The lottery is $202 million tomorrow. On the way out of work I stopped in the little shop in my office building to give it a shot.
“One Powerball ticket, please,” I asked the manager behind the counter.
“A winning one?” he asked.
Category: Observed (Page 3 of 23)
In the wake of the Royals’ latest improbable postseason run, I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent New York Times Sunday Magazine profile of Ned Yost.
Not because Yost is so hard to parse—how is someone that obviously wrong turning out to be that right?—but because of Yost’s anecdote about his friendship with Dale Earnhardt:
In 1994, when a labor dispute truncated the baseball season, Earnhardt invited Yost to travel with him on the Nascar circuit and serve as “rehydration engineer” (in other words, water-fetcher). At one race, Earnhardt roared back from a huge deficit and nearly won. When Yost congratulated him, Earnhardt grabbed him by the shirt and pulled his friend nose to nose. ”Never, ever, let anybody who you’re around, anybody you’re associated with, allow you to settle for mediocrity,” Yost says Earnhardt told him.
What great perspective. So good I’m going to highlight it twice:
Never, ever, let anybody who you’re around, anybody you’re associated with, allow you to settle for mediocrity.
Why are the Royals successful? Because Yost holds his players to a high standard and expects them to reach it. He doesn’t pander, second-guess or micromanage. He sets a standard and his team follows it.
Ballplayers like to say they “believe in ourselves.” Royals first baseman Eric Hosmer stated as much in his post-game interview last night. That comes from the top: Yost, like his mentor Earnhardt, doesn’t let his team settle. It’s an attitude any good manager should adopt.
Re/code, this morning: “Some Uber passengers said they’re waiting to buy a car because of the ride-hailing app,” was a finding from a new report. “CEO Travis Kalanick has said the company’s real competitor … is the auto industry.” The report was commissioned by Uber.
The auto industry, last week: “New-vehicle sales soared a stunning 16 percent last month to 1.4 million cars and light trucks. … Practically all automakers reported double-digit percentage increases.”
We tell the story we want to tell.
While I was standing on a virtually empty subway platform at Houston Street at lunchtime a few weeks ago, an out-of-service train pulled into the station.
I was surprised when, rather than roll slowly through, the train made its routine stop, and the conductor of the out-of-service train launched into the usual station-stop routine. He opened his window; he pointed at the striped bar on the ceiling.
He then opened the two doors closest to his location, leaving the rest of the train shuttered and out of service. A handful of uniformed MTA employees were in the cars surrounding the conductor. The conductor announced the station per usual, seemingly for the benefit of his coworkers: downtown 1 to South Ferry, stanclearaclosindoors.
I was standing a directly in front of one of the open doors, a few feet from the conductor, and I gestured toward a uniformed man just inside the train.
“Training?” I asked.
“Yep.”
The conductor closed the doors, looked deliberately up and down the platform, then watched, window open, as the train’s driver released the brakes.
Smiling, I gave the conductor a showy thumbs-up. Nice work, I wanted to express, good luck in your new career!
Instead, the conductor looked right past me. Didn’t even acknowledge my presence, despite my standing maybe five feet away, the only person in that area of the platform. Off he went to the next station on his training run, focused on his responsibilities like a racehorse wearing blinders.
I suppose the core job skills are taught right away. Even the unwritten ones.
At Columbia University, the Columbia Daily Spectator has decided to stop printing a daily physical edition, opting for a weekly paper and daily postings online.
This follows announcements from magazines like New York to reduce their publication schedules, but because it’s a college paper, this one strikes close to home. In 1994-95 I was editor in chief of Franklin & Marshall’s The College Reporter, and I spent many a late night finalizing galleys and eliminating serial commas before driving, often at 3 a.m., from Lancaster, Pa., up to Ephrata, 25 minutes to the northeast, to slide our glue-sticked and blue-penciled newspaper-to-be through a very wide mail slot at the printer, so that the paper could be printed and distributed on time Monday afternoon.
It’s been years since I saw the Reporter at any length. I enjoyed for several years receiving the newspaper mailed to me as editor emeritus, although that policy died out after awhile, and the paper somehow failed several times to establish a proper digital presence. (It seems to finally have an up-to-date website, although the content made me double-check that it wasn’t a parody.) I imagine readership on campus at F&M had a similarly parallel experience. The school will eventually, like Columbia, turn the print edition into an anachronism, and ultimately a dead product. Columbia’s weekly paper won’t last very long either.
I love my printed media. I love carrying The Economist folded lengthwise in my coat pocket onto an airplane; I love flipping through the heft of the New York Times on a weekend morning and perusing its daily sections on the subway; I love reading Car and Driver on the can. But I’m also a digital native, having been online since the 1980s, and I love that, too.
And so does everyone else. The benefits of digital publishing are incontrovertible. The world has already made up its mind, and it’s just waiting for the stragglers to let go of the past. When I bring the Times on my morning commute, I am almost always the only person reading a printed newspaper on the train, and if there’s another paper in my car, it’s a freebie handed out on the subway steps, wire stories and local advertising for the bored. The days of learning the accordion fold are over.
So farewell, Columbia Daily Spectator, and farewell, weekly New York, and farewell, eventually, to the rest of the printed periodicals that have brightened my life for 35 years. You will be missed. And you won’t, too.
New York City has also issued a hazardous travel advisory.
Government offices are open, but nonessential New York State employees can seek permission to stay home, Governor Cuomo said.
“Because of its timing and intensity, this storm is going to make both the morning and evening rush hours extremely difficult,” Mayor de Blasio warned on Wednesday night. “If you do not need to drive, you will help yourself and everyone else by staying off the roads.”
Wet snow and ice on trees and wires could cause power failures…. The National Weather Service warned, “Heavy, wet snow may cause some weak flat-roof structures to collapse.”
Public schools in New York City are open.
The on-again, off-again discussion about living walking distance from school is definitely on again.
(Source: New York Times)
Quartz and Wired is making a big deal today out of a new survey that shows 58% of American households still have a VCR.
“It shows,” writes Christopher Mims*, “that a majority of Americans are holding onto a device designed to play a media format that isn’t even available anymore.”
But there’s a reason for this “lingering on past their expiration date,” as Mims nicely puts it: old VHS tapes.
While millions of Americans have moved on from tape formats, decades of media were created and stored on them before discs, drives and cloud storage appeared. And while it’s easy to replace that videotape of “Dirty Dancing” with Blu-Ray or a stream, doing so with home movies and one-offs taped from live TV is much harder. Many families have paid for a service to migrate their essentials; mine has dubbed its childhood videos from Super-8 to VHS to DVD over the past 15 years. But many others have not. And until they do, they’re not ditching their VCRs.
I still have roughly 800 cassettes in my possession (well, technically, they’re in my parents’ basement, to my mother’s ongoing chagrin, but still), including a number of bootlegs, one-offs, hard-to-find albums, and irreplaceable moments, from a Taj Mahal concert at summer camp in 1989 to my college radio shows. It’d be great to digitize them for posterity. But seeing how hard it is even to move all my CDs to MP3, the digitizing of my tapes won’t come for awhile. And while I wait for myself, I’m glad to have a working cassette deck, still gorgeous in its anachronistic 1988 glory.
So color me unsurprised at the persistence of the VCR. It remains peripherally useful for many, even in the rarest of moments. And so it remains, unbothered in many homes’ wall units, biding its time, and probably blinking ––:–– as usual.
* Of course, Mims is the author behind the recently infamous “2013 was a lost year for tech,” which suggests he’s in the dot-com-needling-provocateur game right now, much like Farhad Manjoo a couple of a years ago.
Buying some steaks or pork chops for dinner tonight? If you’re buying a name brand at a supermarket, chances are it’s coming from one of the four major players in each market segment.
As of 2007, the four biggest beef packers in the U.S. supply more than 83% of our total supply, with Tyson and Cargill owning the majority. That’s right: more than half of America’s beef comes from one of two meat suppliers. Swift & Co. and National Beef Packing Co are three-four but their combined total is barely more than Cargill’s alone.
The same consolidation exists in the pork packing industry, although Smithfield Foods is the leader, with 26% of the market. The top four players control two-thirds of the market and include—surprise!—Tyson, Swift and Cargill.
These five companies are providing most of our protein nowadays, which makes the locavore movement just a bit more interesting. (Source)
This is the latest in a series of summaries of industries whose corporate consolidation has led to a small number of players controlling the majority of the market, creating oligopolies in the mass market. Previously
Maserati’s “downmarket” Quattroporte–estimated base price: $125,000–utilizes the same nav system as a $15,995 Dodge Dart.
The Tesla Model S is a marvel of engineering, an electric car that doesn’t disappoint driving enthusiasts, but medium-distance drives can result in dead batteries and flatbed tows.
“Carwasheros” is a word. (source)
Renting a car? These are the major domestic options by brand name:
- Enterprise
- National
- Hertz
- Alamo
- Avis
- Budget
- Thrifty
- Dollar
- Zipcar
But this is the corporate landscape, pending FTC approval of two recent deals:
- Hertz Global Holdings (Hertz, Thrifty, Dollar)
- Avis Budget Group (Avis, Budget, Zipcar)
- Enterprise Holdings (Enterprise, Alamo, National)
Nine brands, three car companies. Remember that next time you try threatening the guy at the airport that you’ll walk over to the next counter.
This is the first in a series of summaries of industries whose corporate consolidation has led to a small number of players controlling the majority of the market, creating oligopolies in the mass market.