Recession ahead, drive carefully

Posted on by

From today’s Telegraph…

Forget inflation and the manufacturing figures. Stop looking at the latest existing home sales figures or the data on non-farm payrolls. One of the most accurate indicators of an imminent recession is in and Americans should start tightening their belts.

Winnebago, maker of the famous recreational vehicles, expects its first drop in sales in six years

Winnebago, the makers of the famous recreational vehicles so prominent on the highways of the US, is expected to post a decline in sales this year for the first time in six years. Buying a motor home is seen as the ultimate discretionary item, and over the past three decades, declines have always heralded a rapid slowdown in the US economy.

“Recreational vehicles are at the swing end of discretionary spending because no-one needs an RV, and certainly no-one needs a new RV,” said fund manager Ron Muhlenkamp, who began selling Winnebago shares last year.

As the US housing slump continues, petrol prices head above $3-a-gallon once more and consumer confidence takes a nosedive, sales of motor homes, along with other typical discretionary items such as Harley Davidson motorcycles and plastic surgery, are forecast to fall…

Helpful information: The model shown is a 2008 Damon Tuscany 4055. Yours for $231,070 on the road. Cash in that sub-prime mortgage now.

The smell of burning toast

Posted on by

The latest Brown cock-up du jour is a gift to right-wing nutters like Simon Heffer. Here he is, this morning, in full spate:

Some of us remember not merely the submersion of the Major government under its tide of lies, peculation, rent-boys and mistresses, but also the Poulson affair of the early 1970s. That, too, like this present funding crisis and the Northern Rock debacle, had its roots in the North East, which since then has become the heartland of Labour’s client state. Poulson and his comrade-in-arms T Dan Smith bribed local councillors and officials to get lucrative building contracts. I am sure that this sort of thing has no bearing on the business interests of the real donor of £558,000 to the Labour Party, said to be David Abrahams, alias David Martin, aged 53/63? What are we to make of the decision by the Highways Agency at a time when the Transport Department was run by Mr Brown’s blue-eyed boy, Douglas Alexander, to waive objections to a development scheme that stood to earn Mr Abrahams/Martin £60 million?

It might seem that Labour has netted a one per cent rake-off of Mr Abrahams’/Martin’s earnings on this scheme. I am sure that this couldn’t be true. But it smells to high heaven, does it not? What is Mr Abrahams’/Martin’s link to Harriet Harman? Why did he feel he had to fund her successful deputy leadership campaign surreptitiously? Is it at all a coincidence that her husband, Jack Dromey, is the party’s treasurer? Is her position compromised by this association with a man with interchangeable names, who uses others to shell out huge amounts of money on his behalf, who was deselected when he stood as a Labour candidate because he invented a wife and child, and who appears not even to have a fixed date of birth? Is that the sort of man Mr Brown wants funding Labour, or his deputy leader wants funding her? Is this the sleaze-free, whiter-than-white image that Labour smugly boasted would prevail once the wicked, venal Tories were ousted? Is that a pig I just saw flying past the window?

Tut, tut. He was doing ok until that last sentence. One mustn’t over-egg literary puddings.

What’s interesting, though, is how bad Brown is at handling this stuff compared to Blair.

William Blake

Posted on by

250 years ago today, the poet, painter and engraver William Blake was born in Soho. One of the great paradoxes of life is that a poem (“Jerusalem”) written by this dazzling revolutionary and dissenter should have been appropriated for imperialist anthems.

And did those feet in ancient time
walk upon England’s mountains green?

And was the holy Lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance divine
shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here
among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant Land.

I’ve often wondered how this came about. Wikipedia offers this explanation:

The poem, which was little known during the century which followed its writing, was included in a patriotic anthology of verse published in 1916, a time when morale had begun to decline due to the high number of casualties in the First World War and the perception that there was no end in sight.

Under these circumstances, it seemed to many to define what Britain was fighting for. Therefore, Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate asked Parry to put it to music at a Fight for Right campaign meeting in London’s Queen’s Hall. The aims of this organisation were “to brace the spirit of the nation that the people of Great Britain, knowing that they are fighting for the best interests of humanity, may refuse any temptation, however insidious, to conclude a premature peace, and may accept with cheerfulness all the sacrifices necessary to bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion”[3]. Bridges asked Parry to supply the verse with “suitable, simple music that an audience could take up and join in”. Originally Parry intended the first verse to be sung by a solo female voice, but this is rare nowadays. The most famous version was orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar in 1922 for a large orchestra at the Leeds Festival. Upon hearing the orchestral version for the first time, King George V said that he preferred “Jerusalem” over “God Save the King”, the National Anthem.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Master Blake!

Social networking in meatspace

Posted on by

At a departmental meeting, one of my colleagues wanted to illustrate a point about the complexity of social networking. Everyone present was given five pieces of coloured string and then told to give one end of each to five people they knew well. You can imagine the result. Good fun; and instructive.

Don Norman: kids aren’t smarter than us; they just have more free time

Posted on by

Interesting CNET interview with the guru himself:

For years I used to say, “We shouldn’t have to adapt to technology, it should adapt to us.” I now believe that’s wrong. We shouldn’t have to adapt to arbitrary technology. On the other hand, so much of our modern life has been a major adaptation to the technology surrounding us, whether it’s heating systems, lights, telephone, or television.

If you’d asked me to predict texting I’d have said, “No, it’s really too hard. Jeesh, you need to type three times to get a ‘C.’ That’s ridiculous.” Not only did people learn it, but (they) learned it so well…So, there’s an adaptation for you.

Now, just as an aside, I think it has not to do with the age…I think it has to do with how you live your life…In my case, it was easy because I grew up helping develop the technology so I learned it as it was developed. For many, it suddenly sprung on them and it’s true, it’s hard to keep up.
As people, we should not care about the technology. We should care about the benefits it gives us.

The issue is not how tech-savvy you are, or how quick you pick up to it. I believe these are things that often take many hours to master…You just didn’t want to spend the next 20 hours of your life mastering it. But a lot of the kids, they have that kind of time to devote to it…

Is eBay guilty of “contributory infringement”?

Posted on by

From a New York Times report…

In a weeklong bench trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan that ended last Tuesday, lawyers for Tiffany & Company argued that the online auction house was far more than that: it is a distribution network that enables the trading of counterfeit Tiffany items.

If Tiffany wins its case, not only could other lawsuits follow, but eBay’s business model could be threatened because it would be difficult and extremely expensive for the company, based in San Jose, Calif., to police a site that now has 248 million registered users worldwide and approximately 102 million items for sale at any one time.

Tiffany has requested injunctive relief that would require eBay to alter its procedures to eliminate counterfeit silver Tiffany merchandise from its auctions. Judge Richard Sullivan instructed both sides to file post-trial briefs by Dec. 7.

“I will hopefully turn this around quite quickly after that,” he told the lawyers.

Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said eBay was not responsible for determining whether each product sold on the site was fake.

“As a marketplace, we never take possession of any of the goods sold on the site, so it would be impossible for us to solely determine the authenticity of an item,” Mr. Durzy said. “And we go above and beyond what the law requires us to do to keep counterfeits off the site.”

But in his closing argument last Tuesday, James B. Swire, the lawyer for Tiffany, told Judge Sullivan that eBay directly advertised the sale of Tiffany jewelry on its home page, and “because eBay profits from the sales generated by these and other actions,” Tiffany considers its actions direct copyright infringement.

Mr. Swire added that “there’s certainly much in the record to show that eBay is liable for contributory infringement.”

William Boot, RIP

Posted on by

The memorial service for Bill Deedes was held yesterday. Andrew O’ Hagan was there.

One night at the Hay Literary Festival, the novelist Monica Ali and I quizzed Bill about how much Evelyn Waugh had exaggerated when making up the character of William Boot, the hero of Scoop, who is said to be based on the young Bill Deedes. “Oh, quite a lot,” he said. “I wasn’t that into cleft sticks, though I did pack an absurd amount of stuff. But Waugh wasn’t such a good reporter you know. Frightfully good at other stuff, but not much use to a paper, I must say.”