The Places Oil Will Get You
Posted on September 7, 2011 in Images
Muammar Gaddafi poses with various heads of state during his reign as Libya’s head of state.
The Death Of American Manufacturing
Posted on September 7, 2011 in Images
One frequent and frustrating line that often crops up in the comments section of this blog is that American labor has no hope, it should just accept Chinese wages, since price is all that matters. That line of thinking is wrongheaded on multiple levels. It assumes direct factory labor is the most important cost driver, when for most manufactured goods, it is 11% to 15% of total product cost (and increased coordination costs of much more expensive managers are a significant offset to any savings achieved by using cheaper factory workers in faraway locations). It also assumes cost is the only way to compete, when that is naive on an input as well as a product level. How do these “labor cost is destiny” advocates explain the continued success of export powerhouse Germany? Finally, the offshoring,/outsourcing vogue ignores the riskiness and lower flexibility of extended supply chains.
This argument is sorely misguided because it serves to exculpate diseased, greedy, and incompetent American managers and executives. In the overwhelming majority of places where I lived in my childhood, a manufacturing plant was the biggest employer in the community. And when I went to business school, manufacturing was still seen as important. Indeed, the rise of Germany and Japan was then seen as due to sclerotic American management not being able to keep up with their innovations in product design and factory management.
But if you were to ask most people, they’d now blame the fall of American manufacturing on our workers. That scapegoating serves to shift focus from the top of the food chain at a time when executives have managed to greatly widen the gap between their pay and that of the folks reporting to them.
The Autocrats Club In The Middle East
Posted on September 6, 2011 in Articles
The Article: Gadhafi leaned on Arab allies to stay in power by Maggie Michael at Yahoo.
The Text: Moammar Gadhafi’s dictatorship likely wouldn’t have survived for more than four decades without the sea of dictators all around, protecting one another and working together to silence dissident voices.
Gadhafi himself saw collapse was inevitable as Arab unity frayed, and he pointed to the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein as a sign of things to come. “Your turn is next,” he warned fellow leaders in a scathing speech at the 2008 Arab League summit in Damascus.
Back in 2008, Gadhafi’s listeners laughed. Now, besides Gadhafi, longtime autocrats have been swept from power by popular uprisings in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began, and Egypt. Syria’s Bashar Assad and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh are also under fierce pressure.
Ties with autocrats stretch back to the early days of Gadhafi’s regime, historians have written. The night Gadhafi — then a junior officer who would later promote himself to colonel — ousted King Idriss, the first planeload of official visitors to land in Tripoli was from Egypt. Gamal Abdel Nasser sent veteran journalist and top adviser Mohammed Hassanin Haikal to take the measure of his neighbor’s new ruler.
Gadhafi told Haikal he would seek Nasser’s guidance. Haikal promised Egypt’s support.
Only four months after Gadhafi’s coup, two members of his Revolutionary Command Council turned against him. Egyptian intelligence officers tipped off Gadhafi that he faced a coup, according to historians.
Shortly after that, King Idriss’ nephew Abdullah al-Abid al-Senoussi, also known as the Black Prince, led a force of 5,000 mercenaries from Chad and planned to arm tribes loyal to the king to fight against Gadhafi. This time, it was Tunisians who are believed to have tipped off Gadhafi.
In a recent interview, Gadhafi’s former Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam, who defected during this year’s rebellion, told the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat that Gadhafi used to pay former Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali a monthly salary, and that Tunisian-Libyan cooperation was “at the highest level.”
The exchange of security and intelligence information was the only successful sphere of cooperation among Arab governments, asserted Fathi al-Baja, a Libyan political scientist and top political leader for the Libyan rebels.
“This is the only thing they could do,” he said.
Gadhafi even paid the editors of state-owned newspapers in Egypt, Syria and elsewhere to run “propaganda glorifying him or at the very least to block any channels between the opposition and public opinion,” said Fayez Jibril, a Cairo-based founder of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya, Libya’s oldest opposition group.
Gadhafi’s pursuit of his opponents included televised executions of students, professors, clerics and others in public squares and on university campuses. In the worst instance of repression, more than 1,200 prisoners, including many political detainees, were gunned down at the notorious Abu Salim prison in 1996.
Little of that made it into the Arab press at the time.
Could You Fight Off Serena Williams?
Posted on September 6, 2011 in Articles
“Dad, do you think — if I had to — I could beat Serena Williams in a fight?”
“No chance. Serena Williams has more testosterone than you do.”
“With those thighs? She’d scissor you to death,” my dad’s girlfriend added.
To be clear: I do not wish to fight Serena Williams. She is a post-racial ambassador for the game who transcended it. An inspiration to daughters, mothers, and grandmothers everywhere. I grew misty-eyed when she countered her sister Venus in the 2002 French Open finals.
But suppose the 27-time Grand Slam titlist was overtaken by a seething fit of rage. Could you fend her off?
On a tennis court, no. Her forehand is the stuff of legend. Serena’s serve clocks up to 129 MPH and fells All-American defensive linemen. Serena’s ground-game would prove formidable. Her aforementioned thunder thighs would suffocate me instantly.
I’m a bro in my mid-twenties. I endured years of rough-and-tumble fights with my brother until my innovation of the head-butt ushered in a Pax Fraternus. I run every-day and bench every other. Nonetheless, Madden is the closest I’ve come to a tackle in the last three months. I lack any martial arts training but for Intro to Karate my Senior year of college (I passed).
