LyrArc Article Gist
Remember the pictures of all the bicyclists in cities in China, now there are cars instead, and that we assumed was progress. But crammed as we are into small urban areas, and with so many people in the planet and so many with aspirations for a better life in China, India, Brazil and Russia and other countries, this does not point to a sustainable future. We need bicycles back and a new kind of automobile that is sustainable on the streetsof urban areas. So here we are in New York City and commercial buildings like the Rockefeller Center operated by Tishman Meyer following old rules prohibiting bicycles, looking down on bicyles, and seeing bicycles as affecting safety in the building. So cyclists are on their own. The city has about 5000 bicycle racks, and will add 1200 by 2009, and expects to add 37 bike shelters each for 8-9 bikes by the end of the year at transit hubs. The number of bike racks are inadequate as nearly 131,000 people ride bicycles daily in New York City according to Transportation Alternatives. The city has plans to add 200 miles of new bicycle lanes but mparking is a huge problem. Parking on the street is also risky because of bike thieves in New York City. So new solutions have to be found and it would be nice if building had an area on the ground floor with a separate access for cyclists or a way to go to underground parking through a separate acess and directly park and take elevators just as one does for underground car parking. This would be really commuter friendly but till then its the shop owner who lets youpark there or a friend who has a business and an area where he lets you park your bike and so on, everybody having to be creative. But make no mistake bicycles matter for clean air, the environment, for congestion, for people, for healthy living, and to create a good living environment in urban areas....

LyrArc Article Gist
Friedman on the $43 billion infrastructure he saw in China and the crumbling infrastructure in New York City and driving from dilapidated La Guardia airport in New York city into the city vs the new Shanghai airport and the magnetic levitation trains into Shanghai. He says don't forget that they are mere snapshots. And he is very aware that you go 100 milews outside Beijing and you find a poor developing country. So which is the real China, no easy answers. Give credit to their dedication and all the hard work and the motivation and planning to Chinabut still ask the questions about what we should do here in America and what countries like India have to ask what they should do and go about doing it. China will have its own questions and problems to think about too as it has to figure out what their best allocation of capital will be, what their policies should be from the birth rate and demographic changes, to the environment, and to ways to bring the rest of the country and farmers into the picture and see that the gains from now on reflect the imbalances in growth. The country building the latest infrastructure will always have the latest infrastructure and that will be the next country around the corner with the capital and energy to do it, the USA or India or Russia or some other country. The real progress is in the quality of life, of health and the resources for living productive healthy lives for most of the inhabitants of any country or region and that goes beyond politics or nationalism or rivalries or vested interests of groups of people, as it depends on learning from the best that every productive mind anywhere in the world or any productive place anywhere in the world has to offer. And the thing about this is its never a goal only because in a true sense the road well travelled is the destination for this kind of progress. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Craig Smith, the head of Surgery at Columbia University's hospital in New York, and Craig Smith the writer using language that provides solace to many people at a difficult time. He is also poetic at times quoting from John Wooden, as well as Emily Dickinson. He is in the middle of this public health crisis that is New York City today. When he gave the presidential address to the American Association for Thoracic Surgery he opened and closed his lecture with meditations on a Yeats poem. Here he is as a human talking to humans caught in a most perplexing time for medicine.

He quotes Emily Dickinson in one note saying- 

"Not opening when the dawn will come/ I open every door." Doors are opening all over the place.

 

 

LyrArc Article Gist
Harris call for FDR's "bold persistent experimentation" at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, old industry brought back to life, harks back to this era that saw FDR rescue not just Pennsylvania, but the whole nation, and led the way to JFK and now to Harris, for America to strike out for a bold new path to the future, with a bold vision like no other nation. Harris has said she will bring back the days when Pittsburgh and its surrounding areas were the envy of the world and America had the leading steel industry.   Charles Mcelwee looks at Roman Catholic country in northeastern Pennsylvania in Politico. Everyday working class issues matter here in Lackawana County and FDR still brings back memories in this part of the country that was left behind by all former presidents before Biden from Scranton in this part of northeastern Pennsylvania came to it's rescue on working class issues- around wages, families and neighborhoods, and the neighborhood church. Harris brings her own dedication to these issues as a devout public servant in the same way as John F. Kennedy who campaigned in these same working class neighborhoods drawing on Irish Catholic support and support of coalminers. Northeastern Pennsylvania is home to Lackawana County and Luzerne County, counties which are coal mining country from the 1930's which were key parts of the New Deal coalition of working class people and Catholics, put together by Franklin Roosevelt. But these family ties to the many churches in the area have eroded as churches closed in the last 3 decades, and as the coal industry and the steel industry declined. The tendency of people to go to church every weekend has also declined. As a result no one really knows how the people here will vote, will they vote with other Catholics or will they vote for who can do the most for working class families, increase wages and benefits for workers and protect workers.   ...

LyrArc Article Gist
The defeat of the anti-nuclear candidate Hosokawa supported by former prime ministers Koizumi and Kan in the Tokyo governor's election of 2014. There was low voter turnout due to bad weather and voters showed interest in local issues about elder care and the plans for the Olympics.

LyrArc Article Gist
Norihiro Kato, a professor at Waseda University, describes the change of heart of former prime minister and LDP leader, Junichiro Koizumi, after visitng a nuclear waste facility in Finland. Koizumi who supported nuclear power for Japan has now come out in opposition to dependence on nuclear power. Kato presents the idea of a post-growth phase for Japan in which nuclear power is phased out, as is being done in Germany. The idea being that Japan does not strive for a return of an earlier period of growth but looks to creating a new future that is different from the past.

LyrArc Article Gist
CERA estimates that while prices of crude went up 100% from 2000 to2007 the capital costs for oil exploration went up by 80%, and there are shortages of engineering and other resources.

LyrArc Article Gist
Places like Rapid City, South Dakota, and Topeka, Kansas, where people are choosing to live because of the affordability of homes. Average 30 year mortgage jumped from 3.1% at the end of 2021 to 5.0% by April 2022. High housing prices in coastal and mountain region cities and remote work flexibility are reordering where people choose to live. Rapid City, South Dakota is near the Wyoming border, here you are in what was once the Wild West of Teddy Roosevelt, a western wilderness found in an 8 hour drive to Grand Teton National Park. Nearby to this 145,000 population city are Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills mountain range.

Other cities that are getting attention from younger buyers are Santa Cruz, California, Santa Rosa, California. These are smaller towns of less than 600,000 population with outdoor recreation opportunities and small city feel, and are also attractive to retirees.

LyrArc Article Gist
Everything one needs to know about Brexit. Most questions are answered here during the last minute negotiations on December 14, 2020, in a desperate effort by both sides knowing that no one is going to budge. The effort now is to say look this is going to hurt both sides during a pandemic, the public is going to be angry with the politicians one more time, which will hurt all sides. Britain joined the European Union in 1973 with Ireland and Denmark.

Britain has left the EU legally and politically. It is in a transition period till Jan 1, 2021 by which time the remaining questions on trade, on economic relations and security need to be resolved. This covers $800 billion in trade between Britain and the EU. If nothing happens to settle these issues Britain after Jan. 1 will no longer be part of the EU single market or its customs union. 

LyrArc Article Gist
Dana Goldstein of the NYT looks at the big problem in education today- the failure to teach reading and writing skills to students in American schools. Goldstein cites two alarming statistics. About 40% of students who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lack the reading and writing skills to pass a college level composition class in English. 8th and 12th grade classes in the U.S. have 75% of the students lacking writing skills proficiency, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Of the 1204 comments to this article in the NYT, many of the 17 selected by NYT say the problem is that students lack reading skills. Other problems shown here are the handicaps created by technology, yes technology. Mobile phone use is common and this is done quickly with the least attention to write good sentences, little attention to punctuation, spelling or grammar. Half or incomplete sentences are easier to type on mobile, so a new generation grows up thinking that this is normal. As a result a whole generation of kids have not learned to read or write well, constructing sentences with limited vocabulary. Steve Jobs and Apple may say that iPads and iPhones, smartphones and other tech devices have advanced reading with the beautiful display technology screens, but this is not what is really happening. Google may say that its search helps people access good reading materials, and this too is not what is really happening.  Equally alarming is that there is no clear agreement on how to tackle this problem. The No Child Left Behind 2002 law set a program emphasizing reading and use of multiple choice questions to test reading skills. This was followed by the Common Core standards now implemented in schools for 6 years that shift the focus to writing. Yet the results are still the same, showing little progress. Goodman cites as examples of disagreement, the Writing Revolution project which focusses on grammar and other writing skills, and the Long Island Writing Project that focusses on students finding their own voice by freewriting. A student in the freewriting class which encourages finding your own voice, expresses her frustration by saying she doesn't hear a voice- what voice, she asks.  One of the problems is that teachers themselves lack writing skills. A look at 2400 teacher preparation programs shows little attention paid to teaching writing. The head of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University's Teachers College, says Common Core failed in implementation of massive teacher training, which is required to address the problem. As a result remediation programs are needed badly in colleges to fix literacy skills, when better teaching would have prevented the problem in the first place. Little understood or debated is that every generation has to learn about the country's democratic institutions, every generation has to make its own effort to gain civic literacy- it is not something that can be taken for granted or handed down from one generation to the next. Without reading and learning about how these institutions function, young people lack the skills for participating in our democracy and in the global economy. ...

LyrArc Article Gist
How many jobs will leak out for the fiscal stimulus if a lot of them, like 40% of manufacturing ouput in the US consisting of imported goods, are jobs created in China and Europe or other countries that make the parts for the wind energy and the solar energy products made in the USA? There will be domestic content rules but the international economy is better off if some of the jobs that result from a USA stimulus are offset by the jobs created here from the stimulus packages of Europe, China and other countries. China's infrastructure spending would lead to jobs in the US making some of the infastructure equipment that is exported or in the case of India the nuclear plants equipment that is exported.

LyrArc Article Gist
Amazon is tackling the Indian market by addressing the need of rural shoppers in all parts of India- home to nearly 800 million people. Here WSJ shows how this works with a customer in Dhowachal, in the northeastern state of Assam, who had no access to stores except by travelling for hours to the nearest town.  The customer is a teacher who received an Amazon delivery of pairs of jeans, socks, curtains, glasses and other items. Rural shoppers in India spent about $400 billion in 2017. Barclays estimates Amazon had $7 billion in gross merchandise sales volume in India in 2017, about 2% of what it does worldwide. More than 80% of customers in 2018 are from outside India's largest cities.  To do this Amazon has changed its app to work on cheaper smartphones and patchy cellular networks, added hundreds of thousands of Indian language descriptions of products and videos. It has also opened physical Amazon stores to teach people how to order online. Tens of thousands of distributors were added to deliver packages and take cash or digital payment. Amazon is spending $5 billion in India to set up a logistics network and warehouses, including staff and content development for Amazon Prime. In doing this Amazon has learned from China where Alibaba and other online retailers have grown seven fold by reaching rural areas. Amazon could not compete with Alibaba in China. In India Amazon has no strong local competitors like Alibaba. It is learning how to operate in India. The app offer tips on how to order, no email is needed, only a phone number, machine learning translates all descriptions into Hindi. Icons work well. A digital wallet lets customers without bank accounts or cards to pay or get money back. Amazon is investing aggressively using an advertising campaign and discounts to pass Flipkart which WalMart bought for $16 billion in 2018. Amazon is trying new ideas in India's situation where small stores often closet sized sell a limited number of products often going through multiple middlemen resulting in high prices. Amazon is now enlisting these small stores as package depots in its own unique distribution network. The small store gets an 8-10% commission on sales for helping guide shoppers make a purchase. In Amazon's unique "I Have Space" program 20,000 mom and pop stores in remote areas of India offer to take packages and deliver in neighborhoods for a commission. They get a uniform, a bag and a week of training. Many of these store owners know the addresses in their neighborhood having lived there a long time. The entire effort shows Amazon has adapted its delivery effort, logistics and payment systems to Indian conditions in a well planned way. Compare this to the failed effort by Apple in India, with high management turnover and lack of understanding of Indian conditions and pricing, and no real plan to tackle the Indian market.     ...

LyrArc Article Gist
Revival of the old city of Diriyah in Riyadh province, Saudi Arabia, where Imam Wahhab and Muhammad ibn Saud, the original chief from the Saud family have their origins. With the help of Imam Wahhab, this tribal chief united the Arabian peninsula in 1744, till the fall to the Ottomans in 1818, lasting 74 years. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt helped set up Ibn Saud of the original Saud family, as monarch of a new Saudi state in 1932, when it was possible for the French, British and Americans to setup states in the Middle East region to protect their interests. Ibn Saud's son is the current King Salman, who plans to set up a museum complex in Diriyah, and visits the place on weekends.

LyrArc Article Gist
Some figures on the foreclosure situation. 2.3 million Americans faced foreclosure proceedings in 2008, 81% increase over 2007. 860,000 properties were repossessed by lenders, more than double the 2007 level, according to RealtyTRac a foreclosure listing firm in Irvine,, California. Moody's Economy.com predicts the numbers to go up 18% in 2009 before slowing through 2011. That is 2.71 million foreclosures in 2009. To prevent the foreclosure levels from getting much worse as unemployment drops, the new administration plans to use upto $100 billion of the remaining $350 billion TARP funds to help homeowners. The 4 states hardest hit are Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida. More than 1.1 million properties there received foreclosure notices, almost half the total nationwide. The hardest hit areas are in California, with the metro areas worst hit in order are Stockton, California, Las Vegas, Nevada, Riverside and Bakersfield, California, and Phoenix. In December more than 303,000 properties nationwide received foreclosure notices, up 40% from year ago month, and 17% above November 2008. At 303,000 the yearly rate is 3.6 million foreclosures or higher for 2009, so the Moody's estimate for 2009 must take into account acceleration of steps to help homeowners with the new administration. Are the rather modest steps taken upto now helping? RealtyTrac analysts estimate that without a state law requiring lenders to give borrowers a 30 day warning before starting the foreclosure process, the foreclosures in California would be 10% higher. There are similiar state laws in Massachusetts and Maryland. Throughout 2008 few steps were taken by the Bush administration to slow foreclosures, even though Republican economists like Martin Feldstein repeatedly advocated this. See links to Feldstein and Sheila Bair of the FDIC who also advocated aggressive action, and providing the numbers to show that it was costlier for lenders to see borrowers go into foreclosure compared to reducing principal and interest payments significantly. ...