Just over a year ago coworker and friend Sara Johns and her husband chef Brandon Johns bought into the Ann Arbor restaurant Vinology. Brandon made tremendous progress with his attempts to create a dining experience based around fresh locally sourced foods. Food went from being something of an afterthought to the wines at Vinology to coming front and center. Unfortunately the partnership with the majority owners didn’t work out and Brandon has moved on to a new project.
He and Sara along with my boss Rob Cleveland and another partner have bought Bella Ciao on Liberty St and will be transforming it. Bella Ciao will shut down later this month and then re-open in August as the Grange Kitchen and Bar. Brandon plans to continue the local food effort with a rotating menu based on what is available at different times of the year.
Hopefully with full control this time, things will work out better and the Grange will become a permanent fixture on the local restaurant scene.
By the way if you happen to be in downtown Ann Arbor around lunch time, you might want to hit Kerry Town and check out Monahan’s seafood market where they have a daily special that you can find posted on their twitter feed at http://twitter.com/MonahansSeafood. Sparrow’s meats is also doing sandwiches and salads at lunch now over by the checkout counter.
15 years ago this evening we walked out onto the steps of a bed and breakfast on the south shore of Kauai. As we turned, our backs were to the Pacific with Spouting Horn off to our left as sun slowly sank toward the horizon. Over the next several minutes, we said our vows to each other in the presence of a retired minister, his wife and a photographer.
15 years later we’re still going at and still in love. Happy anniversary Jules! I still adore you! Here’s to many more years.
A new computer supply and repair shop just opened up around the corner from my downtown Ann Arbor office that so far at least is highly recommended. Beagle Brain is located at the west end of Nickels Arcade opposite the entrance to the Maynard parking structure. I’ve been wanting to put a bigger hard drive in my macbook pro for some time but unlike the plastic macbooks, swapping the drive is a more complex procedure. The whole aluminum case has to be opened up with lots of little screws to lose and several connectors. I stopped into the shop last week to see how much they would charge to do the remove and replace procedure, and to my pleasant surprise the price was a very palatable $30. I went ahead and ordered the new hard drive from Newegg and when it arrived I cloned the current drive to an external unit with Super Duper!. I dropped off my laptop when I went into the office and picked it up at lunch time. I plugged in the external drive to clone the data back to the new larger drive and a couple of hours later I was good to go. If you need some repair work done and you’re in downtown A2 it’s definitely worth checking out Beagle Brain.
Over the past year, we’ve seen a string of banks declared as “too big to fail.” As a result they got hundreds of billions of dollars in essentially no-strings attached bailouts. In return we’ve seen them payout $20 billion in bonuses to executives that helped lead these banks to the verge of collapse. Why has this happened? Precisely because the policies of deregulation happy Republicans allowed them to.
These same “conservatives” like to cite Adam Smith and the idea of laissez faire economics. That is the idea of taking a hands off approach and letting the market find its own way. The problem is that to have a free market as envisioned by Smith, there needs to be enough players on both the supply and demand sides of the market equation to prevent manipulation by individuals. This is where Smith’s ideas have fallen apart in the modern world. Over the course of the twentieth century, corporations have grown progressively larger while the numbers of companies in many business segments has shriveled.
As that has happened, those huge businesses have taken control of the market and made it exceedingly difficult to new players to come in. Without someone to call bullshit, huge financial companies have also created a bogus economy that was built on a web of lies. By largely abandoning anti-trust enforcement over the last several decades we have allowed unprecedented consolidation to occur. The result is that institutions with far too much influence on the overall economy have developed. The combination of these over sized players and excess unchecked greed leads to stupid developments. Ultimately this is unsustainable and we have the situation we see today.
If there is one lesson that we must learn from the events of the past year it is that these huge companies should be broken up and never allowed to consolidate to this degree again. There is no reason why companies should be too large to fail. Some anti-trust regulation is a good thing regardless of what Republicans say. Will we learn this lesson? Unfortunately, probably not.
By now you may have seen the commercials for the Snuggie which looks like some old monk’s robe but is actually a blanket with sleeves. Yes it’s a dopey premise, but it makes prime fodder for the talented team that creates “This Hour has 22 Minutes”.
During the debates in the waning days of the last presidential campaign John McCain repeatedly cited Ireland as the example that we should be following for our economic policies, particularly when it comes to business taxes. McCain described the low tax rates that stimulated the Irish economy to huge growth over the last 15-20 years. What he neglected to mention was the with all the tax breaks that businesses get here, they typically end up paying less in taxes than the nominally lower Irish rates.
The real issue though is the premise Republicans and anti-tax types like Grover Norquist rely on that cutting taxes for the business and the wealthy will help everyone. It’s old “a rising tide lifts all boats” argument. The problem lies in the fact only the well-off could afford to buy a boat in the first place. Most people here and in Ireland (and elsewhere) ended up treading water as long as they could while housing prices climbed.
An article on Ireland and the crash its economy experienced in 2008 in the International Herald Tribune looks at what happened over the last two decades as tax policies were changed and the economy boomed. Just as everywhere else it seems that whenever economic growth gets particularly aggressive, greed overwhelms common sense and sustainable growth levels evolve into unsustainable bubbles. At the same time that real estate developers were making fortunes in Ireland, there remained stubborn pockets of urban poverty in places like Limerick.
These chronically unemployed, poverty stricken people were “camped on the beach” as that tide came in and never managed to climb into a boat. Developers who were encouraged to help improve the lot of the people in these urban ghettos decided to go where the real money was. Given the option of almost certain, large short term profits or more moderate and vague, longer term returns, entrepeurs typically opt for the former. This was certainly the case in Ireland just as it has been here in the US where the poor typically end up getting isolated and marginalized.
What all this demonstrates yet again is that we cannot simply rely on private business to do the right thing. Certainly there are those who will do the right thing, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Government policies clearly need to make sure that everyone has a “boat” before the tide comes in. That means that everyone needs to get educated, fed and get basic health care. If we can make sure that everyone has some basic fundementals then those people can be in a position to start to take advantage of economic growth. At that point, the growth might in fact start to become sustainable.
I’ve created a FriendFeed account that pulls together feeds from all the various places where I’m generating content. If you’re interested in following my FriendFeed you can follow the RSS feed at http://friendfeed.com/samabuelsamid?format=atom.
My friend Darryl who recently left his job as the SVP of marketing at Tesla Motors has been doing a lot of blogging in recent weeks, and I find myself strongly agreeing with much of what he says. I’ve expressed many of the same ideas in my posts on AutoblogGreen and Autoblog, drawing a great deal of derision from some very earnest but in my opinion extremely naive readers.
I’m all for vastly more efficient and cleaner transportation for a number of reasons. I think burning fossil fuels is unsustainable from both an environmental and political/strategic perspective. Unfortunately for every person who happily rides to work on their bicycle in 10 degree weather, there are hundreds whose focus is much more self-centered. The reality is people buy the most car they can afford on the day they buy, without regard to future consequences. In his latest blog post Darryl explains some of the economic theories behind all of this.
When gas is cheap they buy more powerful vehicles and only when fuel prices go up do they buy more efficient vehicles. People have now become accustomed to better equipped cars and they expect a certain feature level for their dollar. If gas is cheap they will buy a thirstier better equipped vehicle over a more efficient model with fewer features. The current economic climate will only make things far worse as increasing unemployment makes people reluctant to buy anything.
As much as people want electric vehicles to be mainstream, batteries are simply far too expensive and heavy to be widely used yet. In light of this in order to make any progress on reducing fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions, we need to take the most cost effective approaches as well as provide incentives and disincentives.
First up for disincentives we must let go of the idea of cheap gas forever. Gas needs to taxed up to at least $4-5 per gallon. Since this will disproportionately affect lower income people the tax system needs adjustments to compensate. The upper cap on the incredibly regressive payroll taxes needs to be increased and the first $10-15,000 needs to be exempted. As long as gas is cheap increasing fuel economy mandates on manufacturers will only kill those companies because no one will want to buy the cars they are forced to build. We must created demand for efficiency through increased fuel prices. The idea of increased fuel taxes is finally gaining some steam at least online including over at Mark’s blog, although politicians still don’t seem too hot on the idea.
Because of the sluggish state of the general economy not much of anything is selling right now anyway. To compensate for that more positive incentives are needed to stimulate demand. The extra revenue from the fuel tax could be used to fund rebates for more efficient vehicles as well as public transportation.
We also need to acknowledge the work being done by companies like Ford and Honda. A year ago Ford recognized that in order to make any real dent in fuel use and emissions it was critically important to find the most cost effective solutions. While electric vehicles reduce direct emissions to zero, there are still emissions from the power sources if coal or natural gas is the fuel. The high cost also means that the numbers of such vehicles will remain for low for the foreseeable future meaning the overall effect on emissions will be negligible.
Ford developed turbocharged direct injection engines that they are labeling as EcoBoost. These engines reduce fuel consumption by 15-20 percent and Ford expects to be selling half a million of these engines annually within a couple of years. The extra cost will be far lower in the near term and have more overall impact in the near term while the cost and capacity of batteries is driven down. Similarly Honda has developed a cost reduced version of its hybrid system for the new Insight that will debut next year.
Ford already has a full hybrid system in the Escape and Fusion, but those vehicles will only sell 50,000 units a year because of the cost.
Even efforts such as Honda’s hybrid and Ford’s EcoBoost won’t make a difference if no one can afford to buy. With the economy in the dumper, people will simply vote with their wallets and keep driving their existing vehicles and use the cheapest energy available. That means concerns about the environment will evaporate just as fast as SUV sales in the past year.
The whole trend of using dead celebrities in ads is a bad one. I believe it is fundementally wrong for anyone to endorse a product they don’t believe in. Someone who is no longer alive may well believe in a product, but if they are not around to tell us first hand, who the hell are we to presume?
The latest example of this is an ad for the one laptop per child program. I think the program is a worthy one where people can donate money to send small, robust laptop computers to kids in developing countries. It’s entirely possible that if John Lennon were alive today that he might be a supporter of the program.
The problem is that Lennon has been dead for 28 years. To take the image and words of someone that has been dead for nearly three decades and digitally manipulate them to create a message that person never conveyed is simply wrong. For the OLPC foundation and Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono to assume that Lennon would do such an ad if he were alive today is ethically and morally wrong. The fact that the OLPC foundation is a non-profit is utterly irrelevant. Other companies have done similar digitally manipulated ads for commercial products which I consider even more disturbing and abhorrent. It’s time for this to stop.
Mail this post to a friend
| Comments
15 years ago this evening we walked out onto the steps of a bed and breakfast on the south shore of Kauai. As we turned, our backs were to the Pacific with Spouting Horn off to our left as sun slowly sank toward the horizon. Over the next several minutes, we said our vows to each other in the presence of a retired minister, his wife and a photographer.
The whole trend of using dead celebrities in ads is a bad one. I believe it is fundementally wrong for anyone to endorse a product they don’t believe in. Someone who is no longer alive may well believe in a product, but if they are not around to tell us first hand, who the hell are we to presume?