From Dave Winer

I’m the kind of guy the red stater’s hate.

I have an excellent education, and I didn’t stop after I finished school. I worked hard, and struggled, and made a success of myself. I didn’t borrow money, I don’t have much in my Social Security account, but I do have good retirement savings and health insurance. I have a well-used passport. I read voraciously, and on some subjects, systematically, and communicate with people on the Internet from all over the world.

Because of my education both formal and continuing, I have a perspective on the world that people in the flyover states not only don’t have, but that they openly express hatred of. I know that’s an extreme statement, but listen — in the east and the west you don’t hear ignorant people boasting of their ignorance the way Sarah Palin did in her acceptance speech at the RNC. But in the middle of the country, esp the South, you do hear that. A lot. So much so that you can pretty much win a national election by appealing to that character flaw.

Now I’m not a Democrat, and I’m quite conservative on a number of issues, but they still call me “The Left” when dismissing me. I follow the example of my maternal uncle who said he was a Party Of One, he thought for himself, and made up his own mind. So I am totally Pro Choice, anti-death penalty, and I practice no religion. That’s another reason people in the flyover states hate me.

But I’ve decided I don’t care if they hate me or not. After all, they say that we as Americans shouldn’t care whether people outside the United States hate us. So why should I care if they hate me?

I used to enjoy going to the US — especially to the West Coast. But then in 2000 I got a shock. Firstly because the Supreme Court handed the presidency — wrongly in my view — to George Bush. And secondly, because I realised that I didn’t know a single American who had voted for him. And then it dawned on me that all the Americans I know are on the East or West coasts. I didn’t know a single person who lived in the Red (aka ‘flyover’) states. Not a single one.

One of the distinguishing marks of a great magazine is that it constantly surprises one. The obituaries in the Economist are like that. Last week it ran a fascinating obit of Martin Tytell, a New Yorker who became the world expert on typewriters.

Mr Tytell could customise typewriters in all kinds of ways. He re-engineered them for the war-disabled and for railway stations, taking ten cents in the slot. With a nifty solder-gun and his small engraving lathe he could make an American typewriter speak 145 different tongues, from Russian to Homeric Greek. An idle gear, picked up for 45 cents on Canal Street, allowed him to make reverse carriages for right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew. He managed hieroglyphs, musical notation and the first cursive font, for Mamie Eisenhower, who had tired of writing out White House invitations.

When his shop closed in 2001, after 65 years of business, it held a stock of 2m pieces of type. Tilde “n”s alone took up a whole shelf. The writer Ian Frazier, visiting once to have his Olympia cured of a flagging “e”, was taken into a dark nest of metal cabinets by torchlight. There he was proudly shown a drawer of umlauts.

It’s been a staple assumption of detective fiction since time immemorial that every typewriter had a unique ‘fingerprint’, and Tytell made a good living as a forensic consultant for the FBI. But he also refuted the theory by building an exact replica of Alger Hiss’s typewriter for the spy’s defence team. Not that it did Hiss any good.

The first really amusing piece to come out of WallStreetCrash 2.0 — an elegant essay by Tom Wolfe, who coined the phrase in Bonfire of the Vanities.

The Masters of the Universe is a phrase from that book referring to ambitious young men (there were no women) who, starting with the 1980s, began racking up millions every year — millions! — in performance bonuses at investment banks like Salomon Brothers, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. The first three no longer exist. The fourth is about to be absorbed by Bank of America. The last two are being converted into plain-vanilla Our Town banks with A.T.M.’s in the lobby and, instead of Masters of the Universe, marginally adult female cashiers with wages in the mid-three figures per week, stocked with bags of exploding dye to hand the robbers along with the cash. American investment banking, the entire industry, sank without a trace in the last few days.

So where have they gone? To Greenwich, Connecticut, apparently, where is where the hedge funds hang out. And they left some time ago, it seems.

The hottest, brightest, most ambitious young men began abandoning investment banking in favor of hedge funds six years ago. Your correspondent can describe scenes of raging carotid-aneurytic anger as the young hotshots resigned. Security goons seized them by the elbow and marched them off the floor at six miles an hour. They couldn’t touch anything in or on their desks — not even the framed picture of Mom and Buddy and Sis, propped upright from behind by little cardboard wings covered in synthetic velvet — so furious were their superiors. Their biggest producers and future leaders were walking out on them.

An interesting snippet from the piece: hedge funds allow their investors to withdraw their money on only four days in the year (i.e. once a quarter). The next one is September 30 — next Tuesday. It’ll be interesting to see what happens: will some funds be hollowed out and become mere shells? And if so, where will their investors put their money next?