Global Thoughts — 10 February 2014

IMG_0296I saw the funniest thing when I went to my son’s school to watch him play in a chess tournament. He sat silently, followed the rules and behaved like an adult. His 7 year old opponent put his hand across the table and said “May the best man win” and a few minutes later when Jeremy lost his queen he didn’t say boo. I’m not sure it was really my kid. He’s become nuts about Monopoly — he refers to the railroads as “my babies” — “No matter what — I won’t give up my railroads” and talks about people “landing on my properties.”

News just in from Miami — my oldest niece, now 17, just went on her first date. It was to an ice cream place with a kid from her class. He came over to my brother’s house to introduce himself. My brother reportedly felt pretty “weird.” Another milestone reached; I still remember being in the hospital when she was born.

Consider the following: In the US, 20% of households headed by someone under age 25 don’t have a TV set. A generation ago, a statistic like this portended the dying nature of print newspapers. Now you can see where TV is going.

I think I have figured out BBC World’s strategy for making sure they don’t develop on-air talent that gets poached by other TV networks: Hire correspondents whose names are completely unpronounceable or memorable. I cannot remember these names for even one second or even repeat the names I hear from the hosts of the India and Middle East business programs, for example.

Did you know that one third of traffic in cities is caused by people in cars looking for parking spots? I wonder if all these new apps to help people find spots will reduce traffic.

There was a recent NY Times article about how businesses that cater to the middle class are failing and how the economic recovery in the US is being driven almost wholly by the upper class. Restaurants whose dinner checks average $16 per person are down and those that average $65 are up. The article doesn’t say why this is happening. I don’t think it is simply a matter of people making money from the stock market. I’m trying to figure this out; but clearly the rich are getting richer in this country. Below I discuss the reasons why Democratic ideas that are supposed to redistribute wealth have instead made the middle class harder to get into, which can help explain why the rich get richer.

wd034wdw201400134554932We returned from a few weeks vacation in Florida including Miami and Disney World. The Resort at Turnberry turned out to be a nice surprise; the hotel is not on the beach but it has a shuttle to its beach club. Meanwhile, the pool has a lazy river (go on tubes and float around with a current underneath), a water slide and nice pools. I tried all of them. The food there is also excellent. The Eden Roc hotel in Miami Beach is also excellent all around — great food and facilities. It has truly been redone for a new generation without alienating the older generation — the Fontainbleau is disturbing to walk through unless you are super cool. The Alexander offers good value for money with an all suite hotel, but the facilities are not much to speak of. The only place that didn’t have heated pools that just stands out was the St. Regis in Puerto Rico the previous month. (I was told that the Ritz Carlton Reserve in Dorado in Puerto Rico also doesn’t have heated pools.)

At Disney, we stayed at the Grand Floridian and it is a pretty reliable place with good access to the parks. Karen figured she wouldn’t ride Space Mountain but went for major coolness points with the kids and tried it — she wound up taking the ride 3 times. Our kids said they favored any ride with the word Mountain in it, meaning Space, Splash or Thunder Mountain. Test Track at Epcot is a really great ride, and the new Rock and Roller Coaster at Hollywood studios theme park from Disney was also really cool with a loop de loop. If you are in a resort, you can sign up for Fast Passes in advance using an app on a smart phone. This is really useful, because if you show up at the park looking for Fast Passes, by 9am they are all gone for the day and they are telling you to come back at midnight to go on the ride with a Fast Pass, which is totally useless. We complained to a manager and got two extra Fast Passes to use each day whenever we wanted them on whatever rides we wanted, and that was a really big help. After riding Space Mountain three times, Elizabeth said it was getting kinda less exciting for her. She said she felt that she had seen it all. I said what is there to see, it is all in the dark….I told them that by the next time we return to Disney, they would be older and think the Magic Kingdom was for babies. You can already see that Fantasy Land is beneath them. We had to beg them to ride It’s a Small World. When I was a kid, there were no roller coasters or any of these other theme parks such as Epcot, and I remember having a really great time. Kids today expect so much more.

wd014wdw201336534266949We saw so many obese people there, which is no surprise considering the huge turkey legs people are consuming there at $10 a pop. You have all these people going around in scooters because they can’t hold themselves up to walk around. Most of the food in the park is gross, but people working there told us that American kids don’t eat fruits and vegetables (each park has one spot where you can get fresh fruit and veges). We spent the last two days of our trip at the Waldorf Astoria hotel nearby which was excellent. Next to it is the Hilton. The children’s menu at the Hilton is standard American fare; the Waldorf’s children menu was more European because the guests there tend to be foreigners and it was much healthier and interesting. America has a real problem — they are talking about eating healthier but the walk doesn’t match the talk. We had an 8 hour delay on JetBlue returning home because a flight attendant didn’t make the flight that was coming from Washington DC to take us back to New York. They kept posting departure and arrival flights for that flight that had not even boarded. Only by looking at something like Live Flight Tracker on the internet could we ferret out the truth of the incoming plane. Faced with a lemon of a day, I made lemonade. It was sunny and 76 degrees outside; we checked into the airport Hyatt and sat at the pool, which I considered lucky since we had several cloudy, cold and rainy days preceding this. You could do really well with this — fly out some day to Orlando in the morning on a cheap flight, get your sun tan at the airport  and return home that night.

In politics, what I find interesting these days is the Republican party in the US trying to take back its center and not be taken hostage by Tea Party yahoos. They realize the party is committing suicide by being dragged along with people with ideological hangups and no practical ideas. The Republicans have a case to make, and the new mayor of New York City will certainly help them make it as he makes a new run of liberalism that is sure to alienate many people. The best thing the Republicans can say is that over the last generation, it is true that the middle class has become more unobtainable for people trying to get into it. The 3 big ticket items to entering the middle class are buying a home, college tuition and personal health care. The main reason these costs have increased dramatically is that a generation ago the government began handing out money to enable people to afford these things. That availability of money caused the providers of these services to charge more for them. In housing, the government gave out cheap mortgages with hardly any money down. With college, the government gave out gobs of loans that caused colleges to raise tuition. With health, the government’s attempts to make insurance universal on terms that were bad to the insurance industry caused everyone’s premiums to skyrocket. The HMO health plans created a situation where the consumer never saw a bill and therefore didn’t care what the insurer was charged, unless the old days where the consumer paid the bill and got paid back by the insurance company. The best argument to be made by the Republicans is that if you want to make entry into the middle class more accessible, the way NOT to do it is to have the government engage in handouts to everyone.

I was making this last argument as I was walking through the Pentagon on a recent Sunday afternoon when I was in that area for a meeting. While I was walking around, I passed some Jamaican-looking guy in jeans and dreadlocks who came out of an office into the corridor, and I figured this must be some major hacker who now works for Uncle Sam.

Interesting thing going on in Israel — Avigdor Lieberman is now publicly supporting Kerry’s peace plans for Israel-Palestine. I wonder why — maybe he knows it is doomed to fail. Or maybe he knows they will go along with it and wants to be on the inside of it. I just don’t know.

January 2014 Grove Park Inn 028We had a great time at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina. It was the resort’s annual big band swing dance weekend with two great bands — The Glenn Miller Orchestra and the North Carolina Revelers. The latter isn’t nearly as famous but they are much better to dance to and their vocalists are superb. They have two evening dances and one tea dance in the afternoon with a sweets table and the kids had a great time at that one and took turns dancing with their grandparents. Omni took over the hotel 2 years ago and has improved its food offerings and the hotel still has its charms; not stifled out by chain management. You can fly to Charlotte and drive 2 1/4 hours or you can fly from New York to Greenville, South Carolina where it is about an hour’s drive. Asheville discontinued its nonstop flights to New York during the winter, but in the summer it is an easy flight. In January there are not lots of outdoor things to do in the area, but the Fun Depot was a great place to take the kids. This weekend was a good opportunity for the kids and the grandparents to all do something together that they all enjoyed.

I had a lightning business trip to the Middle East. I stopped in Israel and spent a day in Herzliya. I remember being there in 1988 when the Daniel hotel had just opened and it was the newest and best thing. Now it is the Ritz Carlton that just opened last month atop the local shopping center next to the marina. It was tailor-made for Russians who like that brand and will spend the cash on it. It bring hotels to a new standard in Israel for now and offers a real spa in the hotel; the Waldorf Astoria is soon to open in Jerusalem and I’m sure it will be very good. The King David is already very good; but nothing in Tel Aviv is really up to the top standards yet. My room service dinner was one of the best of its kind for me. They built the hotel without connecting rooms but they are working to correct that now. They are also working to arrange beach access for its guests; right now there are no facilities on the beach and no direct access for hotel guests.

wd009wdw201400134360197When you look at Herzliya at the Sea from the top of the hotel, where much of Israel’s elite and the ambassadors tend to live, it is really small. It all fits into a few coastal blocks. Sorta like the wealthy areas of Kuwait. And 100 meters beyond these neighborhoods are just undeveloped land and nothing has changed in 30 years. If you want miles and miles of mansions and development, there is still nothing like Beverly Hills. Another point — in Israel, french toast for 30 years has been fried bread. At the Ritz, it now has caramelized bananas in the middle and no crust, but at the end of the day it still tastes like fried bread. The other problem is that aside from surfing and going to the mall, there is not much to do in Herzliya. You can take a 20 minute to north Tel Aviv where there are lots of museums near the university. I just went to see the Rabin Center which is a memorial to Rabin who died almost 20 years ago. The museum is up for about 10 years and I just got to it. It is like a parallel museum — half of it is about Rabin, and half about Israel’s social and political history, with a bit of a liberal point of view. It’s worth a visit, but not with small kids in tow. I noticed the King Hussein memorial garden there. Wonder if I’ll ever see such a thing in an Arab country. On the positive side of things, Israelis tend to underestimate the level of service in their country. I think it’s gotten rather good.

If you ask people what did Bibi Netanyahu accomplish for his 10 years in power? They will tell you — lots of great new roads, no new wars, low terrorism and continued good economy. And they will say it’s enough, even if you can’t point to any particular accomplishments. I made the trip from Herzliya to Jerusalem in 45 minutes with the help of the new Route 6 highway. Used to take at least 70 minutes to do that drive.  My friend Mohammed says that today Bibi is more popular in the Arab world than inside Israel. They see him as a force for stability in the Middle East. He says that today the Arabs really don’t know what they want which is one reason why negotiations between Israel/Palestine don’t go anywhere. I argue that people don’t know what they want because they don’t know what they will actually wind up with, because everything going on around them is so unstable.  He says it will take many years, but eventually there will be peace when things become more stable.

My friend Oded says you just wait and see what the Turkish army has in store for Erdogan. They are not going to kill the spirit of Ataturk in that country just yet.

I heard presentations from 4 companies highlighting really cool technologies useful in civilian applications such as for detecting employee fraud, aggregating video content, maximizing energy efficiency for municipalities, and enabling police units to broadcast sound and video to each other around the field in a really cool way, and elite special forces military prowess –for 2 years in a row, the Israeli elite counter-terrorist forces beat out 25 other international special forces units in Urban Shield, a set of military exercises held in the US to compare the results obtained in hostile scenarios by the various elite units. Israel continues to impress.

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