Urban Studies

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“The Question Is Whether Tough Times Are Here For Good”

June 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As our society becomes more automated, we can be very productive and wealthy in the aggregate with many people being left behind. Having tens of millions of new Americans with healthcare may help drive jobs in the short run, but diagnostics, like many other areas of current employment, will soon be left to the machines. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Timothy Aeppel profiles economist frenemies Robert Gordon and Joel Mokyr, who see our financial future in starkly different ways. The opening:

“EVANSTON, Ill.— Robert Gordon, a curmudgeonly 73-year-old economist, believes our best days are over. After a century of life-changing innovations that spurred growth, he says, human progress is slowing to a crawl.

Joel Mokyr, a cheerful 67-year-old economist, imagines a coming age of new inventions, including gene therapies to prolong our life span and miracle seeds that can feed the world without fertilizers.

These big-name colleagues at Northwestern University represent opposite poles in the debate over the future of the 21st century economy: rapid innovation driven by robotic manufacturing, 3-D printing and cloud computing, versus years of job losses, stagnant wages and rising income inequality.

The divergent views are more than academic. For many Americans, the recession left behind the scars of lost jobs, lower wages and depressed home prices. The question is whether tough times are here for good. The answer depends on who you ask.

‘I think the rate of innovation is just getting faster and faster,’ Mr. Mokyr said over noodles and spicy chicken at a Thai restaurant near the campus where he and Mr. Gordon have taught for four decades.

‘What’s the evidence of that?’ snapped Mr. Gordon. ‘There isn’t any.’

The men get along fine when talk is limited to, say, faculty gossip. About the future, though, they bicker constantly. When Mr. Mokyr described life-prolonging medical advances, Mr. Gordon cut in: ‘Extending life without curing Alzheimer’s means people who can walk but can’t think.'”

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“The Psychic, Meanwhile, Stole Wasser’s Polaroids”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

In this post, I used some 1971 photos of Anjelica Huston and Jack Nicholson playing LPs at his Mulholland Drive house, which were taken by the legendary Los Angeles photojournalist Julian Wasser, who is the Weegee of the West, sure, but also a thing all his own, ably adapting to shifting scenes, from street to crime to Hollywood. Wasser just published a book of his work, The Way We Were. Three more of his images follow.

Roman Polanski.

Roman Polanski, 1969

From “Photo Ops,” Dana Goodyear’s excellent W piece:

Wasser’s first real camera was a Contax, which his father gave him when he was a junior in high school in the 1950s. He got himself a scanning radio and tuned in to the frequency used by the police. The first pictures he sold, while still a student at Sidwell Friends, a private Quaker school in Washington, D.C., were of crime scenes. “Crime’s exciting, and it sells,” he says. He got a gig at the Associated Press and met Arthur Fellig, the legendary photographer known as Weegee. “He came in plugging some film,” Wasser continues. “He was my hero.” From Weegee, he learned to use a Speed Graphic. “He was this real gruff, tough, down-to-earth guy, the epitome of a hard-nosed photographer, a street guy on the level of the cops he worked with. He used to beat them to the crime scene.”

That sensibility—an instinct for drama and the decisive moment, the dab of beauty with a smear of grit—put Wasser in the way of news. He was at the Ambassador Hotel the night Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and was with the crowd watching as Richard Ramirez, the infamous Night Stalker, was taken into custody by police. In 1969, three days after the actress Sharon Tate was murdered, Wasser, on assignment from Life, went to the crime scene on Cielo Drive with Tate’s husband, Roman Polanski, a pair of detectives, and a celebrity psychic searching for vibrational clues. (The Manson family hadn’t yet been named as suspects.) Wasser took a picture of Polanski, crouched and grim-faced beside a door smudged with fingerprint dust, where the word pig had been written in Tate’s blood. “I felt so bad for Polanski and for being there photographing it,” Wasser remembers. “He was just shattered.” The psychic, meanwhile, stole Wasser’s Polaroids and sold them to the tabs. Later, during the case brought against Polanski for having sex with a minor at Nicholson’s house on Mulholland, Wasser photographed the judge.•

Bernard Cornfeld, mutual-fund manager, and friends, 1974.

From Cornfield’s 1995 New York Times obituary by Diana B. Henriques:

Born in Istanbul in August 1927, Bernard Cornfeld was the son of a Romanian actor who moved his family to the United States in the early 1930’s. He graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn and Brooklyn College. By 1954, he had become a mutual fund salesman, entering the industry just as mutual funds were experiencing their first strong surge of growth since the stock market crash of 1929.

In 1956, he moved to Paris, planning to sell shares of popular American mutual funds, chiefly the Dreyfus Fund, to Americans living abroad. Using his trademark recruiting challenge — “Do you sincerely want to be rich?” — he built Investors Overseas Services. At its peak, it was a far-flung organization that included a vast and intensely loyal sales force, a secretive Swiss bank, an insurance unit, real estate interests and a stable of offshore investment funds operating beyond the reach of any single country’s securities laws.

By 1970, his company had pumped millions of overseas dollars into the American mutual fund industry, initially through its aggressive sales force and then through Mr. Cornfeld’s trailblazing Fund of Funds, an offshore fund that invested in other mutual funds’ shares.

Mr. Cornfeld gave now-famous money managers like Fred Alger their start by selecting them to run funds owned by the Fund of Funds, which at its peak had more than $450 million invested in American mutual funds.

He also acquired enough financial power over American mutual funds and skirted close enough to the edges of Federal securities laws to attract the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which in 1965 accused him and his company of violating American securities laws.

In 1967, the company settled the commission’s complaint by agreeing to wind up or sell all its American operations. The Fund of Funds also agreed to buy no more than 3 percent of any American mutual fund, the limit imposed by Federal mutual fund law.

After leaving the American market, Mr. Cornfeld continued to live lavishly, and his financial empire appeared strong until early 1970, when it suddenly disclosed that it was short of cash and had substantially overestimated its 1969 profits.•

Farrah Fawcett, 1976.

Farrah Fawcett, 1976.

The opening of “Super-Powered Love,” Lois Armstrong’s 1976 People article:

It would take a network in a ratings crisis to create a six million dollar man, with one telescopic-zoom eye and three nuclear-powered prosthetic limbs—the role Lee Majors plays so stoically on ABC every Sunday night. But, still mercifully, only God can make a Farrah Fawcett-Majors, as Lee’s offscreen wife calls herself. “She’s so gorgeous,” Majors glows, “she’s like a little girl. So cute, so beautiful inside, you wanna…” His natural reticence stifles further elaboration. The whole preposterousness of his series and its success (it shot from the Nielsen cellar last season to No. 5) may also have gotten to his brain and consciousness—which never were exactly “bionic.”

Farrah’s looks are indeed breath-stopping, and her own career is rocketing in commercials (Noxzema, Wella Balsam, Ultra-Brite); TV (as David Janssen’s girl next door on Harry O plus a starring part in a pilot); and film (playing with Michael York in the upcoming Logan’s Run). So, when queried about having children, Farrah replies, yes, but not for a couple of years, and Lee quips, “We already have bids from people who would like to have pick of the litter.”

In the meantime, Majors has begat, if nothing else, a spin-off series premiering Jan. 14 that he calls The Bionic Rip-Off—the official ABC title is The Bionic Woman. Lee’s dubiousness owes to the fear that the new show could dilute the Six Million Dollar Man ratings already perhaps in jeopardy. Part of Majors’ rise can be attributed to this fall’s plop from favor of his CBS competition, Cher, but she is almost certain to make at least a one-week Nielsen rebound next month among viewers curious to see the return of ex-husband Sonny, not to mention the TV premiere of her now gravid midriff. Lee may also begrudge the sweeter contract the bionic female, actress Lindsay Wagner, has chivied out of Universal. She, unlike Majors, negotiated a sizable share of any merchandising royalties—Six Million Dollar Man dolls were supposedly the hottest item in toy biz at Christmas, and he barely collected a pittance. Lindsay was also guaranteed five feature films—which could rankle Lee, because he blames his TV stereotyping for thwarting his own movie career.

Majors, 36, professes to be less threatened by his wife’s sudden stardom at 28—as long as it doesn’t interfere with her cooking his nightly supper.•

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“He Spoke Up On Behalf Of The Dictatorship”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two World Cup-related excerpts from Franklin Foer, New Republic editor and football fanatic. The first is from an Ask Me Anything at Reddit and the second from his excellent TNR article about the mixed legacy of Brazilian soccer, including a largely forgotten chapter in Pele’s life.

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“Question:

What do you think of the protests in Brazil? Is hosting the World Cup good for the people of Brazil in the long run?

Franklin Foer:

Over the past decade, the Brazilian middle class has exploded. A broad swath of the population has been lifted from poverty. This is a great thing and an amazing accomplishment of Lula’s party, the PT. But the new middle class has very sensible concerns about the expenditure of public money. They are asking very wise questions about a ridiculous 11 billion price tag; they aren’t falling for the old bread-and-circus routine. I don’t foresee the protests in Brazil spinning violently out of control. In the long run, this tournament isn’t great for Brazil. It highlights the country’s shortcomings, rather than affirming its greatness. I wish the Brazilians had focused their infrastructure planning and expenditure on a more limited number of cities and venues. This would have contained costs and created a greater likelihood of success.”

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From The New Republic:

“Over time, Brazil grew dangerously dependent on soccer. It came to define the nation in the eyes of the world, and it played an outsized role in its own sense of self-worth. Victories came so easily during the ’60s and ’70s that the country didn’t just demand trophies; they wanted those triumphs procured with what Freyre called Futebol Arte and what the world knows as Jogo Bonito, the beautiful game. As one coach of the national team complained, ‘It got to the point where we beat Bolivia 6-0 and one newspaper in São Paulo accused us of playing defensively.’

The almost unbearable pressure on managers inevitably led the team away from improvisational genius. The tactics used to win the 1994 World Cup—perhaps the worst World Cup of them all—squelched inventiveness and favored the deployment of pragmatic hard men, who had a greater skill at knocking opponents off the ball than running at them with step-over dribbling.

And there was a far graver cost to success than that. Dictators and aspiring dictators skillfully harnessed mass enthusiasm for the game. Getúlio Vargas, the authoritarian leader who presided from 1930 to 1945, explicitly used soccer to create a new sense of national identity, a campaign of brasilidade, or Brazilization—and to ballast his own power. He built stadiums, then held rallies in them. His successors mimicked this approach. During the reign of the military dictatorship in the ’70s, the government plastered Pelé’s face on posters alongside its slogan: ‘NOBODY CAN STOP THIS COUNTRY NOW.’

Pelé, it should be remembered as you watch him in commercials for Subway’s $5 foot-long, didn’t just lend his visage to the cause; he spoke up on behalf of the dictatorship. ‘We are a free people. Our leaders know what is best for [us],’ he said in 1972. At that very moment, the writer David Zirin has noted, Brazil’s current president, Dilma Rousseff, was being tortured in prison.”

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“Why Did We Have To Sue Somebody To Prevent Prayer In Outer Space?”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Atheist crusader Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who lived furiously and died strangely, was right that children should not be forced to pray in public school, but that doesn’t mean she was an ideal parent. O’Hair had dissent in her family that she would not brook: Her eldest son, William, became a religious and social conservative in 1980. His mother, showing characteristic outrage, labeled him a “postnatal abortion” and cut off all communication. From a 1980 People article about the familial rift:

“He traces her atheism to that self-absorption and hubris and to an aggressive antiestablishment streak that led her (with her two sons) into a variety of left-wing causes—even, he claims, to the Soviet embassy in Paris in search of exile. Rejected by Moscow, she retreated angrily back home to Baltimore where, as he puts it, ‘The rebel found a cause in prayer at school.’

As the pawn of her crusade, Bill was excoriated by fellow students, given extra homework by his teachers and baited into schoolyard fights; once, he remembers, some classmates tried to push him in front of a bus. ‘While Madalyn was busy with her rhetoric, newsletters, fund raising and publicity,’ he says, ‘I was fighting for my life.’ At 17, Murray ran afoul of the law. He eloped with a girl despite an injunction won by her parents that prohibited him from seeing her. Police intervened, and both Bill and his mother were charged with assaulting them. (The young woman left Bill and their infant daughter two years later.) 

Throughout Bill’s life his mother’s reputation has been a millstone. Drafted a year after his marriage broke up, he was subjected to grueling Army interrogation about Madalyn’s activist causes—and asked to sign a statement repudiating her left-wing politics (he did). After discharge he took a series of jobs in airline management and remembers living in fear that his employers would find out who his mother was and fire him. He complains she even threatened to expose him herself when he balked at giving her discounted airplane tickets that were due him as an employee. 

In 1969 he asked Madalyn for his daughter, whom she had kept while he was in the Army. She refused, they fought a custody suit and Madalyn won. Still, in 1974, when her second husband was ailing and the AAC foundering, Bill agreed to come to Austin and help out. He did so with great success—and increasing doubts. He multiplied the AAC’s annual income, which underwrote a flurry of new lawsuits—over church tax exemptions, the words ‘under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and ‘In God We Trust’ on coins. But Bill says he began to wonder: ‘Why couldn’t we buy a new X-ray machine for a hospital? Why did we have to buy a new Cadillac and mobile home for Madalyn, or sue somebody to prevent prayer in outer space? I started to think it was because my mother was basically negative and destructive.’ He began to drink too much—’diving into the bottle to forget,’ as he describes it. Six months after he came to Austin, Madalyn turned her animus on him once too often. ‘I told her to get f——-,’ he recalls, ‘and got the hell out.’

By that time Bill was an alcoholic. He had a new marriage and a new job as an airline management consultant, but felt his life was falling apart. “

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“Cockfighting Remains Legal There”

June 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Here’s an uncommon sports-page paragraph, from Nick Cafardo in the Boston Globe:

“I was interested to learn that Juan Nieves’s father’s occupation was training and fighting roosters in the cockfighting arenas of Puerto Rico. Nieves grew up in that environment, and cockfighting remains legal there. Years ago, I ventured out with the late Ivan Calderon to some cockfighting events in Puerto Rico. Calderon had a stable of roosters, approximately 200, that he trained. The matches were gruesome. Calderon was murdered in 2003 when he wouldn’t give up his son’s whereabouts in a drug deal gone bad.”

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A Brief Note From 1901 About A Hard Worker

June 14, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 7, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paterson–Mrs. Leonard Shatem pf Vreeland Avenue was called to the door a few weeks ago by a man begging. He said his name was Charles Burk and told a pitiful story. She allowed him to go into the kitchen and gave him bread and tea. He asked for work. She told him to remain over night. For weeks he did chores around the house. Mr. Shatem said that Burk was a hard-working man, and he was glad that his wife had hired him. Now Mrs. Shatem has eloped with the tramp and left a note for her husband saying it was a case of ‘love at first sight.'” 

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“The Art Market’s Greatest Strength Is Its Ability To Co-Opt Any Radical Demands That A Work Of Art Makes”

June 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Project Syndicate, ethical philosopher Peter Singer, that necessary nudge, assails those who spend tens of millions of dollars on status-boosting art works. While I don’t agree with all of Singer”s ideas about art, I’m with his larger point about philanthropy. An excerpt:

“Perhaps, though, the importance of postwar art lies in its ability to challenge our ideas. That view was firmly expressed by Jeff Koons, one of the artists whose work was on sale at Christie’s. In a 1987 interview with a group of art critics, Koons referred to the work that was sold last month, calling it ‘the ‘Jim Beam’ work.’ Koons had exhibited this piece – an oversize, stainless steel toy train filled with bourbon – in an exhibition called ‘Luxury and Degradation,’ that, according to the New York Times, examined ‘shallowness, excess and the dangers of luxury in the high-flying 1980s.’

In the interview, Koons said that the Jim Beam work ‘used the metaphors of luxury to define class structure.’ The critic Helena Kontova then asked him how his ‘socio-political intention’ related to the politics of then-President Ronald Reagan. Koons answered: ‘With Reaganism, social mobility is collapsing, and instead of a structure composed of low, middle, and high income levels, we’re down to low and high only… My work stands in opposition to this trend.’

Art as a critique of luxury and excess! Art as opposition to the widening gap between the rich and the poor! How noble and courageous that sounds. But the art market’s greatest strength is its ability to co-opt any radical demands that a work of art makes, and turn it into another consumer good for the super-rich. When Christie’s put Koons’s work up for auction, the toy train filled with bourbon sold for $33 million.

If artists, art critics, and art buyers really had any interest in reducing the widening gap between the rich and the poor, they would be focusing their efforts on developing countries, where spending a few thousand dollars on the purchase of works by indigenous artists could make a real difference to the wellbeing of entire villages.”

 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 14, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Badly."

Any older women giving bjs?

Email me I need a bj badly from an older woman in the Queens area. If you’re interested please send me an email and I will get back to you.

“You Don’t Know Who You’re Gonna Get, But You Know It’s Going To Be A Celebrity”

June 13, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

That joker Alan Abel plays pranks that work because beneath the ridiculous set-ups and crude one-liners there’s an understanding of our desires and fears. In this ridiculous interview from basic cable decades ago, he satirized our wish for fame, youth and immortality, marrying the emerging celebrity culture to new scientific possibilities. He pretended that he’d created a sperm bank in which only stars like John Wayne and Johnny Carson were allowed to make deposits. And he was going to cryogenically freeze a young woman and tour her body across America. Everyone would be a star and live forever.

A Note From 1929 About Huge Robotic Fireflies

June 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 20, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Artificial fireflies the size of turkeys which will give off brilliant perpetual light without the vexation of meters, monthly bills and repairs were forecast last night in an address on ‘Living Lamps’ before the American Institute in Cooper Union by Dr. E. Newton Harvey, professor of psychology at Princeton University.

And whereas the firefly of nature only flashes, burning up the tiny amount of ‘oil’ in its lamp and then staying dark again until it has reformed its ‘oil,’ the robot firefly would be so contrived as to give a continuous glow, reforming a part of its ‘oil,’ which is technically called ‘luciferin,’ while it was burning the rest, this being an incessant process.”

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“It Has The Potential To Decrease Private Car Ownership”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo wonders whether Uber, for all the very reasonable doubts about the service, could cause a serious decrease in private car ownership, which would have huge ramifications for not just transportation but also housing and environment. An excerpt:

“It is impossible to say whether Uber is worth the $17 billion its investors believe it to be; like any start-up, it could fail. But for all its flaws, Uber is anything but trivial. It could well transform transportation the way Amazon has altered shopping — by using slick, user-friendly software and mountains of data to completely reshape an existing market, ultimately making many modes of urban transportation cheaper, more flexible and more widely accessible to people across the income spectrum.

Uber could pull this off by accomplishing something that has long been seen as a pipe dream among transportation scholars: It has the potential to decrease private car ownership.

In its long-established markets, like San Francisco, using Uber every day is already arguably cheaper than owning a private car.”

“Technology Leadership Is Not Defined By Patents”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’ve been rumors for awhile that Elon Musk was going to withdraw the patents for all his Tesla EV technology and open-source the previously proprietary information. That has come to pass, and it makes great business sense as well as being altruistic and progressive. If you were trying to popularize electric cars, wouldn’t you want a robust industry to be a part of? That way other companies will be producing innovations and nurturing talent and providing competition. It might be different if large manufacturers were deep into the game, but, sadly, they’re not. Also: Fewer patents mean fewer lawsuits. The Tesla press release:

“Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology.

When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good long ago, but too often these days they serve merely to stifle progress, entrench the positions of giant corporations and enrich those in the legal profession, rather than the actual inventors. After Zip2, when I realized that receiving a patent really just meant that you bought a lottery ticket to a lawsuit, I avoided them whenever possible.

At Tesla, however, we felt compelled to create patents out of concern that the big car companies would copy our technology and then use their massive manufacturing, sales and marketing power to overwhelm Tesla. We couldn’t have been more wrong. The unfortunate reality is the opposite: electric car programs (or programs for any vehicle that doesn’t burn hydrocarbons) at the major manufacturers are small to non-existent, constituting an average of far less than 1% of their total vehicle sales.

At best, the large automakers are producing electric cars with limited range in limited volume. Some produce no zero emission cars at all.

Given that annual new vehicle production is approaching 100 million per year and the global fleet is approximately 2 billion cars, it is impossible for Tesla to build electric cars fast enough to address the carbon crisis. By the same token, it means the market is enormous. Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day.

We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform. 

Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.”

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“We Will Need Robots To Help Us Deal With This Reality”

June 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Technological progress has historically meant more jobs, but is the new normal of potential mass automation the first exception to that rule? Maybe, maybe not. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the focuses of Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, believes we won’t see a net loss. From Brooks at the Harvard Business Review:

“Over the next 40 years, we are going to see a dramatic drop in the percentage of working-age adults across the world. And as baby boomers reach retirement age, the percentage of folks in retirement is going to change dramatically in the opposite direction. That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services, and fewer working people available to deliver those services to them.

We will need robots to help us deal with this reality, doing the things we normally do for ourselves but that get harder to do as we get older. Things like getting groceries, driving cars to visit people, and helping us move around more safely and efficiently as physical ailments settle in.

Before you dismiss this vision for a highly automated society, think about it the next time you put a load of laundry into your washing machine or hit the start button on the dishwasher as you head off to bed. These are tools that have automated unpleasant and time-consuming aspects of our lives, and given us more free time to pursue more productive or pleasurable activities.

A generation ago, these machines were looked at with skepticism and sometimes ridicule. Today, they are staples of modern life that most of us would be hard-pressed to live without. I hope and fully believe we will be saying the same thing about robots a generation from now.”

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Old Print Article: “Office Serves Coffee in Pneumatic Tubes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1933)

June 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“I have my manias, and I impose them.”

Italo Balbo, Mussolini’s Air Minister, created an experimental office environment that was a technocrat’s dream, humming with gizmos, even if it shared some of the fascist tendencies of his politics. There was an Automat-style lunchroom and a tubing system that delivered coffee to desks, which was wonderful provided you weren’t aging, sickly or disabled. Then you weren’t allowed to work there. An article from the February 23, 1933 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paris–Fascist Air Minister Italo Balbo of Italy, soon to fly to America with 20 planes, has hot coffee shot up to his office through pneumatic tubes. So in fact do all the 2,000 clerks and other personnel of his ministry.

This is but one of the fantasies that the 36-year-old, prematurely bearded air minister (possible successor to Mussolini) has incorporated in the newest of Rome’s government buildings.

In spite of his youth he is probably the dean of the world’s air ministers, since he is in his sixth year of office. To Claude Blanchard whom he showed around the building, he stated that he had deep dislike for ordinary government offices.

‘I have my manias, and I impose them,’ he laughed. ‘There is not a drawer in the building.’ He explained that his first four years in politics gave him a horror of desk drawers.

Blanchard describes the ministry as a combination of ‘factory, museum, laboratory, gymnasium, restaurant, bank, university and storehouse.’

Every desk has a telephone and a pneumatic tube such as department stores use to shoot change from customer to cashier and back. The elevators are endless chain affairs which never stop; and on and off which passengers leap while they are in motion.

No Gray Hairs In Sight

There are no paralytics or rheumatics in the ministry. Blanchard said that he did not see one gray hair. 

Balbo, while visiting Chicago, 1933.

Balbo’s own office is a wide bright room, the walls of which are decorated with huge maps painted in the seventeenth century manner. While they were talking something like a steamboat whistle blew; and the minister invited the guest to lunch.

After a descent in the non-stop elevators they came out in an immense stand-up lunch room, in which everybody from the minister down to the workmen in aprons and overalls eat at once. They all pay for it, the minister and upper ranks paying 32 cents and the men in overalls seven. Forty-five minutes are allowed for lunch. Blanchard, between Balbo and a high staff officer, lined up at one of the long nickel and porcelain shelves, opened the small nickeled doors in front of him. There, kept hot by electricity, was the whole meal.

It was not a completely standardized meal. The menu had been circulated earlier in the morning and everybody had shot back his order by pneumatic tube.

In fifteen minutes the lunch was over and everybody flowed around to a colossal bar filled with glittering coffee ‘espresso’ machines. Each made his own coffee; and it was there that Balbo showed with some pride the system by which the clerks get coffee in their offices without leaving their desks. A clerk shoots an order down the tube with his desk number on it; and in a moment a sealed bottle with the coffee in it plops out of the tube.

It is a good ministry to work in. It closes at a quarter to four.”

 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 11, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

I saw some guy walking with a live cat on his head on fifth ave today 

you thought i was kidding but i am not. he walked right past me and i called him back and he walked back and the cat didn’t move. he asked me for a dollar. i gave it to him. 

“How Much Safer Would Driving Be If Robots Replaced Humans On The Roads?”

June 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When paying a bill online recently, I mistakenly entered one wrong letter in my password, and the system locked me out, thinking I was someone else trying to break into my account. I had to phone the company and speak to two tech people before I was re-allowed entry. Sometimes technology can read something innocent as something sinister and overreact in the name of safety.

They’ll be glitches, some unforeseen, when the road begins to crowd with autonomous cars, as there always are with any technological innovation, but on balance driving will be safer. The question is by how much. From Clare Cain Miller of the New York Times:

“How much safer would driving be if robots replaced humans on the roads?

It has been hard to estimate because fully autonomous cars are not yet available to test. Google says that its driverless cars have logged more than 700,000 miles without an accident caused by the car, and that its cars do not do unsafe things that people do, like sharply accelerating or braking.

But two studies by researchers at Virginia Tech — H. Clay Gabler, a professor of biomedical engineering, and Kristofer D. Kusano, a research associate — suggest how much safer robot cars might be. They found that even cars that are not fully autonomous but that automate some of the most dangerous aspects of driving could have as big an effect as seatbelts have had.

The studies, which were sponsored in part by Toyota Motor, analyzed the crashes, injuries and fatalities that could have been prevented by cars that alert drivers when they drift out of their lane or correct the car’s course, and those that sense an impending collision and automatically brake. They used a representative sample of real-world crashes nationwide and simulated what would have happened had the automation been in place.

They found that lane-departure warning systems would have prevented 30.3 percent of the crashes caused by lane drifting, and 25.8 percent of the injuries.”

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“The Benefits And Profits Of The Future Will Go To Those Who Plan Ahead Now”

June 10, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In regards to the Boeing’s misbegotten SST jet which I just mentioned, this 1967 company promotional film was wrong about supersonic travel but right more broadly about the near-term future of commercial aviation.

“The supersonic jet will change everything you know about flying,” 1968:

A Note From 1910 About A Ranch-Bred Woman

June 10, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 6, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Pueblo, Colo.–Announcing that he was a ‘rip-snorting, roarin’ Texas steer,’ a man who later gave his name as John Jones at Police Headquarters, terrorized the women in a residence district yesterday afternoon, until one of them, a ranch-bred woman, accorded to the obstreperous ‘steer’ proper Western treatment by lassoing him with a clothes line and tying him to a waterplug where he was kept until the arrival of the police.”

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“The City Has Become A Vast Pawnshop”

June 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Could a few entrepreneurs, even wildly successful ones like Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Jeff Bezos, rescue an entire city from collapse? A new essay by Andrew Yang in Fast Company, “The Entrepreneurs Who Saved Seattle,” credits the Microsoft and Amazon founders almost wholly with Seattle’s renaissance. The openings of Yang’s article and “City of Despair,” the 1971 Economist piece he references, which interestingly demonstrates the downside of a company town.

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From “The Entrepreneurs Who Saved Seattle,” 2014:

“Today, Seattle is considered one of the most desirable places to live and work in the U.S. Amazon, Starbucks, Expedia, and other leading companies make their homes there.

But in 1979, Seattle was the last place you’d think to find a growth business. It had more in common with today’s Rust Belt than Silicon Valley–its economy centered on a declining manufacturing base and the lumber industry, both of which were shedding jobs. Starbucks was just a tiny local company with three stores serving standard-issue coffee. The Economist had labeled Seattle the ‘city of despair’ and a billboard appeared saying “Will the last person leaving Seattle–turn off the lights.’

So what changed? Two Seattle natives decided to move their 13-employee company there in 1979 from Albuquerque. The two natives were Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And the company was Microsoft.

Is it possible to ascribe Seattle’s entire economic trajectory to just one company? Well, today over 40,000 people work at Microsoft in the region, and 28,000 of them are highly paid engineers. Approximately 4,000 businesses have been started by Microsoft alumni, many of which are in the region. Just one of these companies, RealNetworks, employs 1,500 people. Expedia, originally a Microsoft spinoff, employs another 14,000. The Gates Foundation itself has another several hundred employees. The economist Enrico Moretti estimates that Microsoft’s growth has directly created 120,000 regional jobs for services workers with limited educations (cleaners, taxi drivers, carpenters, hairdressers, real estate agents, etc.) and another 80,000 jobs for workers with college degrees (teachers, nurses, doctors, architects).

The growth of Microsoft also influenced Jeff Bezos to locate Amazon there in 1994 when he was looking for a city with ample tech talent to build an e-commerce company. Today, about 17,000 of Amazon’s 51,000 employees live and work in the Seattle region. If Microsoft had not been there, Bezos could easily have migrated elsewhere.”

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From “City of Despair,” 1971:

“The country’s best buys in used cars, in secondhand television sets, in houses, are to be found in Seattle, Washington. The city has become a vast pawnshop, with families selling anything they can do without to get money to buy food and pay the rent. Even restaurant meals are a bargain: a two for the price of one is offered to customers in smart, half-empty eating places.

More than 100,000 people are out of work in the Seattle area, which many people think is the worst example of economic decline in any sector of America since the great depression 40 years ago. Unemployment in Seattle stands officially at 13.1 per cent of the labour force, more than double the national level, Unofficially the welfare workers closest to the people put it at twice that high.

The root of the problem lies in the economic dominance of the area by one giant corporation, the Boeing Company. Two years ago its sales of aircraft were booming but now Boeing is undergoing a continuing attrition of government and civilian contracts. The halt in the development of the SST, America’s projected Supersonic aircraft, was merely the latest of many blows. Boeing’s payroll of 106,000 two years ago is down to 40,000 and the company acknowledges that it will cut employment further this year, probably to 29,000. The decline would not ave been halted even if the Senate had voted this week to revive the SST.”

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“The Real Value And Insight Comes From The Data That These Devices Provide”

June 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A little more about the Internet of Things, that rough beast waiting to be born, from Luke Dormehl at the Guardian:

“What unites products as seemingly disparate as driverless cars and fitness-tracking wearables such as the Jawbone UP is their ability to collect data from, and on behalf of, their users.

‘When people talk about the Internet of Things, they tend to get hung up on the ‘things’ themselves,’ says Ian Foddering, chief technology officer and technical director at Cisco UK and Ireland. ‘Actually, the real value and insight comes from the data that these devices provide. We’re just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what is possible in terms of data extraction. It’s a very exciting time.’

‘Data empowers us,’ says Renee Blodgett, vice president of marketing and strategy at Kolibree, the world’s first connected electric toothbrush (yes, really!). ‘For the first time, we have data on how we brush our teeth, where we brush our teeth and where we need to improve. Before now, we would only get that feedback from our dentist once a year when we have our annual cleaning. Now, we can get that feedback in real time.’

While marginal gains in toothbrushing might not sound like much, the overall point about the power of big data is certainly valid.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

June 10, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

ODD REQUEST!! Bring us a bottle to our hospital rooms – $20 (Murray Hill)

Listen, my buddy and I have been in Beth Israel dealing with some recovering from a bad accident. However, we’ve been here FOREVER, and have some time to go. We would love a nice drink at night while playing cards. Can anyone help us out? You would grab the cheapest bottle of Gin from a liquor store, then bring it up. Easiest $20 you can make!!

Old Print Article: “Berol, Mind Wizard, Dies; Cause Mystery,” New York Times (1914)

June 9, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before computers became our “second brains,” there were stage performers paid well for displaying astonishing feats of memory. Such was the career of a Horatio Alger-esque immigrant from a century ago, Felix Berol, who allegedly retained hundreds of thousands of fascinating facts and used them to wow vaudeville crowds and teach memory retention via correspondence courses. From an article about his sudden death in the April 20, 1914 Brooklyn Daily Eagle (which doesn’t mention that Berol had willed his brain to the Philadelphia Medical Association):

“Felix Berol, ‘the man with 300,00 facts in his head,’ who was conceded to be one of the world’s greatest memory training experts, died suddenly at 2 a.m. today at his home, 609 Fairview Avenue, Ridgewood Heights.

Mr. Berol and his wife and his niece, Miss Ellie Kosch, returned from Coney Island shortly after midnight, and after a late supper he retired. Shortly before he died he called to his wife and complained of feeling ill, and suddenly collapsed in her arms.

Although heart disease is supposed to have been the cause of death, an autopsy will be performed by a coroner’s physician this afternoon to determine exactly what he died from.

The news of Mr. Berol’s death came as a shock to the members of the Central and Bedford branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association, where only a week ago he gave the first of a series of nine lectures on memory training. He was to have given the second lecture of the course at the Bedford Branch tonight, and at the Central Branch tomorrow night. Unless some former pupil who completed the course at the West Side Branch of the Y.M.C.A. undertakes the lectures, the course may be abandoned.

Mr. Berol attended the dance of the Young Women’s Christian Association at the Central Branch on Schermerhorn Street last Saturday night, and was then apparently in the best of health. He danced several times, and didn’t appear to be the least bit fatigued when he departed for his home early Sunday morning. It was his boast that he had never been sick a day in his life, and he attributed his good health to the fact that he constantly exercised his mind.

In addition to lecturing at the Y.M.C.A. branches, Mr. Berol was conducting a correspondence course through Funk & Wagnalls, the publishers, and had 2,500 pupils.

Mr. Berol was born in Berlin, Germany, on February 1, 1872. He got an education in the public schools of Berlin and came to this country when a boy. His mind was sluggish and dull, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he could remember a fact. As a result, the best kind of job the young immigrant boy could land was washing dishes in a cheap restaurant.

One night, tired and sleepy, he sauntered into Cooper Union and picked up a book at random. It was Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and, as he turned the pages, he was for the first time in his life interested in reading.

By reading Progress and Poverty, Berol’s whole career was changed. From then on, he thirsted for knowledge, and, realizing that his mentality was exceedingly dull and that he couldn’t remember anything he read, he started to hunt up books on memory. He haunted Cooper Union, the Astor Library and other libraries in his spare time, devouring everything pertaining to memory that he could lay his hands on. After months of hard work, he mastered the principles of the subject as laid down by teachers of memories. Within seven months he was able to perform astonishing feats of remembering and branched out in vaudeville as ‘Berol, the Mental Marvel, With 5,000 Facts in His Head.’ His success was instantaneous; he was booked as a headliner and commanded big salaries, which made a fortune for him.

At a big financial sacrifice, he abandoned the stage to devote his time to educational work in the teaching of his wonderful but simple memory training system.

Berol actually had 300,000 facts in his head, any one of which he could name in an instant. He could give exact dates of births and deaths of great men, the date of every battle in the history of the world, and the population of every city and town in the United States of more than 5,000, and thousands upon thousands of statistics.”•

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“We’ll Fight Till We’re Dead Or We’re Free”

June 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some will always leave the culture, go off by themselves or in pairs or groups. They’ll disappear into their own heads, create their own reality. For most it’s benign, but not for all. There are those who don’t want to live parallel to the larger society and come to believe they can end it. The deeper they retreat, the harder it is to reemerge. Instead they sometimes explode back into their former world, as in the case of Jerad and Amanda Miller committing acts of domestic terrorism in Las Vegas. It reminds me of a piece of reportage by Denis Johnson.

The writer was paranoid about both the government and the anti-government militia movement in 1990s America when he wrote the chilling article “The Militia in Me,” which appears in his non-fiction collection, Seek. The violence of Ruby Ridge and Waco and the horrific Oklahoma City bombing had shocked the nation into realizing the terror within, so Johnson traveled the U.S. and Canada to find out how and why militias had come to be. Three brief excerpts from the piece.

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The people I talked with seemed to imply that the greatest threat to liberty came from a conspiracy, or several overlapping conspiracies, well known to everybody but me. As a framework for thought, this has its advantages. It’s quicker to call a thing a crime and ask Who did it? than to call it a failure and set about answering the question What happened?

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I’m one among many, part of a disparate–sometimes better spelled “desperate”–people, self-centered, shortsighted, stubborn, sentimental, richer than anybody’s ever been, trying to get along in the most cataclysmic century in human history. Many of us are troubled that somewhere, somehow, the system meant to keep us free has experienced a failure. A few believe that someone has committed the crime of sabotaging everything.

Failures need correction. Crimes cry out for punishment. Some ask: How do we fix it? Others: Who do we kill?

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They told me they made furniture out of antlers and drove around anywhere and everywhere, selling it. For the past month I’d been reading about the old days, missing them as if I had lived in them, and I said, “You sound like free Americans.”

“No,” the smaller man said and thereafter did all the talking, while the other, the blond driver changed my tire. “No American is free today.”

“Okay, I guess you’re right, but what do we do about that?”

“We fight till we are,” he said. “Till we’re free or we’re dead, one or the other.”

“Who’s going to do the fighting?”

“A whole lot of men. More than you’d imagine. We’ll fight till we’re dead or we’re free.”•

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“I Never Had The Chance To Pry Off The Top Of His Head To See What Motivated Decisions Like This”

June 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Regardless of what actually killed him, Howard Hughes died of being Howard Hughes, eaten alive from the inside by neuroses. But that doesn’t mean he was alone at the feast. An autopsy suggested codeine and painkillers were among the culprits, and his personal physician, Dr. Wilbur Thain, whose brother-in-law Bill Gay was one of the executives angling for control of Hughes’ holdings, was treated like a precursor to Conrad Murray, though he was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing.

From Dennis Breo’s 1979 People interview with Thain, who made the extremely dubious assertion that aspirin abuse claimed the man who was both disproportionately rich and poor:

Question:

Are you satisfied that Hughes received adequate medical attention?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

Everything possible was done to help Hughes in his final hours. At no time did the authors of Empire try to get in touch with me. Yet they say in the book that an aviator friend of Hughes called me in Logan, Utah two days before Hughes’ death and told me, “I don’t want to play doctor, but your patient is dying.” I am quoted as telling the guy to mind his own business, since I had to go to a party in the Bahamas. Well, the first word I actually got that Hughes was in trouble was about 9 p.m. April 4, 1976—the night before he died. I was in Miami at the time—not Utah. At about midnight I was called and told that Hughes had suddenly become very critical. I was stunned. I left Miami at 3:30 a.m., arriving in Acapulco at 8 a.m. April 5.

Question:

What was the first thing you did?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

Empire says the first thing I did was spend two hours shredding documents in Hughes’ rooftop suite at the Acapulco Princess. This is absolutely false. I walked straight into Hughes’ bedroom with my medical bag. He was unconscious and having multiple seizures. He looked like he was about to die. Other than one trip to the bathroom, I spent the next four hours with him.

Question:

Why did you then fly to Houston?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

The Mexican physician who had seen Hughes advised against trying to take him to a local medical center, so we spent two hours trying to find an oxygen tank that didn’t leak and preparing the aircraft to fly us to Houston. We left at noon. He died en route.

Question:

Was Howard Hughes psychotic?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

No, not at any time in his life. He was severely neurotic, yes. To be psychotic means to be out of touch with reality. Howard Hughes may have had some fanciful ideas, but he was not out of touch with reality. He was rational until the day he died.

Question:

Was Hughes an impossible patient?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

That’s a masterpiece of understatement. He wanted doctors around, but he didn’t want to see them unless he had to. He would allow no X-rays—I never saw an X-ray of Hughes until after he died—no blood tests, no physical exams. He understood his situation and chose to live the way he lived. Rather than listen to a doctor, he would fall asleep or say he couldn’t hear.

Question:

Is that why you didn’t accept his job offer after you got out of medical school?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

No, I just wanted to practice medicine on my own. I understand that Hughes was quite upset. I didn’t see him again for 21 years. He was 67 then. He had grown a beard, his hair was longer. He had some hearing loss partially due to his work around aircraft. That’s why he liked to use the telephone: It had an amplifier. He was very alert and well-informed. His toenails and fingernails were pretty long, but he had a case of onchyomycosis—a fungus disease of the nails which makes them thick and very sensitive. It hurt like hell to trim them. For whatever reason, he only sponge-bathed his body and hair.

Question:

What was the turning point?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

After his successful hip surgery in August of 1973 he chose never to walk again. Once—only once—he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom with help. That was the beginning of the end for him. I told him we’d even get him a cute little physical therapist. He said, “No, Wilbur, I’m too old for that.”

Question:

Why did he decide not to walk?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

I never had the chance to pry off the top of his head to see what motivated decisions like this. He would never get his teeth fixed, either. Worst damn mouth I ever saw. When they operated on his hip, the surgeons were afraid his teeth were so loose that one would fall into his lung and kill him!

Question:

What kinds of things did he talk about toward the end of his life?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

The last year we would talk about the Hughes Institute medical projects and his earlier life. All the reporting on Hughes portrayed him as a robot. This man had real feelings. He talked one day about his parents, whom he loved very much, and his movies and his girls. He said he finally gave up stashing women around Hollywood because he got tired of having to talk to them. In our last conversation, he told me how much he still loved his ex-wife Jean Peters. But he was also always talking about things 10 years down the road. He was an optimist in that sense. If it hadn’t been for the kidney failure, Hughes might have lasted a lot longer.•

A 1976 Houston local news report on the death of Howard Hughes, whose demise was as shrouded in mystery as was much of his life.

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“This Future Vehicle Is Not A Car, Not As We Know It Today”

June 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a blog post by Brad Templeton, consultant to Google’s driverless-car division, about the company’s recent wheel-less and brake-less autonomous prototype, which has been surprisingly mocked by some:

“I was not involved in the specifics of design of this vehicle, though I pushed hard as I could for something in this direction. Here’s why I think it’s the right decision.

First of all, this is a prototype. Only 100 of this design will be made, and there will be more iterations. Google is all about studying, learning and doing it again, and they can afford to. They want to know what people think of this, but are not scared if they underestimate it at first.

Secondly, this is what is known as a ‘Disruptive Technology.’ Disruptive technologies, as described in the Silicon Valley bible The Innovators Dilemma are technologies that seem crazy and inferior at first. They meet a new need, not well understood by the incumbent big companies. Those big companies don’t see it as a threat — until years later, they are closing their doors. Every time a disruptive technology takes over, very few of the established players make it through to the other side. This does not guarantee that Google will dominate or crush those companies, or that everything that looks silly eventually wins. But it is a well established pattern.

This vehicle does not look threatening — not to people on the street, and not to existing car companies and pundits who don’t get it. Oh, there are many people inside those car companies who do get it, but the companies are incapable of getting it in their bones. Even when their CEOs get it, they can’t steer the company 90 degrees — there are too many entrenched forces in any large company. The rare exception are founder-led companies (like Google and Facebook and formerly Apple and Microsoft) where if the founder gets it, he or she can force the company to get it.

Even large companies who read this blog post and understand it still won’t get it, not most of the time. I’ve talked to executives from big car companies. They have a century of being car companies, and knowing what the means. Google, Tesla and the coming upstarts don’t.

One reason I will eventually move away from my chosen name for the technology — robocar — along with the other popular names like ‘self-driving car’ is that this future vehicle is not a car, not as we know it today. It is no more a ‘driverless car’ than a modern automobile is a horseless carriage. 100 years ago, the only way they could think of the car was to notice that there was no horse. Today, all many people notice about robocars is that no human is driving. This is the thing that comes after the car.”

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