Traveling without moving

Thursday afternoon, while working on my laptop at a local Starbucks, I ended up having a conversation with a couple nearby. It turned out they were from Paris, in the U.S. on vacation. Nothing too odd about that, but this particular Starbucks was tucked into a stretch of U.S. Route 46 chockablock with hubcap shops, fast food restaurants, hourly-rate motels, used car lots, a couple of BYO strip clubs, and a recently-demolished massage parlor. I go to that Starbucks sometimes because it gets a lot of late afternoon sunlight, but it's not somewhere I'd think of taking friends from out of town. Not exactly a tourist hotspot.

The couple explained that they had taken a year off to travel around the U.S., and had bought a used minivan (for $3k) at a used car lot near that Starbucks last spring. Now they were back after circling round the country and taking a detour into Mexico. They were planning to drive up to Canada for a couple of weeks to renew their tourist visas, but first they wanted to take their new American friend -- the guy who sold them the minivan -- out for a nice French dinner.

They asked if I knew any good French restaurants and I gave them a few ideas, and then let them borrow my laptop to book a hotel for the night. The husband gave me his business card: back in Paris he's a rédacteur en chef of a magazine. His wife was an editor too. The night before, I had been arguing with Trumwill on his blog that the class distinctions he and one of his guest bloggers frequently make are mostly pointless, partly because the demarcations they try to draw are so porous. And here, as if to underline my point, were two Parisian journalists befriending an American used car dealer.

Recently, on the 4HWW forums, someone mentioned CouchSurfer.org, a site built to connect couch surfers with hosts willing to let them sleep on their couches. In one of the testimonials on that site, a host said that hosting a foreign couch surfer was like "traveling without moving". Meeting that French couple in the Little Ferry Starbucks reminded me of that line, which in turn reminded me of where I'd first heard it: in Dune. Embedding is disabled for this one, but click the link and see 1:47-1:57 of the clip.

Dune: Folding Space

What Jeffrey Sachs doesn't get

I'm a couple days late to this, but Columbia's Jeffrey Sachs went one-for-three in his recommendations in his Financial Times op/ed Wednesday ("Obama has lost his way on jobs"). He also made a pretty glaring omission. From his essay,

The past week brought news of US double-digit unemployment and the Federal Reserve’s decision to maintain near-zero interest rates. Both pieces of news expose the inadequacy of US economic policymaking. The Obama administration’s stimulus policies are not well-targeted.

[...]

During the previous bubble, the US consumer was encouraged to over-borrow. Recreating a new bubble is like offering just one more drink, on the government’s account, to overcome a mass hangover. With budget deficits of about 10 per cent of gross domestic product, government spending needs to be far more consequential than temporary boosts to consumer spending.

The Republican alternative is equally fatuous. For every problem there is a single Republican answer: tax cuts.

OK, so far so good, though it's worth noting that Sachs's characterization of Republicans doesn't apply to all (e.g., Bruce Bartlett).

Sachs goes on to recommend a three part solution:

1) An increased emphasis on exports and infrastructure (makes sense).

2) " " Education (doesn't make sense).

3) " " Green energy (doesn't make sense, except, perhaps if it's limited to nuclear which many environmentalists don't consider to be green. Spain, the world leader in wind power, had 19.3% unemployment as of October).

On education, Sachs writes,

The unemployment rate among college graduates is only 4.7 per cent, while it is 15.5 per cent among those without a high-school diploma. The US woefully under-invests in education outlays for the poor, who drop out of school and then cannot find gainful employment.

First, I'm not sure what Sachs is talking about with respect to under-investment. We spend plenty on education -- 7% of GDP, versus 4% for defense. We spend more per student on primary and secondary education than Japan does.

Second, this is the kind of thing I guess someone might write if he had never gone to public schools growing up and were ensconced in a sinecure at Columbia University. It must make perfect sense from Sachs's perspective: unemployment rates are lower for college grads, so let's just turn those high school dropouts into college grads. It probably has never occurred to Jeffrey Sachs that most high school dropouts dropped out because they didn't have the aptitude for college prep work in high school, let alone college itself.

Sachs seems unaware of the higher education bubble (As Sheila Tone noted recently at Hit Coffee, even last week's Florida shooter had been a participant in it).

Now for Sachs's glaring omission:

The president has lost the economic initiative, weighed down by a tedious fight between two outmoded ideologies: Keynesianism and supply-side tax cuts, as well as by the president’s excessive deference to Congress.

Can you think of another domestic policy initiative that has preoccupied the President this year (Hint: it rhymes with "stealth care")? I suspect Sachs knows that, as Tsinghua University Professor Yu Qiao warned back in April, the administration's emphasis on social spending could "delay sustainable recovery". But he probably is in favor of the Democrats' proposed health care reform and figures that, politically, this is their best chance to enact it, even if it's the wrong priority economically. Hence, Sachs's omission.

Girls soccer gets rough

Watch what happens at 1:04. HT: Trumwill @ Hit Coffee.



I mentioned this over there, but one of the players mentioned in the voice over (I think the one who got yanked down by her pony tail) was named Shumway. There’s a noted finance professor whose work I came across in doing research for Shortscreen named Tyler Shumway. Maybe that name is more common out west.

Because pointing and walking is epic

Hat tip to Hit Coffee for this clever commercial for a business that sells refurbished mobile homes:



And hat tip for the Hackensack for digging deep to find this video of the making of that commercial:



I may have to hire these guys to make a commercial for Shortscreen.com.