Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Little did he know that his last three fillets would end up in a Thanksgiving meal. And what a meal it was. I salute his memory.
I’m very intrigued by Amazon’s new Kindle device.
Dave Davison, IT venture capitalist and visualization maven, is very high on the potential of Kindle:
“Amazon “kindles” a new fire in electronic book reading. This 6 minute video shows how you will use this new portable, 10.3ounce, paperback size device. Download your reading library via a wireless connection just like calling on your cell phone. This device and the kindle service will revolutionize the book, magazine,newspaper and blog publishing media space.”
Count me as an avid reader and collector of books but if Amazon has truly solved the ” reading online” problem that causes me to print out anything longer than a handful of pages, with a vision-friendly, virtual-paper screen, then I’d be keen to own a Kindle. Just putting all of my magazines on it to reduce clutter or using it to read on the treadmill instead of lugging books in my gym bag, would be worth it. I would also speculate that, if you buy an absurdly large number of books annually, as I do, a kindl could allow you to purchase strategically; some in dead-tree version and some virtual form, and accumulate a considerable cost savings.
I would also expect that, as a platform, the uses for Kindle are only going to grow.
Cross-posted at Zenpundit
Following Helen’s example, I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. Unlike Helen, I have no plans yet to import Thanksgiving into my country, unless I get to cancel Labor Day (the international edition on May 1st) in exchange.
Update: It seems that some people had to do without turkey.
(This is a rerun of a 2003 post at Photon Courier. New links added at the end.)
Stuart Buck encountered a teacher who said “Kids learn so much these days. Did you know that today a schoolchild learns more between the freshman and senior years of high school than our grandparents learned in their entire lives?” (“She said this as if she had read it in some authoritative source”, Stuart comments.)
She probably had read it in some supposedly-authoritative source, but it’s an idiotic statement nevertheless. What, precisely, is this wonderful knowledge that high-school seniors have today and which the 40-year-olds of 1840 or 1900 were lacking?
One trend in housing is the ever-increasing size of the average American house. A drive through any city or suburb will show that new houses are growing larger, right up to the lot lines, and buyers perceive total square feet to be an important amenity. If you took the typical suburban family and put them in the house that they originally grew up in they’d generally shudder – only one bathroom for all those people, sharing a bedroom, and hardly any closets! Closets are viewed as a key amenity, with the ability to store racks and racks of shoes and clothes for all seasons is a virtual requirement.
In parallel with this is the growth in off site storage. When I was growing up it seemed that few people I knew had off site storage, but it seems much more prevalent today. Storage for furniture, hobbies, collectibles and everything else that people can’t bear to throw out.
While houses are getting larger and in particular storage elements & off-site storage is a growth industry, a different trend is going the OTHER way. Deflation, or chronic price reduction, is occurring with most of the “stuff” that people are storing.
Here is one example – my new “blog” camera with a small footprint (it is pretty slim although the lends does pop out when you turn it on) was only $212 and it has 7 megapixels and a bunch of cool features, like when you tilt the camera 90 degrees the photos switch from landscape to portrait in “view” mode. This camera blows the doors off previous digital cameras that I paid over 600 dollars for just a few years ago.
