Barcelona

Financial crisis? What crisis? To an outsider everything seems wonderful. The streets are full, the bars are full - food is as good as before. It's just as I remember. There are more independence banners than before, but I expected that too.



We visited the Sagrada Familia, Parque Gruell - the tourist stuff. And I only got lost a little bit.

Flan con Nata II

Flan con Nata I

Mardi Gras 2013

We had heard about Mardi Gras our whole lives. And we had heard the worst. I had the impression - spring break in Tijuana. We wouldn't enjoy that sort of thing. You can do those things if you like. Nobody will hold you back. If you go too far they put you in the pokey. You have to be a certifiable idiot to go that far, but all that's confined to the French Quarter anyway and late nights. Everything else is surprisingly family oriented. People dress their children up and take them to the parades. You can't stand on a curb too long before some local asks you where you're from and if it's your first Mardi Gras. It's easy to strike up conversation.

You may have heard me say that there is nothing in the world like the US. We have one language, one kitchen. You can find Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes and gravy on the menu of any diner (now supplanted by Big Mac & fries which we have taken global) and Coke! These things are ubiquitous and it spans 4 time zones. No place else on earth is that uniform across that scale. We are a homogeneous culture. A multi-ethnic nation. That's not a contradiction in terms.

Except in New Orleans. Here they have their own kitchen, their own music. And they have music everywhere. Everywhere! The French Quarter is nothing but restaurants and bars (a few shops for the tourists). And it's all good. I can't imagine how long a bad restaurant would last in the French Quarter. Not long. We ate dinner one night at the Acme Oyster House and breakfast two mornings at the Cafe Fleur de lis.

Remember the names. Just be sure not to stay too long in that neighborhood.

Each parade is sponsored by its own krewe, pronounced crew I believe. Some are 200 years old and you have to born into them, old money. Others are younger and more “commoner”. The floats they produce are very topical, political, irreverent, and each shows its particular heritage. After it's pointed out to you you can see the difference from the street. The newer more commoner krewes are the more pointed, more bawdy, raucous. The old money krewes more conservative, but probably also the more elaborate. Some are just amazing.

Mardi Gras pictures click here.

An Old Rant

In response to another conversation:

I thought the original premise was about how the tech/labor debate related to the financial crisis. Not how tech undermined capital. (Though Krugman seems to have picked up on that in a way I probably don't understand). Capital has prospered because tech requires capital. Globalization and horizontal integration, necessary to the global enterprise, reduces the cost of capital. Why borrow and buy expensive machinery when cheap foreign labor can accomplish the same result? And if you were horizontally integrated, production being only one more enterprise component, you don't even have to capitalize a factory (production facility). Some foreign enterprise (perhaps with subsidized capital) will do that for you. It's the difference between scale (GM) and scaleable (Google/Facebook) - (I saw that somewhere else).

But horizontal integration has its limitations. It's easy enough to make accounting, advertising, production, etc., profit centers (out-sourcing). But what about R&D? "Innovation"? If you out-source it you don't own it. Those would always be cost centers. It would require some egg-head to build a "garage project" on his own. No help. No capital. That was my rant of long ago. And I suggested that the challenge was for the financial system to identify those worthy projects and fund them and make them available to the horizontal enterprise for production.

Boy was that dumb! Capital's job is to make credit available to credit worthy borrowers. Homeowners, Italians, Greeks, Spaniards, derivatives - make up your own lies. Whatever someone else will buy. Forget about actually trying to ascertain the enterprise value of an idea. Myopia.

And that, in a nutshell, is how tech/labor relates to subprime.

Sunnyside

I just uploaded a new photo album SUNNYSIDE

HERE

Cyclops

A comment from "Jay" (that's all I know) about one of our presidential candidates:


"I’m reminded of the remorseless Cyclops in Homer’s Odysseus. His monocular vision is a metaphor, he is unable to perceive depth, and his outlook on the world is strictly superficial, especially when it comes to the suffering of Odysseus’ sailors as he eats them. His hunger is the only thing that matters; he is unable to sympathize with anyone unless it is himself."