he Web icon's CEO on the mobile computing revolution, the future of newspapers, and privacy in the digital age.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.
To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately. The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company's way, along came Apple's iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google's search box. The "app" revolution was going to spell an end to Google's dominance of Web advertising.
But that's all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google's CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.
For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That's a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.
True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: "You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it."
"In general in technology," he says, "if you own a platform that's valuable, you can monetize it." Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android's continued development.
And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.
Can it all be so easy? Google's stock price has fallen nearly $150 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn't give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—the triumvirate running the company—to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a "cash cow" and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.
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Zina Saunders
Eric Schmidt
But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors' minds: how to preserve Google's franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when "search" is outmoded.
The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? "We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. "I mean that in a positive way. We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type."
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
Let's say you're walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there's a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you've been reading about took place on the next block.
Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know. "The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically," Mr. Schmidt says.
Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the "economic disaster that is the American newspaper." He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted "brands" will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: "The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That's our business."
Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he's a believer in targeted everything: "The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."
That's a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: "As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that's basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time."
Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the "public interest" sector shouting "treason."
What was most striking about the set of net neut "principles" Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn't apply to wireless. "The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy," Mr. Schmidt told one news site. "And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue."
Wait. Isn't the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn't wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google's Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.
If that weren't about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. "There's a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does," Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. "The first opponent will be Microsoft."
Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is "good for consumers" and "fair" to competitors.
Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find "creepy."
Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn't stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?
Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.
"I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he adds. "I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things," he says.
Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a "company of consequence." And though "there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money" in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more "companies of consequence" will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.
A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost "took down" the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the "proxy cache"—lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. "The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you," says Mr. Schmidt. "It was a tremendous technological achievement."
But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt's.
Mr. Jenkins writes the Journal's weekly Business World column.
Investment Chart Kondratiev Wave
Thursday, 19 August 2010
Bye-Bye to the Fed-Funds Rate
Ben Bernanke's 'exit strategy' will involve a sea change in the conduct of monetary policy. Just ask the European Central
By BENN STEIL AND PAUL SWARTZ
The Federal Reserve last week announced that it would reinvest proceeds from its massive mortgage-bond portfolio, sustaining what Chairman Ben Bernanke had in February called its "extraordinary lending and monetary policies." But there must eventually be an exit from such policies. And if the chairman is to be taken at his word, the Fed's exit strategy will involve a sea change in the way it conducts and communicates its policies. In particular, it implies that the Fed will no longer be able to control the critically important fed-funds rate—or indeed any interest rate at all. That would have far-reaching implications for the future of monetary policy.
Between August and November 2008, the Federal Reserve swelled its balance sheet to $2.2 trillion from $940 billion to ease a potentially catastrophic credit crunch brought on by fears of cascading defaults. The assets added to the balance sheet are today comprised overwhelmingly of mortgage securities. The purchase of these securities had the parallel purpose of shoring up a collapsing housing market.
Much of the money the Fed conjured to buy these assets made its way into reserves, which the banks chose to hold at the Fed. Excess reserves—reserves held above and beyond what the Fed requires of the banks as a minimum—soared to more than $1 trillion from $2 billion.
As long as this money remains parked at the Fed, it poses no risk of fuelling inflation—just like cars parked in garages can't tie up traffic. But at some point the banks will muster the courage to begin transforming these near zero-yielding reserves into credit, and the Fed knows it then will have to act to prevent exuberance from pushing up prices too far and too fast—in traffic terms, to stop the cars from streaming onto the roads all at once.
In normal times, the Fed would do this by selling Treasury securities from its balance sheet, which the banks pay for using the excess dollars they've parked in reserves. Those dollars are then no longer available to the banks to create credit.
But these are not normal times. The Fed doesn't have an excess stock of Treasurys to sell—its holdings are at roughly what they were before the crisis. It has only a vast excess pile of politically toxic assets—the mortgage securities it has amassed since 2008. Dumping them would depress the housing market further by pushing up mortgage rates and enrage an already Fed-wary Congress.
So what will the Fed do? Chairman Bernanke has been anxious to assure the markets that he has other tools in his chest, two in particular. The first is to entice the banks to move a portion of their reserves to term deposits, which would lock up that money for a fixed period. The second is to use "reverse repos," in which the Fed continuously borrows money from the banks, using its Treasury securities as collateral. Both strategies soak up reserves.
But both strategies have a hidden "catch"—the Fed will lose control over interest rates. Since 1994, the Fed has announced its so-called fed-funds target rate, or the rate at which it intends to see banks lend reserves to each other overnight. By buying or selling securities, the Fed jiggers interest rates to keep them at the target. But if the Fed is no longer willing to sell securities to tighten policy, and if it is instead determined to drain a specific quantity of reserves through term deposits, it will have to pay whatever rate the market demands. Logically, then, the fed-funds rate will mechanically shadow the term deposit auction rate.
Since 2000, the daily correlation between the one-month Treasury repo rate and the fed-funds rate is nearly a perfect 1.0, meaning that the reverse repo strategy is functionally equivalent to the term deposit strategy. In both cases, the Fed gives up control over rates. Simply put, the Fed must choose between managing the level of reserves and managing rates. It cannot do both.
Is this a problem? It does not have to be, because a central bank can, in principle, control inflation by controlling the level of excess reserves, and therefore the money supply, while letting the market control interest rates. But we suspect that in practice it will be a big problem. This is because the Fed will not be willing to accept impotence in determining rates. Can you imagine Mr. Bernanke telling Congress that he has no idea how high rates might rise next year, since those will be determined by term deposit auctions? We can't.
We need look no further than Frankfurt for evidence. In June, the European Central Bank (ECB) assured the markets that it would reabsorb through term deposit auctions the euros it printed to buy the bonds of fiscally challenged eurozone governments, but that it would not pay more than 1%. Thus the ECB made clear that if it had to choose between monetizing debt or letting rates go up, it would monetize debt—meaning that it would allow the money supply to rise to a level it had previously maintained would be inconsistent with stable prices. Late that month, eurozone banks decided to hold on to their cash, owing to the rate cap, and one of the auctions failed to withdraw the liquidity the ECB had injected.
We expect the Fed to behave the same way, continuing to announce a fed-funds rate that it will not allow the markets to exceed, even if this means permitting far too much money to spill out into credit growth and the broader economy.
None of this matters a lick at the present moment, with inflation barely perceptible, credit weak, and banks happy to earn infinitesimal returns on their reserves. But it does suggest that the Fed's exit strategy is not credible, and that means a serious risk of high inflation down the road.
Mr. Steil is director of international economics and Mr. Swartz is an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations
[WSJ 18 August 2010]
By BENN STEIL AND PAUL SWARTZ
The Federal Reserve last week announced that it would reinvest proceeds from its massive mortgage-bond portfolio, sustaining what Chairman Ben Bernanke had in February called its "extraordinary lending and monetary policies." But there must eventually be an exit from such policies. And if the chairman is to be taken at his word, the Fed's exit strategy will involve a sea change in the way it conducts and communicates its policies. In particular, it implies that the Fed will no longer be able to control the critically important fed-funds rate—or indeed any interest rate at all. That would have far-reaching implications for the future of monetary policy.
Between August and November 2008, the Federal Reserve swelled its balance sheet to $2.2 trillion from $940 billion to ease a potentially catastrophic credit crunch brought on by fears of cascading defaults. The assets added to the balance sheet are today comprised overwhelmingly of mortgage securities. The purchase of these securities had the parallel purpose of shoring up a collapsing housing market.
Much of the money the Fed conjured to buy these assets made its way into reserves, which the banks chose to hold at the Fed. Excess reserves—reserves held above and beyond what the Fed requires of the banks as a minimum—soared to more than $1 trillion from $2 billion.
As long as this money remains parked at the Fed, it poses no risk of fuelling inflation—just like cars parked in garages can't tie up traffic. But at some point the banks will muster the courage to begin transforming these near zero-yielding reserves into credit, and the Fed knows it then will have to act to prevent exuberance from pushing up prices too far and too fast—in traffic terms, to stop the cars from streaming onto the roads all at once.
In normal times, the Fed would do this by selling Treasury securities from its balance sheet, which the banks pay for using the excess dollars they've parked in reserves. Those dollars are then no longer available to the banks to create credit.
But these are not normal times. The Fed doesn't have an excess stock of Treasurys to sell—its holdings are at roughly what they were before the crisis. It has only a vast excess pile of politically toxic assets—the mortgage securities it has amassed since 2008. Dumping them would depress the housing market further by pushing up mortgage rates and enrage an already Fed-wary Congress.
So what will the Fed do? Chairman Bernanke has been anxious to assure the markets that he has other tools in his chest, two in particular. The first is to entice the banks to move a portion of their reserves to term deposits, which would lock up that money for a fixed period. The second is to use "reverse repos," in which the Fed continuously borrows money from the banks, using its Treasury securities as collateral. Both strategies soak up reserves.
But both strategies have a hidden "catch"—the Fed will lose control over interest rates. Since 1994, the Fed has announced its so-called fed-funds target rate, or the rate at which it intends to see banks lend reserves to each other overnight. By buying or selling securities, the Fed jiggers interest rates to keep them at the target. But if the Fed is no longer willing to sell securities to tighten policy, and if it is instead determined to drain a specific quantity of reserves through term deposits, it will have to pay whatever rate the market demands. Logically, then, the fed-funds rate will mechanically shadow the term deposit auction rate.
Since 2000, the daily correlation between the one-month Treasury repo rate and the fed-funds rate is nearly a perfect 1.0, meaning that the reverse repo strategy is functionally equivalent to the term deposit strategy. In both cases, the Fed gives up control over rates. Simply put, the Fed must choose between managing the level of reserves and managing rates. It cannot do both.
Is this a problem? It does not have to be, because a central bank can, in principle, control inflation by controlling the level of excess reserves, and therefore the money supply, while letting the market control interest rates. But we suspect that in practice it will be a big problem. This is because the Fed will not be willing to accept impotence in determining rates. Can you imagine Mr. Bernanke telling Congress that he has no idea how high rates might rise next year, since those will be determined by term deposit auctions? We can't.
We need look no further than Frankfurt for evidence. In June, the European Central Bank (ECB) assured the markets that it would reabsorb through term deposit auctions the euros it printed to buy the bonds of fiscally challenged eurozone governments, but that it would not pay more than 1%. Thus the ECB made clear that if it had to choose between monetizing debt or letting rates go up, it would monetize debt—meaning that it would allow the money supply to rise to a level it had previously maintained would be inconsistent with stable prices. Late that month, eurozone banks decided to hold on to their cash, owing to the rate cap, and one of the auctions failed to withdraw the liquidity the ECB had injected.
We expect the Fed to behave the same way, continuing to announce a fed-funds rate that it will not allow the markets to exceed, even if this means permitting far too much money to spill out into credit growth and the broader economy.
None of this matters a lick at the present moment, with inflation barely perceptible, credit weak, and banks happy to earn infinitesimal returns on their reserves. But it does suggest that the Fed's exit strategy is not credible, and that means a serious risk of high inflation down the road.
Mr. Steil is director of international economics and Mr. Swartz is an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations
[WSJ 18 August 2010]
Ajaan en de clash of civilisations
How to Win the Clash of Civilizations
The key advantage of Huntington's famous model is that it describes the world as it is—not as we wish it
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703426004575338471355710184.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read
By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.
Huntington's argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.
The balance of power among these civilizations, he argued, is shifting. The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations—especially China—are economically ascendant. Huntington also said that a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with each other and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization.
The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China. Thus the survival of the West depends on Americans, Europeans and other Westerners reaffirming their shared civilization as unique—and uniting to defend it against challenges from non-Western civilizations.
Huntington's model, especially after the fall of Communism, was not popular. The fashionable idea was put forward in Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History," in which he wrote that all states would converge on a single institutional standard of liberal capitalist democracy and never go to war with each other. The equivalent neoconservative rosy scenario was a "unipolar" world of unrivalled American hegemony. Either way, we were headed for One World.
President Obama, in his own way, is a One Worlder. In his 2009 Cairo speech, he called for a new era of understanding between America and the Muslim world. It would be a world based on "mutual respect, and . . . upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles."
The president's hope was that moderate Muslims would eagerly accept this invitation to be friends. The extremist minority—nonstate actors like al Qaeda—could then be picked off with drones.
Of course, this hasn't gone according to plan. And a perfect illustration of the futility of this approach, and the superiority of the Huntingtonian model, is the recent behavior of Turkey.
According to the One World view, Turkey is an island of Muslim moderation in a sea of extremism. Successive American presidents have urged the EU to accept Turkey as a member on this assumption. But the illusion of Turkey as the West's moderate friend in the Muslim world has been shattered.
year ago Turkey's President Recep Erdogan congratulated Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election after he blatantly stole the presidency. Then Turkey joined forces with Brazil to try to dilute the American-led effort to tighten U.N. sanctions aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear arms program. Most recently, Turkey sponsored the "aid flotilla" designed to break Israel's blockade of Gaza and to hand Hamas a public relations victory.
True, there remain secularists in Istanbul who revere the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey. But they have no hold over the key government ministries, and their grip over the army is slipping. Today the talk in Istanbul is quite openly about an "Ottoman alternative," which harks back to the days when the Sultan ruled over an empire that stretched from North Africa to the Caucasus.
If Turkey can no longer be relied on to move towards the West, who in the Muslim world can be? All the Arab countries except Iraq—a precarious democracy created by the United States—are ruled by despots of various stripes. And all the opposition groups that have any meaningful support among the local populations are run by Islamist outfits like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, Islamist movements are demanding the expansion of Shariah law. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak's time is running out. Should the U.S. support the installation of his son? If so, the rest of the Muslim world will soon be accusing the Obama administration of double standards—if elections for Iraq, why not for Egypt? Analysts have observed that in free and fair elections, a Muslim Brotherhood victory cannot be ruled out.
Algeria? Somalia? Sudan? It is hard to think of a single predominantly Muslim country that is behaving according to the One World script.
The greatest advantage of Huntington's civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. And it helps us to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historic rivalries between Arabs, Turks and Persians for leadership of the Islamic world.
But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.
Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington's most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.
Ms. Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations," which has just been published by Free Press.
Richard Barnes wrote:
So, we can acknowledge the "realpolitik" of Huntington's insight. Where does that get us in and of itself? Is not the strength of our Western Civilization its tolerance and democracy? We can ban burkas in public because they inhibit the equality of women, yet allow face-showing hejabs. We can permit - welcome - the establishment of an Islamic Center that is near Ground Zero (not at it!) as a celebration and affirmation of the tradition of Western tolerance. We can support Israel's right to exist, yet not support its suppression of the Palestinian population. We can oppose Iranian and al Qaeda calls for jihad and let partners such as Turkey know when their behavior with Iran negates our otherwise good mutual interests, just like we do with Russia. We exercise some judiciousness in how we deal with China, yet we deal with them. We do business with anti-democratic regimes all over the world.
So what good does Ms. Ali's recitation of Huntington's insight do for us??
The key advantage of Huntington's famous model is that it describes the world as it is—not as we wish it
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703426004575338471355710184.html?mod=WSJ_hp_us_mostpop_read
By AYAAN HIRSI ALI
What do the controversies around the proposed mosque near Ground Zero, the eviction of American missionaries from Morocco earlier this year, the minaret ban in Switzerland last year, and the recent burka ban in France have in common? All four are framed in the Western media as issues of religious tolerance. But that is not their essence. Fundamentally, they are all symptoms of what the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington called the "Clash of Civilizations," particularly the clash between Islam and the West.
Huntington's argument is worth summarizing briefly for those who now only remember his striking title. The essential building block of the post-Cold War world, he wrote, are seven or eight historical civilizations of which the Western, the Muslim and the Confucian are the most important.
The balance of power among these civilizations, he argued, is shifting. The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations—especially China—are economically ascendant. Huntington also said that a civilization-based world order is emerging in which states that share cultural affinities will cooperate with each other and group themselves around the leading states of their civilization.
The West's universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China. Thus the survival of the West depends on Americans, Europeans and other Westerners reaffirming their shared civilization as unique—and uniting to defend it against challenges from non-Western civilizations.
Huntington's model, especially after the fall of Communism, was not popular. The fashionable idea was put forward in Francis Fukuyama's 1989 essay "The End of History," in which he wrote that all states would converge on a single institutional standard of liberal capitalist democracy and never go to war with each other. The equivalent neoconservative rosy scenario was a "unipolar" world of unrivalled American hegemony. Either way, we were headed for One World.
President Obama, in his own way, is a One Worlder. In his 2009 Cairo speech, he called for a new era of understanding between America and the Muslim world. It would be a world based on "mutual respect, and . . . upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles."
The president's hope was that moderate Muslims would eagerly accept this invitation to be friends. The extremist minority—nonstate actors like al Qaeda—could then be picked off with drones.
Of course, this hasn't gone according to plan. And a perfect illustration of the futility of this approach, and the superiority of the Huntingtonian model, is the recent behavior of Turkey.
According to the One World view, Turkey is an island of Muslim moderation in a sea of extremism. Successive American presidents have urged the EU to accept Turkey as a member on this assumption. But the illusion of Turkey as the West's moderate friend in the Muslim world has been shattered.
year ago Turkey's President Recep Erdogan congratulated Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election after he blatantly stole the presidency. Then Turkey joined forces with Brazil to try to dilute the American-led effort to tighten U.N. sanctions aimed at stopping Iran's nuclear arms program. Most recently, Turkey sponsored the "aid flotilla" designed to break Israel's blockade of Gaza and to hand Hamas a public relations victory.
True, there remain secularists in Istanbul who revere the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey. But they have no hold over the key government ministries, and their grip over the army is slipping. Today the talk in Istanbul is quite openly about an "Ottoman alternative," which harks back to the days when the Sultan ruled over an empire that stretched from North Africa to the Caucasus.
If Turkey can no longer be relied on to move towards the West, who in the Muslim world can be? All the Arab countries except Iraq—a precarious democracy created by the United States—are ruled by despots of various stripes. And all the opposition groups that have any meaningful support among the local populations are run by Islamist outfits like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, Islamist movements are demanding the expansion of Shariah law. In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak's time is running out. Should the U.S. support the installation of his son? If so, the rest of the Muslim world will soon be accusing the Obama administration of double standards—if elections for Iraq, why not for Egypt? Analysts have observed that in free and fair elections, a Muslim Brotherhood victory cannot be ruled out.
Algeria? Somalia? Sudan? It is hard to think of a single predominantly Muslim country that is behaving according to the One World script.
The greatest advantage of Huntington's civilizational model of international relations is that it reflects the world as it is—not as we wish it to be. It allows us to distinguish friends from enemies. And it helps us to identify the internal conflicts within civilizations, particularly the historic rivalries between Arabs, Turks and Persians for leadership of the Islamic world.
But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.
Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington's most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.
Ms. Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey through the Clash of Civilizations," which has just been published by Free Press.
Richard Barnes wrote:
So, we can acknowledge the "realpolitik" of Huntington's insight. Where does that get us in and of itself? Is not the strength of our Western Civilization its tolerance and democracy? We can ban burkas in public because they inhibit the equality of women, yet allow face-showing hejabs. We can permit - welcome - the establishment of an Islamic Center that is near Ground Zero (not at it!) as a celebration and affirmation of the tradition of Western tolerance. We can support Israel's right to exist, yet not support its suppression of the Palestinian population. We can oppose Iranian and al Qaeda calls for jihad and let partners such as Turkey know when their behavior with Iran negates our otherwise good mutual interests, just like we do with Russia. We exercise some judiciousness in how we deal with China, yet we deal with them. We do business with anti-democratic regimes all over the world.
So what good does Ms. Ali's recitation of Huntington's insight do for us??
het nieuwe normaal en productiviteitsstijging
Friedman schreef het al in de New york Times (17 augustus 2010: Really Unusually Uncertain): er komt zo veel nieuwe technologische vooruitgang, dat de creatieve vernietiging zoals Schumpeter dat beschreef angstaanjagende vormen aan gaat nemen. (Thanks to Internet diffusion, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and the shift from laptops and desktops to hand-held iPads and iPhones, technology is destroying older, less skilled jobs that paid a decent wage at a faster pace than ever while spinning off more new skilled jobs that pay a decent wage but require more education than ever. )
Men moet steeds meer kennis hebben om mee te kunnen draaien in de nieuwe kenniseconomie. Een toenemend aantal Amerikaanse middenklassers haakt hierdoor af. De banen die een redelijk inkomen genereren ($40 en meer) raken steeds verder buiten bereik. De gevestigde middenklasse in Amerika legt het steeds vaker af tegen goed geschoolde Aziaten. De wereld is zo plat geworden dat Aziaten nieuwe technologie even snel oppikken als Amerikanen. Het inkomensverschil wordt opgelost door daling van de reële lonen in de VS en Europa en stijgende lonen in Azië.
In Europa gaat het op Duitse wijze zoals Friedman al zegt: Keeping up with Germany won’t be easy. A decade ago Germany was the “sick man of Europe.” No more. The Germans pulled together. Labor gave up wage hikes and allowed businesses to improve competitiveness and worker flexibility, while the government subsidized firms to keep skilled workers on the job in the downturn. Germany is now on the rise, but also not free of structural challenges. Its growth depends on exports to China and it is the biggest financier of Greece. Still, “Germany is no longer the country with the oldest students and youngest retirees,” said Kornblum.
Men moet steeds meer kennis hebben om mee te kunnen draaien in de nieuwe kenniseconomie. Een toenemend aantal Amerikaanse middenklassers haakt hierdoor af. De banen die een redelijk inkomen genereren ($40 en meer) raken steeds verder buiten bereik. De gevestigde middenklasse in Amerika legt het steeds vaker af tegen goed geschoolde Aziaten. De wereld is zo plat geworden dat Aziaten nieuwe technologie even snel oppikken als Amerikanen. Het inkomensverschil wordt opgelost door daling van de reële lonen in de VS en Europa en stijgende lonen in Azië.
In Europa gaat het op Duitse wijze zoals Friedman al zegt: Keeping up with Germany won’t be easy. A decade ago Germany was the “sick man of Europe.” No more. The Germans pulled together. Labor gave up wage hikes and allowed businesses to improve competitiveness and worker flexibility, while the government subsidized firms to keep skilled workers on the job in the downturn. Germany is now on the rise, but also not free of structural challenges. Its growth depends on exports to China and it is the biggest financier of Greece. Still, “Germany is no longer the country with the oldest students and youngest retirees,” said Kornblum.
Monday, 9 August 2010
het oude normaal: een reality
De elektrische auto doet zijn intrede. Zonne-energie wordt spotgoedkoop via Chinese zonnepanelen. De wereld zwemt in het aardgas. Via gengewassen en daardoor flinke groei productie blijft voedsel goedkoop.
Middenklasse China verstopt toeristische trekpleisters van Europa.
Medische techniek rukt op. Na 2025 veroudering vertraagd, Alzheimer onder controle door de revolutionaire behandeling van de Koreaanse wonderdokter Ji Park.
Wie had gedacht dat na het aarzelende herstel van de kredietcrisis de groei in de wereld zo hoog zou worden. Niet alleen in China en India, maar ook in de VS. Zelfs in Europa en Japan was de groei hoger dan in de jaren 2000-2010.
Niemand dacht dat de Emerging Markets zelfstandig de wereldgroei konden trekken. Waarom begon men steds met te kijken wat er in de VS gebeurde. Ook in Beleggen op de golven maakt men zich hier ernstig schuldig aan.
Overal was er productiviteitsstijging, zelfs in het ambtenarenapparaat.
In vier jaar ijd daalde werkloosheid in de VS van 10% naar 5%.
De loonstijging ging weer in de pas lopen met de productiviteitsstijging.
De asset economy kwam weer op gang toen men zich realiseerde hoe goedkoop aandelen en huizen in de VS waren.
Winsten stegen veel harder dan na 2002 of na 1991.
In de tweede ambtstermijn van Obama werd global warming stevig aangepakt. De republikijnen stribbelden niet meer zo tegen toen ze zagen hoe veel geld hier mee te verdienen was.
Middenklasse China verstopt toeristische trekpleisters van Europa.
Medische techniek rukt op. Na 2025 veroudering vertraagd, Alzheimer onder controle door de revolutionaire behandeling van de Koreaanse wonderdokter Ji Park.
Wie had gedacht dat na het aarzelende herstel van de kredietcrisis de groei in de wereld zo hoog zou worden. Niet alleen in China en India, maar ook in de VS. Zelfs in Europa en Japan was de groei hoger dan in de jaren 2000-2010.
Niemand dacht dat de Emerging Markets zelfstandig de wereldgroei konden trekken. Waarom begon men steds met te kijken wat er in de VS gebeurde. Ook in Beleggen op de golven maakt men zich hier ernstig schuldig aan.
Overal was er productiviteitsstijging, zelfs in het ambtenarenapparaat.
In vier jaar ijd daalde werkloosheid in de VS van 10% naar 5%.
De loonstijging ging weer in de pas lopen met de productiviteitsstijging.
De asset economy kwam weer op gang toen men zich realiseerde hoe goedkoop aandelen en huizen in de VS waren.
Winsten stegen veel harder dan na 2002 of na 1991.
In de tweede ambtstermijn van Obama werd global warming stevig aangepakt. De republikijnen stribbelden niet meer zo tegen toen ze zagen hoe veel geld hier mee te verdienen was.
The First Church of Robotics
By JARON LANIER
Published: August 9, 2010 NYT
THE news of the day often includes an item about some development in artificial intelligence: a machine that smiles, a program that can predict human tastes in mates or music, a robot that teaches foreign languages to children. This constant stream of stories suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should think of them as fellow creatures instead of as tools. But such conclusions aren’t just changing how we think about computers — they are reshaping the basic assumptions of our lives in misguided and ultimately damaging ways.
I myself have worked on projects like machine vision algorithms that can detect human facial expressions in order to animate avatars or recognize individuals. Some would say these too are examples of A.I., but I would say it is research on a specific software problem that shouldn’t be confused with the deeper issues of intelligence or the nature of personhood. Equally important, my philosophical position has not prevented me from making progress in my work. (This is not an insignificant distinction: someone who refused to believe in, say, general relativity would not be able to make a GPS navigation system.)
In fact, the nuts and bolts of A.I. research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of A.I. at all. For example, I.B.M. scientists recently unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show “Jeopardy.” Suppose I.B.M. had dispensed with the theatrics, declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained I.B.M.’s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial intelligence, but would also have educated the public about how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.
Another example is the way in which robot teachers are portrayed. For starters, these robots aren’t all that sophisticated — miniature robotic devices used in endoscopic surgeries are infinitely more advanced, but they don’t get the same attention because they aren’t presented with the A.I. spin.
Furthermore, these robots are just a form of high-tech puppetry. The children are the ones making the transaction take place — having conversations and interacting with these machines, but essentially teaching themselves. This just shows that humans are social creatures, so if a machine is presented in a social way, people will adapt to it.
What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.
In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial — real thought and creativity — takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.
Consider too the act of scanning a book into digital form. The historian George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an A.I.” While we have yet to see how Google’s book scanning will play out, a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers. In this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost.
What all this comes down to is that the very idea of artificial intelligence gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can take on more and more human responsibility. This holds for things that we don’t even think of as artificial intelligence, like the recommendations made by Netflix and Pandora. Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.
What makes this doubly confounding is that while Silicon Valley might sell artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn’t apply the same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design features in a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game. Engineers don’t seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough to put them up against Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other person with a real design sensibility.
But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent A.I.’s, are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings. We must instead take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green.
WHEN we think of computers as inert, passive tools instead of people, we are rewarded with a clearer, less ideological view of what is going on — with the machines and with ourselves. So, why, aside from the theatrical appeal to consumers and reporters, must engineering results so often be presented in Frankensteinian light?
The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.
Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.
It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.
What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity — whether it’s the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science or stem-cell research.
If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?
Technology is essentially a form of service. We work to make the world better. Our inventions can ease burdens, reduce poverty and suffering, and sometimes even bring new forms of beauty into the world. We can give people more options to act morally, because people with medicine, housing and agriculture can more easily afford to be kind than those who are sick, cold and starving.
But civility, human improvement, these are still choices. That’s why scientists and engineers should present technology in ways that don’t confound those choices.
We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas out of our work.
Published: August 9, 2010 NYT
THE news of the day often includes an item about some development in artificial intelligence: a machine that smiles, a program that can predict human tastes in mates or music, a robot that teaches foreign languages to children. This constant stream of stories suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should think of them as fellow creatures instead of as tools. But such conclusions aren’t just changing how we think about computers — they are reshaping the basic assumptions of our lives in misguided and ultimately damaging ways.
I myself have worked on projects like machine vision algorithms that can detect human facial expressions in order to animate avatars or recognize individuals. Some would say these too are examples of A.I., but I would say it is research on a specific software problem that shouldn’t be confused with the deeper issues of intelligence or the nature of personhood. Equally important, my philosophical position has not prevented me from making progress in my work. (This is not an insignificant distinction: someone who refused to believe in, say, general relativity would not be able to make a GPS navigation system.)
In fact, the nuts and bolts of A.I. research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of A.I. at all. For example, I.B.M. scientists recently unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show “Jeopardy.” Suppose I.B.M. had dispensed with the theatrics, declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained I.B.M.’s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial intelligence, but would also have educated the public about how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.
Another example is the way in which robot teachers are portrayed. For starters, these robots aren’t all that sophisticated — miniature robotic devices used in endoscopic surgeries are infinitely more advanced, but they don’t get the same attention because they aren’t presented with the A.I. spin.
Furthermore, these robots are just a form of high-tech puppetry. The children are the ones making the transaction take place — having conversations and interacting with these machines, but essentially teaching themselves. This just shows that humans are social creatures, so if a machine is presented in a social way, people will adapt to it.
What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.
In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial — real thought and creativity — takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.
Consider too the act of scanning a book into digital form. The historian George Dyson has written that a Google engineer once said to him: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an A.I.” While we have yet to see how Google’s book scanning will play out, a machine-centric vision of the project might encourage software that treats books as grist for the mill, decontextualized snippets in one big database, rather than separate expressions from individual writers. In this approach, the contents of books would be atomized into bits of information to be aggregated, and the authors themselves, the feeling of their voices, their differing perspectives, would be lost.
What all this comes down to is that the very idea of artificial intelligence gives us the cover to avoid accountability by pretending that machines can take on more and more human responsibility. This holds for things that we don’t even think of as artificial intelligence, like the recommendations made by Netflix and Pandora. Seeing movies and listening to music suggested to us by algorithms is relatively harmless, I suppose. But I hope that once in a while the users of those services resist the recommendations; our exposure to art shouldn’t be hemmed in by an algorithm that we merely want to believe predicts our tastes accurately. These algorithms do not represent emotion or meaning, only statistics and correlations.
What makes this doubly confounding is that while Silicon Valley might sell artificial intelligence to consumers, our industry certainly wouldn’t apply the same automated techniques to some of its own work. Choosing design features in a new smartphone, say, is considered too consequential a game. Engineers don’t seem quite ready to believe in their smart algorithms enough to put them up against Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, or some other person with a real design sensibility.
But the rest of us, lulled by the concept of ever-more intelligent A.I.’s, are expected to trust algorithms to assess our aesthetic choices, the progress of a student, the credit risk of a homeowner or an institution. In doing so, we only end up misreading the capability of our machines and distorting our own capabilities as human beings. We must instead take responsibility for every task undertaken by a machine and double check every conclusion offered by an algorithm, just as we always look both ways when crossing an intersection, even though the light has turned green.
WHEN we think of computers as inert, passive tools instead of people, we are rewarded with a clearer, less ideological view of what is going on — with the machines and with ourselves. So, why, aside from the theatrical appeal to consumers and reporters, must engineering results so often be presented in Frankensteinian light?
The answer is simply that computer scientists are human, and are as terrified by the human condition as anyone else. We, the technical elite, seek some way of thinking that gives us an answer to death, for instance. This helps explain the allure of a place like the Singularity University. The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.
Some think the newly sentient Internet would then choose to kill us; others think it would be generous and digitize us the way Google is digitizing old books, so that we can live forever as algorithms inside the global brain. Yes, this sounds like many different science fiction movies. Yes, it sounds nutty when stated so bluntly. But these are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.
It should go without saying that we can’t count on the appearance of a soul-detecting sensor that will verify that a person’s consciousness has been virtualized and immortalized. There is certainly no such sensor with us today to confirm metaphysical ideas about people, or even to recognize the contents of the human brain. All thoughts about consciousness, souls and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.
What I would like to point out, though, is that a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity — whether it’s the distrust among Islamic or Christian fundamentalists of the scientific worldview, or even the discomfort that often greets progress in fields like climate change science or stem-cell research.
If technologists are creating their own ultramodern religion, and it is one in which people are told to wait politely as their very souls are made obsolete, we might expect further and worsening tensions. But if technology were presented without metaphysical baggage, is it possible that modernity would not make people as uncomfortable?
Technology is essentially a form of service. We work to make the world better. Our inventions can ease burdens, reduce poverty and suffering, and sometimes even bring new forms of beauty into the world. We can give people more options to act morally, because people with medicine, housing and agriculture can more easily afford to be kind than those who are sick, cold and starving.
But civility, human improvement, these are still choices. That’s why scientists and engineers should present technology in ways that don’t confound those choices.
We serve people best when we keep our religious ideas out of our work.
Sunday, 8 August 2010
raadsel Bermudadriehoek opgelost?
http://salem-news.com/articles/august062010/bermuda-triangle-ta.php
Grote opborrelende aardgasbubbels van de bodem van de oceaan kunnen schepen ineens op de bodem van de oceaan krijgen en vliegtuigen ook.
Australiërs in Melbourne krijgen van DIGG in dit artikel de eer.
How Brilliant Computer Scientists Solved the Bermuda Triangle Mystery
Aug-06-2010 14:30 Terrence Aym Salem-News.com
Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.
[picture: The Bermuda Triangle. Courtesy: steelkaleidoscopes.typepad.com]
(CHICAGO) - According to two research scientists the mystery of vanished ships and airplanes in the region dubbed "The Bermuda Triangle" has been solved.
Step aside outer space aliens, time anomalies, submerged giant Atlantean pyramids and bizarre meteorological phenomena ... the "Triangle" simply suffers from an acute case of gas.
Natural gas—the kind that heats ovens and boils water—specifically methane, is the culprit behind the mysterious disappearances and loss of water and air craft.
The evidence for this astounding new insight into a mystery that's bedeviled the world is laid out in a research paper published in the American Journal of Physics.
Professor Joseph Monaghan researched the hypothesis with honor student David May at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
The two hypothesized that large methane bubbles rising from the ocean floor might account for many, if not all, of the mysterious disappearances of ships and aircraft at specific locales around the world.
Researcher Ivan T. Sanderson identified these mystery areas during the 1960s. Sanderson described the actual shape of these regions as more like a lozenge rather than a triangle. Some of the more famous spots include an area in the Sea of Japan, the North Sea, and of course the infamous "Bermuda (or Devil's) Triangle."
Oceanographic surveyors of the sea floor in the area of the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea region between continental Europe and Great Britain have discovered significant quantities of methane hydrates and older eruption sites.
Because of the correlations and existing data, the two envisioned what would happen when gigantic methane bubbles explode from natural fissures on the seafloor.
The methane—normally frozen at great pressure as gas hydrates embedded within subterranean rock—can become dislodged and transform into gaseous bubbles expanding geometrically as they explode upwards. When these bubbles reach the surface of the water they soar into the air, still expanding upwards and outwards.
Any ships caught within the methane mega-bubble immediately lose all buoyancy and sink to the bottom of the ocean. If the bubbles are big enough and possess a high enough density they can also knock aircraft out of the sky with little or no warning. Aircraft falling victim to these methane bubbles will lose their engines-perhaps igniting the methane surrounding them-and immediately lose their lift as well, ending their flights by diving into the ocean and swiftly plummeting
From the comments:
this has been hypothesized for quite some time. It was even part of the plot of an adventure novel by Jack DuBrul.
This is a bunch of crap. The Bermuda Triangle has no mysterious disappearances and no more wrecks of any sort than any other area of the ocean. The whole idea of the Bermuda Triangle as mysterious in any way is a complete and total hoax
Saturday, 7 August 2010
de wereld van de stijgende winsten en de doormoddereconomie
In Barrons stat een video waar men er zich over verbaast hoe verschillend het gaat met de winsten respectievelijk economie.
Florissante winstcijfers komen samen met moiezaam economisch nieuws van de persen rollen.
Winsten doen het goed als kapitaal schaars is (dan minder overinvesteringen) en de werkloosheid hoog. Daarom is het niet zo vreemd dat het met de winsten veel beter gaat dan met de economische groei.
Misschien blijft dit zo in het westen: goede winstgroei en matige economische groei. In Azië is het verhaal natuurlijk dat je wel veel winst plus economische groei krijgt, misschien valt daardoor de winst wel tegen omdat de loonstijging zo hoog is en men er voldoende spaart en kapitaal niet schaars is.
Hoe gaat de beurs omhoog in fase EF? Gewoon de langzame realisatie dat alles nog goed gaat, dat het einde der tijden toch niet zo nabij is als even van te voren gedacht. Natuurlijk komt er geen recessie, natuurlijk gaat de rente niet oneindig omhoog (dat gebeurde in het oude normaal). Winsten gaan gewoon omhoog, natuurlijk wat minder dan de consensus roept, maar niet dat is heel normaal, ze gaan gewoon omhoog in 2010, 2011 en 2012.
het nieuwe normaal een sprookje
Een terugblik vanuit 2050 naar de periode van het nieuwe normaal die duurde van 2010 tot 2025.
Wat was dat toch, dat nieuwe normaal? Iedereen had te veel schuld en moest daarom meer gaan sparen. Bepaalde groepen in de samenleving moesten dan het puin ruimen, maar maakten daardoor zelf veel te veel chulden. Het was begonnen met het te veel verhogen van de hypotheekschuld op het eigen huis in amerika. Die hypotheekschulden werden verpakt en via een sprookjesformule (waardoor tophypotheken vvan de artingbureaus de allerhoogste rating AAA kregen) verkocht aan banken en andere beleggers. Deze kregen daardoor te veel slechte schulden en de overheden moesten ze redden, maar ondertussen kon niemand meer nieuw krediet krijgen, waardoor de overheden te veel schulden kregen, waardoor centrale banken te veel overheidsschulden moesten opkopen waardoor de achterliggende valuta's waardeloos werden. Het ging allemaal om schulden terugrdingen, terwijl het vroeger ging om hoge productiviteitsgroei te krijgen via innovaties, lage werkloosheid en andere achterhaalde kletskoek.
We werden geregeerd door zuurpieten. Eerst het zuur en dan nog meer zuur en en dan nog veel meer zuur en dan vlak voor de verkiezingen een toefje zoet.
JP de MP werkte als eerste zuurpiet volgens dit beproefde recept van Nixon met zoutzuur, MR wilde als een echte Rambo werken met zwavelzuur om de wonden die in de begroting zijn geslagen dicht te schroeien. Als afleidingsmanoeuvre gooiden we ondertussen de grenzen dicht voor niet hoog opgeleide allochtonen (de hoog opgeleide allochtonen zagen dat als aansporing om hun biezen te pakken weg uit Nederland.
Er was eens een wereld waarin alles deze keer anders was. Alles was volgens het nieuwe normaal. De mensen leefden lang maar ongelukkig in dit nieuwe normaal, zo lang zelfs dat pensioenfondsen gingen korten op de pensioenuitkeringen aan asociale oude besjes die na hun 90ste weigerden de pil van Drion te nemen.
De mensen spaarden en spaarden, zoals de grote economen van die tijd (Roubini, Reinhardt, Rogoff en Rugman (vroeger krugman, maar uit eerbied voor eerstgenoemde economen moest je nam als gooede econoom na 2018 met een R beginnen, zoals Bill Gros van Pimco al voorgesteld had in 2010)) voorzien hadden, maar ze werden steeds armer. Hun schulden namen af, maar hun inkomen nog harder. De banken hadden het maar wat druk om iedere wanbetaler zijn huis uit te zetten. Yazz, the only way is up, een ballade waarbij ze zongen dat alles beter zou gaan als je je huis uitgezet werd, werd verboden.
De bazen van de centrale banken hadden een rente van 0% beloofd op spaardeposito's totdat de laatste babybommer dood zou zijn. en ze hielden aardig woord. De fiscus bleef natuurlijk wel vermogensbelasting op die deposito's heffen.
Dat men toen toch niet inzag dat die 0% rente het herstel tegenhield. In Japan was dat ook al zo geweest. Pas toen de rente daar in 2020 verhoogd werd naar 4% ging men pas echt consumeren en het bedrijfsleven rendabel investeren met voldoende en toch niet te veel risico. Na 2020 had je de terugkeer van Goldilocks in Japan.
Na 2008 had je een periode van Skcolidlog, het omgekeerde van Goldilocks. Het was voortdurend te koud en te warm, nooit precies goed. Het was vooral veel te warm, want de overheden moesten in het nieuwe normaal bezuinigen en hadden geen geld om global warming tegen te gaan. Gelukkig werd dat anders na 2025 toen de grote Chinees Ching Peng Wang uitvond hoe je zonne-energie bijna gratis kon inzetten via Chinese zonnepanelen. de meeste olieconcerns gingen toen failliet, waardoor er nog meer werkloosheid kwam en de mensen nog meer moesten sparen.
De overheidstekorten bleven voortdurend te hoog en de economische groei te laag. Het ene na het andere land ging zijn valuta flink devalueren en liet de centrale bank zo veel mogelijk geld drukken. Dat maakte steeds weer noodzakelijk dat je een nieuw spaartegoed moest opbouwen in de nieuwe, met twee nullen afgestempelde valuta.
Hoe enthousiast meer en meer mensen in Nederland ook op Wilders stemden, de gesubsidieerde ouderenzorg werd in 2025 afgeschaft voor iedereen die een aanvullend pensioen had van €€ (de oude euro was €, de nieuwe €€) 10.000 of nog hoger. Allochtonen hadden we niet meer om voor onze zieken en oudreen te zorgen.
Omdat wilders in 2016 de laatste allochtoon het land uit had laten zetten, moest men andere zondebokken gaan zoeken waarom het zo slecht ging. Dat werden de babyboomers natuurlijk. Zij hadden alles verpest, te veel potverteerd, te veel pensioenrchten gekregen, alle huizen weggekocht voor een habbekrats met oneindige hypotheekrenteaftrek en wilden nu van alle snufjes die de medische revolutie nu bood gebruik maken. Genetische reengeneering van 80-plussers bracht alle niet babyboomers tot armoede. Ze laten doorwerken na hun 80ste hielp, maar niet genoeg.
Oma van 82 helpt nu haar vroegere buurvrouw van 96 op de pyjamadagen in het gesticht (dat is de meest toepasselijke naam voor het bejaardentehuis bij ouderen) een beetje toonbaar te maken, zodat ze niet voor schut staat achter de rollator.
Medische kosten werden begrensd tot een maximumbedrag, afhankelijk van de leeftijd. Mensen boven 85 hadden geen recht meer op medische diensten die meer dan €€ 85.000 kostten.
Opa vertelde hoe vroeger in het oude normaal de beurzen daalden als de rente steeg. Wat waren dat rare tijden toch.
Maar opa, hoe is het toch gekomen dat we zo lang op Wilders gestemd hebben? Hoe kreeg hij dat toch voor elkaar? Waarom konden de andere politici niet uitleggen dat je een euro niet twee keer kunt uitgeven en besparingen op cultuur en ontwikkelingshulp niet alle probleen oplost, dat protectionisme (grenzen dichtdoen) toch in alle economische theorieën als kansloos is uitgelegd? Dat Nederland als exportland er niet zo’n rare buitenlandse politiek op na kan houden? Dat kopvoddentaks niets oplevert als je alle allochtonen het land uitgezet hebt?
Ook zag men in 2010 niet dat India het belangrijkste land in de wereld zou worden in 2050, en niet langer China. Men ad wel door dat de economie van China ergens rond 2020-2025 groter dan die van de VS ging worden. Maar men was toch verrast dat de Chinese economie na 2025 nauwelijks harder groeide dan die van de VS, omdat de Amerikaanse demografie beter bleef. Ook het de facto faillissement van de Amerikaanse overheid na invoering an de $$ (100$ werd een nieuwe $$, net als bij de euro) trof China zwaar.
Wat was dat toch, dat nieuwe normaal? Iedereen had te veel schuld en moest daarom meer gaan sparen. Bepaalde groepen in de samenleving moesten dan het puin ruimen, maar maakten daardoor zelf veel te veel chulden. Het was begonnen met het te veel verhogen van de hypotheekschuld op het eigen huis in amerika. Die hypotheekschulden werden verpakt en via een sprookjesformule (waardoor tophypotheken vvan de artingbureaus de allerhoogste rating AAA kregen) verkocht aan banken en andere beleggers. Deze kregen daardoor te veel slechte schulden en de overheden moesten ze redden, maar ondertussen kon niemand meer nieuw krediet krijgen, waardoor de overheden te veel schulden kregen, waardoor centrale banken te veel overheidsschulden moesten opkopen waardoor de achterliggende valuta's waardeloos werden. Het ging allemaal om schulden terugrdingen, terwijl het vroeger ging om hoge productiviteitsgroei te krijgen via innovaties, lage werkloosheid en andere achterhaalde kletskoek.
We werden geregeerd door zuurpieten. Eerst het zuur en dan nog meer zuur en en dan nog veel meer zuur en dan vlak voor de verkiezingen een toefje zoet.
JP de MP werkte als eerste zuurpiet volgens dit beproefde recept van Nixon met zoutzuur, MR wilde als een echte Rambo werken met zwavelzuur om de wonden die in de begroting zijn geslagen dicht te schroeien. Als afleidingsmanoeuvre gooiden we ondertussen de grenzen dicht voor niet hoog opgeleide allochtonen (de hoog opgeleide allochtonen zagen dat als aansporing om hun biezen te pakken weg uit Nederland.
Er was eens een wereld waarin alles deze keer anders was. Alles was volgens het nieuwe normaal. De mensen leefden lang maar ongelukkig in dit nieuwe normaal, zo lang zelfs dat pensioenfondsen gingen korten op de pensioenuitkeringen aan asociale oude besjes die na hun 90ste weigerden de pil van Drion te nemen.
De mensen spaarden en spaarden, zoals de grote economen van die tijd (Roubini, Reinhardt, Rogoff en Rugman (vroeger krugman, maar uit eerbied voor eerstgenoemde economen moest je nam als gooede econoom na 2018 met een R beginnen, zoals Bill Gros van Pimco al voorgesteld had in 2010)) voorzien hadden, maar ze werden steeds armer. Hun schulden namen af, maar hun inkomen nog harder. De banken hadden het maar wat druk om iedere wanbetaler zijn huis uit te zetten. Yazz, the only way is up, een ballade waarbij ze zongen dat alles beter zou gaan als je je huis uitgezet werd, werd verboden.
De bazen van de centrale banken hadden een rente van 0% beloofd op spaardeposito's totdat de laatste babybommer dood zou zijn. en ze hielden aardig woord. De fiscus bleef natuurlijk wel vermogensbelasting op die deposito's heffen.
Dat men toen toch niet inzag dat die 0% rente het herstel tegenhield. In Japan was dat ook al zo geweest. Pas toen de rente daar in 2020 verhoogd werd naar 4% ging men pas echt consumeren en het bedrijfsleven rendabel investeren met voldoende en toch niet te veel risico. Na 2020 had je de terugkeer van Goldilocks in Japan.
Na 2008 had je een periode van Skcolidlog, het omgekeerde van Goldilocks. Het was voortdurend te koud en te warm, nooit precies goed. Het was vooral veel te warm, want de overheden moesten in het nieuwe normaal bezuinigen en hadden geen geld om global warming tegen te gaan. Gelukkig werd dat anders na 2025 toen de grote Chinees Ching Peng Wang uitvond hoe je zonne-energie bijna gratis kon inzetten via Chinese zonnepanelen. de meeste olieconcerns gingen toen failliet, waardoor er nog meer werkloosheid kwam en de mensen nog meer moesten sparen.
De overheidstekorten bleven voortdurend te hoog en de economische groei te laag. Het ene na het andere land ging zijn valuta flink devalueren en liet de centrale bank zo veel mogelijk geld drukken. Dat maakte steeds weer noodzakelijk dat je een nieuw spaartegoed moest opbouwen in de nieuwe, met twee nullen afgestempelde valuta.
Hoe enthousiast meer en meer mensen in Nederland ook op Wilders stemden, de gesubsidieerde ouderenzorg werd in 2025 afgeschaft voor iedereen die een aanvullend pensioen had van €€ (de oude euro was €, de nieuwe €€) 10.000 of nog hoger. Allochtonen hadden we niet meer om voor onze zieken en oudreen te zorgen.
Omdat wilders in 2016 de laatste allochtoon het land uit had laten zetten, moest men andere zondebokken gaan zoeken waarom het zo slecht ging. Dat werden de babyboomers natuurlijk. Zij hadden alles verpest, te veel potverteerd, te veel pensioenrchten gekregen, alle huizen weggekocht voor een habbekrats met oneindige hypotheekrenteaftrek en wilden nu van alle snufjes die de medische revolutie nu bood gebruik maken. Genetische reengeneering van 80-plussers bracht alle niet babyboomers tot armoede. Ze laten doorwerken na hun 80ste hielp, maar niet genoeg.
Oma van 82 helpt nu haar vroegere buurvrouw van 96 op de pyjamadagen in het gesticht (dat is de meest toepasselijke naam voor het bejaardentehuis bij ouderen) een beetje toonbaar te maken, zodat ze niet voor schut staat achter de rollator.
Medische kosten werden begrensd tot een maximumbedrag, afhankelijk van de leeftijd. Mensen boven 85 hadden geen recht meer op medische diensten die meer dan €€ 85.000 kostten.
Opa vertelde hoe vroeger in het oude normaal de beurzen daalden als de rente steeg. Wat waren dat rare tijden toch.
Maar opa, hoe is het toch gekomen dat we zo lang op Wilders gestemd hebben? Hoe kreeg hij dat toch voor elkaar? Waarom konden de andere politici niet uitleggen dat je een euro niet twee keer kunt uitgeven en besparingen op cultuur en ontwikkelingshulp niet alle probleen oplost, dat protectionisme (grenzen dichtdoen) toch in alle economische theorieën als kansloos is uitgelegd? Dat Nederland als exportland er niet zo’n rare buitenlandse politiek op na kan houden? Dat kopvoddentaks niets oplevert als je alle allochtonen het land uitgezet hebt?
Ook zag men in 2010 niet dat India het belangrijkste land in de wereld zou worden in 2050, en niet langer China. Men ad wel door dat de economie van China ergens rond 2020-2025 groter dan die van de VS ging worden. Maar men was toch verrast dat de Chinese economie na 2025 nauwelijks harder groeide dan die van de VS, omdat de Amerikaanse demografie beter bleef. Ook het de facto faillissement van de Amerikaanse overheid na invoering an de $$ (100$ werd een nieuwe $$, net als bij de euro) trof China zwaar.
bezuinigen, bezuinigen
Duitsers hebben dat bezuinigen nodig om het vertrouwen te herstellen. Wij in Nederland msischien ook. Wij hopen natuurlijk wel dat andere landen om ons heen iets minder streng in de bezuinigingsleer zijn.
Gelukkig komt er wat dat betreft een kabinet met mededogen van de PVV. Dat maakt bezuinigen een hels karwei. Men is 18 miljard overeengekomen en inclusief wat nagekomen tegenvallers dus 20 miljard.
De PVV heeft als echte oppositiepartij bedongen dat er niet op zorg bezuinigd mag worden. Dat is het enige deel van de begroting dat volstrekt uit de hand aan het lopen is in Nederland en dat wordt nog even wat extra aangewakkerd. Nederland heeft de kosten voor pensioen en ziektekosten prima geregeld, maar met de zorgkosten heeft Nederland nu het duurste systeem in de wereld, zo heeft men berekend. Dat optuigen van een volstrekt onbetaalbaar zorgstelsel is een uitvloeisel van de Fortuynrevolutie (dat waren immers de puinhopen van paars (wat zou ik die puinhopen graag terughebben)) en dat wordt door Wilders natuurlijk in ere gehouden.
De VVD houdt de hypotheekrenteaftrek overeind. Defensie moet zijn dure speeltjes in verwegistan houden van VVD en CDA. De lasten moeten niet verhoogd worden.Meer blauw op straat.
Geen kopvoddentaks. Nog enige ontwikkelingshulp en niet alle musea dicht.
Zo eenvoudig gaat dat bezuinigen niet worden. Men zal het wel eens worden met alle infrastructuurinvesteringen uitstellen en te snoeien in de uitgaven voor onderwijs (iets dommers kun je economisch gezien niet doen, maar er zit niets anders op, willen we kunnen genieten van het eerste kabinet Wilders).
Gelukkig komt er wat dat betreft een kabinet met mededogen van de PVV. Dat maakt bezuinigen een hels karwei. Men is 18 miljard overeengekomen en inclusief wat nagekomen tegenvallers dus 20 miljard.
De PVV heeft als echte oppositiepartij bedongen dat er niet op zorg bezuinigd mag worden. Dat is het enige deel van de begroting dat volstrekt uit de hand aan het lopen is in Nederland en dat wordt nog even wat extra aangewakkerd. Nederland heeft de kosten voor pensioen en ziektekosten prima geregeld, maar met de zorgkosten heeft Nederland nu het duurste systeem in de wereld, zo heeft men berekend. Dat optuigen van een volstrekt onbetaalbaar zorgstelsel is een uitvloeisel van de Fortuynrevolutie (dat waren immers de puinhopen van paars (wat zou ik die puinhopen graag terughebben)) en dat wordt door Wilders natuurlijk in ere gehouden.
De VVD houdt de hypotheekrenteaftrek overeind. Defensie moet zijn dure speeltjes in verwegistan houden van VVD en CDA. De lasten moeten niet verhoogd worden.Meer blauw op straat.
Geen kopvoddentaks. Nog enige ontwikkelingshulp en niet alle musea dicht.
Zo eenvoudig gaat dat bezuinigen niet worden. Men zal het wel eens worden met alle infrastructuurinvesteringen uitstellen en te snoeien in de uitgaven voor onderwijs (iets dommers kun je economisch gezien niet doen, maar er zit niets anders op, willen we kunnen genieten van het eerste kabinet Wilders).
Thursday, 5 August 2010
The Big picture zwengelde de dsicussie aan: zijn de aandelenkoersen een self fulfilling prohecy, zoals Greenspan beweert? Greenspan beweerde dat een stijgende beurs meer stimulering oplevert dan wat de FED kan doen via ruimer monetair beleid.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/08/do-capital-markets-create-their-own-fuel/#comments
Ontstaat er een virtuous of vivious circle door het momentum van aandelenkoersen? Ritholtz: Is dat de reden dat momentumstrategieën zo goed werken?
Soros zou het een voorbeeeld van relexivity noemen.
Je kunt ook zeggen dat het de animal spirits aanwakkert of de grond in boort.
Wat preciezer kun je zeggen dat te hoge koersen allerlei ellende veroorzaakt (te lage idem). Maar als de koersen te laag zijn, dan is het gunstig dat de koerse stijgen, zonder dat d e excessen optreden.
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/08/do-capital-markets-create-their-own-fuel/#comments
Ontstaat er een virtuous of vivious circle door het momentum van aandelenkoersen? Ritholtz: Is dat de reden dat momentumstrategieën zo goed werken?
Soros zou het een voorbeeeld van relexivity noemen.
Je kunt ook zeggen dat het de animal spirits aanwakkert of de grond in boort.
Wat preciezer kun je zeggen dat te hoge koersen allerlei ellende veroorzaakt (te lage idem). Maar als de koersen te laag zijn, dan is het gunstig dat de koerse stijgen, zonder dat d e excessen optreden.
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
de neerwaartse cycli van zulauf
Ritholtz interviewde Felix Zulauf op zijn blog The Big Picture. Zulauf heeft veel geld verdiend door short te gaan in aandelen. Dat begon al bij de eerste oliecrisis maar ook in 1987 en na 2000.
Cycli zijn doorslaggevend in zijn beleggingsbeslissingen. Als de beurs afwijkt van wat normaal is volgens de cycli dan gaat hij handelen. De voorraadcyclus, de investeringscyclus en de schuldencyclus zijn het belangrijkste.
In cycli schieten de koersen altijd te ver door, zowel naar boven als naar beneden. Omdat nu de schuldencyclus nog niet is uitgeraasd zal de beurs nog ver dalen, tot onder de boekwaarde (500 voor de S&P500).
Er komt een devaluatiewedloop, de eurozone spat uit elkaar en alle oude munten komen terug. Goud is de beste belegging (maar nu even niet).
Op de website van Ritholtz was er uitsluitend lovend commentaar. Men was het er helemaal mee eens en had het niet beter kunnen zeggen. Men verbaasde zich erover dat er nog mensen zijn die er anders over denken.
Cycli zijn doorslaggevend in zijn beleggingsbeslissingen. Als de beurs afwijkt van wat normaal is volgens de cycli dan gaat hij handelen. De voorraadcyclus, de investeringscyclus en de schuldencyclus zijn het belangrijkste.
In cycli schieten de koersen altijd te ver door, zowel naar boven als naar beneden. Omdat nu de schuldencyclus nog niet is uitgeraasd zal de beurs nog ver dalen, tot onder de boekwaarde (500 voor de S&P500).
Er komt een devaluatiewedloop, de eurozone spat uit elkaar en alle oude munten komen terug. Goud is de beste belegging (maar nu even niet).
Op de website van Ritholtz was er uitsluitend lovend commentaar. Men was het er helemaal mee eens en had het niet beter kunnen zeggen. Men verbaasde zich erover dat er nog mensen zijn die er anders over denken.
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Mad Men and Bad Girls
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01dowd.html?_r=1&hp
Back in the early ’60s, Holly was the woman we wanted to be. The slender and stylish New York beauty was supported by men, yet she seemed free.
Now, back in the early ’60s on TV, Betty is the woman we don’t want to be. The slender and stylish New York beauty is supported by men, and she seems trapped.
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was cool because of its modern glamour, ushering in a sexy future. “Mad Men” is cool because of its retro glamour, recalling a sexy past.
Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, a call girl with a crazy streak, got money from strange men at boîtes for “trips to the powder room.” January Jones’s Betty Draper, a housewife with a crazy streak, cheated on her husband, when she was pregnant, with a strange man at a boîte.
The tightly wound Betty is a gilded bird in a cage; she needs to belong to someone, this season to a new, older husband, an adviser to Governor Rockefeller.
The wild-child Holly is terrified someone will put her in a cage — in the Truman Capote novella, she won’t even walk past the Central Park Zoo — and she doesn’t want to belong to anyone. (She also doesn’t want anything to belong to her; that’s why she dumps her cat in a garbage can at the end. In the tacked-on happy ending of the movie, she finds the cat; in the book, which has no leading man to tell her she’s already in a cage of her own making, she doesn’t.)
The alcohol-swigging Betty never calls her blue periods “the mean reds,” as the alcohol-swigging Holly did, but the women have their vertiginous moods in common: luminescent looks overlaying dark psyches.
In Georgetown, in the window of a vintage store called Annie Creamcheese, there’s an iconic poster of Audrey Hepburn as Holly, sleek with cigarette holder, long black Givenchy dress and pearls. Right around the corner, in the window of Banana Republic, there’s a huge picture of Jon Hamm, looking sleek with Don Draper’s mysterious, matinee-idol smolder.
Even though many of us grew up not realizing it, Holly’s a hooker. And in the new season of AMC’s “Mad Men,” which started last Sunday, Don hires a hooker and wants to be slapped.
Set in the same era, the two Manhattan fantasies are dashing escapes from the prim, airless Eisenhower era. Both feature magnetic characters, smoke rings and, in Capote’s phrase, “martini laughter.”
Their gorgeous visual style cloaks strangled emotions, and both narratives brim with louche trysts, sexual liberation, bohemian flashes, suppressed demons and reinvented lives.
In “Mad Men,” the single Richard Whitman from Pennsylvania coal country morphs into the married Don Draper after an accident in the Korean War. In “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the married Lulamae Barnes morphs into the single Holly Golightly to get out of the backwater Tulip, Tex.
“In New York you can become anything,” Sam Wasson, who wrote the new book “Fifth Avenue, 5 a.m.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the Dawn of the Modern Woman,” told Vanity Fair.
Wasson asserts that Holly was the precursor of Carrie and the “Sex and the City” singletons (not to mention TV trailblazers Mary Tyler Moore and Ally McBeal.) Truman Capote had wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role of the teenage hillbilly turned chic prostitute, and it would have been fun to see that version, too.
But when the producers chose the less exhausting Audrey, her real-life good-girl persona helped mask the raciness of her character.
In the 1960 movie of John O’Hara’s “Butterfield 8,” Elizabeth Taylor’s call girl had to die in a car crash for her sins, just as 20 years earlier, Vivien Leigh, playing a ballerina-turned-prostitute in “Waterloo Bridge,” had to be punished for her wicked ways with a final leap off the bridge.
It would be many years before audiences would embrace overt hookers as heroines: Jamie Lee Curtis in “Trading Places” in 1983, Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” in 1990 and Kim Basinger in “L.A. Confidential” in 1997.
Married to the oppressive Mel Ferrer and with a new baby boy, Hepburn’s princess-swan image bled into Holly, making her seem less like a member of the oldest profession and more like a modern, fun-loving single girl.
“In ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ all of a sudden — because it was Audrey who was doing it — living alone, going out, looking fabulous and getting a little drunk didn’t look so bad anymore,” Wasson writes. “Being single actually seemed shame-free. It seemed fun.” So, as a haute hooker, Audrey Hepburn was a fairy godmother, not only to feminism but to the prevailing ethos that style and cool trump all.
Published: July 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01dowd.html?_r=1&hp
Back in the early ’60s, Holly was the woman we wanted to be. The slender and stylish New York beauty was supported by men, yet she seemed free.
Now, back in the early ’60s on TV, Betty is the woman we don’t want to be. The slender and stylish New York beauty is supported by men, and she seems trapped.
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was cool because of its modern glamour, ushering in a sexy future. “Mad Men” is cool because of its retro glamour, recalling a sexy past.
Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, a call girl with a crazy streak, got money from strange men at boîtes for “trips to the powder room.” January Jones’s Betty Draper, a housewife with a crazy streak, cheated on her husband, when she was pregnant, with a strange man at a boîte.
The tightly wound Betty is a gilded bird in a cage; she needs to belong to someone, this season to a new, older husband, an adviser to Governor Rockefeller.
The wild-child Holly is terrified someone will put her in a cage — in the Truman Capote novella, she won’t even walk past the Central Park Zoo — and she doesn’t want to belong to anyone. (She also doesn’t want anything to belong to her; that’s why she dumps her cat in a garbage can at the end. In the tacked-on happy ending of the movie, she finds the cat; in the book, which has no leading man to tell her she’s already in a cage of her own making, she doesn’t.)
The alcohol-swigging Betty never calls her blue periods “the mean reds,” as the alcohol-swigging Holly did, but the women have their vertiginous moods in common: luminescent looks overlaying dark psyches.
In Georgetown, in the window of a vintage store called Annie Creamcheese, there’s an iconic poster of Audrey Hepburn as Holly, sleek with cigarette holder, long black Givenchy dress and pearls. Right around the corner, in the window of Banana Republic, there’s a huge picture of Jon Hamm, looking sleek with Don Draper’s mysterious, matinee-idol smolder.
Even though many of us grew up not realizing it, Holly’s a hooker. And in the new season of AMC’s “Mad Men,” which started last Sunday, Don hires a hooker and wants to be slapped.
Set in the same era, the two Manhattan fantasies are dashing escapes from the prim, airless Eisenhower era. Both feature magnetic characters, smoke rings and, in Capote’s phrase, “martini laughter.”
Their gorgeous visual style cloaks strangled emotions, and both narratives brim with louche trysts, sexual liberation, bohemian flashes, suppressed demons and reinvented lives.
In “Mad Men,” the single Richard Whitman from Pennsylvania coal country morphs into the married Don Draper after an accident in the Korean War. In “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the married Lulamae Barnes morphs into the single Holly Golightly to get out of the backwater Tulip, Tex.
“In New York you can become anything,” Sam Wasson, who wrote the new book “Fifth Avenue, 5 a.m.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the Dawn of the Modern Woman,” told Vanity Fair.
Wasson asserts that Holly was the precursor of Carrie and the “Sex and the City” singletons (not to mention TV trailblazers Mary Tyler Moore and Ally McBeal.) Truman Capote had wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role of the teenage hillbilly turned chic prostitute, and it would have been fun to see that version, too.
But when the producers chose the less exhausting Audrey, her real-life good-girl persona helped mask the raciness of her character.
In the 1960 movie of John O’Hara’s “Butterfield 8,” Elizabeth Taylor’s call girl had to die in a car crash for her sins, just as 20 years earlier, Vivien Leigh, playing a ballerina-turned-prostitute in “Waterloo Bridge,” had to be punished for her wicked ways with a final leap off the bridge.
It would be many years before audiences would embrace overt hookers as heroines: Jamie Lee Curtis in “Trading Places” in 1983, Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” in 1990 and Kim Basinger in “L.A. Confidential” in 1997.
Married to the oppressive Mel Ferrer and with a new baby boy, Hepburn’s princess-swan image bled into Holly, making her seem less like a member of the oldest profession and more like a modern, fun-loving single girl.
“In ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s,’ all of a sudden — because it was Audrey who was doing it — living alone, going out, looking fabulous and getting a little drunk didn’t look so bad anymore,” Wasson writes. “Being single actually seemed shame-free. It seemed fun.” So, as a haute hooker, Audrey Hepburn was a fairy godmother, not only to feminism but to the prevailing ethos that style and cool trump all.
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