When Ray Kroc was spreading McDonald's, he deliberately made the seats uncomfortable so people wouldn't hang out too long. Now McDonald's is rolling out wi-fi connections, the better to lure patrons into lingering and perhaps buying more food. CNet News looks at the strategy.
Lynne Kiesling has a good posting on the economics of expensive summer gasoline. Since prices rise every summer, why doesn't some smart person stockpile cheaper winter gas?
A friend spending the year in France writes:
You cannot believe how many people in France do not believe me when I say that an attack on the US would favor Bush. They say, an attack by Al Qaeda would show that Dean is right, Bush lied, etc. And I go, HUH???!?
They think that an attack before the election would help Kerry win. The fact that so many bozos on the left in Europe think this, is probably a sign that Al Qaeda is gonna try real real hard to hit the US before November.
Otherwise I figure, Italy, Poland, or Greece is on their hit list.
Maybe Kerry can explain to his foreign friends that this theory about American reactions to terrorism is 100% wrong. Let's hope Al Qaeda is not as naive as the French.
With support from the National Institutes of Health, the University of Washington is testing the idea of letting women buy birth control pills without a prescription. From the substantial A.P. report:
More than 50 woman have enrolled since the study was launched Feb. 23 by the UW School of Pharmacy and Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Researchers hope to enroll 300 women.
Women 18 to 45 years old can visit any of eight Fred Meyer or Bartell pharmacies in Seattle and its suburbs, complete a health questionnaire and have their weight and blood pressure checked.
If they pass a good-health checklist, they can obtain three months of birth-control pills or patches right away, and an additional nine months' worth at a follow-up visit. The price is $25 per visit plus the medicine. Insurance companies generally will not pay.
Yes, yes, yes, it's a good idea to have an annual physical, and the need for a birth control prescription often prompts women to see their doctors. But it's also a good idea to floss your teeth and watch your diet. Just because something is a good idea doesn't mean your right to buy birth control should be contingent on that practice.
If you want to sell magazines, put the Virgin Mary on the cover and forget about Ariel Sharon. (In other news, Sarah Michelle Geller sells better than Jon Stewart). Here's a look at the best and worst-selling magazine covers of 2003. (Via L.A. Observed.)
This WaPost piece by Fareed Zakaria provides the first coherent argument I've heard for thinking that a "war on terrorism," as opposed to a war against enemies using terrorism, might be a meaningful concept. I'm not sure what conclusions I draw, but he paints a convincing, if depressing, picture:
Yet with many terrorist groups -- like ETA, like al Qaeda -- violence has become an end in itself. They want a lot of people dead, period.
Some in Spain have argued that if an Islamic group proves to be the culprit, Spaniards will blame Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. It was his support for America and the war in Iraq that invited the wrath of the fundamentalists. But other recent targets of Islamic militants have been Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, not one of which supported the war or sent troops into Iraq in the after-war. Al Qaeda's declaration of jihad had, as its first demand, the withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden does not seem to have noticed, but the troops are gone -- yet the jihad continues. The reasons come and go, the violence endures.
Read the whole thing.
Was the massacre in Madrid the work of al Qaeda? Of ETA? Of ETA and al Qaeda in a new alliance? Of ETA pretending to be al Qaeda? Regardless of its perpetrators, the election results provide an unhappy, and potentially dangerous, lesson: If you kill enough people, you can change the outcome of a democratic election.
Warning to terrorists: Americans do not draw the same conclusions from massacres that the Spanish did. Americans tend to rally around the president and direct our anger outward.
The death toll in the Madrid bombings is now up to 200 people. Sophisticates think it's tacky to call such actions "evil," but I don't know what other term applies. If wantonly slaughtering innocent people isn't evil, what is?
My friend Xavier Lewis writes from Brussels:
Demonstrations took place across Europe to express sympathy for the victims and anger at the perpetrators. We had one in Brussels, attended by several thousand Spaniards and non Spaniards like me nothwithstanding the cold and rain. I took a few not very good photo.
The husband of a lawyer I know in Madrid is a surgeon. According to him the injuries were ghastly. A couple of details of the attacks emphasize their callousness (if need be). The train stations targeted bring into the city people from working class suburbs--there were lots immigrant workers on them. The stations also serve a line to a big university town-- hundreds of students were making their way to classes. And next to one of the stations is a large school. Hence the high number of children and young people among the victims.
A controversy is raging as to whether ETA or Al Quaeda is responsible. Frankly it does not really matter to the rest of us who did it. Our sympathy for the victims remains the same and it is wrong to do it regardless. The press is working itself up about it, though. If it was Al Quaeda, the press seems to think it was revenge on Spain for supporting the US in Iraq. But Sept 11, 2001 was not revenge on the US for its role in toppling Saddam was it?
Wired News has an interesting piece on the massive online response to the bombings.
What happens if your new cell phone has Chris Rock's old (but not very old) phone number? Here's the tale, via Jeff Jarvis. Reminds me of the time Steve and I moved to a new apartment in L.A. and got the old phone number of a movie producer. Typical message on our answering machine, which identified the number as belonging to the Postrels: "This is Demi Moore's office, and we're updating our Rolodex..." No calls from actual famous people, though.
Reader Tim Belknap writes:
I am an 20-year veteran, operating executive at a rather gigantic company and we are hiring, but mostly for replacement and some niche growth areas (sales, engineers, product managers etc.). I think we'll just barely grow our employment year over year.
I don't think one can characterize the American economy by what us Big Multinationals do, but all of you are on to something regarding how expensive and risky it is to do business now than it was 5 years ago.
All of the [Sarbanes-Oxley] costs are going to be amortized on employees...so we've made it even more expensive to hire people. Already, we put aside nearly 40 cents on the dollar for every employee we hire for benefits, pension, healthcare etc. How long until that is dollar for dollar? Are you kidding me?
The structure costs of business reporting are brutal also. I am sure you've seen the report from Emerson on US competiveness.
And frankly, people can be a pain in the rear. At 5.6% unemployment, you just can't convince me or any of my peers that the people out there looking for work are top notch...and as expensive as it is to hire someone, we want the best. Otherwise, you'd be surprised how well you can get by without someone, especially someone of mediocre professional value.
So we are either hiring from campus (aren't in the 5.6%) or from other companies (ditto).
I know this "get by" without hiring is real because we've never seen the leverage on sales like we are seeing now. That is, our revenues have grown double digits, and we've not added anyone, or even added any physical capacity.
I'm sure this doesn't help Bush, but it has very little to do with him or his team anyway. I laughed out loud when I heard Carville's response on Meet The Press this weekend. Russert asked him what specifically the Democrats would do to help improve job growth and he said something like "spend more money on roads and infrastructure to make us more productive" I thought Industrial Policy was the 1992 mantra?
The 5.6 percent unemployment isn't equally distributed across professions; in fields with lots of layoffs, job seekers may in fact be highly qualified. But Tim's note captures the risk aversion that's holding down hiring. It also points to the unmentionable reason high-tech companies are looking abroad for programmers: When you're trying to get the very, very best--the top 1 percent--it helps to expand the pool to a billion Indians, not to mention drawing from an elitist education system that leaves lots of children behind but gives the geniuses unsurpassed training.