We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
First, I think she is mainly talking about Manhattan real estate. There is a lot of NYC outside of Manhattan, and the prime fashionable neighborhoods of Manhattan (and Brooklyn) will never be "affordable" to the middle class because, given the barriers to new construction, demand will always outstrip supply. Even so, there are reasonable neighborhoods in places like Inwood, Harlem, Washington Heights, Spanish Harlem, Little Italy.
Second, there are few free markets in housing in NYC except at the higher end (ie condos in the 2+ million range). Even there, it's not really a free market because the barriers to entry for builders are so high (legal, regulatory, community review, architectural boards, time, political dealings, etc). Donald Trump, with his huge legal teams and political connections, can get that sort of thing done, but there are few of him and, even so, supply will never catch up to demand.
Third, NYC's approach to "affordable" housing since WW2 has been housing projects for the poor and rent control and/or entire rent-controlled developments (eg Stuyvesant Town or Tudor City) for the middle class. The former destroyed neighborhoods and was a catastrophe, and the latter (ST as an example) is bankrupt. Furthermore, rent control, instituted temporarily as a post-war adjustment, now has a huge and vociferous constituency (of course). The more recent efforts are to require some time-limited below-market rentals in new construction.
Altogether, many things conspire to keep rental and condo prices high, even out in the boroughs. Since massive deregulation will never happen in NYC, supply will never catch up with demand because NYC is a world-wide magnet for the energetic, the prosperous, the young, and for those who just want a toe-hold in the greatest and most interesting city in the world. (And if supply ever did catch up with demand, a lot of people would lose a lot of money.)
Government helped create the problem - if it is a problem. The Dems want to fix their problem with even more controls and takings. Typical.
My final thought is this: High prices mean high demand. That's a problem few city centers have these days. It's a good kind of problem to have. It's like when I hear people complain about parking in my village, and feel I need to remind them that there are tons of towns where you can park anywhere downtown - but would you want to live where nobody wants to go?
Mrs. BD and I went down to NYC yesterday to see The Pearl Theater Company's production of Part 1. Matinee, sold out house.
Their new digs are way over on the west end of 42nd St. We admire their efforts to run an acting company with its own theater, given the competition with hundreds of Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway theaters in NYC, very few with their own acting companies. (Along with the Classic Stage Company, we support them with modest donations.)
I am amazed by the number of fancy apartment towers that have emerged in that once-seedy area - "Hell's Kitchen" district, more or less. Used to be all street hookers and drug dealers, and now it's parents with kids in strollers with their dogs, even in the evening:
Over an early northern Italian dinner at the tiny, cozy Gallo Nero, Mrs. BD and I discussed whether the play - chock full of eternal quotes (eg "If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work" - is a coming of age play, or a comedy featuring Falstaff with some sword-fights and wars for tension.
My theory is that Shakespeare was an entertainer, a screenwriter, who would do anything to sell tickets. Throw in some sword fights, family conflicts, a king and some nobles, some thieves, a jester, a tavern wench, some human emotions, and see what happens. Just happened to be a genius writer/thinker too. When he made enough money (and he made plenty), he just retired from theater.
Despite the obnoxious Nanny Bloomberg, NYC sure seems to be thriving, clean, cheerful, safe, and busy. Just a wonder to me, always. So many good-looking people, too. If I were a little rich, I'd buy a brownstone there somewhere, rent out the top 2 floors, and keep the garden floor and the first floor as a pied a terre. That would be fun. We country and suburban folk need an escape once in a while, an escape to where the action is. Gee whiz, I really do love banging around Manhattan and I am fortunate to have a Mrs. who drags me in at least monthly, or more, to do interesting, stimulating things to prevent mental/cultural/spiritual decay.
Around here, we have seen many older people retire by buying a 6-month + 1 day place in a low tax state (FL, NH, SC, etc) and a place in the city. I like to remain rooted in my community, but I think that sounds cool.
By the way, Mrs. BD strongly recommends the series In Search of Shakespeare on Netflix. Enjoyable.
Half of those surveyed…said they had trouble finding recent graduates qualified to fill positions at their company or organization. Nearly a third gave colleges just fair to poor marks for producing successful employees. And they dinged bachelor’s-degree holders for lacking basic workplace proficiencies like adaptability, communication skills, and the ability to solve complex problems.
As I have said here many times, a Liberal Arts education is not job training. It's designed to be about life-enrichment and about molding civilized and thoughtful citizens with deeper understanding of the world and of their own civilization than secondary schools can offer.
If people want job credentials, I'd advise majoring in Medieval History, Classics, or Renaissance Literature, and minoring in Accounting, Engineering, hard sciences, or Econ (or the other way around) - combining the life-enhancement with the utilitarian.
The kids should consider this: anything that can be learned just as well at The Great Courses/Teaching Company should not be studied at great expense in college. With all the alternative ways of learning higher ed material nowadays, spending big bucks for it makes no sense. And if you need a class and exams to provide the discipline, then one should work on one's discipline.
You can obtain a top-notch Liberal Arts education with them, with as much breadth or depth as you desire. I eagerly await the day that the company will offer their courses for college credit.
Of the plethora of super-hero movies that have spilled out of Hollywood over the past few years, I've thought most of them went from 'pretty bad' to 'barely okay'. Green Lantern was a slight cut above, and Thor was terrific. It was so good it got its own review.
Add Watchmen to the A List. This engaging little number is intriguing from beginning to end. It deals with a banned group of (mostly) masked crimefighters and the story that unravels after one of them is killed. The ending poses the classic philosophical question; isn't it better that nine million people die, rather than nine billion?
As usual, click on the little symbol on the player bar to expand it to full-screen mode.
Here's a small snippet from the opening. Dig the 'real-time slo-mo' effect. I believe that's Donovan singing in the background.
Hot chicks, bullets, kissing, hot chicks kissing — this movie's got it all!
And then there's Rorschach, the narrator of the story and winner of the coveted 'Mr. Congenial' award in high school. This badass has such a good line at the end that I put it on my Great One-Liners page.
Check out the spy drone at the beginning listening in on your every word.
Likable old cuss, isn't he?
It's hard to put into words, but there's just something about this movie that's...
different.
I'll review the quite-intriguing Bunraku below the fold.
My son Nicholas is now in his early teens. He can swing a pretty mean axe, piling up the wood with steady progress. I remember well when multiple strikes of his little axe were as so many raindrops on a window. As years passed by we kept setting up a chopping station for him at a safe distance from mine. Little talk, much swinging, even if not much splitting. Then the tell-tale sound—a sort of hollow echo—of a strike that has hit home. This followed by the ripping sound of a strike that has broken through. I will never forget his looking over to see if I had heard that magical sound. Of course I had. I would not take that away from him. I would not take it away from us.
Gals seem to have a thing about diamonds. Must be in their blood. Large rocks are tacky. I think emeralds and rubies look great, and gold seems to have been a good investment, but diamonds are certainly flattering and are known to increase the odds of getting lucky.
Fellows, sneak out of work this morning and get her one of these outfits to show that you care:
That's easy for me to answer: I do, and I always did. A person without family, tribe, and community is a person adrift, a lone wolf, a lost soul. Governments have nothing to do with it. He says of socialist schemes:
The state replaced the family. It told men and women that they no longer needed to make permanent commitments to each or to their parents and children. So long as they paid their taxes, the state would bear the burden of their commitments. And so men and women gave up on each other, parents gave up on their children and children gave up on their parents, the family fell apart and now the state that took its place is also falling apart.
He is so earnest that he could almost be an optimist. He believes that the end of the world is nigh, and secretly is rather pleased about it. If he is of a scientific bent, he does the following: he takes an undesirable trend and projects it indefinitely into the future until whatever is the object of the trend destroys the world. For example, he might take the fact that Staphylococci reproduce exponentially on a Petri dish to mean that, within the week, the entire biosphere will consist of Staphylococci and nothing else. Man will be crushed under the weight of bacteria.
The desire to write for publication is one which inheres strongly in every human breast. From the proficient college graduate, storming the gates of the high-grade literary magazines, to the raw schoolboy, vainly endeavoring to place his first crude compositions in the local newspapers, the whole intelligent public are today seeking expression through the printed page, and yearning to behold their thoughts and ideals permanently crystallized in the magic medium of type...
Copies are available at Amazon for over $100. but I found a used copy somewhere on the internet for one dollar.
It's a practical, common-sense introduction to management. Fun to read with all of his examples. His main topics: Authority, Communication, Productivity, Morale, Change.
Previous books in this semester's not-for-credit course:
We have posted in the past about the history of romance being converted into covenant marriage. Marriage has always been in transition, and, for better or worse, it is in transition now.
As I have said countless times here, I don't know how people can run an orderly, complicated, and productive life without a committed partner, much less create a family with all of the things family entails - finances, traditions, social life, stability, values and religion, disciplines, etc. The very wealthy always could do that, but not otherwise.
I never forget the story of how Thomas Lincoln (Abe's father, a prosperous and prominent Kentucky farmer and real-estate investor at the time) hopped on his wagon and drove to the nearest city, leaving the kids in charge of themselves, to quickly fetch a new wife after Nancy died. I believe he fetched the first widow he could find, Sarah.
Today, he would be arrested for leaving the kids on their own.
In Mind and Cosmos, subtitled Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, Nagel revives the concept of teleology on the basis of his conviction that the mind-body problem has more serious ramifications for evolutionary science than is ordinarily accepted. How does the electrochemical activity of neurons in the human brain produce subjective, first-person experience? Nobody knows. Nagel says that the appearance of conscious beings such as us can be described as the universe waking up. Yet to him it seems unlikely that life would ever have got started in the first place, somehow springing forth from ‘dead matter’; still more unlikely that some forms of life would have developed consciousness; and extremely improbable that one form of life would have acquired the ‘transcendent’ power of reason. In order to explain these events, Nagel suggests, you need more than simply the ‘mechanistic’ tools of the laws of physics, natural selection, and so on. You need not just physical theory but ‘psychophysical theory’. And you might even need teleology.
It’s a bold claim, but not in itself an unscientific one. Indeed, what Nagel’s critics rarely conceded was the fact that teleological talk remains rampant to this day in popular and even academic science writing. Vast subterranean seams of purposive metaphor imply a picture of final cause not only in modern biology but in chemistry and physics, too. It has long been accepted that ordinary descriptions of biological function, such as ‘The heart is for pumping blood’, are teleologically inflected shorthand. But we also commonly read, for example, that subatomic particles ‘know’ or ‘choose’ the ‘right’ path to take; that molecules rearrange themselves ‘in order to’ achieve a certain energy state; or that traits in organisms evolve ‘in order to’ allow the animal to do something new.
Our metaphors are teleological, our language and understanding is metaphorical. Where does it all end?
...even after almost half a century, somewhere inside I’m still eighteen and scratching a living on horseback in chaps, helping push a dusty, cranky herd of cattle to the upper range, with the brim of my cowboy hat shading a blinding bright summer view that stretches out well beyond next payday and leapfrogs my petty cares, a view from where we stood on the high summer range, overlooking the winter pastures far below, and on beyond the cities known and unknown, my young heart sailing away past the verdant, distant hills, careening towards an unknown brilliant future … and now, like the old cowboy with his idiot grin, I find myself wandering that same path still, with that same young heart and those same illusions and foolish dreams.
500,000 rail passengers move daily through that remarkable two-level space. That's a lot, but it will be more when the Long Island Railroad's new underground construction is complete (LIRR now only goes to Penn Station out in the West Side hinterlands). It was brilliant to put those tracks underground up to 96th St., thus creating upper Park Avenue and its now-insanely valuable real estate.
This ol' country boy still loves NYC. In my youth, I greeted so many gals and pals at that station, coming or going, that I feel nostalgia whenever I am there. Adventure. It looks and feels far better now, but that musty old train station smell is the same.
My pic of the Grand Central Market. Good stuff for prosperous commuters
to pick up on the way home. Excellent cheese and fish stalls.
We all want to be effective in achieving our life goals. Like all of the classic or semi-classic books in this seminar, the best advantage is to be gained from group discussion of favorite points in a seminar forum or a group of peers instead of just by reading them. A book group sort of thing.
Is it possible to create new habits? Of course it is, but learning requires humility and improvement requires self-discipline and risk-taking. I am eager to learn from others. We all tend to learn how to negotiate life by example, or by our failures. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change.
All of these books have helped me enormously in my work life and in managing my personal life.
Previous books in this semester's not-for-credit course:
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