Archive for the 'Business' Category

Here’s the S-1.


Is this company really worth the $100 billion or so implied by the IPO pricing? A few points of comparison: the market capitalization of Duke Energy is $29 billion. Target stores is $36B. Yahoo is $19B while Amazon is $101B and Cisco Systems is $89B. CSX railroad is $22B, Ford is $38B, and General Electric is $194B.


Do you think a $100B valuation for Facebook is realistic? What strategies and future environments could lead to this number being sustainable or even understated?


(I don’t have any direct financial interest in Facebook currently, but may do something with the stock at some point, more likely in the short than in the long direction. This post is for sharing of general information and discussion and does not represent financial advice.)

In Chicago a new real estate boom is occurring. There are 3 large hotels and 2 major apartment skyscrapers being built in River North.

There is also some good news on the “abandoned building” front. At 111 W Wacker, there is an abandoned, partially finished skyscraper that was going to be an 80+ story condo / hotel. They recently changed the facade in the front of the building as you can see in the photo above and claim to be working on completing the building, sitting idle since the 2008 crash. According to this article, it is to become a 65 floor apartment building, apparently satisfying an insatiable demand for high end apartments in the city (also due to the fact that people were having trouble selling condominiums in this real estate market). We’ll see if it actually gets built but this is a good start nonetheless. I wonder if it hurts a building to sit out half-finished, exposed to the elements all winter, but apparently this isn’t stopping the new owner. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.

On the other hand, there is a Staybridge Suite building in River North that has been covered with some sort of strange tarp for years. If you go to this link you can see the odd shape that the building was supposed to have. I will believe that they finish this damn thing when I see actual construction, although they do keep the lights on at night. The f’d up part of this is that Staybridge is an actual company – I hope that this leads to some bad publicity or something for them, leaving a giant half built eyesore in the middle of Chicago. Hopefully they make some headway on this before the current mini real estate boom ends in dust and misery like the last one.

Cross posted at LITGM

Richard Epstein:

So what next? The best first step is to free up labor markets world wide. Specifically, we need policies that take aim at the unbearable political forces that seek to tighten the regulatory noose on voluntary labor markets.
 
Unfortunately, the dominant attitude of macroeconomists is to assume that nothing that takes place within the labor market (of which Krugman never speaks) is large enough to influence the large macro trends to which they attribute today’s high employment rates.
 
The blunt truth is exactly the opposite. The calcification of labor markets is the primary impediment to economic recovery. The direct effects of government regulation of labor can matter far more than the indirect effects of macroeconomic policy, whether Keynesian or austerity-based. Neither austerity nor lavish public expenditures will improve the overall situation, which is why the massive increase in American public debt has not nudged unemployment rates down. The only workable solution has to stress job creation, not by misdirected subsidies, but by dismantling the government obstacles to market exchange.

Nick Schulz interviews Jim Manzi about Manzi’s forthcoming book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society. Excerpt from the interview:

We are all, to some extent, the prisoners of our experience. Like everyone, my experiences have surely created numerous biases to which, by definition, I am blind. But I have drawn some conscious lessons from my various jobs. Mostly, I suppose they relate to humility about how much harder it is to get anything done out there in the world than it seems like it ought to be when you read about it in a book or discuss it in a conference room. 

A good example is that I think that most mainstream economists radically underestimate the importance in any business of what in another context Carl von Clausewitz called “friction.” Headquarters rarely knows what is going on in the field; people in frontline positions have little idea of the big picture, and react to local conditions as best they can; entrepreneurs are mostly making it up as they go, and so on. Economists are of course aware of this issue conceptually, but their attempts to incorporate it into their models of the firm and the economy are inadequate in the extreme. As compared to mainstream economic doctrine, therefore, I believe that uncertainty plays a far bigger role in real world decision-making, that quantitative models of the economy are less useful as guides to action, and that trial-and-error learning as embodied in existing institutions and practices is more important.

(via Grim’s Hall)

Last week, long-time Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen published an extremely vitriolic column attacking Mitt Romney as “a man of falsehoods.” What I want to focus on in this post, though, is not the positives and negatives of Mr Romney, but rather the concluding paragraph of Cohen’s article:

He often cites his business background as commending him for the presidency. That’s his forgivable absurdity. Instead, what his career has given him is the businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is. This is what enables the slumlord to be a charitable man. This is what enables the corporate raider to endow his university. Business is business. It’s what you do. It is not who you are. Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.

So, in Cohen’s view, the businessman’s “concept of self” inherently involves a separation of what he does from who he is…a more forthright way he could have put this, I guess, would have been to simply say that all businessmen are weasels. (It’s interesting that Cohen chooses to use the term “businessman” rather than the gender-neutral term “businessperson.” Does he believe that there are no female slumlords? Does he think women inherently lack the analytical skills and competitive spirit required to be a successful corporate raider?) Evidently, Cohen believes that businesspeople are much more prone to unethical behavior (“Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.”) than are, say, tort lawyers, college professors, civil-service employees, or the executives of “nonprofit” organizations.

Of course, there is a long tradition of aristocrats looking down their long noses at those who are “in trade.” (Although I expect that average aristocrat’s view of a newspaper columnist wouldn’t be much more positive than his view of a storeowner or a factory manager.)

Cohen is far from being on the leftmost pole of the Washington journalistic establishment, and that fact that he feels able to make such pejorative drive-by assertions about the nature of businesspeople, without the need to build a case for their validity, speaks volumes about the current climate of opinion among those who today identify themselves as liberals and “progressives”–ie, the controlling elements of the Democratic Party.

A corporate executive who despised salespeople or manufacturing people would be unlikely to be able to run the sales function or the manufacturing function of his company effectively. There is no chance that politicians from a party dominated by people like Cohen–and much worse–will be able to supervise a free-market economy in a way leading to sustainable economic recovery and growth.

Yahoo! had a recent article titled “1 in 2 New Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed“. From the article:

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder

The article discusses the “plight” of an individual with a college degree who is working as a barista at Starbucks because he cannot find employment in his chosen field (note – is “barista” a masculine or feminine term, or neutral?)

And what was this individuals’ major? CREATIVE WRITING.

I often contemplate what someone with that major thinks their job opportunities really are out there in the world. Let’s see…

- You could use your skills to write something, like this blog, for instance (and cash in all the nickels you will receive, maybe)

- You could go to Hollywood and try to write for a show or screenplay (good luck – the competition is ferocious)

- You could try to write that serious book that is in your head (uh… and there is a 1 in a billion chance that it will sell enough copies, should it be published, to feed you for even one month)

I’m not saying that creative writing isn’t interesting, fun, or could lead to pay that could sustain your life. I just don’t think that you need a DEGREE to do this, and if you are “banking” on this out of the gate, then you are in for some very likely serious hard knocks in the cash flow area.

Also, it isn’t clear to me that “creative writing” as a degree is necessary to be a “creative writer”. I would be interested to hear of a single popular author or even widely read blogger or screenwriter that has a degree called “creative writing”. Since I must admit that I am not sure even what “creative writing” is I looked it up at trusty old wikipedia and here is their definition:

Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems. Writing for the screen and stage, screenwriting and playwriting respectively, typically have their own programs of study, but fit under the creative writing category as well.

Who would you even send a resume to for “creative writing”? If this definition was true, you aren’t sending it to any newspapers or technical writing firms (there are a lot of computer specifications being written) or even ad agencies; I don’t think that most screenwriters hire underlings and certainly the big film studios don’t hire you out of college and train you.

The article goes on to explain what is likely obvious to most readers:

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

I can’t imagine that these findings are a surprise to anyone. If you don’t have connections, you are better off getting a practical science-based or business-based degree (you can put computer science in whatever bucket you want) to get your foot in the door in business or in government. It IS true that many, many people started out with liberal arts degrees and rose to the top (often becoming lawyers) – but many of those that DID rise (in recent years) already had massive connections and were able to get in to elite graduate schools or careers like investment banking where only the most elite can apply. When you eliminate the liberal arts programs from elite Ivy-league or private universities from the mix (like Northwestern), getting a liberal arts degree from a non-elite school is going to leave you marooned in your job hunt. Probably 90%+ of liberal arts degree holders that are graduating now come from these non-elite schools (just a guess), so those are the ones likely “underemployed” or working as a barista somewhere.

What is surprising to me is that this is a surprise to anyone, at all.

Cross posted at LITGM

Once I was having a conversation with a friend after a few drinks and he said

What would the business world be like if it really was the way it appeared on soap operas?

On soap operas business is a clandestine, cloak and dagger operation.  You are forever opening drawers for obscure documents while the other guy isn’t there, thinking about conspiracies, and flirting / sleeping with one another.  People have large offices, secretaries, and complex relationships with everyone they encounter.

And very little actual work seems to get done.

When I was growing up everyone I knew had a job of some sort.  You started out mowing lawns and shoveling snow, and girls babysat.  Some people in rural areas (we weren’t near fields) de-tasseled corn, which could be a brutal job out in the hot sun.  When you were 16 you graduated into a new type of job, a more formal job with an actual boss on a payroll and with a paycheck, in retail or at a fast food restaurant or something like that.  You worked during the school year, and then you worked a lot during the summer, and you worked during spring break (if you could).  When you were back from college in the summer you worked too, or stayed on campus and found some sort of job there, instead.

Now kids don’t get jobs at nearly the same rate for a variety of reasons – they have a lot more homework than we did, and parents want them to focus on school as the highest priority.  Plus the minimum wage is higher now, and the retail and fast food jobs are often going to full-grown adults that need the work in this economy.  For whatever reason, I see a lot less kids (16-20) that seem to be potential full-time college student candidates doing actual work when I am out shopping or elsewhere in the type of jobs I used to work.

But instead there are many more TV programs that appear to show work.  The most prominent is “The Office”, which actually has many more truthful elements of actual work than the traditional soap operas.  The divide between management and staff is more obvious, and the staffers reflect their stereotypical personas (the semi-autistic or boring accountant, the pretty secretary, the beaten-down HR worker, the semi-optimistic sales staff, and those hangers on that have somehow survived rounds of layoffs but you can’t quite figure out what they do), while the actual workers are in the basement, moving paper with a forklift and having a culture of their own.

The general spirit of the office is the absolute minimum level of competence and business skills to keep the organization afloat, with a chimerical camaraderie of forced meetings and boring encounters.  There is a continuous focus on the head office and corporate, which is certainly realistic, since change do derive from the top often with little knowledge of what is happening “on the ground”.

Since many kids don’t have jobs or actual contact with formal managers, shows like “The Office” do in fact color their view of the traditional workplace.  While many kids can understand what is obviously real and what is obviously fake, the “accoutrements” of power (secretary, an enclosed office, a conference call relationship with corporate) seem relevant.  Certainly living in the “cube farm” is not a good fate, sitting at a communal table or small beige cube adjacent to obnoxious, dopey or deranged co-workers is to be escaped at all costs.

An abstract concept of “work” and “management” unhinged from “actual work” or “actual management” appears to be at its highest in the (wealthy) Arab world.  This excellent article in Bloomberg describes the job situation for young adults in Saudi Arabia.

Today, all three still live at home, get pocket money from their parents and are jobless in Riyadh, capital of the world’s largest crude oil exporter.  When the three Saudi men met each other in school 11 years ago, they dreamed that by the time they had reached their mid-20s, each would have a well-paid job, a house, a new car and maybe a wife

Most of the work in Saudi Arabia is actually done by guest workers or expatriates.  The “dirty” work of construction, domestics, etc… is done by fellow Arabs from countries that aren’t sparsely populated and endowed with natural resources, and the “thinking” work of managing and running businesses is done by expatriates from around the world.

The article goes on to explain how young adult Saudis don’t want to work in supermarkets, construction, or as cashiers.  They want the jobs that they see on TV – the managerial jobs, sitting behind a desk, in a climate controlled and first class office building.

“In my previous job, I used to sit at a desk in my own office,” he says. “I want the same standard of work.”  Abdullah, who has a high school diploma, says he has been offered “bad” jobs: as a waiter, security guard and cashier.

The interesting part of this is that the Saudis want those jobs without any sort of skills that would make them relevant in the wider, competitive world.  They have a concept of what “work” means and this abstract concept is completely unhinged from any sort of skill building or “work your way up from the bottom” mentality that could support it on a larger scale.

This is the ultimate abstraction of work; routine, office tasks with demanded accoutrements that have no bearing on the underlying economy or added value of goods or services.

Cross posted at LITGM

Barry Ritholtz put up an interesting post this past weekend. He attended some lunches and dinners with the heads of some start up companies. I am encouraged about what he had to say. Here is the money, italics mine:

The youth of America are full of ideas and energy. They don’t give a shit that their parents fucked everything up — they are going to steam roll over the old order and replace it with one of their own. They understand that future is not about the past. They know that they are a business of one, that no company or government is ever going to offer them economic security. They are their own team, brand and idea factory.

There are lots of things people are rightfully upset about — I lost my voice ranting last night about eejit economists who think the crisis was caused by “predatory borrowing” (it wasn’t). But that’s not what is going to be propelling us forward.

Don’t look to DC — the political debates there are laughable. Its like watching two different T-Rex debating who gets to eat the dead plant eater unaware of the the giant asteroid hurtling their way. Their argument gets resolved when the asteroid turns their summer into nuclear winter.

The old order, the political hacks and hangers on, the whiners and recession porn stars and permabears — the dinosaurs — all have no idea WTF is coming their way. They are going to be mowed down like so many extinct species before them. They cannot see the asteroid hurtling their way from the deep black depths of space.

The Future of America is coming. It is not being driven by Goldman Sachs or the GOP or Obama. That’s old school, the old order, yesterday. It’s coming, and coming sooner than most people imagine.

When you get run over, don’t say you weren’t warned . . .

While I think Rithotlz ignores some of the roadblocks along the way that will slow down and possibly derail this new breed, such as old school politics and the like, I agree with his thrust in general.

My generation – the Gen X ers, and those who are coming after us have received a pretty raw deal, perpetrated upon us by the Boomers. We realize that there will be no Social Security at this pace, even though our weekly paychecks are deducted for it. We understand that there are millions of people who have enormous salaries and benefits for pushing papers across the desk of a DMV, and we resent it. Now that we are starting to have kids, we are teaching them that there is NO REASON to rely on the government for ANYTHING and that they are on their own. And that we vote accordingly.

I agree with Ritholtz – some of the new tech and other things coming down the pipe are going to blow the old guard away. We can organize a rally very quickly with thousands of people with a simple Facebook page. This is just one example. The dinosaurs better get ready. Because it is coming. It may take a decade or two, but it will be here before you know it.

Cross posted at LITGM.

*the comments at the Ritholtz post are very good

Ran across some information about a project to create an open-source Jacquard loom. A Jacquard has the ability to weave elaborately-patterned fabrics by controlling each individual warp thread in the weaving process. Machines that can handle a large number of threads are pretty costly…numbers I’ve seen are in the $30K-60K range…and there are evidently a lot of hobbyists and small businesspeople who would like such a loom but are unable to afford one. Hence, the open-source loom project.

The Jacquard is important in the history of technology, and I’ve been intending to write about this topic for a while. A good source is Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age, by James Essinger. (I’m not a weaver, so hope that those who are will forgive and correct any inaccuracies or incorrect use of terminology in this post.)

Traditionally, the weaving of patterned fabric was a very labor intensive process requiring that for each throw of the shuttle, a number of cords must be pulled or not pulled in order to lift or not lift specific threads. Essinger estimates only 1 inch of fabric per day, for a weaver and his assistant, could be produced–so these fabrics were definitely luxury goods.

Read the rest of this entry »

…would be the predictable result of a second Obama term. So says Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, in this video.

via Instapundit

It’s been reported that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who is also head of Obama’s jobs council, is increasingly appalled at the President’s economic ideas. Charlie Gasparino says:

Friends describe Immelt as privately dismayed that, even after three years on the job, President Obama hasn’t moved to the center, but instead further left. The GE CEO, I’m told, is appalled by everything from the president’s class-warfare rhetoric to his continued belief that big government is the key to economic salvation.

The “Just Unbelievable” title of this post does not refer to Mr Immelt’s belated recognition of the problems with Obamaism (if such has really occurred–the Gasparino story is based soley on unidentified sources)–but rather to the headline that the major financial website Business Insider chose to put on this story:

GASPARINO: Here’s Why GE CEO Jeff Immelt Is Going To Stab Obama In The Back

(The “stab in the back” phrase does not actually appear in the Gasparino article, but was added by the BI author or headline-writer)

Read the rest of this entry »

A long time ago I decided to make an effort to look my best. Conventional wisdom said guys get better haircuts at female hair shops because the standards are higher. (Actually the prices are higher because getting your man-hair cut at a chick place is like taking your Camry to the Rolls Royce dealer for an oil change. Also some female barbers hairdressers give high-maintenance haircuts that look good when you are all teased and pouffed up as you leave the shop but require gels and blow-dryers to maintain the look. But I digress.) Anyway I started getting my haircuts at places that called themselves salons.

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Amazon is acquiring Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash. Kiva makes robotic systems for picking, packing, and shipping products in fulfillment centers for distribution operations. It seems clear that Kiva is intended to play a dual role at Amazon: supporting Amazon’s own distribution centers, and generating expanded revenues through the sale of Kiva systems to other companies.

There is a parallel with what Amazon has been doing in cloud services: Amazon developed an extensive set of capabilities for data center operations, which it needed to support its massive e-commerce business, and several years ago began selling these capabilities to other companies as well as using them internally. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud has now become a leading provider, perhaps the dominant provider, in the cloud services marketplace.

Use of a technology investment both to support internal operations of a company and as the base for an externally-saleable product or service has a strong appeal; however, it can be fraught with problems. Priority decisions in product development are likely to become highly politicized due to the conflicts between internal needs and the demands of the external marketplace, and potential external customers can be scared off by fear of being put in the position of competing with their supplier. Amazon’s success with Cloud, however, builds confidence in their ability to navigate these tricky waters successfully.

Interestingly, Kiva is backed by Bain Capital Ventures.

On the masthead of our blog at “Life in the Great Midwest” it used to read “We Shill for Nobody”. And that is still true. But if we find something that may be interesting to others we like to share it.

Recently I bought a Sony Blu-Ray Disc Player BDP-BX58. This replaces my existing Samsung DVD player (which worked fine). I bought it, after rebate, for about $100 at Costco.

I bought it to try out the internet through my television. It also allows you to stream other media (pictures from your PC, songs from your PC, etc…) through your TV which I wasn’t as interested in.

Although it is a DVD player, I only put a DVD in to make sure it worked and all the wires, sound, etc… were working correctly through my surround sound system. I remember reading an article about a focus group that tested a smart phone with a bunch of high school students – the researcher said in all the time he watched them text, stream, and run apps, he never saw them use the smart phone to MAKE A PHONE CALL. Like them, I was basically using this DVD player as a gateway to the internet not as a DVD playing device.

I went to You Tube and immediately started having fun. Recently I was at a friends’ condo and we were discussing music (for hours, since I know a lot of obscure stuff, but he dwarfs my knowledge on the topic). It was cool to just type in a band like “Mastodon” and all their videos come up, including all their appearances on late night shows like Letterman. Obviously there is a lot of stuff on You Tube and it is fun to watch it through your TV.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ann Althouse has a good post today. I can’t get through her Captcha system so I thought I would post a few comments here. This NY Times op-ed piece is the source for her observations. It is behind the Times’ idiotic payment wall so go to her blog for the link.

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

That certainly states the issue clearly. What does he complain about ?

I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

What specifically is the problem ?

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent many years in the consultancy / accounting industry, which has many similarities to the business model for legal firms. They are both 1) primarily based on hourly billing rates for their income 2) use a pyramid or partnership structure with the top members often receiving an equity or ownership stake 3) have partners who need to seek out business in order to keep the revenues flowing. If you are interested in this industry, I highly recommend reading “Managing the Professional Services Firm” by David Maister, a timeless book on the topic.

The Wall Street Journal had an article recently titled “Next Pension Clash: Law Firms” with the subtitle “Unfunded plans burden younger partners, but build loyalty among small group”.

At some of the country’s top firms, younger lawyers will foot the bill for deluxe pension plans that could drag down their own earnings for years to come… these pensions are largely unfunded. Partners at some elite firms are often entitled to between 20% and 30% of their peak pay after retirement – in many cases, for life… that could mean payments of $400,000 to $600,000 per retired lawyer.

One of my friends who is a partner in a professional services firm once told me that he’d never tell his son to go into a business where he was “selling his time”. While there are many other attributes (a senior person is selling his time AND his ability to manage and supervise staff), there is a lot of truth to this quote.

Thus the partner, who was well compensated while he was at the firm, is now going to collect a pension in the future, while he is no longer contributing to the ongoing revenues of the firm. It is true that the client relationships that the partner built up (and left behind) are valuable to the firm, along with any specialties that the partner built up (and trained staff on), but the bottom line is that most of that revenue stream is up for grabs soon after the partner is gone. Even if the clients are left in good shape and well transitioned, if the NEXT partner doesn’t do a good job, all that goodwill is drained very quickly.

Like all unfunded pension schemes – it is really a “bet” on the future, on an era of rising prosperity, and a bet that paid off for a generation of retired lawyers. For those coming up the ranks, however, the future of course looks more uncertain, with more vicious competition and increasing use of offshore resources for more mundane matters, which both can be a source of short term profits as well as a long term threat of cannibalization of higher margin revenues up the chain.

It seems like these sorts of burdens would turn off rising lawyers, who have the ability to “jump ship” quite easily since non-compete laws generally don’t apply to lawyers, from what I understand (it is interesting how those that write the laws that entangle everyone else managed to develop an escape hatch for themselves). These sorts of payouts, which come out of partner profits after all expenses have been allocated, can be significant in harder times.

Traditional pensions are also under intense pressure, especially since the “rate of return” assumptions are being reduced with the Fed’s extremely low interest rates. This article sums up how corporations are asking for relief:

The latest bid is spurred by the effects of the Federal Reserve’s low interest-rate policy, which has led to soaring pension liabilities.

While the companies are basically arguing that interest rates are artificially low and that their funding requirements shouldn’t surge as a result, the unstated point is that returns for EVERYONE have gone down, as well. Many models for investors in 401k plans used to assume 10% rates of return indefinitely; given market volatility and flat returns over the last DECADE, 10% / year seems ridiculous to investors of all stripes.

The pension firms in this article often have different challenges because they are often unfunded and totally dependent on future revenue streams; in this sense at least they are immune from the Fed’s zero interest rate policy distortions.

Cross posted at LITGM

CommodityOnline:

India’s crude oil imports from Iran is facing a risk of potential disruption as increasing US and EU sanctions make it impossible for Indian ships to obtain insurance.

Greg Scoblete, The Compass Blog (Real Clear World):

I imagine if I were an Indian official, I’d be a bit peeved to learn that acting “responsibly” means privileging the interests of the United States over my own country. Nevertheless, Burns has a point. After all, India may rely on Iran for 12 percent of its oil imports, but look at what the United States has been willing to do for India:
 

Presidents Obama and Bush have met India more than halfway in offering concrete and highly visible commitments on issues India cares about. On his state visit to India in November 2010, for example, President Obama committed the U.S. for the very first time to support India’s candidacy for permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council.

 
I don’t know about you, but if the U.S. was asked to forgo 12 percent of its oil imports in exchange for another country’s endorsement for a seat on a multilateral forum, I’d make the trade. I mean, c’mon, 12 percent? The U.S. gets about that much from the Persian Gulf – and we barely pay that area any attention at all…

Europa:

“The EU-India free trade agreement will be the single biggest trade agreement in the world, benefiting 1.7 billion people,” said president Barroso. “It would mean new opportunities for both Indian and European companies. It would mean a key driver for sustainable growth, job creation and innovation in India and Europe.”
 
The EU is India’s largest trading partner, accounting for about €86bn of trade in goods and services in 2010. Bilateral trade in goods rose by 20% between 2010 and 2011.”

Asia Times Online:

Last year Israel supplied India with $1.6 billion worth of military equipment and is India’s second-largest defense supplier after Russia. Sales are only going to rise. Indian defense procurements from Israel in the period 2002-07 have touched the $5 billion mark.

And this doesn’t even get into the China-EU-US-Israel-Saudi Arabia wheels-within-wheels complications when it comes to arms deals, hoped for arms deals, trade deals, hoped for trade deals, energy politics, and the rest of it….

It’s not 1985, now is it? The past is a different country, a Russian (Soviet)-oriented Cold War country used to thinking in terms of “Kissengerian” alliances and blocs. An intellectual adjustment may be needed. It’s like 3-D chess out there….

Speaking of energy:

“Was Saudi Arabia involved?” (Asia Times Online.) If it makes you feel better, let me point out that Saudi petrodollars continue to fund all sorts of interesting educational activities on the subcontinent, in Africa, and elsewhere, along with Iranian monies. So that’s nice.

-from SHOTS, NPR’s Health Care Blog:

Health care reform is no laughing matter, but MIT economist Jonathan Gruber’s new comic book on the subject aims to communicate some pretty complicated policy details in a way that, if not exactly side-splitting, is at least engaging.
 
In Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It’s Necessary, How It Works, Gruber steps into the pages of a comic book to guide readers through many of the major elements of the law, including the individual mandate to buy insurance, the health insurance exchanges where people will be able to buy coverage starting in 2014 and how the law tackles controlling health care costs.

I draw your attention to another graphic novel: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation.

While I was buying a copy of Persepolis from a real-life book store a few years ago, a young woman at the sales counter mentioned that there was a “great” graphic novel about North Korea that I might like. I’m not a graphic novel reader and I think Persepolis is it for me unless I decide to review the health care book, but it interested me that she seemed so enthusiastic about the topic of North Korea and graphic novels. I guess it makes sense given our “information overload” society. I don’t know. Why not look for clarity?

PS: Linking is not endorsement and all that.

PPS: What’s the “all that” about? Eh, I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for the past week or so and my blogging has been pretty terrible because of it. I linked the health care graphic novel because it amused me, not because I am simpatico with the message. I think you all knew that already….

Minneapolis is the head of commercial navigation on the Mississippi river. The city’s barge facilities handle about 600,000 tons of traffic annually–not huge by water-transport standards, but not trivial either.

Concerns about a predatory fish called the Asian Carp have raised the idea of permanently closing the locks at St Anthony Falls and hence eliminating Minneapolis’s industrial waterfront. Maybe this is necessary, or maybe there is an alternative way of dealing with the carp invasion–I don’t know. But I do think that the reaction of the Mayor to the potential termination of barge operations in his city is a little–jarring:

Get over it. Minneapolis does not need a port

What Minneapolis apparently does need, in the opinion of many real-estate developers and politicians, is a new swath of riverfront parks, condos, and restaurants.

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…out of a wide range of potential choices, is Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). I first became aware of this reprehensible individual after seeing the incredibly arrogant letter that she wrote to Kathleen Fasanella (of the blog Fashion Incubator) in response to Kathleen’s attempts to call attention to the harm being done to many small manufacturers by the ill-thought-out CPSIA legislation.

There are lots of reasons to dislike Schakowsky (see this, for example)—another such reason made its appearance Wednesday with her assertion, in an attempt to defend Obama’s suppression of the Keystone Pipeline project, that “Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs, and investing in green technologies will produce that and more.”

Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs?

There is of course a huge difference between a project funded with private money that will act to reduce America’s energy costs and increase its industrial competitiveness, and one funded with taxpayer money (much of it undoubtedly going to politically-well-connected corporations) which would quite likely act to increase America’s energy costs and thereby reduce its industrial competitivness. Perusal of Schakowsky’s bio reveals no experience at all working in the private sector, of course.

Whatever one thinks of the Pipeline and of various “alternative energy” options, surely it should be obvious to all that this CongressCreature’s cavalier dismissal of twenty thousand jobs should be considered unacceptable arrogance on the part of any American officeholder. It is a level of arrogance that, unfortunately, has become far too common among the government classes.