Carl from Chicago

Business executive interested in history, economics, taxation and energy policy.

Singapore

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Singapore looked shiny and new. They had a lot of development along the shore. They built the Marina Bay hotel which has an amazing “infinity” pool on the roof of the three hotel buildings connected together. This was built on reclaimed land.

The Singapore shoreline had a big skyline of mostly financial district buildings. My local contacts said that they all seemed to spring up over the last few years. Singapore as a city seemed to have the widest mix of races and ethnicities of any city I’ve ever visited, from Chinese to Malay to English / European and a large Indian population.

Singapore is a very expensive place to live / visit. It costs $70,000 to have the right to buy a car due to the limited parking and roadways available for the booming city. Singapore does have a favorable tax regime but this doesn’t really help US citizens since we have to pay US rates (after a foreign income exclusion) anywhere in the world unless you give up citizenship.

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Rolling Stone is Laughable on Hip Hop List

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From time to time I have to report out on the insanity of the Rolling Stones lists and their fixation with Bob Dylan, the sixties, and other obscurities. Here I had to revise their top guitarist list which was comically irrelevant, as well as their equally terrible top guitar songs list.

While I know hardly anything about hip hop relative to my knowledge of rock everyone knows that putting Eminem on the cover is a gaffe in that community. Even Eminem himself would probably cringe at being the face of hip hop, when you have icons like Jay-Z, Tupac, Biggie, Snoop, Dr Dre, and Kanye. Sure he’s the best white rapper alive but really…

Then onto the list. These songs are so old I even remember them.

1. “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash from 1982

2. “Rapper’s Delight” by Sugarhill Gang from 1979

3. “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambattaa from 1982

4. “Sucker MC’s” by Run-DMC from 1983

5. “Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang” by Dr. Dre and Snoop from 1992

It is hilarious that Rolling Stone put their “musty test” to rap just like they do to rock (Bob Dylan) and guitar (Jimi Hendrix). They are really saying that those first four songs that are 30 years old or even older are the best hip hop songs? They are definitely old and were pioneers but that isn’t the best. Fine I’ll agree with #5 but the first four gotta go.

Luckily the list is so laughably bad right from the top and with Eminem on the cover I don’t need to spend even five minutes thinking about it. This post basically wrote itself.

Cross posted at LITGM

Modern Surveillance

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Times change. Recently I was at a Starbucks in Old Town when I noticed that a woman near me got up and left her purse and other valuables at her table while she went to use the restroom or get another coffee.

Then I figured out what she was doing… her friend that she was Skyping with was sitting there, watching her belongings! From what I could see her friend was very vigilant in her task, like an overhead drone.

Cross posted at LITGM

Your Government Money At Work… On a Sports Car

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I was out walking at night in River North when I came upon a cool looking sports car outside on the street. I hadn’t seen one of these before so I took a photo to look it up.

When I woke up in the morning and was reading my old-school paper copy of the Wall Street Journal, I saw on the front page of the finance section an article titled “Its Battery Drained, Fisker Hunts for Partner” with a picture of my Fisker Karma in color. Per the article:

Fisker Automotive, the troubled maker of a battery-powered sports car, is accelerating a global search for a strategic partner to keep its business going…Fisker has taken steps to reduce its cash use. In July, it halted production of its sole vehicle, the $110,000 Karma, to lower production costs. The Karma has been hobbled by recalls and quality problems.

Who thought that we needed another sports car, in a market glutted with them? Why the US Government, of course. Per wikipedia:

In 2010, the Department of Energy awarded Fisker a $529 million green-energy loan, primarily to assist the company in transitioning the Karma, which is assembled in Finland, into the American markets. Fisker collected nearly $200 million until February this year, when the government froze the loan because the company was failing to meet the government’s milestones

What is also apparently hurting Fisker is that they can’t obtain batteries from A123 Systems, Inc. Bizarrely, the Wall Street Journal didn’t even mention that NOT ONLY did the US government bankroll Fisker on their futile plan to create another un-neeed sports car, but they also bankrolled A123 Systems in their battery development, per Wikipedia:

The company received US$249 million grant from the Department of Energy for building battery production facilities. As of June 2012, $129M of the grant has been used to build the 550 MWh Livonia plant and the Romulus plant. Remaining untapped $120M grant’s expiry date has been extended from end of 2012 to end of 2014. The company laid off 125 workers in December 2011 as demand for partner Fisker’s automobiles has been slack.

It is astounding to me that the government decided to build up an entirely vertically integrated chain of industry in order to produce a sports car that is unreliable that no one apparently wants to buy. And yet this is likely one of the most tangible “products” that the stimulus package delivered.

Also I am still shaking my head that the normally OK WSJ (for main stream media) didn’t see the further lunacy beyond just Fisker’s imminent demise in that it was linked to the troubles of A123 Systems. A Wikipedia search like yours truly could have figured that out.

Back when I took courses on economics and socialism they spoke of the government’s inability to allocate capital as a core problem with top down socialism. This is exhibit A. It is one thing to prop up an already existing business like the auto industry or banks (not always a good idea) which needs restructuring or a short term cash infusion, but starting an integrated value chain industry from scratch is beyond a longshot, it is lunacy.

Cross posted at LITGM

The Taj Mahal

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The Taj Mahal is as beautiful as you’d expect it to be. It is in Agra which used to be an earlier capital of India. We arrived early in the morning trying to get a sunrise shot but the light wasn’t right. We still had an opportunity to take great pictures.

This is the classic front view. Sometimes if you waited long enough you could get a picture with a better reflection and with no people in it but I wasn’t that patient.

Since the site is so massive it is hard to get all the minarets in one photo. Here is a view from up front on the side. Once you understand the scale of this it is even more amazing to think that they proposed building a version of the Taj Mahal in Dubai that is even larger (and includes a hotel).

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