Folks: I’ll be working in San Francisco Monday and Tuesday of next week (Jan 14 and 15). Please email me, philg@mit.edu, if you’re interested in getting together. One possibility is downtown coffee on the morning of January 16. I might be able to make it down to Silicon Valley on the 16th if I can finish work early.
Decided: Coffee at the Fairmont (Nob Hill) at 8:00 am. The lobby should be an awesome place for conversation! (unfortunately I don’t think that I can make it down to Silicon Valley)
About 35 seconds into this video (Guardian), Nancy Pelosi says that “a wall is an immorality,” presumably explaining why she and other Democrats won’t vote to fund the “wall” requested by the Trumpenfuhrer.
On the other hand, we already have 580 miles of “barrier” (Wikipedia), which includes parts that look like walls and parts that look like fences.
Could the solution to our current political impasse be for Democrats to vote to fund an extension of the current “barrier”? (Or, if they truly do think that any kind of barrier is immoral, will they vote to tear down the existing 580 miles? If something is “immoral” then surely we don’t want to keep doing it.)
Related:
“I met Sonny for the first time in 1992 when we both were candidates for the Republican Senate nomination in California. I shook hands with him, as we prepared for a debate, and I immediately liked him. The first question in the debate was about illegal immigration. I gave a prepared three-minute answer. Sonny simply said, ‘It’s illegal immigration. It’s illegal. Enforce the law.'” (regarding Sonny Bono)
Cuba was richer, per capita, than Singapore in 1959 (Forbes) and Havana was the richest part of Cuba. As such, the city enjoyed world class physical infrastructure circa 1959: roads, sidewalks, beautiful houses and colonial buildings, etc.
Except for some central business district areas and parts of the city that have been restored for tourist, Havana today is essentially in ruins. It is a good thing that not everyone has a smartphone because walking and trying to use a phone would likely result in falling into a pit (not marked off with cones) or stumbling over broken pavement. One guide said that approximately 33 buildings collapse monthly in Havana and 600 people are injured from collapsing ceilings, etc. (see also USA Today)
The GDP per capita today is about the same as it was in 1959 while the cost of materials and construction and construction have skyrocketed. There is no way that current Cubans could reproduce the infrastructure that their grandparents and great-grandparents bequeathed to them. Even if they never spent a dime on building anything new, I don’t think that 100 percent of their income would suffice to maintain the roads and buildings that they had in 1959 (concrete deteriorates rapidly in a hot humid salty environment).
Cuba should be a cautionary tale for any nation that isn’t experiencing substantial per capita GDP growth. Even if a country maintains a steady population and income per capita, the rise in the cost of repairing and rebuilding infrastructure means that quality and quantity will decline.
Apple is in the news for disappointing earnings growth. I wonder if this is due to lack of innovation. I’ve met a lot of folks who are still using their iPhone 5S and aren’t interested in upgrading unless motivated by a device failure. Thus, at least from the point of view of the average user, the company stopped innovating after the 5S was delivered.
I’m reasonably happy with the iPhone X, but am not excited about the XS or whatever Apple calls its latest and greatest. I would switch to Android if any vendor made a superior camera (in practice) to Apple’s. Now that I’ve stopped using ForeFlight, I have no allegiance to iOS (which maybe limits how much profit Apple can extract from people like me?).
Back in the 1980s, you knew that you were in a Third World country when
traffic congestion made daytime trips take 2-3 times longer than they would be on clear roads
your driver had only a tenuous command of local geography
your driver was not proficient in English
On a recent visit to Miami, my born-in-Colombia Uber driver was unable to find the Hyatt on Miami Beach, unable to follow the directions from the Uber app, and unable to speak more than a few words of English. Here’s Interstate 95 circa 6 pm on a Monday:
Upon arrival in Boston, my born-in-the-Dominican-Republic driver struggled with the English language (after six years in the U.S.; he’d been a bus driver in the DR so presumably hadn’t needed English there) and with the mid-December snow (thanks, Honda, for engineering the Accord so that I’m still alive!).
None of my previous 10 Uber drivers in Miami or Washington, D.C. had been native-born or were English-proficient.
Is it fair to say that, at least when it comes to traveling around our cities, the U.S. is delivering the Third World 1980s life experience?
[Tangentially related: We lined up for coffee and “Aussie pies” at a shop in St. Augustine, Florida a couple of days ago. The huge Christmas/New Year’s tourist crush was over, but the city was still packed with humanity (of course we need more via immigration!). It was 10:30 am and they’d mostly sold out of the pies. I noted to a former Soviet comrade: “This is just like what Westerners said life in the Soviet Union was like circa 1970. You wait in a long line and then when you get to the front find out that everything has been sold.”]
Hurricane season is over so perhaps it is time to plan that Caribbean vacation. If you’re curious to visit Cuba as a U.S. citizen, you can choose between going native (hotels) and just touching briefly at the edges via a cruise.
Based on my December cruise with Royal Caribbean on Empress of the Seas, here are some thoughts…
The cruise is way cheaper than any of the land-based options that I saw. The basic rooms with window were being marketed at $100/night per person, including food and entertainment. If you need to be connected, Internet is roughly $40 per room additional per night (two people, one phone and one laptop each; unfortunately it was not working consistently on our ship and in our room).
A lot of the fun of Cuba seems to happen after 9 or 10 pm. Some cruises will dock overnight in Havana or stay late (we departed at 1 am so that people could come back from scheduled shows), but if you’re passionate about Cuban music the hotel option is probably best.
(Note that the cruise ship essentially becomes a temporary downtown hotel. The dock is smack up against the old city and a 5-minute walk from many of the liveliest tourist sections of town. See picture below.)
Cuban official salaries are low by US/EU/China standards, e.g., $60/month for a doctor or $20/month for a government job that requires a college degree (though keep in mind that they don’t have to pay taxes or rent). A pedi-cab driver can charge $5 or $10 for a ride if a tourist isn’t passionate about negotiation. A schoolteacher can substantially supplement her income with one night of, well, “work” with a tourist. Thus there is an entire industry of hustlers trying to persuade tourists to buy various things. Walking around Havana unescorted, a pair of male tourists will be saying “no, gracias” to offers of taxis, women, restaurant meals, and bars/shows every 30 seconds. A tour group out of a cruise ship, on the other hand, glides through this semi-official economy mostly unnoticed. Near the paddle-equipped guide and sporting a matching tour number sticker, the same two guys will be presented with an offer once every 10 minutes.
If you want to expend minimal dollars and zero effort to satisfy your curiosity regarding what life is like in Cuba and how socialism has worked out (recognizing that it hasn’t truly been given a fair chance!), the good news is that a couple of all-day guided tours off a ship will suffice. Perhaps it is the demographic, but we didn’t hear anyone on our ship saying “Boy, I wish we’d had three more days in Cuba to dig into the local experience.” People were more likely to comment on the poverty and disrepair that they’d observed.
Beginning of a new year and time for some tax planning. If you’re not a U.S. citizen and thus subject to worldwide taxation, maybe it is time to move to the U.K.? The all-in tax rate for “entrepreneurs” is 10 percent for capital gains (see Entrepreneurs’ Tax Relief). Compare to 37.1 percent for a California resident (20 percent federal plus 13.3 percent to uphold virtue within the state plus 3.8 percent Obamacare tax).
A wealthy (through marriage) and virtuous (through Trump-hatred) friend posted while on a $1,000+/day luxury vacation on Grand Cayman:
I mentioned the fundamental lack of sustainability of any economic ecosystem involving cruise ships filled with passengers interested in snorkeling coral reefs and visiting white sandy beaches. How the destruction of mangrove forests for the sake of resort development will only increase the damage done by future hurricanes, and that it was my hope that tourists not want to visit places with gross wealth disparity between themselves and the local population: the simile is an invasive species that devours resources to (the resources’) extinction before moving on.
This is consistent with a lot of what I’ve seen and heard from elite Americans. They say that they’re upset by inequality. They also say that they hate cruises and they mock cruise ship passengers as obese, uneducated, undiscriminating, and uncouth.
My response:
If you dislike wealth disparity you should welcome cruise ships. They are the cheapest form of vacation. A week on a cruise ship that visits St. Bart’s is cheaper than one night of hotel on that island. (Currently on a Royal Caribbean ship where the cost per person per day is less than $100/day including food, entertainment, and transportation to all of the ports visited.)
Let me devote New Year’s Day, then, to celebrating the cruise concept, which enables people of many different income levels and nationalities to come together and experience the world. Empress of the Seas is the smallest vessel in the Royal Caribbean fleet, but we still had crew from 59 countries and passengers from 39 countries on board. The cost of visiting Cuba via this ship was less than half of the cheapest land-based “person-to-person” tours that I’d ever seen. Roughly 20 percent of the Americans on board were African Americans. Due to the policy of mixing up passengers at tables for eight, I saw more mixed white/black groups in a week on the ship than in a year of dining out in Boston. Retired government workers (loyal Democrats!) conversed politely with working small business owners.
Here I am with a new friend:
(my Facebook friends posted some similar images, minus the golden halo, after each had found one African American friend to join for Black Panther)
One block of cabins on our ship was occupied by graduates of a Taiwanese engineering college enjoying their 60th reunion(!).
Who else, other than Purell sales reps, will be brave enough to join me in hoping that 2019 sees further growth in what has already been a spectacular growth story and a force for national and global unity?
