Constitution? Who Needs It?

I can't pretend I've read all the stuff about the export of the US Constitution and Justice Ginsberg's "controversial" comment on same, but are people picking up on two important qualifications:

• Of course it is archaic; it's over 200 years old.  Nobody would write it the same way today.  This is not an argument for abandoning it: continuity has its claims, and the prescribed process of amendment is probably the best available response  to change in an imperfect world (but a constitutional convention dominated by Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump--that would be a sight to see, eh?).

• But more important: don't you suspect that over the whole  life of state-making, most constitutions have been a fraud?  No, not including ours: ours is perhaps an exception-that-proves-the-rule in the respect that there may be at least a passing resemblance between the document to which it refers.   But if you're an upstart hustler with a bit of scrambled egg on your hat, what's the first thing you do when you capture government house?  Why, you promulgate a constitution, and pack it with every scrap of pious nonsense you can muster for the further abuse of a harried populace.  By corollary, if you really want to know how things work in a country, about the last thing you look at is "the constitution" (except, possibly, as a proxy for the chasm of falsehood that might separate ruler and world).   And keep reminding yourself: the Brits never did write theirs down.

More broadly: it's amazing how easy it is to miss, but a "constitution," is merely the social fact of how the government is constituted.  Every society has to have one, it's definitional; if you aren't constituted, you aren't a society.  The piece of paper (parchment, vellum, foolscap, whatever) is only evidence of the social fact, and damn poor evidence most of the time.  Now, get back to something serious.  

Sadly

I suspect he's right.

Labor Numerology

Number of Apple employees in the US: 43,000.

Number of Apple employees in the mother-of-all-factories in China: 430,000.

Number of employees at GM at its peak: I could swear I saw the number 430,000 again (which is, obviously what set me out to write this post).  But Google is unavailing. Here's an older NYT clip that says GM US had  "more than 600,000 workers in 1979."

Oh and: UAW membership in 2010: 430,000, down from a peak of 1.5 million.  

Ignoto has been Hitting the Red Bull Again

My friend Ignoto the investor is cranky this morning:

For decades the flow of capital was treated like the flow of water, sewage, and electricity - a regulated utility with means to ensure that "excess risk" was not being taken with the public's "airwaves."  Bank regulators were like the Public Utilities Commission.  In the 1980s, someone decided that when it came to finance, mixing water, sewage, and electricity into the same conduit were perfectly appropriate.  Naturally, after 25 years of allowing this stuff to mingle a bunch of sparky shit-water came out...  Bankers called it "finance" while the rest of called it, well, sparky shit-water... (The first phase of structured credit, Fannie/Freddie/etc., were logical - like going from copper to fiber-optics.  The next stage was putting sewage down fiber-optics...)

 Maybe Ignoto is remembering Scopenhauer's law of sewage entropy.  

Failure? Let Me Tell You about Failure!

Donald Trump was on the TV in the exercise room a few minutes go, mocking Rick Santorum for having lost his Sente seat by the largest majority ever sustained by a sitting senator.  That strikes me as pretty rich for  guy with four bankruptcies under his belt.

Somedbody Has to Win

Laugh while you can but just remember--one of these bozos has to win the nomination.  And in November, we'll elect a president who is cool with the idea of locking people up and throwing away the key.

He Thought Well of Huckleberry Finn, Though

What do these three have in common: the novels of Jane Austen, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and the Book of Mormon?

Answer: Mark Twain disparaged them all.   On Jane: "her books madden me ... .. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."  (With more here).

 Cooper gets a famous (and savage) essay in which Train concludes (writing of The Deerslayer):

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

His judgment on the Book of Mormon is more muted in tone; it extends over several pages of Twain's own great memoir,  Roughing It.  Twin writes:

It is such a pretentious affair and yet so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print.


If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle. Keeping awake while he did it, was at any rate.  ... Whenever he found his speech growing too modern, which was about every sentence or two, he ladeled in a few such scriptural phrases as, "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc. and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass," was his pet. If he had left that out, his bible would have been only a pamphlet.  

Given the severity of his judgments, it is probably just as well that Twain restricted himself to writers who were safely dead.

Jonathan Gruber Explains What's Different About Obamacare

Note the highlighting in the third paragraph:

You were an architect of Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health programme and an instrumental adviser in the design of the Obama administration’s health reforms. So please settle the question of the year: How similar are they?

They are very, very similar. You can think of the Affordable Care Act as a more ambitious version of the Massachusetts reform. Both reforms have the same core principles: Non-discrimination in insurance markets, health insurance mandates and subsidies so insurance is affordable. In Massachusetts, we stopped there.

The national bill – the Affordable Care Act – has two additional features. One is it’s paid for and two, it takes on cost controls. Romney’s reform was paid for with funding from the federal treasury. The Affordable Care Act is paid for through offsets in the federal budget. And the Affordable Care Act tackles the increase in costs in a serious way, which the Massachusetts bill didn’t do. So you can think of the Affordable Care Act as the Massachusetts bill-plus.

 How to guess your age?  I remember when Republicans paid their debts.   

Happy 200 Charles (and a Word on Words)

It's Charles Dickens' 200th birthday today.  Apparently they are making almost as big a deal of in England as they are over the Queen. I've never been a huge Dickens fan myself (and in fairness, I've read only about half the Dickens canon so I might have missed something wonderful): too much Victorian sentimentalism, especially about women--that last a topic on which he seems to me just awful. Still, I will have to grant his fecundity and his felicity at generating a certain kind of memorable cartoon.

But Michael Quinion points to something that I'd missed before: Dickens as a wordsmith, a coiner of words.  Not, perhaps, on a plane with Shakespeare.  And not, perhaps on a plane with himself, or at any rate his former self as admiringly characterized as his Victorian admirers.  Still, Michael gives him credit for "butter-fingers, unpromisingly, sawbones, messiness, spiflication, whizz-bang and seediness."  Quite enough for a day's work.  BTW, if you don't read Michael's excellent weekly words newsletter, you're missing a treat.



Update:  Buce's friend Bruce points out that it is also the anniversary of the Beatle's  first American tour.  He asks: "which has had more lasting cultural influence?"  The question is perhaps intended to be rhetorical but I am not sure the answer is obvious.  No  doubt that the Beatles are more vivid in our consciousness but Dickens may just be more closely woven into the woof.  Maybe (as Bruce graciously observes, echoing Chou En-lai about the French Revolution) it is just too soon to tell. 
  

Banking Grandpa's Way

I'm still trying to digest Gabriel Sherman's New York Magazine piece on "The End of Wall Street as They Knew  It," suggesting that the great barbecue is over in money-center banking, and not coming back.  You'd kind of hope that part of this is true though it reads so much like a PR man's dream you can't help but wonder whether Sherman wrote it as a job application.  There is one thread I want to pull at the moment, though. Specifically Sherman, observing that JP Morgan Chase seems to be sailing relatively unscathed through the  troubled waters "unlike that of his rivals at Goldman, has a real, physical business to fall back on"--i.e., old-fashioned deposits and loans, or as we used to call it "banking."  I stack that one up against the cover story in Forbes about Wells Fargo "The Bank that Works," as the headline writer announces.

I'm struggling to avoid swallowing the hype here, and I'm writing almost totally unencumbered by actual knowledge.  And god knows old fashioned banking has its own history of crimes and follies (the watch list of troubled banks still stands somewhere in the 900s, I think."  But recall that old-fashioned banking tended to be (a) boring (b) not very profitable and (c) often pretty steady.  Could it be the boring and not very profitable parts are what is holding the ship above water now?  [Ed.--Buce, this is incoherent. B of A and Citi are both huge in old-fashioned banking (as you call it) and they are both a mess. Buce--wal,yes I suppose so, but maybe without old fashioned they would be an even bigger mess? Ed.--Buce, now you are floundering.]

Yokes

Back in the 70s I met a Russian woman--young, cheerful, smart, outgoing, also a total true believer.  I often wonder what became of her, and can only hope that she didn't wind up among the platoons of 16-stone babushkas who sold Mars bars outside Moscow subway stations in the crash of the 90s.

But anyway, she liked to talk about Russian history.  And it seems that every time, she found some reason to say (I wish I could imitate her Natasha Nogoodnik accent)  "Vhen Ve Vher Under Mong-ol-Tat-ar Yoke."  I was pretty shaky on what she was even talking about at that point; now, I guess I understand that she was adverting to the time in the 13th Century when the Golden Horde showed up and made cavalry stew out of the Kievan Rus (though I'm still a little unclear as to how exactly the Russians define the end of it).

Anyway it only just this weekend that it struck me: we (heh!) Anglo-Saxons use the same device when we speak of "The Norman Yoke"--the "foreign" hegemony that arrived with William the Conqueror in 1066. Wiki says:

The idea of the Norman Yoke characterized the nobility and gentry of England as the descendants of foreign usurpers who had destroyed a Saxon golden age. Such a reading was an extremely powerful myth for the poor and excluded classes of England. .... "Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake." wrote [Gerrard] Winstanley on behalf of the Diggers, in December 1649.

 Link.   But once you detach yourself, you start seeing this stuff everywhere; "peoples" who define themselves in terms of their oppressor.  Think "Babylonian captivity."  Hell, think every third-world country ever colonized by a European (can we imagine an India without the British Raj?).   And where would Fidel Castro have been all these years without the Americans to howl at, just 90 miles off his shore?

Aside from the general principle of "defined by our oppressor," are there other examples of the specific "yoke" metaphor?

Fn:   I want full credit for having written a headline which, however spare, at least avoids all puns on "Yoke."  

Sauciest Underbelly Post of the Day, or Maybe Ever

They lined the bathtub with rubber ducks given to him as a gag gift; they named the ducks after his family members, mad

Link. And yes, I read it. Every word. Thought it sweet that he asked permission.

Computerese

Dear Mr. %$^#,

Thank you for shopping with *%^#$. Your order has been processed and all available items have been shipped.

One of the @&#^$% is temporarily out of stock and there will be a 2-3 week delay.

 I think they just told me that I'll be getting one pair of paints now and one pair of pants later.  

Girl's Gotta Do What a Girl's Gotta Do (Leviticus)

An Alabama state senator named Shadrak (whoa!) McGill says that keeping teacher's pay low is a biblical principal.  Prompting, as so many things do, Ivan to remember his youth in the newspaper business and elsewhere:

Back a half century and more ago all the smart girls who could get to college studied to be teachers. My wife graduated from U of A  with a teaching degree when she was 19 years old. Started at 16 out of  Hazel Green HS. Taught 5th grade at Verner school at U of A.  ... When I was a reporter in Kentucky I went around the state sizing up the election between LBJ and Goldwater. In one really poor Kentucky county I interviewed the county’s chief official. He was proud of the county seat – “no stoplights, no (n’s) and no jews,” he told me. What kind of work was there for the people, I asked him. He admitted there were no industrial jobs – not one in the county. All the good timber had been cut generations before. No coal. What do people do for a living? (a lot grew marijuana for the market in Lexington, but he didn’t go into that). “Well, if a woman ain't married and got to work,” he said, “she can be a waitress or a teacher or a whore.” Haven’t checked in a while but I bet that county still votes Republican. Shadrack would fit right in.

 I can match it.  Armed with her freshly minted PhD, she descended on the unemployment office.  They offered her: (a)  third grade or (b) go-go dancer.  Actually, she was a pretty good third grade teacher in her day.  

Two Mozarts

We idled away the evening yesterday taking in a Rachel Barton Pine concert, she doing all five of the Mozart violin concerti.  This is work of his youth: the last three appear to have been written in 1775, when he was 19.  I found myself oscillating between:

• I giving my entire evening's attention to a kid.

• My god, he did this before he was 20.

The Sweet Spot (aka One Web to Rule them All)

Let's review the bidding.  Right now we've  got three of them: Apple, Google and Facebook.  Only three but it's still fluid, and anarchic, still wild west.  You know that because they still try to cater to you, to give you stuff (or seem to).   Even when they charge you, they still try to go through the motions of making it seem "fair."  They still try to make you feel like you are part of the enterprise--an "associate," or a "colleague," as in "the new name for working grunt in a low level service job."

But this cannot last.  Sooner or later--no, strike that, sooner--we're going to reach some kind of stasis, and then we find out what the meaning of the word "inventory" really is.

In a first draft of this squib, I tried write about how we are in a death-struggle cage match and that one (only one) of the big three can possibly survive.  One slips on a banana peel, one trips on his own shoelace, and we re left with--one.   But then almost by accident, I described the big three as "networks."  Yes, that's a pretty good name for them: "networks," social and otherwise.  And you remember networks?  We used to have networks.  And we had three of them.  Except we didn't: we had one with three heads, engaged in a perfunctory exercise of faux "competition," while they all cooperated in working out the same agenda on the same platform.   Networks, as in "the networks," and for most purposes, we didn't need to differentiate.

So at the moment, I'm not so sure.  We might end up just one indigestible  behemoth called AppGoBook.  Or we might end up with a  network of networks, and it'll come down to the same thing.

One consequence of the inevitable coalescence is that it will serve to redefine other issues that we think of as unrelated today.    Consider the IP thugs: SOPA PIPA ACTA and whatever is gestating in the acronymic incubator.  Up to now, we think of "the entertainment industry" as the villains of the IP story, while the net giants stand for "freedom" (the ghost of Steve Jobs emits a maniacal  cackle).     But once the positioning is over, the networks and the IP goons will discover that they are  natural allies, as they morph from "online piracy" into "stop anything on the internet that the animals don't pay for." Drones? Hey, Zuckerberg would love drones... 

To repeat: this "pretend we are all co-venturers" phase can last only a little longer and then we are all back in the dutifully receptive role where, apparently since the end of the Pleistocene, we were all  meant to be.  So enjoy the sweet spot while you can, bunkies and remember: the pony express lasted just 18 months.  

If You've Been Needing to Go to the Laundromat

...today might be a good day.  Maybe also if you intend to jimmy the cash box, although Underbelly does not recommend it.  Or, come to think of it, if you've always dreamed of walking down Seventh Avenue buck naked.

===

Laundromat anecdote:  last time I was in one (long story), I overheard a woman on the coin op phone  (sic) saying: "Mama, I know I screwed up, but he's still my baby."  World of hurt out there. 

Uneasy Lies the Head

 [I] boni príncipi temono non per sé, ma per quelli a’ quali comandano, e li tiranni temeno quelli medesimi a’ quali commandano; però, quanto a maggior numero di gente commandano e son piú potenti, tanto piú temono ed hanno piú nemici. Come credete voi che si spaventasse e stesse con l’animo sospeso quel Clearco, tiranno di Ponto, ogni volta che andava nella piazza o nel teatro, o a qualche convito o altro loco publico, ché, come si scrive, dormiva chiuso in una cassa? o vero quell’altro Aristodemo Argivo, il qual a se stesso del letto avea fatta quasi una prigione, che nel palazzo suo tenea una piccola stanza sospesa in aria ed alta tanto che con scala andar vi bisognava, e quivi con una sua femina dormiva, la madre della quale la notte ne levava la scala, la mattina ve la rimetteva?

 That is:

[G]ood princes do not fear for themselves but for those whom they rule, while tyrants fear those whom they rule; hence the greater the number of people they rule and the more powerful they are, the more fear they feel and the more enemies they have. How fearful and of what an uneasy mind was Clearchus, tyrant of Pontus, whenever he went into the market place or theater, or to some banquet or other public place, who, as it is written, was wont to sleep shut up in a chest! Or that other tyrant Aristodemus, the Argive, who made his bed into a kind of prison: for in his palace he had a little room suspended in air, so high that it could only be reached by a ladder; and there he slept with his woman, whose mother would remove the ladder at night and replace it in the morning.

 So Baldassare Castiglione, The Courtier, Book IV, part 24  (Charles S. Singleton trans., Anchor Paperback ed. 1959).  The anecdote derives from Plutarch.  Shakespeare says that "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," but he seems to have been thinking of all crowned heads without reference to general beneficence.  

Is Newt Really That Clever?

Could Underbelly's Wichita bureau be right in surmising that the Trump endorsement of Romney was a febrile plot by Gingrich? 

A Facebook Footnote

What I offer here is no real secret but nobody else seems to be picking up on it so I guess it falls to me.

Specifically--we're hearing all this talk about how the Facebook IPO implies a company that is "worth" perhaps $100 billion.  But unless  miss something simple and vital, that number is a "market cap"--share price times market cap.

Yet everybody knows that market cap is a fantasy number. It implies (assumes) a flat demand curve--that each share will sell at the same price of all shares.

A moment's reflection should be enough to persuade the observer that this will be the case, if at all, only by accident.  Most of the time, the more shares offered, the lower the price. Sometimes (buyer trying to corner the market), the more shares purchased, the higher the price. Either way, the curve is non-flat.

So even if Facebook does go out at the anticipated numbers, it doesn't imply much of anything at all about the value of the company as a whole.

One group does gain from all the hubba hubba, though: those who hold shares already.  By conventional standards, the Facebook offer is  tiny--perhaps five percent of all shares.  Restricted demand plus unrestricted hype means the new issue is indeed likely to go out the door at  heart-stopping price--enriching nobody so much as those who already own shares who just have to stand by and bath in the warm spray of the market pop.

End of message. Just sayin'.  

Body and Soul

Every Man Has a Pope in his Belly

--Attributed to Martin Luther 

Every Prussian soldier carries his sergeant in his breast

--Proverb 

"When I am dead and chested you will find Calais written on my heart."

--Mary Queen of Scots 

---

I'm sending my liver to Liverpool

My pancreas off to Peru.

My stomach and kidney

For the summer to Sydney,

But my heart I'm still saving for you.

There must be others.  Maybe I can count the vicar's wife I once met in England who said "I have to stop at the grocer's for more blood and body."