Mr. Fussbudget Reads a Spy Novel

A while back I gave a copy of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale to my father-in-law. It was one of those “the movie’s coming out, I wonder how the book is?” kinda gifts. Besides, who doesn’t like spy novels? I’ve read most of John Le Carré’s stuff quite happily. And since the Bond movie franchise is based on the Fleming novels, I thought I’d try reading one. So I borrowed it after he’d finished.

I made it 40 pages in. Bond was in France, getting ready to gamble against Le Chiffre. He’d met his contact. And he’d just met Miss Lynd, with whom he’d be working.

Naturally, this being a Bond novel, Miss Lynd was wearing a dress “of grey soie sauvage with a square-cut bodice, lasciviously tight across her fine breasts.”After Fleming spills about a page of ink describing how ravishing and well-appointed Miss Lynd is, there’s some stage business. Mathis (the contact) leaves, and Lynd warms up to Bond, who is now optimistic he can work with her. But then, this:

“As a woman, he wanted to sleep with her but only when the job had been done.”

If you’re wondering if Bond is actually a woman, that’s because Mr. Fleming has blundered into a dangling modifier.

Sigh. Anyhow, I was all hyped for Bond to win at roulette, bandy the fisticuffs, kiss Miss Lynd with abrasive lust-and-disdain (this being the sexist 50s and all), and pump … umm, lead with his the Walther PPK.

But alas, if Fleming’s writing is so lazy as to make mistakes like that, how am I to trust him when Bond’s life is on the line — or Miss Lynd’s garters?

Yes, well, you can forgive the old man all you want, since after all, it’s just once sentence. But if I read writing that careless, I can’t help but wonder if that same carelessness holds true for the story … if, sooner or later, Bond is going to shove his Walther down the front of his pressed gabardine trousers and accidentally shoot one of his nuts off. (Which, come to think of it, would make that earlier sentence a bit of foreshadowing, wouldn’t it?)

As a woman, he wanted to sleep with her

He wanted her so badly, he was changing gender

His desire for her brought out his feminine urges

D’oh!

Transparency in the News

This all started about a week ago, when Treehugger and the New York Times began reporting that

As of Jan. 1, Pennsylvania is banning labels on milk and dairy products that say it comes from cows that haven’t been treated with artificial bovine growth hormone, which is sometimes known as rBGH or rBST. State officials say the labels are confusing and impossible to verify.

The government maintains that artificial bovine growth hormones are safe, even though they’re illegal in many other countries, critics question their safety, and many American consumers won’t buy milk treated with it.

So instead of exercising the precautionary principle Monsanto has instead spent more than a decade lobbying to get the labels removed. And now Pennsylvania agriculture secretary has agreed, arguing that the labels confuse consumers. “It seems to imply there is a safe, nonsafe dimension.”

Winner: Monsanto.
Loser: the people of Pennsylvania

A few days later, the Federal Reserve changed its reporting policies, publishing economic forecasts four times of year instead of only twice, in order to “take some of the mystery out of its decision-making, disclosing far more information about its economic forecasts — and, implicitly, about its objectives for growth and inflation.”

Now, I’m not an economist (but I’ve dozed through economics lectures), but how can this not be a good thing? Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech to the Cato Institute outlining the history of the decision, which is pretty interesting.
An excerpt:

Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England from 1921 to 1944, reputedly took as his personal motto, “Never explain, never excuse.” Norman’s aphorism exemplified how he and many of his contemporaries viewed the making of monetary policy–as an arcane and esoteric art, best practiced out of public view. Many central bankers of Norman’s time (and, indeed, well into the postwar period) believed that a certain mystique attached to their activities and that allowing the public a glimpse of the inner workings would only usurp the prerogatives of insiders and reduce, if not grievously damage, the effectiveness of policy.

Norman’s perspective on central banking now seems decidedly quaint.

But before you expect to see enlightened beings at the Fed, it’s worth listening to Alan Blinder (an irono-nym, that), a former vice-chairman there.

“If you are a big believer in transparency, which I am, it’s incremental,” Mr. Blinder said. “If I had my druthers, the Fed would be giving out a forecast eight times a year.”

Then again, this may be a tempest in a money temple, especially if Steven Levitt is correct that economists are lousy forecasters.

More Fun in Paradise

When we were in Hawai’i last month I took my kids to the Kahalu’u Beach Park (above) in Kailua-Kona to go snorkeling. I affectionately refer to the place as “fish in a bucket,” because it’s so darned easy to see fish. (There’s a good slide show on this site that has 19 more pictures of what it’s like.)

The day we went, however, the place was overrun with hapless tourists standing on the coral (bad), and generally flailing about. (I was one of those, trying not to swallow water while propping up my youngest.)

One sea turtle was loitering in the shallow water, eating and letting some gentle waves wash him this way and that. But because this is a city beach, he was surrounded by pale, sunscreen-gooped people, about twenty feet from where some volunteer was patiently explaining all the things you weren’t supposed to do so the reef and its poor denizens wouldn’t get completely thrashed.

It was a perversion of nature, an endangered species surrounded by us icky humans like were were in an interactive zoo. Then, when things didn’t look as if they could get get any weirder, an teenager waddled up with his waterproof camera, stuck it into the one foot of water, and snapped off a couple pictures of the turtle’s head.

The text on the kid’s shirt said it all: “Industrial Vultures.”

The (Horrendous) Shipping News

I used to get discouraged when I read the news because of politicians.Now I get discouraged because of them and all the horrible environmental news.

Here’s the headline of the day: “Ship pollution kills 60,000 yearly: Study“. You may think 60,000 isn’t all that much, except that most of them are on the West Coast — where I live.

The damage comes from the sulphur-laden Bunker C fuel that powers the growing number of ships conducting global trade.

The sludgy fuel is “basically the dregs of the oil refining process,” and contains nearly 2,000 times as much sulphur as the diesel fuel burned in trucks in North America and Europe, says David Marshall, of the Clean Air Task Force, one of the groups that commissioned the study.

And as usual, the really hair-whitening stuff is snuck into the middle of the story.

• The annual number of premature deaths from all outdoor air pollution is estimated to be about 800,000 (and that’s only humans)
• Without a clean up, the global total is expected to hit 84,000 within five years
• “At the International Marine Organization, seagoing nations have been negotiating for the past 15 years on new air pollution standards, Marshall said. To date, the talks have only produced regulations that amount to business as usual.”
• 70 per cent of emissions occur within 400 kilometres of land

Color me depressed. Or maybe it’s just that weird color one’s face turns from inhaling sulphur.

Putting Red Meat out to Pasture

Even though I did a sustainability tip about this about a year ago, I’d forgotten what a big deal this was.

At the time I pointed out all these unsavory beef byproducts:
- A recent UN report concluded that livestock generate more greenhouse gas emissions than transportation
- US livestock consume 70 percent of America’s grain production
- Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface
- 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon are now used for grazing.

If 1,000 people ate one less meal with beef a week, it would save over 70,000 pounds of grain, 70,000 pounds of topsoil and 40 million gallons of water per year.

Sources:

“Livestock a major threat to environment,” Food and Agriculture of the United Nations

newdream.org

Not long ago, the LA Times ran an op-ed piece that made the case even more fully:

“A report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization identified livestock as one of the two or three top contributors to the world’s most serious environmental problems, including water pollution and species loss.”

“All told, livestock are responsible for 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, according to the U.N. — more than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet.”

“A University of Chicago study examined the average American diet and found that all the various energy inputs and livestock emissions involved in its production pump an extra 1.5 tons of CO2 into the air over the course of a year, which would be avoided by a vegetarian diet. Thus, the researchers found, cutting out meat would do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than trading in a gas guzzler for a hybrid car.“

Pass the tofu, eh?

My Vote for World’s Worst ISP

Guess what? I am once again waiting to talk to tech support at iPowerWeb, the World’s Worst ISP. Okay, maybe they’re not the world’s worst, but they keep earning a place on the list. (Here’s what happened last time I had to call them.)

I’m calling them now because the site they host is showing a 403 error, the control panel login says “forbidden,” and when I called them, I waited for 10 minutes—and then got cut off. Nice!! Do I get that 10 minutes back? Nope.

So now I’m trying live chat. Here’s the first auto-response:

Welcome to IPOWER! You are number 51 in the queue. Your wait time will be approximately 32 minute(s) and 10 seconds. We apologize for the wait time. Please hold for a site operator to respond.

Here’s the second:

We appreciate your patience. All operators are currently assisting other customers. Please continue to hold and we’ll be with you as quickly as possible. In the meantime, please be prepared to answer your Security Question when we begin chatting. To enhance our security protocols, we’ll need you to provide the answer to your Security Question at the beginning of our conversation. If you have not yet set your Security Question and Answer, please log into your account now to set it up. Thank you for waiting.

I can’t log into my account, remember? All I can do is wait. And once again I’ve waited so long, I can e-mail this blog post to their staff.

Too bad the photos on their website don’t pick up the phone.

POSTSCRIPT:

Total wait: 58 minutes.

The tech came back after hearing the problem and said,

I have updated the domain information in your account. Hence, please check once again by accessing his Web site and account after 1-2 hours. If the issue still persists then please get back to us , so that we could investigate further. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

And now the site is back online. The problem occurred on their end, it took us discovering it and spending over an hour to reach them so they could fix it.

Hawai’i Tourism: A Modest Proposal

Not long ago I was on the Big Island of Hawaii on vacation. We were there for a week, and we snorkeled, body-surfed and dined out. Last year we also went to Volcanoes National Park, where we hiked through lava tubes, checked out the Kilauea Caldera, then drove down to the end of the park to see the lava falling in the ocean, which was fascinating and sketchy, in about equal measure. We also ponied up for a submarine ride, which allowed our little guy and his grandma to see fish by looking through the windows.

In other words, we had quite a fun, busy week — though that isn’t the point of this post.

We also visited with friends who were staying at a different hotel. Their hotel typically has a kiddie pool, but since it was being remodeled, the kids were allowed to share one of the adult pools during the remodel.

In tight proximity to the pool on three sides were chaises, about half full of adults doing … nothing. Just lying there, reading, while the Pacific Ocean beckoned 100 yards away, while sea turtles rested on the beach, while tropical fish swam in their own tide-filled lagoon. I even took a picture of an eagle ray cruising around there … it was just that easy.

Yet the whole time we were watching someone feed the eagle rays and having lunch and swimming and watching the turtles, these people poolside didn’t budge, unless it was to roll over, or get Evian water spritzed on them. (No I’m not making this up. If you have enough money, apparently you can get people to do all sorts of embarrassing things to you.)

Then in USA Today, I found statistical evidence that these hopeless slugs are practically the majority of vacationers:

Which makes me think we could save a great deal of time, money and carbon if we just identified these people before they ever got on a plane. Hell, if Dubai can build a ski resort

Then surely we can build Hawaii simulation centers in large urban areas. With enough warming lamps, humidifiers and island-trained chefs, I’m sure we could build a very expensive, exclusive, peaceful pool where lazy, harried vacationers can get the Hawaii “experience” without bothering to move their carcasses halfway across the Pacific just to baste.

Meanwhile, the few of us who actually want to do stuff will just do things the old-fashioned way.

Just Don’t Call Us “Rich”

Reuters Life! recently ran a story (perversely enough, I saw it on Yahoo! … can we stop with the exclamation points now?!!) titled, “More U.S. millionaires are middle-class.”

Interesting title eh? More interesting was a sentence in the first paragraph: “New research has found that more and more Americans worth at least $1 million want luxury goods such as yachts but otherwise lead family-focused, work-oriented lives.”

The Reuters story is regurgitating the results of research by “private wealth specialists” Lewis Schiff and Russ Alan Prince, for their upcoming book, “The Middle Class Millionaire: The Rise of the New Rich and How they are Changing America.”

After trotting out some statistics about the rich getting richer (and that’s what millionaires are, not middle-class), they add this: “But instead of entering the echelons of the elite, these new millionaires adhere to middle-class values, earning their money rather than inheriting it, working 70 hours a week, and choosing neighborhoods based on the quality of schools.”

Let’s pick apart what’s going on in this story, shall we?

1) The concept of “middle-class” is miraculously fungible, somehow applying to people worth over $1 million, and those households—not individuals—earning $48,000 a year (the US median).

However, nearly everyone in the U.S. is deluded into thinking they’re part of the middle-class, either middle-class, upper-middle-class, and lower-middle-class (if you don’t believe me, find someone to tell you they grew up working-class or grew up rich). Barbara Ehrenreich argues, persuasively I think, that there’s an all-pervasive set up assumptions in the U.S. that are middle-class assumptions, many of which are cemented during college (which is essentially the middle-class guild). Her book “Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class” is particularly good on this.

2) The Reuters story completely ignores what’s going on in the story, even when one of the authors identifies himself as a “private wealth specialist”—he’s studying the wealthy!

3) Instead, the story uncritically adopts the authors’ catch-phrase: “They found that 89 percent of middle-class millionaires believed anyone could attain wealth through hard work.” Note that tiresome repetition of the American myth, that wealth (oops, there’s that word again!) is attainable through hard work.

4) But the story isn’t even consistent about this. After some more “middle-class millionaires are better than you and me” factoids

“They are much more outgoing and involved in the community than the very affluent who tend to be more insular and react with fewer people,” Schiff said.

He said the four main characteristics of a millionaire were that they were hard working, networked, persistent even in the face of failure, and put themselves in the flow of money.

The paragraph argues:

“The authors argue this new group has a strong influence on spending, shaping the habits of their middle class counterparts and impacting certain product sectors ranging from yachting to jewelery to handbags.” (Anything wrong with that? Yep.)

Hold the handbag. Are they middle-class, or are they rich? If they’re rich, they buy yachts. If they’re middle-class, they don’t.

The story then quotes the president and CEO of marine lender KeyBank Luxury Yacht Lending, who says demand for 80-foot and up yachts is way up. “The new buyers really value leisure time as they have so little time,” he told Reuters. Um … WTF does lack of leisure time have to do with it?

The end of the story (thank God):

“When you’re very wealthy you look for exclusive expressions of affluence and when these are more available to a larger number of people they lose their exclusivity so they want something new and innovative,” said Schiff.

“This means the top one percent has to find a new way to express their affluence and we are seeing this most commonly through technology.”

Decoded, that means the rich have to keep finding ways to prove they’re NOT just like you and me. So yachting has nothing to do with leisure time. It’s an expression of affluence. In other words, as a concept (and probably as a book), “middle-class millionaire” is bullshit.

Join the middle class, and this too could be yours.