock? The only thing I have on ROIC warrants is you mention selling about a third to play with house money 3/13/2012 but I’m lost as to how NRDC NAQ converted to ROIC warrants, at what price, and what happened to the rest of them. I guess there is still 2/3rds of the ROICW position? What about any ROIC stock? help! + I have BZ warrants bought for 2 cents 10/23/2008. What price for the warrants mentioned 7/28/2009? + What is the price and what happened to INHI warrants mentioned 11/2/2009? + Can you help me with the WMT leaps? Date? Price paid? What leaps were they? Date and strike price?
Everything Comes Clear February 22, 2013February 21, 2013 You gotta watch, you gotta watch, you gotta watch. That’s not three separate things you gotta watch, just one; I’m trying to give it extra emphasis. What you’ll see (after a 15-second ad) are two gripping tales of almost unimaginable heroism (by government workers!) followed by the kind of eye-opening big-picture charts and logic that make everything come clear. And that also happen to reinforce, at least tangentially, yesterday’s post, which spoke of private versus public consumption. One of you actually pulled that item and sent it to his list. I know because I am on that list. And so . . . because I read all the stuff you send (and often find it more interesting than my own — I should be paying you) . . . I read it. And you know what? It was pretty good! Here it is again (how self-indulgent is that?): SEQUESTRATION The thing is — having shifted sharply in the other direction for the last three decades — we need to shift the emphasis from personal consumption back a bit (just a bit) to public consumption for a decade or two. Bigger houses and more TV’s are nice; faster power boats and granite counter tops are nice. But so are bridges and highways that work . . . waterways that are deep enough . . . subways that are comfortable . . . levees that withstand storms . . . sewage systems that handle the load . . . great public schools and universities . . . groundbreaking research that make lives better and keep our economy competitive . . . clean air and water . . . energy efficiency . . . and things like these are largely public expenditures, funded not by credit cards at Home Depot but by checks mailed in to the IRS. Our Republican friends are determined NOT to put people back to work doing the work that so badly needs doing to keep our nation strong and get our economy humming again: that would require tax revenue (because public spending is paid for with tax revenue or bond issues serviced by tax revenue). Instead, they are working hard to “cut the deficit.” But that will cause a recession, and a recession will increase the deficit. And bridges that may cost X to repair now will cost 20X to rebuild after they’ve collapsed (a number I’ve pulled out of thin air, that may or may not include the cost of millions of hours wasted in the months or years of detours and traffic jams that will result). Write your Republican congressperson and make this point? And, as I say: find nine minutes to watch the tales of heroism and the big-picture charts. It all comes clear.
Pity the Moray Eel! February 21, 2013 LADY MONDEGREEN Thanks to Mark Plotkin for this ultimate book of mondegreens wherein is revealed the term’s derivation: a 1954 piece in the Atlantic by a woman who had misheard “they had slain the Earl of Moray/and laid him on the green” for “they had slain the Earl of Moray/and Lady Mondegreen.” Apparently, the introduction to this book of 275 mondegreens tells us, a great many mondegreens involve food or animals or other basic, primal things our brain jumps to. Sounds a bit silly pop-psych to me . . . except that, come to think of it, my own mondegreen in place of Lady Gaga’s “can’t read my, can’t read my” was . . . “cherry pie, cherry pie.” GREAT 30-SECOND SPOT It’s for the Kindle. How the world has changed since books were books and . . . well, you’ll see. I shake my head in grateful wonder.. Here. PLAN AHEAD Oh. My. God. Thanksgiving and Chanukah fall on the same day this year, November 28. This last happened in . . . never? (Try to Google it to find out and you realize you need joint PhDs in math, astronomy, and Hebrew to make the calculation.) (And I know one of you has them and will.) SEQUESTRATION The thing is — having shifted sharply in the other direction for the last three decades — we need to shift the emphasis from personal consumption back a bit (just a bit) to public consumption for a decade or two. Bigger houses and more TV’s are nice; faster power boats and granite counter tops are nice. But so are bridges and highways that work . . . waterways that are deep enough . . . subways that are comfortable . . . levees that withstand storms . . . sewage systems that handle the load . . . great public schools and universities . . . groundbreaking research that make lives better and keep our economy competitive . . . clean air and water . . . energy efficiency . . . and things like these are largely public expenditures, funded not by credit cards at Home Depot but by checks mailed in to the IRS. Our Republican friends are determined NOT to put people back to work doing the work that so badly needs doing to keep our nation strong and get our economy humming again: that would require tax revenue (because public spending is paid for with tax revenue or bond issues serviced by tax revenue). Instead, they are working hard to “cut the deficit.” But that will cause a recession, and a recession will increase the deficit. And bridges that may cost X to repair now will cost 20X to rebuild after they’ve collapsed (a number I’ve pulled out of thin air, that may or may not include the cost of millions of hours wasted in the months or years of detours and traffic jams that will result). Write your Republican congressperson and make this point?
Hang On – It Gets Better February 20, 2013 Thanks to Upworthy for this brief video. Imagine charging your iPhone in 30 seconds or your electric car in a minute. I’m telling you kids: if we find a way to hang on for another 20 years — to get “from here to there” without mucking it up — and if we find a way to “share the wealth” that unparalleled technological progress will provide — it’s gonna be pretty great. All the more reason to want to live forever. Or at least a long time. And guess what — Watson, which now beats humans at Jeopardy, may soon take over your medical care, or at least some important pieces of it. Read that one here. Of course, in so many respects, for those of us fortunate enough to have what are now considered “the basics” — adequate sustenance, shelter, electricity, and Internet access — it already IS pretty great.
In Response: Mondegreens and Chuck Hagel February 19, 2013February 18, 2013 >> In response to Friday’s note about Gaga’s “cherry pie, cherry pie” . . . Richard Factor: “Mondegreens. Did you know that’s what misheard lyrics are called? My own personal favorite is my mishearing of the semi-mononymous Elvis’s lyrics in Jailhouse Rock: ‘Everybody in the whole cell block…’ I heard as ‘Everybody in a wholesale frock…’ ” ☞ More mondegreens. >> In response to Friday’s note about Macklemore’s “Same Love” . . . Tony Ksander: “Here’s a a way better version.” ☞ Yes! A lot easier to make out the words. >> In response to yesterday’s post on the creatures of Amazonia . . . Kathryn Lance: “To put the perils of the Amazon in perspective. Tarantula hawk wasps are also found in the southwestern US of A. They prey on tarantulas, not humans. Which is not to say it is a picnic to be stung by one, but they are only dangerous to tarantulas, which they sting and then drag into a hole, where they lay their eggs in the still-living but paralyzed tarantula. As for bird-eating spiders, did you know that here in these United States (and many other places, of course) praying mantises prey on HUMMINGBIRDS? It’s not uncommon to find a mantis hanging out above a hummingbird feeder, or near hummingbird flowers. The mantis catches the hummingbird, rips open its throat or other parts, and eats it. I’ve never seen this happen, but there are videos of it on the Internet, and I have seen a mantis lying in wait and grabbing for (but, luckily, missing) a hummingbird in my own front yard.” ☞ Okay, now I’m afraid to visit your front yard. Listen: I’m still scared to stay overnight in the Hamptons 40 years after reading Dan Greenburg’s (possibly exaggerated) account in New York Magazine. (“Spiders the size of dinner plates.”) I will visit during the day, but that’s it. Tom Foley: “Umm, yes, so I thought it would be a great idea to take my 25-year-old god daughter on an ‘Amazon Adventure.’ So, this just in, it’s hot there, like really hot, and buggy, and did I mention hot? As we trundled through the rainforest (jungle), soggy, gooey, slippery, ridiculously dangerous (clearly no personal injury attorneys in that part of the world), we crossed over death-insuring plummets via a single 2′-by-8′ without ropes, railings, or harness. We did this a lot, over and over, as electrolytes leapt from our bodies in a sort of suicidal final effort at meaning. Much of this frolicking took place on (and I am totally not making this up) Anaconda Island. Eventually, we found our way to a rehabilitation center for local cuddly creatures, where I stood in the shade, only about 110, and heard the instructions for what to do . . . ‘in case a monkey jumps on you!’ It was that precise moment, just then, when I wondered out loud what the hell I was doing in the Amazon. By the way, you know what to do when a monkey jumps on you? Nothing. Well, that’s not true. First, you put your arms at your sides, then do nothing. Wouldn’t trade the experience with my god daughter for the world — she loved the trip — but I’ve felt better after car accidents. Anyway, rent the movie. Thanks for triggering the PTSD, you’ll be hearing from my people.” ☞ It seems that in addition to the stuff about jumping monkeys, Tom also “learned about rodents that are only slightly larger than [his] Golden Retriever guide dog.” His . . . WHAT??? Turns out Tom is blind. Deputy Director of the World Institute on Disability, no less. “Scared the heck out of the poor guide for the first day or three, but that always happens.” He left his Golden Retriever home. “I was afraid something might eat him, and guide dogs are hard to replace.” >> In response to the Republican outrage over the Benghazi tragedy, against which more precautions should certainly have been taken . . . Peter Stolz: “Have you seen this?” ☞ It tallies the 10 embassy attacks under George W. Bush. TOTAL DEATHS: 60 OUTRAGED REPUBLICANS: 0 Listen. I’m fine with breaking precedent when it’s broken in a progressive, constructive way. The first voluntary papal resignation in 719 years? I like it. Seems Eminently sensible, verging on modernity. But the unprecedented Republican Hagel haggling over Benghazi? And, more broadly, the unprecedented explosion in filibusters? The country faces serious challenges with at least some obvious solutions (for example: crumbling infrastructure + millions unemployed eager to repair it + near-zero borrowing cost to finance that investment = a pretty obvious solution) but the minority party blocks those solutions — in the Senate, by the filibuster; in the House, by controlling the gavels even though fewer Americans voted for Republican House members than for Democratic members. Okay, that’s the way it is. But the solution to that is to work toward such massive Democratic turn-out in 2014 that, despite all the gerrymandering, we take back the House; and retain the Senate (and then, finally, require Senators who wish to filibuster actually to do it — at the very least — as in the movies).
Turn Left At The Tarantula February 18, 2013February 17, 2013 My friend Mark Plotkin routinely invites me to visit the Amazon, where he works with the indigenous people of the rain forest to protect their habitat, but also to protect you and me, whose lives may be saved by drugs derived from its biodiversity and whose environment is at least partly protected by the massive amounts of CO2 it consumes. I just as routinely decline because it is my view that “if it’s not paved, how safe can it be?” If God had meant for me to visit the Amazon, She would have endowed me with courage. Instead, I got good copy-editing skills (or so I flatter myself to think). I tell you this by way of introduction to the 5- minute interview that accompanies a piece Mark wrote for Harvard Magazine — a profile of Alexander Hamilton Rice, who mapped Amazonia a century before Mark introduced the shamans to Google and GPS. He did so, Mark recounts, braving “man-eating black caimans, vampire bats, riverine stingrays, giant piranhas, electric eels, ubiquitous sandflies, flesh-eating botfly larvae, burrowing toe fleas, tarantula hawk wasps, goliath bird-eating spiders, and tocandeira bullet ants” . I read that list trying to select a hazard I could use for a sentence like, “I’m vaguely okay with the ??????’s, but draw the line at flesh-eating botfly larvae.” But there was not a single item I could contemplate being okay encountering. Indeed, I was unable even to rank-order their awfulness. They all ranked first. Tarantula hawk wasps? Burrowing toe fleas? Bird-eating spiders??? Which is why I will continue proudly to support Mark’s highly effective Amazon Conservation Team as long as I can (and you should, too, with money you can truly afford to contribute); and why I will never accept one of his invitations. Ever. (Victor: don’t even think about it.) # [The stock market is closed today and you know the rules: I only have to write these things when it’s open. So this is in all likelihood tomorrow’s post.]
Getting Hip. Ish. February 15, 2013February 15, 2013 I come a little late to rap, let alone rock ‘n roll, but I never said I was on the forefront of anything. (Well, frequent flier mileage. My AAdvantage number is so low reservation agents gasp when they see it.) I was afraid of “The Twist” (come on baby, let’s . . . not) and afraid to admit as a freshman in college that I not only got no satisfaction, I didn’t fully get what they were talking about. (The Beatles I found a little more approachable. Who could fail to want to join Sergeant Pepper’s band? I was myself a lonely heart. That much I could identify with.) And so it was odd that I was recently drawn to spend 23 hours and 8 minutes listening to Johnny Depp read Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life. (In 16 hours because my iPhone lets me speed it up.) But drawn to it I was and — to my surprise — I found it charmingly outrageous from beginning to end. Do not try this at home, I hasten to add, as the author himself feels compelled to caution several times — even with money you can afford to lose — because as unlikely as it is you have Keith Richards’ talent on the guitar, it’s even more unlikely you would have made it through his life without (a) serious prison time and (b) serious death about eleven different ways, all of them involving drugs. Not to mention the STDs. But to see the Rolling Stones not as one of 11,000 fans in a stadium (which I have never done), but, rather, through bloodshot eyes looking out at those 11,000 fans . . . and to learn how some of their songs got written . . . and to finally feel more or less “with it,” 40-odd years after everyone else in Pennypacker Hall was on board . . . was fun. And it could be fun for you, too. Especially if you have chores you can be doing at the same time, as I did, so you get to live this guy’s life and straighten all your closets and paint the garage at last. (I have no garage; but boy do I have closets.) Now, I want to be clear: I am not musical. Which is odd, because my great uncle, Charles Previn, with whom I was close growing up — Uncle Charlie — was conductor of Radio City Music Hall before I was born and has more than 400 musical credits to his name over at IMDB. What’s more, he was the great uncle also of André Previn — my second cousin, whom I have never met — whose own IMDB composing and conducting credits include such minor items as “My Fair Lady” and who was once the subject of a two-part profile in The New Yorker; who was known as a jazz pianist in my youth; who has won four Oscars and ten Grammys; who was for nine years principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra; and who — despite the fact that my birth certificate reads “Andrew Previn Tobias” and that we shared that wonderful great uncle — does not know I exist. Or perhaps does, but has heard me sing. Anyway, I should be musical but I’m not and, to top it off, I have always had a terrible time making out “the lyrics,” which gets harder and harder as the music gets louder and louder. Then again, I have met Usher. Twice. (Don’t feel bad: I had no idea who he was, either — “what do you do?” — but he’s huge. And mononymous. Like Cher. Or Prince.) And . . . well, it just seemed to me I should watch the Grammys this year. A first for me, which I’m only halfway through (the rest safely stored on TiVo), but hey: I even watched the Superbowl this year. I am seriously flirting with popular culture, if not yet fully committed to it. Kind of the way the fictional Queen of England in Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader discovered books late in life . . . and, having read one, found that one rather . . . enjoyed it . . . and read another. I still can’t make out the lyrics very well — for a full summer, as I may have told you, I thought Lady Gaga was singing “cherry pie, cherry pie” when in fact she was singing “can’t read my, can’t read my” (poker face) — but at least I know who she is and that she’s done something to her hip that’s required her — just yesterday — to cancel her entire tour . . . what’s happening to me that I know this? — and so when someone sent me Macklemore’s “Same Love” video, never mind that I had never heard of Macklemore, I found it pretty great and decided to save it to share with you on Valentine’s Day. Today being that day as I type this, I almost have. Watch. Six minutes. It’s about love. And here is Mackelmore — is everyone mononymous these days? Macklemore who? — on thrift. This one is even better (if you can handle the explicit language) — it’s an ode joy. The joy of frugality. Roll over, Beethoven. Now there’s something this site can get behind. Have a great weekend. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Happy V Day February 14, 2013 NO – NOT THAT ONE Yesterday I saluted Marco Rubio for standing with 21 other Senators — all men, all Republicans — in voting against the Violence Against Women Act. The reasons he gave were, to my ear, somewhere between weak and obscure. But there you are. A man who stands on principle. If only any of the Senate’s 21 female members had had the courage to stand up against the bill as he did. Today — because all of us oppose violence against anyone, and certainly against women — I give you One Billion Rising. Check it out, on this Fifteenth Anniversary of V-Day. Tomorrow, to give you the full weekend to deal with it, I will address the other V-Day. BORROWING MORE NOW — REALLY? My argument yesterday was that, with interest rates so low, we would be nuts not to borrow to put people to work modernizing our infrastructure and making the country more efficient and competitive. Paul deLespinasse: “I think you are saying the expenditures will do a lot of good and the threat of future interest rate increases, while real, will not be greatly increased by the additional debt involved. I still do worry about what interest rate increases will do to federal finances, though.” ☞ Interest rate increases are indeed a worry. But the severity of future rate increases may be decreased by greater investment, because it may persuade lenders we will be a stronger credit. Which would you prefer to lend to: a country with $20 trillion in debt a few years from now, but that had failed to break out of its sluggish economy or deal with its crumbling, uncompetitive infrastructure? Or a country $22 trillion in debt that’s humming along making itself efficient, modern, and competitive (the process of doing which, as I argued yesterday, could very well SHRINK the deficit, as more people working means more tax revenue and less safety-net expenditure)? Even if I’m wrong about this, don’t forget that when the Treasury issues 30-year bonds, the interest rate is fixed for 30 years. So at least on those bonds, and all the other Treasuries not soon coming due, rising interest rates would have no impact. Ken Doran: “If interest rates later go up — a virtual certainty — inflation will move roughly in tandem, so in real terms the payoff on the bonds gets cheaper and the taxpayer benefits. Not a newsflash here; this is how public infrastructure and capital improvements have been handled forever; it is just that we now have a splendid opportunity — which Republicans are effectively vetoing Am I missing something here?” ☞ You are not. If we borrow at 3.2% for 30 years (say), it’s possible that inflation over the life of those bonds will exceed 3.2% a year . . . in which case, we will have been PAID to borrow the money. Come 2043, we may well have to refinance those bonds at higher rates. But by then $1 trillion borrowed today will be like $476 if inflation has been a steady 2.5% a year; or like $411 billion if its been a steady 3%. Throw in a bad patch — say, three years of 7% inflation somewhere between now and 2043 — and it shrinks considerably further still, to $367 billion. This is not, by the way, a good argument for you to buy long-term bonds these days. I’ve been warning against it. But it’s a good argument for our issuing them to modernize invest in the nation’s future, as the President proposes.