American Madness

Intelligent Criticism in the Service of a Better Nation




Carnegie Hall has crappy marketing (and other reasons for the death of classical music)

Posted by Josh Friedlander on | July 26, 2010 | 3 Comments

So here is the crux of my problem with Carnegie Hall: It worships the musicians at the expense of the music.

I am on the list for Carnegie Hall because I’ve attended a couple of concerts there, but I rarely respond to emails or mailings and I haven’t been to the Hall in years. Why? Because I can’t read the marketing materials. I just can’t understand what I’m seeing. It makes no sense to me.

Let me explain. In mid 2010, Carnegie Hall sent out a pamphlet with a bland picture of an orchestra on the cover and a headline proclaiming “2010-2011 Season: Subscribe Now!” First, what is a season? Does it last a year? When does it start? We’re already well into 2010, so this is baffling. Is the “music year” like a school year (Sept to June)? I’m not familiar with this concept of a season. Already I feel like I’m being snubbed by people who assume I know the habits of their particular world. Read more

I’m flummoxed, can anyone explain this to me!

Posted by Joel Friedlander on | July 15, 2010 | Click to Comment

I am sure that almost no one is terribly concerned with how ultra orthodox Jews view the preparation of leafy vegetables.  A friend of mine’s daughter was told by a super orthodox Rabbi that if she served a lettuce without taking it apart and examining every part of the leaf for tiny bugs, eating it would be worse than eating a roast pork sandwich on Yom Kippur.  A little ridiculous, don’t you think, for surely there is nothing in the Bible about not eating leafy vegetables while there is a very strict prohibition against eating pork.  Well the same type of thing happen in the Catholic Church today.  Their new rules include:

Art. 5

The more grave delict of the attempted sacred ordination of a woman is also reserved to the

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:

1̊ With due regard for can. 1378 of the Code of Canon Law, both the one who attempts to confer sacred ordination on a woman, and she who attempts to receive sacred ordination, incurs a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.  My Emphasis

2̊ If the one attempting to confer sacred ordination, or the woman who attempts to receive sacred ordination, is a member of the Christian faithful subject to the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches, with due regard for can. 1443 of that Code, he or she is to be punished by major excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.

3̊ If the guilty party is a cleric he may be punished by dismissal or deposition[31].

Art. 6

§ 1. The more grave delicts against morals which are reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are:

1̊ the delict against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue (Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultry) committed by a cleric with a minor below the age of eighteen years; in this case, a person who habitually lacks the use of reason is to be considered equivalent to a minor.

2̊ the acquisition, possession, or distribution by a cleric of pornographic images of minors under the age of fourteen, for purposes of sexual gratification, by whatever means or using whatever technology;

§ 2. A cleric who commits the delicts mentioned above in § 1 is to be punished according to the gravity of his crime, not excluding dismissal or deposition. http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_norme_en.html

According to what I read above, if you try to ordain a woman as a priest the punishment is major excommunication, or being denied entry into Heaven through the Church, but if you are a pederast, the punishment is dismissal or deposition.  I’m having a problem understanding this, can anyone explain to me how the Church thinks on this?  How can #5 be worse than #6?  How can having a woman priest, which is not specifically prohibited in the New Testament be worse than raping a child under the age of majority, which is specifically prohibited in both the New and the Old Testaments, albeit under different numbers in the Decalogue.

Self-funding regulation:
Another stupid idea

Posted by Josh Friedlander on | June 12, 2010 | 2 Comments

Response to Top Securities Lawyers Call for Self-Funded S.E.C., in which it is stated that “Forty leading securities lawyers urged Congress on Friday to allow the S.E.C. to keep the hundreds of millions of dollars in fees it collects each year and use them to support its operations”:

We select among a series of bad options. An externally financed bureaucracy leaves its leadership with perverse incentives to enhance their power by pushing for more staff and resources. This is, at best, only slightly correlated with the task with which the agency is tasked. A self-financed agency arguably has a worse incentive structure: Imagine telling the police that their salaries will be a function of whatever tickets and fines they can collect? Some will say that there should be no agency at all and people will have to protect themselves. That is clearly suboptimal (like, uh, having no police force!). Or: eliminate sector-specific regulatory agencies and meld them into a general justice department (fraud is fraud, right? Or is it?). There seem to be no good answers. I prefer Temple Grandin’s solution to regulation (in her case as applied to the cattle slaughter industry): Set clear rules and deal with violations. So, if we don’t want cows falling down on their way to slaughter, we institute a rule that slippery floors are forbidden and we define slippery as X cows falling in a given period of time. What we don’t do is say: You must have a floor no more than one degree from perfect flatness, that adheres to XYZ-level of friction, and so on. We don’t tell people how to achieve compliance, we simply define compliance based on outcomes. Clearly, there will differences of opinion as to how one defines compliance in financial services, but I’d rather have an outcome-based regulatory structure than one in which the SEC wanders around with a stick in one hand and a coin jar in the other. This proposal sounds like ancient French tax collection practices that involved eyeballing people’s possessions and that resulted in the French having a weird fetish for blinds on their windows (some apartments in Paris have retail store-type metal gates on the windows…even those facing out on locked gardens from several stories up!). Turn each regulator into a tax collector and you encourage enormous opacity.

“Stimulus” is a meaningless term

Posted by Josh Friedlander on | June 11, 2010 | Click to Comment

My reply to David Brooks (who now fancies himself an economist):

If economists had a clue most of them would work real jobs producing something. This is REALLY simple.

If you had a friend who was in debt to his eyeballs and had just lost his job and he asked for a loan to spend the weekend drinking bourbon and snorting cocaine, you’d turn him down, right? If he came to you and said, “I’ve gotten into this degree program to learn some stuff that will help me find work” it would be a different story.

The term “stimulus” is useless. Either a debt is incurred to invest in productive capacity or to blow on useless unproductive activity. That’s it. Really. There are no other reasons to incur debt. When private enterprise stops borrowing and spending, and individuals stop borrowing and spending–because they CAN’T borrow and spend any more–the only entity left that can borrow is the government (and even then there will eventually be a limit to what the USGovt can borrow).

The ONLY question that matters is whether the government borrowing and spending has been an investment in future productivity. Has the borrowing been to invest? Well, let me answer this for you: No. No, it hasn’t. We print money, spend it to import from other countries, they take our dollars and have no choice (realistically) but to reinvest those dollars with us.

We get cheap goods, they get IOUs on future US productivity that won’t materialize, and we get inflated asset prices resulting from petro-dollar and import-dollar recycling. Ultimately, they decide to buy their own stuff, stop selling to us at such cheap prices, stop denominating energy commodities in our ponzi currency, and we STILL win because they’ve created too much productive capacity while we’ve merely spent too much of our own monopoly money. We are therefore forced to cut back (eventually) and so are they. In the meantime, try to pretend this is easy to understand, because it is.

Tom Friedman math:
debt + inexperience = success!

Posted by Lord Halifax on | June 10, 2010 | 4 Comments

Thomas Friedman, the most “important columnist in America,” reminded New York Times readers on Wednesday that all is possible if you just pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Friedman’s latest footnote in America’s ongoing Horatio Alger narrative prescribes a new round of government tax cuts to help college graduates start their own businesses.

By Friedman’s twisted logic, the current dust bowl that passes for a job market offers few promising leads for graduates, so why not encourage students to make their own career opportunities? After all, small businesses are the traditional engines of job growth. If you combine this fact with the republican mantra that insists tax cuts are like Miracle-Grow for labor markets we have another Freedman breakthrough that smashes two unrelated ideas into an incoherent argument. He truly is the gift that keeps on giving. Read more

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