90% off the Philharmonic April 11, 2005March 1, 2017 A NEAT THING TO DO WHEN YOU COME TO NEW YORK You could attend a performance of the New York Philharmonic in terrific seats for $150 each . . . or you could click here to attend an open rehearsal of the same performance for $15. You might even have an open seat next to you, to sprawl out a little. The friend who tipped me off to this says that the rehearsal often plays right through, with few or no do-overs . . . and that, of course, the do-overs themselves can be interesting. Not to say it’s so terribly romantic to attend a concert at nine forty-five in the morning. But – don’t kill me for saying this – I never thought attending one at eight p.m. was so romantic, either. I HAVE THE SMARTEST READERS Patti: ‘The text-wrap problem you had Friday came from the use of the tag for ‘preformatted text’ in your HTML. This tag preserves spaces and line breaks. That is, if the text you paste in does not have line breaks, it won’t let the browser break them either. Click here for more. I copied the source code for your web page, and did a global search and replace in my copy, replacing ‘pre’ with ‘p’ (the paragraph tag). Text wrap worked fine after that.’ ☞ Thanks, Patti! You’re a hero and a genius and I think I actually knew this several years ago, from when it happened once before (who knows why?), but long since forgot. THANK YOU! MAC VS PC Don Hurter (noting Friday’s text-wrap problem): ‘Don’t take this as a slam against you or Microsoft. But you really owe it to yourself to at least borrow a Macintosh for a few weeks and see how the other side lives.’ ☞ One very smart friend of mine DID recently switch to a PowerBook – loves much about it – but is now buying a new Dell laptop. I was surprised. He said: “The Macintosh is terrific, but the software for it just isn’t as good.” Quicken for the Mac was terrible compared with Quicken for Windows, he said, and Mac’s equivalent of Outlook just wasn’t as good. So it’s not all one-sided – maddening as PCs and Windows can be. WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH YOU AT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL President Bush and I went to the same B-school three years apart. We likely had a couple of the same professors. I missed Yoshi Tsurumi, however, who wrote this last week for the Harvard Crimson. In part: Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called former president Franklin D. Roosevelt a ‘socialist’ and spoke against Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other New Deal innovations. He refused to understand that capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints. . . . Since the 1980s, as neo-conservatives have captured the Republican Party, America’s business education has also increasingly become contaminated by the robber baron culture of the pre-Great Depression era. Bush is the first president of the United States with an MBA. Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education. To privatize Social Security, he is peddling a colossal lie about its solvency. Furthermore, Bush, along with today’s business aristocrats, shows no compassion for working Americans, robbing them to benefit big business and the very rich. Last year, due to Bush’s tax cuts, over 80 of America’s most profitable 200 corporations did not pay even a penny of their federal and state income taxes. Meanwhile, to pay for his additional tax cuts for the very rich, Bush is drastically cutting back several social services, such as federal lunch programs for poor children.