This posting is a combination of stuff written in November and early December. There was a delay while this site was relaunched over the past month.
Today (November 9), I’m sitting on a flight from Madrid to NYC and I’m feeling like I’ve done this before (because I have). I just don’t even remember when except that I can recall 20 years ago when Madrid airport departure was one room with 10 gates. Back then Delta had a new plane; now it takes 20 minutes to get out of Madrid airport upon arrival at 10pm since it is so huge, and Del
ta is still using the same old plane. The business class snack across the pond is either a hamburger or chicken and the dessert is a sundae with vanilla ice cream or a really soggy cannoli. Either they just don’t learn to accommodate their customers (ie: who don’t want meat) or they just truly don’t care. After a while, all this travel ceases to be fun and it’s just annoying, especially when the airlines over-promise the front-of-the-cabin experience. I went this week to Israel for the umpteenth time and stayed in two different hotels I’ve never stayed in before to try them out – the American Colony in East Jerusalem and the David Citadel in West Jerusalem (notes to follow further below). At this point the 48 hours I spent in the country was roughly 40 more than I needed. What’s fun at 35 and single just isn’t as interesting at 45 with a wife and two kids.
Today is my 9th anniversary and I have a lovely wife that was worth waiting for all those years as well as 2 great kids to celebrate. I’ve been in business for 12 years since I left my law job and started out with my room-mate in our apartment. Together we managed to build 3 companies and not kill each other just yet. But there are real differences between us and we are trying to resolve them so that we can each take part of what we’ve built up jointly and move on with a bit more space between us. I want to take stock of things at this point and go to the next stage where certain things become important and other things that were important are now not important. At a certain point, you’ve tasted as many chocolate hat desserts as you can stand and only 1 in a 100 comes along to wow you and it’s not worth tasting the other 99 to find the one you like. And trips just melt into hotel rooms and meetings or places that are now too exotic for comfort, and frankly I just want to do less exploring on my own and more with my kids in tow who really seem to “get it.” My 6 year old daughter Elizabeth was describing desserts at a local restaurant as poor – “they don’t make them there; they get them from somewhere else and it comes out of a freezer.” My late grandmother would have been so proud! You can’t push crap past this maven. This morning we missed the school bus and I got a taxi to school but was upset that I would have to walk home without my coat. Elizabeth said – just let us get out and you can take the taxi home!
A year or two ago I remarked here that it was getting harder for me to think of opinions that I didn’t already see published somewhere else – the internet allows so many people to just put everything up there, just like me. I hope that I am still writing compelling commentary, but I am definitely becoming of the opinion that less is more and I hope you don’t mind.
My wife is in Germany this week on business and tonight (the 14th) I took the Pepsi Challenge and made home-made chicken shnitzel, and I am happy to tell you that it came out not bad at all. “Not bad for a beginner” opined our 6 year old daughter who has that patronizing and condescending tone down to a tack. “Awesome” was how Jeremy described it. Ah, boys are much simpler.
Look at the world today. Russia is producing gas which is becoming less competitive in the world marketplace. The US produces gas at one-third the price and the Europeans are finding other sources of gas other than the Russians. Oil is really becoming passe. China is not growing as it used to and its manufacturing edge is being lost as wages rise in that country; Mexico is supplanting China as the main supplier for America. Europe is bankrupt. Iran is on the decline as it over-reached and Syrian rebels are gaining in strength and at a certain point Assad will be gone. The US is in a great position with housing coming in for a rebuild. All we need is for the leaders of Congress to reach a deal of financial reform and the US is set to fly.
My main take on the US Election is that I failed to get with the program, but now it is crystal clear and I won’t make the same mistake. 70% of the voters had made up their minds by September and had Romney got even 25% of the minority vote or had fewer Blacks and Latinos showed up to vote, Obama would have lost. White straight Anglo men no longer decide elections and the majority of the Democratic Congress Caucus are not white males. I had thoughts of all these people changing their minds in the voting booth and of white men showing up to vote. Forget it – If the Republicans want to see the White House again, they better stop talking about gay marriage, deportation of immigrants, abortion and tax cuts. They have alienated a clear majority of America with these positions and made themselves unelectable. If the Tea Party has to winnow out candidates, they are doomed. Romney boxed himself in last spring; to vote for him you had to believe that everything he was saying in the fall in order to come to the Center was a lie. That’s not a platform on which to run for president and nobody really bought it. Even Jews ignored the scare-mongering about Israel and Iran and 70% voted for Obama. The billions spent on this election went to waste – Congress hardly changed and virtually all the nutty Republicans lost. The American voter is more nuanced than we care to believe and they voted for Obama and against Romney and the Republican platform. I won’t make the same miscalculation; I hope the GOP figures it out and fast. I have complained here for years that the GOP platform is all talk and no walk and nobody really believes in it. And frankly, most of this country hates rich people and wants to see them taxed even more. Obama called for class warfare because it helped him win. Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal wrote in the spring that Obama pissed off the nation’s Catholics when he forced church health institutions to provide coverage for contraception. Most Catholics do not adhere to church doctrine on abortion and there are a lot more women in the country than Catholics who agree with the Church. He knew exactly what he was doing. Again, GOP take note. Sometimes all those polls and the columnists you read in the liberal papers get it right. The polls were 100% on target with electoral college projections this time from sources such as Votamatic and 538.
I can tell you that I never saw a single TV advertisement this year concerning the presidential campaign. I did spend $2.95 on a greeting card at a Target that would only be useful if Romney won to send to my uncle on Inauguration Day. I lost my $2.95, but hey – Sheldon Adelson lost over $60 million on this election. Speaking of which, you had to consider that Romney and Bibi Netanyahu kept up this love fest during the campaign partially because Sheldon Adelson gave them both so much money. That’s probably why Obama will forgive Bibi – he knows that Bibi was very much playing up to his major donor and business is business. Some perspective — Americans spent more on potato chips this year than the $6.5 billion spent on the presidential elections.
Notes from Conversations in Israel during my most recent visit this past month– First from Arabs and liberal Israelis: Farouk al Sharaa in Syria might be a good interim leader. Qatar is pouring millions into the Moslem Brotherhood trying to put its favored leaders in place. They are competing with the Saudis for influence here but the Saudis really don’t care for the Moslem Brotherhood and the Qataris are interested in engaging with them (and Israel used to have an interests office in Qatar after the Oslo accords were signed). It is not a fluke that Israel allowed the emir of Qatar to visit Gaza last month. Khaled Mashaal might replace the worldwide movement’s aging leader. Israel’s new gas pipeline of 190 miles is not going to be defensible underground; this might push Israel to realize that it needs to have peace with its neighbors. Al Jazeera’s English service is getting noticed and people see it as a real alternative and rather good in Middle East coverage. I had mentioned that earlier this year and I’m getting positive feedback from others. Arab countries themselves are getting a bit more sophisticated; Israel shouldn’t join Hamas in waiting another 5-10 years just because both sides think that time is on their side. Arab Israelis want to stop complaining that they are second class citizens and just work hard, make money, have friends and buy things. These notes were from interesting conversations with an Arab flight attendant for El Al (the company’s first one), my good friend Mohammed, and a person who has for several years been listed as one of the top 50 Jews of interest. The concierge at the American Colony Hotel said that Jerusalem is still today the safest place in the entire Middle East – he said he couldn’t believe how the Syrian “brothers” were killing each other like “rabbits.” The hotel was overbooked – obviously there are tourists here. Here from another Arab source: Jordan’s king must move toward a constitutional monarchy to survive. He is in trouble there because the Gulf countries are withholding money pledged to keep Jordan afloat on condition that Jordan get more involved in their campaigns against Syria. Jordan is afraid that getting involved will bring in competing factions who will ultimately move to destabilize Jordan. People want the king to stay in charge over all the factions that would carve up that country if they had a chance but they want real change.
Oded is my resident Israeli curmudgeon but who tends to be right. He mentioned that the 3 Syrian tanks that were firing into Israel had actually wanted to defect. He mentioned that 7 Syrian generals had fled to Turkey the previous night. 7,800 Syrian soldiers have died so far in their civil war; that is more than against all the wars against Israel. The army has been decimated; Israel will be able to demobilize at a certain point and not have to worry about the Arab armies around them. He is not worried about the gas pipelines – the navy has 6 nuclear submarines – what do the arabs have, divers? He figures the Arabs will spend the next 20 years arguing among themselves in all these countries – only the Army in Egypt ever ran anything well and Egypt is in a real mess now and maybe at a certain point the army will get fed up with Morsi.( I saw the Egyptian prime minister on BBC Hard Talk and I thought he was rather good, but clearly they have a lot of expectations to meet.) Hamas and PLO is nothing; Bibi will be around for years to come. There is nobody to talk to and the whole region is in chaos. Israel is the only stable place from Morocco to Afghanistan. Whatever the US thinks, they have to deal with Israel because it is the only place they can count on in the entire region. Israel is to the US today what the UK was in 1945. Who else does the US have around here to rely upon? Iran will be psychologically busted if they get bombed for 2 days – doesn’t matter what is actually hit or destroyed. Get ready for the big show. Arabs will just stop complaining and want to make money. (Well on that point he agreed with the Arabs I spoke to.) Oslo was a great success for Israel – you don’t even see Bethlehem anymore. Gaza has Hamas working with Israel to track down the real bad trouble makers (which despite the recent events since I left still seems to be true; the guy the Israelis killed with the drone was actually cooperating with them until they decided he wasn’t anymore). In Egypt, he is not worried about Sinai. The country can tolerate a few rogue Beduin. Obama gave Israel lots of money and Obama will cooperate; Bibi will decide when the war against Iran will be. Infrastructure in Israel is great; economy and transport all point to a bright future. Oded feels that everything today is exactly as he predicted 20-30 years ago; the Arab Spring was a self-destructive event that will bog down the Arab countries for the next 20-30 years and he has predicted since the mid 80’s that Egypt would eventually become a fundamentalist country, which is where it seems to be in danger of heading.
In West Jerusalem, I saw a new bike path built between the old railway station and the German Colony neighborhood. The old train station is under renovation. There are some new night spots in the Germany colony area. The Waldorf Astoria hotel is not finished yet; I don’t think that more than a few rooms will have old city views and the views from the King David are definitely superior to those in the David Citadel hotel. El Al is OK up front but the 747 airplane is far superior to the 777. Desserts in the front were poor. On Iberia’s A319 business class, get row 2 on the right side of the plane (D/E/F) – that is by far the best legroom seat on the plane. They give out these Sony Playstations to watch things on – I couldn’t even figure out how to turn it on. I sat next to a Russian who had just visited Israel for the first time on the Iberia flight to Madrid. He wasn’t impressed with Israel – felt it was overpriced as a tourist destination compared to other places and felt that most Russians who were any good had moved on to other western countries leaving Israel with the riff-raff of people from that region. He kept hearing from people in Israel that life “sucked” and there was no money and no housing. I will definitely agree that 550 Euro ($700) in Spain buys you a lot more hotel room than $900 in Israel, although a massage in good hotel in Spain is twice the cost than in Israel, both with Russian-immigrant therapists (which is an important reason why Spain is bankrupt – labor is too expensive).
Trying to see Jerusalem again for the first time, I stayed at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem in its famous Apartment #6 which was the suite that the pasha had made for his favorite wife. It is interesting to stay here for a night and it has a nice balcony; you can get a massage in the spa hearing the koran being read from the mosque across the street. There is memorabilia all over the place; General Allenby’s walking stick is in a hallway. Walking around East Jerusalem outside the hotel feels like walking around the Turkish side of Nicosia in Cyprus – everything even after 45 years feels “pending.” You see UN everything everywhere and don’t really feel like walking around. The Palestinian Heritage Museum is across from the hotel and it is interesting to see another point of view as well as some nice exhibits about Palestinian heritage, aside from the politics. The hotel is a Raffles kinda place as in Singapore with pretty gardens where you really smell the spices. Though it is part of the Leading Hotels of the World, the soap cracks in two when you take it out of the package. It is not exactly a 5 star hotel and I think it gets a “bye” because people want to be “fair” and include something from East Jerusalem on the list, and because of its history and charm. Do go there for a night, but frankly the hotel is no match for the properties on the Western side of the city such as the King David. I also stayed for a night at the David Citadel. It is an OK hotel but has all the warmth of a Hilton; you feel lonely in your room and in the lobby. Maybe it is all the jerusalem stone and the empty spaces but I didn’t like it. The gym is good and the views of the old city are OK. There is a lounge but it is nothing special. If you are going to pay for a junior suite here, pay the extra $75 to the King David via American Express Platinum and you get their junior suite plus an upgrade plus all the goodies. There is just no comparison. I visited the Inbal; the rooms are small and even the suites are small and there are only 2 suites with connecting rooms for the whole hotel.
I spent a day in Madrid. The Hotel Villa Magna is a nice hotel not exactly in the city center but there are various “centers” of this city and 5-10 Euro in a taxi will get you just about anywhere quickly. The Metro works well too. I liked the hotel; it was well decorated and in a pleasant area.
I had BBC World in all 3 hotels (American Colony, Citadel and Villa Magna) and saw more coverage of the US Election than I would have seen had I been home that week. I had stayed in the Westin last time in Madrid but found it cold. The NH Nacional near the Prado Museum is a good budget choice; I stayed there once many years ago. Madrid does not impress me nearly as much as Barcelona. It is more run down than I expected. The Prado has a lot of church art and some other stuff; I spent close to an hour there. Arriving at 4pm is good as there is no line. In 3-4 hours I saw the Prado, the Royal Castle and walked through the center of town (Plaza Mayor, Plaza de Sol). El Cortes Igles has too many locations around town but I went to the main store and found nice things there for the children. At the Royal Castle, go to the bottom floor of the Armory and see the children’s knight costumes. The irony of Spain of course is that they stole all this stuff from the Jews and put it in museums and threw out the Jews in the late 1400’s – and since then all they’ve done is gone downhill these past 500 years and now they’re basically bankrupt with unemployment at 26%. The Israelis are living on a higher standard at this point than the Spaniards and people like Oded think that Israel is in the best position ever. Even if the Russian on the plane felt that Tel Aviv looked like Madrid (and in some respects he’s right), the fact is that if the Israelis are on par with Madrid, that sets them far above their neighbors around them and it’s not bad for a country that was nothing 60 years ago versus a country with all of its history that used to be a world empire. It’s a crazy place but Oded and the concierge in East Jerusalem agree – nobody in that country wants to be anywhere else today between Morocco and Afghanistan.
Here’s a Thought about Mergers – At a certain point, there have been so many mergers that you wonder if there is no longer any economy of scale here or if there are actually added costs just to maintain these huge corporate structures. The Economist asked that question and thought it just might be so that mergers have gone too far for their own good.
Gaza events of this month are a prelude to a ground invasion after the next Israeli election. Egypt allowed these long range rockets to enter Gaza and I can’t imagine how the Israelis will deal with it. In the meanwhile, Netanyahu shows his strength with the promise of more to come after he solidifies his new government. Turkey’s stance toward Israel leaves it with no leverage; Turkey has really made a mess of its foreign policy. It said it wanted no enemies; what it has is no friends or influence.
The US has so much creaky infrastructure that it is costing us economically in lost productivity. Offices in downtown Manhattan are closed for weeks. In Chatanooga, TN, a smart electricity grid meant that after a storm that knocked out power to 80,000 people, the power for half of them went back on after 2 seconds as opposed to 17 hours.
Oil prices will remain high over the next few years because Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran are all trapped — they need high prices to keep their countries solvent. They are addicted to the spending. Meanwhile, this high price makes it viable for North America to develop its oil fields which eventually by 2017 will overtake Saudi Arabia as the largest producer of oil in the world. If the rest of the world had a longer term view, they would drive the price down now in order to stymie development efforts which require a higher price. Saudi Arabia once drove down the price to $10 a barrel a generation ago and that low price coupled with American defense spending threw the Soviet Union out of business, so they know how to do this when they want to. But right now with the Arab Spring, they don’t want to. But eventually, the price of oil will go down a lot and I suppose that whatever countries in the world lived off high oil such as the Gulf, Russia, Iran and Venezuela, will then be forced to deal with reality. Meanwhile, we pay our bills and bide our time.
My gut feeling is that whether or not the Congress and the White House reach a compromise or not in the next month, there will be a lot of gimmicky involved in telling people how the numbers add up, and I believe there will be fewer changes than believed. Democrats also don’t want to raise estate taxes and I think it is clear that if they go around raising tax rates and limiting deductions too much, it will really strain economic activity. People will get fed up and make lifestyle changes such as move to lower tax states if they can’t deduct state income tax in highly taxed states, and people won’t want to buy homes if they can’t deduct home mortgage interest. People will spend less money and the recipients of those discretionary dollars will lose their jobs. As it is, people are not eating out as much in restaurants or buying things in stores. Owners of companies are not buying equipment and don’t want to hire people. Industries that are worried about having their labor pools become subject to health insurance laws set to go into effect next year will simply make sure to hire fewer people or employ them for fewer hours to avoid being caught in the net. As it is, people are accelerating income and postponing deductions to account for their concern over future changes to tax law. It is not good for an economy to worry people so much.
In Syria, no doubt everyone who a year ago assumed that Assad would be gone is sitting around wondering why he is still around. But rest assured, in another year he will be gone. You can see that the momentum is turning or at least that a full scale push of misinformation is out there to make it look like the Iranians and Russians are abandoning hope in him and that the West is going to be forced to act because of the chemical weapons somehow being moved around. Problem is that nobody knows what comes afterward and nobody is happy about it. The US will probably get more involved in Syria because if it doesn’t begin to lead more, it will be dragged from behind and wind up with a situation that it cannot control and does not like. It’s funny but the Arabs hated American involvement in their lands and now wish the Americans would lead. The Americans are fed up with this part of the world and the biggest fear of the Arabs is that in another 5-10 years the US won’t need oil from that region and simply won’t care. The Israelis either have to worry that if the Americans don’t care about that region that they won’t care about Israel either — or they are secure in knowing that with friends like the Iraqis who let Iranian arms prop up Syria or Pakistanis who undercut the Americans in Afghanistan — why would America even want to pretend that they have friends in this region? The Israelis are a bit nuts, but there is no doubt that they stand with the U.S. and if you are the US why would you want to do anything but back your real friends. So let’s be real — Netanyahu announces 3,000 new housing units in the West Bank to snuff his nose at the Palestinians getting a vote in the UN (which was more symbolic than real) — Western Europe threatens to pull their ambassadors but so far I haven’t seen a single country do anything. It’s all a show. The Israelis will create facts on the ground under Netanyahu; the Arabs will talk to themselves. I think Oded is going to be proven right all along.
Now here’s some news you can really use. Jeremy doesn’t like to eat his food. Always eats the carbs. So we made them disappear. We had meatballs; he usually skips them. When I told him it was cauliflower and meatballs and nothing else, he looked at us, totally broken and said “give me the meatball.” This is better methodology than anything we’ve read in the books!
Here’s a great interview question that tells you instantly a lot about people: When you get on an escalator, do you keep walking or wait till it takes you where you’re going?
Some home news: Jeremy is age 5 in pre-kindergarten at an age where he has lots of questions. He wants to know why people don’t fall off the edges of the world, how electricity works, how planes fly and all sorts of things that I can’t easily answer, although I had a docent at the New York City transit museum try to answer him how subway tracks work. He is great at climbing things and is super fantastic at finding his way back from anywhere. He has a very pretty smile and we enjoy him very much. Elizabeth is nearing her 7th birthday; she is becoming a better eater but life is also becoming more complicated for her. She agonizes over which girls in class are being nice or rude, whether or not she is able to direct traffic on the playground to what suits her, and she is rather particular that her clothes match and her hair is getting long enough to be in a ponytail. She loves to party and loves hip hop and is in an advanced gymnastics class. At school she is learning in the first grade how to add two digit numbers even though she is completely average for her class and I would swear that there is no way that I learned that kind of stuff when I was in first grade.
For Thanksgiving Weekend we flew to sunny but a little bit chilly Tampa / St. Petersburg, Florida. Not a high priced destination to fly to on a holiday weekend and easy to get in and out of there. High temperatures were in the high 60’s when we were hoping for mid to upper 70’s, but the kids didn’t really notice and they loved the Tradewinds Resort on the beach. We’d been there 3 years ago and we still like it. There is a great beach with a big slide (though freezing in the winter), pools, jacuzzis, paddleboats, trampoline with bungee jumping, a pirate show on saturday nights, an arts and crafts shed, a day spa and the rooms have kitchenettes. Food on the property is reasonable but Marriott quality. Restaurants off property weren’t much better but the Don Cesar Hotel is 5 minutes drive away and you can get good food there. The Salvador Dali Museum was a nice attraction and both kids liked it; we also went to see a Titanic Exhibition just across the courtyard along the St. Petersburg waterfront and our two kids actually enjoyed going to see these exhibitions back to back. About 15 minutes drive away from the hotel is Jon’s Pass, a nice promenade along the waterway with some shops and places to eat — it’s a way to break up the day for an hour or two. On departure we were stuck for 4 hours on an American Airlines flight — the management and labor don’t get along and the passengers are being stuck with delays as they fight out how much they can squeeze their unions. In our case, they were renovating seats on aircrafts using non-union labor and it was no surprise that the unions found all sorts of leaks and defects forcing delays. We read about in the New York Times the same day.
Later this month we will heading to Australia to visit Karen’s family. On the way we will stop at Disneyland in California and the Big Island of Hawaii. A companion article this month contains summaries of family vacations we have taken over the past 7 years with our kids with some tips. I hope that over time it grows into what might become an interesting book.
You can also go back to the homepage and click on the links in the Recent Postings section of the home page to reach these 2 stories.
