A Master of “Science” in Luxury Management? What will they think of next…

The other evening, the episode of “House Hunters International”, one of my favorite time wasters, was devoted to a rather sweet young fellow from Connecticut who was looking for an apartment to rent in Monaco, where he would be attending graduate school.

The degree he’s pursuing is a MSc in Luxury Management from the University of Monaco. This degree will help young Ben achieve what he says has been a dream since childhood: to surround himself with things lux-y and folks riche. His path to affording things lux-y and becoming a folk riche is through selling things lux-y to folks riche.

Who knew you needed a degree for that, or that there even was such a degree.

In the MSc in Luxury Management programs, we seek students who are passionate about a specific luxury sector or brand – and who are willing to make the effort to go beyond the surface, beyond the alluring and dazzling images that only capture the visible part of the luxury iceberg. (Source: University of Monaco)

“The visible part of the luxury iceberg” O-M-gilded-G. Maybe something gets lost in translation from the Monégasque, but doesn’t “visible part of the iceberg” usually mean there’s a problem below? And then there’s the mental connection that so many of us will make to that arch-symbol of luxury: The Titanic.

Then there are the program’s objectives.

As the proud holder of an MSc – although mine’s in plain old vanilla management, not luxury management – I can appreciate that MSc programs need objectives. It’s been quite a long while, but I believe that the objectives of my alma mater, MIT’s Sloan School, included learning how to apply mathematics to just about everything (one of my concentrations was applied – i.e., quantitative – marketing), and make sure you get a good enough job that you can contribute to the annual fund (or at least on every 5th anniversary of your graduation date. Anyway, one of the objectives of U Monaco’s MSc in Luxury Management is:

…to understand the luxury codes and the business logic behind the glamorous curtains of the luxury world.

I’ve never had all that much to do with the luxury world, but I do know a bit about marketing stuff that costs a ton – in my case software – so I do get that one thing that’s behind those glamorous curtains is the sheer fact that charging more for something conveys value. In the case of software, my rule of thumb was that the “halo effect” of charging more let you get away with a price about 15-20% more than something comparable from the competition. After that, you better be able to point to real extra-added value.

In the case of the world of luxury, I believe that what’s behind the glamorous curtains is also quality (a Hermes tie actually is better made than a polyester number you get for $10 in TJ Maxx). And it’s some sense of exclusivity and rarity. (It’s not luxury if everyone can have it.)

Of course, luxury is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. I’m sure that some folks would find the gilt, marbled, and ormolu’d home of Donald and Melania the essence of mondo luxe. It gives me the willies – and not just because the Trumps live there. I prefer my luxury unormolu’d, I guess.

Anyway, there were a few interesting elements to the curriculum. There’s the yachting management course – “the first and only one of its kind in the world”. And then there’s something called e-movie learning:

…an innovative learning experience based on a web series of eleven episodes, combining fiction and pedagogy

Wouldn’t I love to get a look at that combo of fiction and pedagogy. How fun to sit around dissecting vignettes about fake rich people wearing pricy watches and designer duds, and comparing the merits of a Bentley vs. a Rolls, while sipping the world’s most expensive champagne (which I’m pretty sure is not prosecco, the house bev chez non-luxury moi).

If you’re pursuing the MSc in Luxury Management, you can specialize in retail, hotel, or goods and services. Retail helps students figure out how to maneuver in the “key battleground in the crucial quest to find and keep the best customers.” In Hotel, you’ll learn not just how to compare and contrast, say, the Metropole vs. the Monte Carlo, but to learn about spas and gambling. (Shocked, I’m shocked…) Goods and Services sounds more generalist. There, you’ll learn about “the resonances generated by high-end goods and services.”

Which, I will give you, sounds more interesting than worrying about the resonances generated by high-end software. (Typical resonances from my experience: why does this cost so much? why is it so hard to use?)

Meanwhile, young Ben, pushed and prodded by his more sensible mother, decided against the high-end, fantasy-luxury apartment in Monaco – with the terrace overlooking the ocean and the swank kitchen – and settled into student digs, a few feet over the border in France, and half the price of the Monaco dream flat. Less distracting. More time to study up on how to capture the visible part of the luxury iceberg.

Tenth Blog-iversary

Today, Pink Slip is observing it Tenth Anniversary. When I first started out, the content was strictly business. Sort of. I’d written a business memoir, the eponymous Pink Slip, and my friend John told me I needed a blog. And Pink Slip was born.

In my inaugural post – “Blogger Manqué,”  September 7, 2006 – I confessed (and what’s the point of being raised Catholic if you can’t confess?) that, while I’d set the blog up in January 2005, it took me nearly two years to actually getting around to writing anything.

We’ll see where things go - I could just as easily slack right back into my blog-slackin’ ways - but for now I plan on using this forum to share my observations on the business world, filtered through my own often woeful but sometimes exhilarating experiences.

Perhaps to make up a bit for lost time, or perhaps because I hadn’t yet figured out how to set dates ahead of time, I wound up with three posts for Day One.

In addition to “Blogger Manqué” there was “Management Productivity Tool?”, which was about Xobni (that’s inbox, spelled backwards), which at that point in time was going to help improve productivity by monitoring how long it took people to read and respond to emails. I thought it was a dumb idea, but what do I know? The company manage to hang on until 2013, when it was acquired by Yahoo. Within a year, Yahoo killed the product, so maybe I do know something.

I also had a post, “We Regret to Inform,” which knocked Radio Shack for a lay-off the conducted via email. As we all know, the years have not be kind to Radio Shack. Still, they’ve managed to hang on. Wonder if they’ve gotten any better at layoffs? Maybe these days they just tweet it out.

As it turned out my concern that “I could just as easily slack right back into my blog-slackin’ ways” – i.e., do absolutely nothing – was unfounded. In short order, I got blog religion and was doing a daily weekday post.

This is the 2564th Pink Slip.  More than 250 per year over ten years.

Over time, I’ve branched out from strictly business to whatever interests me (or bothers me) at the moment. In general, I have avoided the third rail topics of politics and religion. As it has been observed, it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out my either. Religion-wise, I’m a an ex-Catholic/cultural Catholic atheist; politically speaking, baptized a Catholic, but born a Democrat pretty much covers it. And this may not be the year to ignore the political scene, so I may trumpet something pretty soon. Although I’m not too worried about Massachusetts, there’s just way too much at stake this time around to sit around pretending that politics doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, I saw Florence Foster Jenkins over the weekend. Starring the ever-wonderful Meryl Streep, the movie is about a somewhat addled women who was a NYC socialite and patron of the musical arts in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s. Although she had a terrible voice, Florence performed at her salon and developed a cult following, including Cole Porter and Tallulah Bankhead.

While watching the movie, it struck me that I’m kind of like a Florence Foster Jenkins of the writing world.

Oh, there are differences: I’m not bald and dying from the effects of treatment for syphilis. (Her fist husband was a cad.) I’m not a rich socialite. And I’m actually pretty good at what I love doing.

To switch art forms, I decided at one point that I was a Sunday painter writer. I enjoy it. I’m reasonably talented. And, if I’d focused on writing earlier in life, I might have made a go of it. But I didn’t.

So here I am, ten years on, blogging away. This is the tin/aluminum anniversary. Maybe I’ll open a can of soup later, and eat a plum out of my mother’s hammered aluminum fruit bowl from the 1940’s.

Happy Anniversary to me.

And how was your week? Not as bad as Elon Musk’s, I’m guessing.

Starting with that wonderful name -  worthy of a Bond villain, or a porn-stache men’s “fragrance” from the 1980’s (All my men wear Elon Musk, or they wear nothing at all), right down through PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, I find Elon Musk pretty darned interesting.

So I was pretty darned interested when I saw on Bloomberg last week that, at least on paper, he lost $779 million.

Now Musk is a billionaire many times over, so he may not even notice the loss. It’s not quite a rounding error – his fortune is estimated at $8.3 billion – and most of us would be hurting if our wealth dropped by nearly 10 percent, even if only on paper. (Anyone with a 401K likely has had this experience at one point or another, and the only way to avoid the hurt is to resist the temptation to go online and look at what happened to your 401K on a day the market takes a turn. You’ve just got to close your eyes and assume that, in the long run, it’ll all work out. Or the world will be in such a state of collapse that it won’t matter. Or we can always fall back on John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run, we are all dead.”) But a paper loss of the Musk magnitude ain’t nothing. In fact, it was large enough for a prominent mention on Bloomberg.

The paper fall from economic grace happened because of drops in the respective stock prices of Tesla and SolarCity (which may or may not merge with Tesla; Musk holds major positions in both), and as a result of his having:

…put up an additional $489 million of his Tesla and SolarCity stock as collateral to secure personal borrowings. The pledged shares are stripped out of his total net worth calculation because they’re not immediately available to him. The borrowing is for personal liquidity; he doesn’t even accept the $37,584 minimum-wage salary Tesla is required to pay him. (Source: Bloomberg)

$489 million in personal liquidity. Wow. Didn’t I read a few months back that the average American doesn’t have $400 on hand to cover an emergency situation. (Guess that’s what GoFundMe’s for.)

I guess if your idea of personal liquidity is $489 million, it wouldn’t really matter one way or another whether your were hauling in a $37.5K salary.

Anyhow, both SolarCity and Tesla have been burning through cash:

In a regulatory filing Wednesday, Tesla said that in the first six months of the year, it burned through $611 million in cash, and SolarCity went through $433 million. .

And cash isn’t the only thing that’s been burning.

An explosion destroyed a Falcon 9 rocket belonging to Elon Musk's SpaceX and its cargo during preparations for a routine test firing at Cape Canaveral in Florida on Thursday, two days before it had been due to blast off and place a satellite in orbit…Musk set up SpaceX with the goal of slashing launch costs to make travel to Mars affordable. The company plans to fly its first unmanned spacecraft to Mars in 2018 and to send humans to the red planet as early as 2024. (Source: Reuters)

What was going to be launched, by the way, was a satellite that Facebook was going to use to increase Internet access in Africa. So this crash and burn is a bit of a bummer for Mark Zuckerberg, too. (Oh, boohoo.)

All in all, between the paper loss of $779 million, and that rocket’s red glare thing, last week was pretty darned interesting – and pretty darned crappy – for Elon Musk.

And there you were last week, sitting around ruing the end of summer. No comparison.

Labor Day, 2016

It’s Labor Day and, once again, I’m quasi-taking a day off from my blogging labors.

But I’ve written at some length about Labor Day, and what it means to me, in the past, and here’s a link to one of my favorites: Once Again, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.

Were it not for my brother-the-union guy, who runs the Greater Boston Labor Council (GBLC), I probably wouldn’t think that much about Labor Day one way of the other, other than for the fact that it signals the end of summer. But because of Rick, I do think of Labor Day differently. Here’s a bit of a hat’s off I wrote for him on Labor Day in 2014.

Anyway, last year on Labor Day, I did not see Joe Hill. But I did see POTUS.

With my niece Caroline (Rick’s daughter), I got a coveted seat to the annual GBLC breakfast, one of the biggest celebrations in the country, at which President Obama spoke. As did Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, and Boston’s Mayor, Mahty Walsh.

It’s not every day you hear POTUS give a shout out to your kid brother, but last year, on Labor Day, I got to hear Barack Obama say “Let’s give it up for Rich Rogers.” And we all did.

That’s POTUS at the podium in this terrible picture I took. That’s Rich (Rick or Stick to the family, but Rich to the union world), second over from the woman in the green dress. (Massachusetts AG Maura Healy.) Next to Rich is Mayor Walsh. If you get to the woman in the print dress (who I think is Darlene Lombos of Community Labor United), you’ve gone too far.

Here’s an equally dreadful shot, this one of POTUS walking the line to shake hands. He’s about to get to my brother.

You may notice that, with the exception of Mayor Walsh, the men all have their ties off. Walsh went to the airport to greet POTUS, and texted back to the breakfast that POTUS was coming casual. Off came the ties.

I’ve included this picture because it’s got Elizabeth Warren in it, and Senator Warren is who will be keynoting Rick’s breakfast this year. I’ll be in the crowd, this year with my sister Trish, as my niece is now off to college.

Can’t wait to hear Senator Warren. Bet I can guess what she’ll be talking about...

Meanwhile, Happy Labor Day to blue, white, pink, and no-collar workers everywhere, especially those who are members of unions. You remember unions, don’t you? The folks who gave us the weekend, the paid vacation, child labor laws, anti-sweatshop laws, sick leave, the eight hour day, and a lot of other pretty good things we take for granted. This day’s for you!

Nomorobo? Bring it on.

It was bad enough that 99.99% of my landline calls are either spam or someone looking for a donation to a political campaign. For the last several months, I’ve been getting spammed on my mobile. Day-umm!

Unless you’re on my contact list, or a number I otherwise recognize, or maybe – just maybe – if you’re in my area code, I’ll pick up. But mostly I ignore those pesky calls. Sometimes, I’ll google the number to see if I can find out what they’re about. But mostly I ignore.

I don’t care if I “won” a free cruise. Not going.

I don’t believe that there’s a problem on my PC that Microsoft has authorized a contact center in India to fix. Not buying.

The IRS is really going to take legal action against me. Not biting.

And how many times do I have to hang up on you before you get that I don’t want to change my electricity provider.

The Do Not Call registry worked for a while with these scam artists, but scam artists have wiggled their way around the roadblocks. A pox on their call centers!

HELP may be on the way:

Back in 2013, Nomorobo won an FTC challenge to find a way to block all those unwanted, annoying, and – if they catch you in weak moment – potentially hazardous to your financial health calls. They’re beta-ing a “wireless robocall catcher.” For $4.99 a month, you can unspam your mobile. (Landline is free.) I signed up to get on the waiting list for the beta of their Android app. They’re already working with Time Warner, and claim to have blocked over 131M robocalls. Get moving with Verizon, please.

Primus, a Canadian outfit, also has blocking technology that:

…intercepts calls before the customer’s phone rings, then identifies the caller and gives the customer a choice to accept or reject or send to voice-mail. It also asks callers to dial a digit -- something robocallers can’t do -- and identify themselves, and has intercepted 80 million calls. (Source: Bloomberg)

Apple has an SDK for iOS developers; Google has something out there for Nexus and Android One devices.

“It’s clear that the technology is out there to address the robocall problem,” said Maureen Mahoney, a public policy fellow at Consumers Union, which has collected more than 630,000 signatures on a petition to stop robocalls. “Consumers have had enough.”

(Okay. This quote doesn’t shed particular light for purposes of my post. I included it solely because the person quoted is named Maureen. I clicked through on the link, and I have to say she appears to be one of the youngest Maureens in existence, my first name having gone the way of Bertha, Gertrude, and Ethel, I’m afraid. Ah, but when I was a girl-een, me name was all the rage in my little corner of the world.)

Meanwhile, phone hardware and software makers – with a push from the FCC – are joining forces with carriers to try to resolve this aggravating problem. There’s even a Robocall Strike Force. I like the sound of that, mostly because my mental image is a bunch of Navy Seals parachuting into these robocall outfits and knocking them out. No, I don’t want the workers killed, but I wouldn’t mind seeing them hog-tied with those plastic zip ties before being carted off to a rehabilitation center.

The Strike Force has:

…pledged to develop an action plan by Oct. 19 that includes driving adoption of call-blocking technologies and standards. The group also will look at how to reduce “spoofing” -- when an overseas call center pretends to be a U.S.-based caller by routing through multiple carriers.

The group will be looking at the problem systemically, not piecemeal, solving it from the perspective of the “entire ecosystem.” (One of my favorite marketing words, by the way: ecosystem.)

“One thing we’d really like to see is the carriers offering tools to consumers as soon as possible,” said Mahoney at Consumers Union. “We are going to keep pushing the phone companies and the task force to see that that will happen.”

You go, girl. That’s what we want, too.

Just say No Mo Robocalls! Just say Moe!

Washout

I have never been very good at spotting good business ideas, but I do have an okay eye for pegging the bad ones.

Thus, I wasn’t surprised to see that Washio, an Uber wannabe for laundry service, has washed out, swirling $16.8 million in venture drain down the drain with the rinse water. Their demise announcement began by reminding us of their mission:

We started Washio some 4 years ago with a simple goal in mind: to clean the world’s clothes. That mission began from our kitchen counter, and led us through an incredible journey over the last few years as we became the nation’s largest dry clean and laundry service. We served our loyal customers in six cities across the country, 7 days a week, morning noon and night, with 24-hour turnaround for clean clothes. A proposition that still, to this day, does not exist in the offline world. (Source: getwashio)

Unfortunately for Washio, getting your laundry picked up morning, noon, and night – and getting it back in 24 hours – is not all that compelling a mission. I mean, just because it relies on the use of a smartphone app, this is no ‘I’m drunk and it’s 3 a.m., I have no cash, I’m calling an Uber’ situation. Laundry emergencies do exist, but they’re few and far between. And – get this – for many of those emergency situations, you may be able to save your very own day by – get this – washing something out by hand. Of course, this doesn’t cover dry cleaning, but most dry cleaners provide day-of service if you get something there in the morning. And whether you’re paying for wash and fold, or plugging in the quarters and washing your own, the cities that the Washio service was offered in -   Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, SF, Washington DC – are places “where most people probably live within a ten minute walk of some place they can drop their dirty laundry off.” (As I wrote in my May 2014 post making fun of Washio.)

Of course, the entire “value proposition” of Washio is that you don’t actually have to get your ass in gear and go someplace and actually engage in a human-based transaction (dry cleaners or laundry drop off) or a low-tech, machine-based on (the laundromat).

Washio had company, of course. Doesn’t every ambition young entrepreneur want to be the Uber of whatever, so why not laundry? So what’s become of these Washio competitors?

Brinkmat’s now part of Delivery (which also does restaurant, grocery store, and packy delivery). Spotless City’s last FB posting is from 2012, its website defunct. Sudzee seems to still be around, but they haven’t yet Uber-zied: San Francisco, only. Prim, as Tech Crunch had it, “threw in the towel.” Cleanly looks like it’s still in the biz, but it’s not around here.

All these laundry pick up and delivery services. Talk about solving a problem that really doesn’t need to be solved.

Although maybe it’s just the me who actually LIKES to do laundry talking. I just can’t think outside the detergent box, I guess.

My read on this sort of service, back in 2014 was:

…And Allen Ginsberg thought he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed…Well, I guess it beats the best minds of [the millennial/Gen Z] generation focusing on weapons of mass destruction…But an app to summon up someone to pick up your laundry…?

Somewhere, Allen Ginsberg’s weeping.

Anyway, after washing and folding over 21,000 tons of laundry, Washio is done for. And I can’t say I’m in the least surprised. Sometimes you just have to separate your own darks from whites.

Laundry pickup and delivery services were by no means the worst of the laundry-related startups. That would have to have been Washboard, an almost surreal service that delivered two rolls of quarters (for $27) so that you could do your own laundry. The market spoke quickly on that one. Back in their brief day, they were better at generating publicity – including my post, Washboard Abs(urd)   - than they were at business. They washed out in a matter of a couple of weeks.

The Boxty Belt

Fun little memoir piece by Michael Malone in the NY Times the other day on the “Irish Alps,” the Irish-American version of the Borscht Belt: a Catskill getaway for the sons and daughters of Erin. Malone vacationed there with his family when he was a kid in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, by which point the Irish Alps was already a bit passed its prime.

According to Kevin Ferguson, who directed the 2016 documentary “The Irish Catskills: Dancing at the Crossroads,” there were once as many as 50 Irish themed inns, along with several bungalow communities sporting shamrocks on their shingles. Today there are a scattered few.

“I’d say 1955 to 1965 was the sweet spot,” Mr. Ferguson said. “Mobs of people would be walking down Route 145, going from place to place.”

They were the immigrants of the Bronx and Brooklyn, fleeing stifling tenements for the Catskills’ clean air, the traditional music, the dance, the camaraderie. “It was like a little Ireland without having to go to Ireland,” said John Connors, singer in the Irish Express, a band that has played the East Durham scene since the early 1980s.

The three A’s — air conditioning, airlines, assimilation — are said to have been the resort communities’ downfall. After that mid’ 60s heyday, many immigrants had departed the tenements, plane travel was no longer limited to the rich and the Irish became, well, America(Source: NY Times)

Most of what I know about the Borscht Belt came from Dirty Dancing. (“Nobody puts Baby in the corner.”) And, of course, from listening to all those Borscht Belt comedians tell bad jokes on Ed Sullivan for all those years. (Think Jackie Mason and Henny “Take my wife, please” Youngman.)

But the Irish Alps? Or, as I’ve decided to think of it, The Boxty Belt?(For boxty, think Irish latkes.) Never heard of it.

I was familiar with the Irish Riviera – shorthand: the Irish Riv – which is half the towns on the South Shore (i.e., seaside communities that are south of Boston). That’s our version of the Irish Riv. New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Indiana have their own. And there are plenty of towns on Cape Cod that are plenty Irish Riv-ish. (And, yes, The Dennis-es, I’m looking at you. Plus, at minimum, the street my cousin Barbara has her Pocasset cottage on.)

Growing up, we sometimes vacationed on the Cape, in Bass River (part of South Yarmouth). “Vacationed.” That sounds sort of swell, doesn’t it? What we did was rent the small Cape ranch of my parents’ friends Mae and Nemo for two weeks. You could walk to the beach, and to shops, including an Irish gift store, where – pious little prig that I was – I once bought some rosary beads. They were of surpassing ugliness: weirdly shaped brown beads – were they pebbles? -  that looked like badly decayed teeth. A normal pious prig of a child would have gotten rosary beads made of green glass. And/or had a Celtic cross. But, no, I wanted something that looked like my grandmother’s teeth.

I don’t know whether that gift store still exists, but South Yarmouth is now home to the Cape Cod Irish Village, which is a hotel cum pub and restaurant, and features regular Irish-y entertainment. So it sounds a little like what’s still on offer in the Irish Alps, albeit to lesser extent than in those halcyon days before air conditioning, airlines, and assimilation. 

I grew up in a predominantly Irish Catholic enclave. Our parish church and school were staffed by Irish American priests and nuns. It was difficult to escape a sense of Irish consciousness. We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day. We listened to the Jimmy Dooley “Irish Hour” on the radio. It was pretty clear that being Irish was superior to any other option.

But there was never a sense of “Worcester Irish” in the same way as there was and is a sense of “Boston Irish”. Somewhere way back in the day, I read that the Worcester Irish were never as insular and us-vs.-them as the Boston edition. I can’t remember the exact reasons for this, but I think it had something to do less of a contentious relationship between the immigrant Irish and the incumbent Yankees. Was it because the Irish who came to Worcester weren’t poor, bedraggled famine Irish, but came  - like my great-grandparents, who immigrated in the 1870’s – in the next wave? They were by no means wealthy, but they had more than a pot to piss in. My sister Trish has Bridget Trainor’s trunk, which is actually quite pretty.

In any case, by the time if got down to my generation, we may not have had air conditioning. We may never have flown on a plane. But, by god, we were assimilated. No one joined the AOH (Ancient Order of Hibernians.) I was aware of Irish step dancing because I saw all those Boston Irish girls stepping on Community Auditions, Boston’s answer to the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. No one I knew took Irish step dancing. The kids I knew who took dance took tap. And no one I knew deliberately went on an Irish-themed vacation. If you went to the Cape, or to Hampton Beach (which were basically the only places anyone went unless, like us, they didn’t trek every other year to Chicago to visit family), you were likely surrounded by Irish Americans. But that was the by product, not the main event.

Still, it was fun to read about the Irish Alps.

Who knew?

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And a tip of the scally cap to my brother-in-law, Rick, who went to camp, and later worked as a busboy/waiter, in the Borscht Belt. (Nobody puts Rick in the corner.)

“Bypassing the brand system”? It’s just so damned opaque out there.

The only thing that’s got to be worse than being an adult who has to carry around an EpiPen in case of a food allergy emergency, is having a child who might have a food allergy emergency. Hard to imagine ever wanting to let your allergic kid out of your sight.

Most instances of death from anaphylaxis aren’t from food reactions. They’re from medicines. But there are plenty of ER-related visits made in the US each year due to an adverse reaction to some sort of food; 200,000 of them, in fact. The estimate is that, annually, there are only 200 deaths from food allergy. But that’s a statistical “only.” Not much comfort in a statistical only if one of those 200 deaths is your kid. (Data Source: Allergic Child)

I don’t recall ever hearing about severe food allergies when I was growing up. And it’s not just my imagination. Food allergies have increased over the past several decade. They haven’t yet put their finger on why, but more processed food, environmental changes, overuse of antibiotics are on most lists of suspects. (Round up the usual…)

That said, I have known folks who’ve had severe food reactions, in one case to shellfish, in another to anything with citric acid in it.

Many years ago, we were out to dinner with friends – one with an allergy to shellfish. The restaurant swore that there was nothing shell-fishy about the fish dish our friend ordered, but it turned out that it had been poached in some kind of shrimp-based broth. Fortunately, our friend’s wife was a nurse, and fortunately she had something – were there even EpiPen’s in the 1980’s – that could undo the reaction. But it could have been ugly.

And today, of course, I know folks whose kids have the dreaded peanut allergy.

All those peanut and other allergies translates into a big demand for EpiPens. And big demand does have a way of translating itself into higher prices, even if there are no shortages. And especially if there’s a third party footing all or part of the bill for those Epi kits.

I’m using the word EpiPen as the generic expression for a needle loaded with epinephrine. It’s the most well-known brand out there. The EpiPen people have cornered the school nurse’s office market. They do all that advertising. Doctors routinely prescribe it by name. And, overall, its owners have made it the Kleenex of the allergy response world. But the recent story is, of course, about the trademarked EpiPen® from Mylan. Which has been scooting prices up since they acquired the product in 2007. Back in that day, a two-pack retailed for $100; these days, it goes for a bit over $600. And since they have a shelf-life of 12-18 months, you can’t just buy a pack and forget it.

Anyway, since insurance has mostly covered the cost, regular, quite gouge-y price hikes were easy to sneak by the parents: they weren’t paying. But now with higher deductibles, more folks are noticing. So there’s been a big hue and outcry over Mylan’s behavior. Cue the pitchforks, especially when it came to light the Mylan CEO’s compensation had chugged right along, increasing from $2.4 million to $19 million since 2007. (She wasn’t the CEO in 2007, but that’s beside the point, given all those pitchforks…)

Mylan’s response to their recent bad press was to rush out with a generic version that will be identical to EpiPen®, brand identify and packaging aside.

We can expect the usual reaction from those being prescribed the generic. Many will welcome it, as it’s the same only cheaper and less glitzily packaged. Others will accept no substitutes. (I read somewhere, years ago, that the little purple pill called Nexium did such a bang-up job advertising, that many patients balked at using a generic version, believing that only Nexium had the purpleness that made it effective.)

Here’s how Heather Bresch, Mylan’s CEO, framed the announcement of the plain brown wrapper version of her company’s money maker:

Because of the complexity and opaqueness of today’s branded pharmaceutical supply chain, and the increased shifting of costs to patients as a result of high deductible health plans, we determined that bypassing the brand system in this case and offering an additional alternative was the best option. (Source: Mylan)

While this was in the press release, under “Heather Bresch commented”, we do know that she never actually said this. Nobody in the history of human speech would ever make this comment. Even by press release gobbledygook standards, this one is gobbledygook-y. Pretty darned opaque, if you ask me.

Having recently written a white paper for one of my clients on how their product makes the pharmaceutical supply chain a better place, I do understand that it’s complex. But is it really all that opaque? In announcing a plan to bypass the brand system, isn’t Myllan really just saying that there will be fewer nodes along the chain with their hands out, grabbing their piece?

And, of course, there’s opaque and then there’s opaque.

In bypassing the brand system, Mylan is “able” to cut the price of the EpiPen® in half. But, given rebates, they stand to make pretty much the same profit per pack. So it really won’t matter, one way or the other, whether consumers accept the generic or insist on the “real” version. You know. The Kleenex, the Nexium one that does all the advertising, and gives all those samples out to doctors.

And we wonder why prescription drugs in the US cost so much.

I’m all for making a profit. I’m all for drug companies investing in R&D. But this whole situation seems ridiculous.

Maybe all the light being shed on Mylan will make the opaqueness of today’s branded pharmaceutical supply chain a bit more transparent. Would that it can do the same for opaque press releases…

Crime shoppers. (Yet another reason ya gotta love Walmart)

When I began reading the article on crime at Walmart, the first thing that came to mind was the term ‘going postal.’

I mean, didn’t someone finally figure out that the reason there were so many workplace murders involving postal workers was because there are so many postal workers?

So I was thinking, of course there’s more crime at Walmart. Therere are more stores, more shoppers, more everything at Wallies. It would stand to reason, then, that there are more crimes associated with the vast emporium of our nightmares. (Mine at least.)

But not so fast.

Turns out the that the situation is more like Walmart’s being able to get away with crappy pay and benefits by letting the taxpayers pick up the difference between what a worker can eke out there vs. what they need to live on. (For the record, I’m all in favor of helping the “working poor” make up the difference between what they make and what they need. But there does seem to be something wrong when Walmart hauls in billions in profits on the backs of the poor – and the poor taxpayer.) Why pay for security when the local PD’s will handle it for you?

Here’s the story:

In Tulsa, there’s an officer who operates out of the security office at one of the city’s Walmarts. Over the past five years, the police van – I guess we can no longer say paddy wagon – has made over 5,000 trips to the store to pick up shoplifters, as well as for more serous crimes: “including five armed robberies so far this year, a murder suspect who killed himself with a gunshot to the head in the parking lot last year, and, in 2014, a group of men who got into a parking lot shootout that killed one and seriously injured two others.” (Source: Bloomberg)

The demands placed on Tulsa PD by four Walmarts resulted in more than six times the calls from Walmart than from the city’s four Targets.

And it’s not just Tulsa:

More than 200 violent crimes, including attempted kidnappings and multiple stabbings, shootings, and murders, have occurred at the nation’s 4,500 Walmarts this year, or about one a day, according to an analysis of media reports.

Then there was the meth lab that cops found in a Walmart parking lot drainage pipe in upstate New York…

It’s pretty clear cops should be jumping in when it there are shootouts in its parking lots, people getting stabbed and kidnapped. And when meth labs are open for business, well, if that lab blows, Attention Shoppers. That said, stores do have a legal obligation to protect shoppers from crimes that the store might reasonable have known could happen.

But some of these crimes are occurring due to Walmart negligence. And tying up police forces to handle shoplifters on the recurring basis it seems to be recurring on? Not that I have any reason to know this personally, but didn’t store security just take shoplifters aside and scare the crap out of them? (Which reminds me of a story that we were told in grammar school by one of our more imaginative nuns. Some kids must have been picked up shoplifting gimcrack at the local Woolworth’s. Anyway, Sister Saint Whatever, having told us that our record would follow us throughout our lives, let us know that in Woolworth’s, there were “midgets with cameras in baby buggies” shooting pictures of shoplifters. So we were bound to get caught. Plus, we were also warned about ‘shoplifting in uniform’, which would cause scandal, because Protestants would see us shoplifting and judge the entire Holy Roman Catholic Church on our behavior. I actually didn’t know anyone who ever stole from Woolworth’s, or Zayre’s, the other cheesy store in our neighborhood mall, Webster Square Plaza. But the nuns were all over it.)

Back to our friends at Walmart:

There’s nothing inevitable about the level of crime at Walmart. It’s the direct, if unintended, result of corporate policy. Beginning as far back as 2000, when former CEO Lee Scott took over, an aggressive cost-cutting crusade led many stores to deteriorate. The famed greeters were removed, taking away a deterrent to theft at the porous entrances and exits. Self-checkout scanners replaced many cashiers. Walmart added stores faster than it hired employees. The company has one worker for every 524 square feet of retail space, a 19 percent increase in space per employee from a decade ago.

In terms of profit, all this has worked: Sales per employee in the U.S. have grown 23 percent in the past decade, to $236,804. For criminals, however, the cutbacks were like sending out a message that no one at Walmart cared, no one was watching, and no one was likely to catch you.

And it’s not making local police departments very happy.

They like the way they do things at Target a lot better.

Sure, Targets tend to be in wealthier neighborhoods. And,

Unlike most Walmarts, they’re not open 24 hours a day. Nor do they allow people to camp overnight in their parking lots, as Walmarts do. Like Walmart, Target relies heavily on video surveillance, but it employs sophisticated software that can alert the store security office when shoppers spend too much time in front of merchandise or linger for long periods outside after closing time. The biggest difference, police say, is simply that Targets have more staff visible in stores.

Ditto for shopping centers, which also have less crime.

Walmart is supposedly becoming more security conscious, but maybe not so aggressively, given that it could mean loss in profit.

Why am I not surprised?

Happy 100th, National Park Service

If not for clicking on yesterday’s Google Doodle – something I rarely do – I never would have known that August 25th marked the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.

I’ve been to a number of the National Parks, mostly in 1972 when my friend Joyce and I drove cross country, camping along the way.

I remember the National Parks as grand and glorious. We drove through Wind Cave, where the buffalo were roaming. We drove through Black Hills, and gawked at the stone faces on Mount Rushmore.

Ah, Mount Rushmore. Goofy, yet so magnificent. George Washington. Thomas Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln. Theodore Roosevelt.

How does TR get to keep company with those greats?

Ah, well. Teddy Roosevelt might have been a jingoistic nutter. And I’d rather see his cousin Franklin D’s visage on Mount Rushmore. But he was one hell of a conservationist. And while it was Woodrow Wilson who founded the National Park Service to oversee our national parks, monuments, historic sites, etc., Teddy Roosevelt played a major role in raising our collective national consciousness about the environment, and during his administration, established a number of new national parks.

We camped (and had a flat tire) in Yellowstone, and camped (with no flat) in Grand Teton. When we were in Yellowstone, did we see Old Faithful? If we did, I don’t remember it. What I do remember was that, on the outskirts, we passed a motel called The Flamingo. Or The Palms. Or something that seemed – neon sign and all – spectacularly ridiculous in that setting. I guess the names like Mighty Pine, Grizzly Cub, and Old Faithful were taken. What I also remember was the breathtaking beauty of those western parks. And that, Grand Teton became one of my two favorite national parks.

We breezed through Crater Lake, and Redwoods, and camped at Yosemite and Sequoia. I suppose we saw El Capitan. Mostly I’m thinking about the road signs that posted a speed limit of 5 MPH. They don’t call them hairpin turns for nothing.

At Yosemite, we spent one night ‘camping’ in the confines of our Karman Ghia. After spending some time visiting with the folks at the next camp site – okay, we were sharing a joint – we came back to our spot only to find two bear cubs playing in the well of our tent. We didn’t wait for mama bear to come back and fetch them. We hopped in the car and spent a fitful night trying to get a bit of shut-eye.

In Arizona, we buzzed the Petrified Forest which disappointed me. Somehow, I had imagined that the trees in the forest would be full standing, not the logs and stumps that make it up.

We did not hike down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, but did (sort of) peer over the ledge.

It was cold and rainy when we camped in Rocky Mountain.

We spent a night at Hot Springs but, even though a ranger encouraged us to take the waters, we didn’t.

I think that our last national park was Shenandoah which ties with Grand Teton as my favorite. Just beautiful. Although scary. We were the only tent in a large site (it was late September, mid-week), and a ranger came by to warn us about bears. We knew all the precautions to take: no food on the ground, don’t sleep in the clothing you cooked in, don’t use scented hand cream. Still, Joyce and I were a bit nervous. We didn’t want another repeat of our night at Yosemite.

Then, in the middle of the night, we were both awoken by the sound of an animal sniffing around our tent. This was it. We reached out to each other across the space that separated our sleeping bags, and held hands while we tried to remember if we ever knew what to do when a bear is sniffing your tent. Scream? Play dead? Bang a pan? Oh, the pans were well away: washed up and stowed in the car.

Just as we thought we might be breathing our last, the clouds parted and, in the bright moonlight, we saw that what was sniffing around our tent was a skunk.We weren’t quite sure whether it would be better to be mauled by a bear or sprayed by a skunk.

I’ve been to a few other national parks since then. A couple in Arizona. Catoctin, where Camp David is, and where I spent a week winter camping a million years ago. (We were in an very rough, uninsultated cabin, and we did have a fireplace, but, boy, was that cold.)

When I worked for Wang, I went out to Tacoma, Washington, with a colleague to meet with a client to spec out a project. The schedule had been set up by a business development guy, without our input, and he planned for three days. We were done in one day.

Because it was going to cost a few hundred bucks to change our plane tickets, Wang wouldn’t approve our coming back. This was in the days before laptops and the Internet, so there wasn’t a lot of work we could get done. So we decided to go up to Mount Rainier National Park and spend the night. We did, in a rustic hotel at the base of the mountain. We couldn’t do much hiking in our business clothing. Even my travel outfit didn’t quite work: a pair of silk slacks and some Cole Haan loafers. But we did have a very nice meal at a nearby restaurant: just-caught trout, and blackberry pie made with just-picked blackberry. Yum. Best business trip ever…

I haven’t been to Acadia in Maine, which is the only – I think – national park in New England. We have a whole bunch of national historic sites, and I’ve been to plenty of them. Boston is one big national historic site, and there are plenty of national park rangers floating around.

So since it was the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, I went to one of those national historic sites: the Museum of African American History, Boston. It’s just up the street, and I’ve been planning on stopping in for years.

They had a wonderful exhibit of photographs of Frederick Douglass, who was the most photographed American of the 19th century. (Now you know.)Talk about fascinating. The most interesting picture wasn’t a solo portrait, but a crowd picture of Abraham Lincoln giving his second inaugural address. In the crowd: both Douglass and John Wilkes Booth.

A National Park Service ranger gave us a tour of the African Meeting House, which is part of the Museum. It’s the “oldest black church edifice still standing in the United States.” Frederick Douglass spoke there many times, as did abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

Maybe not as magnificently scenic as our magnificently scenic national parks, but magnificent nonetheless.

Happy 100th to the National Park Service. May you have many more years of preserving our amazing physical, historic, and cultural heritage.

Grave robbing. (Let sleeping dog tags lie.)

I remember a few years ago, reading – and blogging – about auction houses that subspecialize in Nazi paraphernalia. I can’t remember the details, and I’m too lazy to look them up, but there was some Goering-related stuff: teaspoons, ashtrays, coasters. Crap like that.

Goering memorabilia is apparently a real catch. In June, his silk underwear fetched $3.4K at auction. No comparison with his boss, however. A jacket worn by Hitler went for over $300K. (All part of a major purchase made by an anonymous bidder from Argentina. Is Josef Mengele still alive, or was that Paraguay?) (Source: Newsweek)

I can’t imagine who’d want any of this ghastly stuff, but there’s no accounting for warped taste and infinite pocketbook.

It’s not just objects associated with über Nazis that are drawing interest. Some collectors are after relics of plain old rank and file German soldiers from WWII. Which has gotten some enterprising Latvians to dig up gravesites looking for something worth selling.

Around 100,000 German soldiers were killed in Latvia in the waning days of the war. When it comes to long-dead soldiers, Talis Esmits is a good guy. He and a group of comrades see to about 700 reburials each year, helping landowners properly dispose of remains they find in their backyards and fields, working without compensation out of the goodness – or sheer weirdness – of their hearts.

“In Latvia, it is normal for you to have dead soldiers on your yard,” Esmits said. “When people came back to their homes after the war, they saw there was a dead soldier here and a dead soldier there, and they just buried them.” (Source: Bloomberg)

But while Esmit and his guys are going about their morbid, yet well-intended, tasks, there are others at work, and they’re looking to make a buck off the remains of the day.

…in recent years, the often illicit market in Nazi memorabilia has intensified, creating a new class of diggers across eastern Europe that is at odds with Esmits’s work. Of particular interest are relics—items dug up from the ground. “When we first started, the market for relics was a local one—you couldn’t even call it a market,” Esmits said. “Then the internet appeared, and Europe and the world opened up, and many things changed.”

As they say, the Internet changed everything.

And one thing that it’s changed is the market for low-end German leave behinds: dogtags, medals, uniforms, helmets.

This stuff doesn’t demand a ton, but they’re not making any more, say, Wehrmacht helmets, which today demand almost four times what they did just three years ago.

So the scavengers today compete with Esmits to grab up those helmets. And dog tags. Regular soldier dog tags go for $60. Creepily, SS tags can bring in several hundred bucks. When Esmits finds dog tags, he sends the information on them to a German group that focuses on reburials and “closure” for families. Some of the commercial grave robbers also give over the info, but others aren’t so concerned with the niceties. They want the cash.

All of this is making not just those whose have loved ones whose bones are being dug up, and their belt buckles pillaged, upset. It also makes war historians nuts, too.

Even though they were part of the Nazi war machine, I have some sympathy for the families of those dead soldiers. Most of them were probably not ardent, rotten to the core Nazis, but just plain grunts.

I also have some sympathy for poor Latvians trying to scratch out a living selling German dog tags and helmets. But

But what a grim and disgusting way to make a living. Why not just let those sleeping dog tags lie.

How to stay rich in Europe? Too late for that…

Like any good red-blooded American with visions of fleeing to Europe, based on an at least remotely possible election outcome, I was intrigued by a Bloomberg headline that read: How to Stay Rich in Europe: Inherit Money for 700 Years.

The article was about how a larger proportion of European billionaires – remember when millionaire was a big deal? – got their money the old fashioned way: they inherited it. In the US, “only” 29 percent of our billionaires are scionics. In Italy, the figure is 37 percent. In Germany, an astounding 65 percent.

The richest Florentine families today were already at the top of the socioeconomic ladder almost 600 years ago, according to a recent study by the Bank of Italy. And research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that in many European countries, not only wealth and income but even occupations tend to be “sticky,” passed on from generation to generation.

Six-hundred years? Or is it the seven hundred years of the title? What’s a century, I guess, if you’ve got all that money, not to mention your “sticky” occupation behind you?

Six-hundred years back, I’ll venture to say that both my German and Irish antecedents were peasant farmers. This is a pretty safe bet, given that what they were leaving when they came in the 1870’s (the Irish) and the 1920’s (the Germans) were peasant farms.

So I’m just as happy that those occupations didn’t stick.

I’ve only been to one antecedent town, Ballintubber (officially Ballintober) in County Mayo, where my great-grandmother Margaret Joyce hailed from. I saw the restored, 13th century Cistercian Abbey (quite lovely), and a graveyard full of Joyces, but I don’t recall the town. Ballintubber (officially Ballintober), County Mayo, is not to be confused, by the way, with Ballintober (officially Ballintober), County Roscommon, which is where my great-grandfather John Rogers came from. He met Margaret Joyce in Amerikay, and the rest is history.

The other Irish side, the Trainors, were from Ballymascanlon, County Louth. My cousin Barbara breezed through years ago. It’s one of those “blink you’re out” villages, but they do have a hotel, and it’s on my bucket list.

My more recently arriving family, the Wolfs of Neue Banat - a German settlement in the Austro-Hungarian empire that, after WWI, became part of Romania, hit our shores in the 1920’s – came through Ellis Island with all those other tired, poor, and huddled masses. I can only imagine what this little outpost looks like today (Neue Banat, not Ellis Island; I know what that outpost looks like), between WWII and all those decades under the Ceaușescu fun fest. I don’t imagine I’ll ever get there. (Romania is not on anyone’s bucket list, unless they’re a Dracula fan.) But my Aunt Mary did get there as a kid, when my Grandmother Wolf made a reverse pilgrimage to see her family in 1937, before all hell broke loose. In keeping with family dynamics, my mother – the oldest child, the drudge – had to stay home and tend to my grandfather. Grandma took Mary and my Uncle Jack.

Thanks to my cousin Ellen’s salvaging some family pictures of that excursion, I do know what Neue Banat looked like in the 1930’s. You can find them on her wonderful blog post, European Vacation: 1937, on her wonderful blog, Hello, Lamppost.

No billionaires there, I can tell you that.

Anyway, back to the Bloomberg Euro-billionaire story, the piece highlights two fellows, Lamberto Frescobaldi, of the wine- (and money-) making Frescobaldis of Florrence, and Count Alexander Fugger-Babenhausen of Germany.

I guess another part of being rich is not just the money, it’s the names. Jacob Wolf. Magdalena Folker. Mary Trainor. Charles Rogers. My grandparents. Not a Lamberto or Fugger-Babenhausen in the bunch.

Although I will say that, if my German family had been wealthy, I’d like to think that they would have been Fuggers. In the fifteen-hundreds, the ur uber-rich Fugger, Jacob, founded the Fuggerei, and affordable housing complex in Augsburg, Germany.

The Fuggerei’s 140 apartments have survived innumerable wars and partial destruction during World War II. While they have been renovated, they still follow the original floor plans and feature some unique Renaissance decor, such as a lever-activated door-opening mechanism that in the past let tenants allow visitors in without leaving the apartment’s only heated room.

Count Fugger-Babenhausen still keeps the Fuggerei up. Good for him.

Sometimes it pays to be rich, in more ways than one.

Meanwhile – and alas – it’s too late for me to become a rich European. Should have thought of that six (or is it seven?) hundred years back.

Greetings

I’m a big greeting card person.

Christmas. St. Patrick’s Day. Birthdays. Baby. Get Well. Sympathy. Thanksgiving. Easter. Halloween. Valentine’s Day.

Other than at Christmas, these aren’t mass mailings. But I do send out a lot of cards. Sometimes I send an e-card, but mostly I send something physical – personal note, signature, address, stamp and all.

And I like getting cards back. It’s nice when my birthday rolls around, and Christmas, and there’s something in the mail besides a bill or a tin cut letter from some outfit that I don’t actually owe anything to asking for money. Since so many of my bills are sent and paid electronically, I don’t even get that many bills these days. At least bills are somewhat personal… Not so the letters asking for donations, even if they have some kind of fake “Dear Maureen” in them, or are addressed using a faux penmanship font.

So I was interested in a recent article on Slate, by June Thomas, that clued me in on Postable. June checked Postable out when she got a birthday card that was a bit “off”. Sure, it was personal – she knew the sender, and he wasn’t asking for money – but what was up with the handwriting. So she followed the URL on the return address.

Over at Postable, I learned that the site bills itself as “snail mail heaven.” It notes that postal mail seems special and surprising these days precisely because “it’s a pain in the ass to send.” We’re all familiar with that particular PITA. In the case of a friend’s birthday, you have to remember the date, acquire a card, find the time to compose a message—if I’ve spent money on a card, I generally want to write more than “Happy birthday”—dig up an appropriate stamp, and take it out to the mailbox. Postable claims it was “created to alleviate that ass pain. We make sending seriously stylish snail mail as easy as sending an email. You type it and we handle all the annoying stuff. We print, stuff, stamp, address and mail all of your cards directly to everyone for you.” (Source: Slate)

I followed June’s trail over to see for myself, and I have to admit that most of the card designs are pretty good. They didn’t make the egregious “Happy St. Patty’s Day” error. (It’s St. Paddy’s Day, yez amadan, yez.) But there were some under the Sympathy section that were a tad bit questionable. Would you send someone a sympathy card that had a picture of a sheep on it, and the words “Thinking of ewe”? Or one that read “Ugh! This sucks.” Not me. (It does remind me of a group card signed by the office mates and sent to someone in my sister’s office who’d just lost her husband. One of Trish’s colleagues – apparently unfamiliar with normal expressions of sympathy – wrote “Bummer!” and then signed his name.)

For whatever reason, I send a fair number of sympathy cards. (What do I mean “for whatever reason”. I know exactly what the reason is. I’m getting to the age when the few people I know who still have parents are losing them, and when my friends are starting to lose their spouses, sibs, and friends.) Lately, I’ve mostly been sending the same card, which has the words of James Joyce on the cover: “They lived and laughed and loved and left.” Given that a lot of my friends and family members have a bit o’ the Irish in them, the Joyce quote makes sense. And I like the fact that the quote well may be the only words in Finnegan’s Wake that actually make sense.

Anyway, the Postable cards are also reasonably priced – especially when compared to what cards cost at the pricey card stores that I tend to drift into. (I do save on Christmas cards, however, in that I buy them for the next year on the day after Christmas, for half price. And I definitely try to avoid the cards that require extra postage. Recently, I did make a poor card choice when I bought a b-day card for my niece Caroline that I didn’t notice had a black envelope and black paper on the inside. Alas, I did not have any silver ink. Since I gave her the card in person, however, I was able to narrate what I’d written in invisible black ink on it.)

While the Postable cards look nice, and the price is right, I think I’ll keep with my practice of sending real physical cards, personally signed, personally addressed, personally stamped by me. In my personal, not so great, Palmer Penmanship handwriting. I like sending them, and I like receiving them. Sure, it may be a PITA to take care of all this, but I’ll take a page from my 91 year old Aunt Mary. Mary has a booklet where she has written down all the birthdays she observes, by month. Each month, she buys cards for the birthdays-of-the-month. My niece Caroline was a recent recipient. We were all thrilled, and getting my birthday card from Mary is an annual highlight. Nothing from Postable will ever do quite the same trick.

Retiring Minds Want to Know

As I drift into my Golden Years, visions of fully and intentionally retiring are starting to dance in my head. Most likely, I will “retire in place.” After all, Boston has been my home for most of my life, I have a beautiful condo in a great neighborhood, my front yard has the Swan Boats in it, I can run most of my errands by walking around the corner, and I can get to most anyplace worth getting to on my own two feet, including Fenway Park, the Gardner Museum, and my internist, eye doctor, dentist and Mass General Hospital.

Yes, Boston is colossally expensive. And, yes, as the climate continues to change and the oceans continue to rise, my ‘hood will be under water at some point. With luck, I will have sold my condo and moved to higher ground by the time that happens. But I haven’t given a ton of thought to where that higher ground might be.

Kiddingly (or not so kiddingly), I have occasionally mentioned that my home town of Worcester might be a fine place to retire.

Yes, almost all of the family I still have there are of the six-feet-deep variety. And you pretty much do need a car to get around. Not to mention that, in terms of weather, Worcester – although a scant 50 miles down the ‘pike from Boston - has the world’s worst weather. But housing-wise, you can get a lot more for a lot less than in Boston. There’s a decent hospital. Good restaurants. An excellent museum and other culture-vulture-y things to do, thanks in large part to all the colleges that are there. And it’s on the train to Boston. Why, there’s even a stop for Fenway Park.

You could do worse than retire to the Heart of the Commonwealth.

Alas, according to an outfit called WalletHub, the only way you could do worse than Worcester, Massachusetts (ranked 149), in terms of retirement, would be Providence, Rhode Island (150).

Providence? Huh?

As any Providence-watcher can tell you, this is one city that has really turned itself around over the years, going from what was pretty much a dump in the early 1970’s to the vibrant and interesting place it is today. I got to watch Providence change via second-hand up close and personal, as my great and good friend Marie moved there in 1977, settling up on The Hill, near Brown, where she and her husband had both gone. So I’ve been a regular visitor over the years. Like Worcester, Providence is a city I can actually see myself retiring to.

Unlike any of WalletHub’s Top Five: Orlando, Tampa, Miami, Scottsdale, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota? I get the affordability part, but, gee, how did Sioux Falls get to be ranked #1 for health care?

And I’m guessing that I should take back what I just said about Worcester’s weather. It may be Massachusetts’ worst, but it’s probably not any worse than what you experience in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

WalletHub, of course, used its own methodology to decide where it’s best to retire, some no doubt arbitrary combo of proxies (“key metrics”) for affordability, activities, quality of life, and health care.

Boston ranked a lowly 92 in the rankings, after “achieving” – make that underachieving – the same score as Chattanooga and Lubbock. Those scores, I suspect, is the only answer to the question “What do Boston, Massachusetts, and Lubbock, Texas have in common?”

My husband had always talked about retiring to New York City. Apparently, at position 88, a slightly better bet than Boston.

Meanwhile, I’m staying put.

(Lubbock, Texas…Hah!)

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Where this was spotted: Huff Po.

Who did the spotting: my cousin Ellen, who grew up in Chicago (43), one step ahead of Jackson, Mississippi. Thanks, Ellen!

Ur Source: WalletHub

Division of Labor

Last week, the fire alarm went off in our building

The firefighters came and checked it out, but they can’t turn off the blaring alarm, which is skull splitting. It’s okay for someone “authorized” to turn the alarm off once the firefighters have given the “all clear.” That someone used to be my husband, but I never bothered to watch how he did it. It pretty much goes without saying that no one else who lives in this building has a clue, so I had to figure it out. Now I know.

On Sunday night, around 10:30, when I was taking the recycle out, I smelled gas coming from the laundry room. That’s the only place where there’s anything fueled by gas – the water heater and the communal dryer – and I thought that maybe the pilot had gone out in either one of these appliances. That wasn’t the case. Since paying the gas bill is the responsibility of the condo association’s management company, so I didn’t even know what our gas company is. I took a chance that it was Eversource, which provides my electricity, and called their gas leak number. They put me through to National Grid, and within a half hour, two National Gridders were here to figure out what was going on. What was going on was a gas pipe coupler, located in the recently-vacated apartment of an elderly man who died last month at the age of 99, wasn’t really coupling. I got the National Grid repair guys into Jack’s vacated apartment and hung with them for a couple of hours while they made the fix. What I wanted to do was go to bed, which is what I probably would have done if Jim were still alive. Dealing with emergencies like the gas leak were his thing, not mine.

Earlier this week, I got the plane tickets for Venice for me and my sister Trish. (We’re heading there this fall.) Given that Trish has a full time job, a kid, and a dog, I put my hand up to do the trip planning. It’s not a big deal to make plane reservations, yet I kept putting it off. Jim used to do all the trip planning. I’ve been on plenty of trips since Jim died a couple of years back – Ireland, NYC (three times), Chicago (twice), Scotland, Dallas, Tucson (twice). But for some reason, I’m not that wild about taking care of the details. Jim was really good at it, and I do believe he actually enjoyed it.

Like most couples, Jim and I had, over the years, worked out a division of labor.

Jim dealt with the repairmen. He planned the trips. He worried about retirement. He turned off the fire alarm. He was vice president in charge of television. He made the restaurant reservations. He took the trash out.

I was vice president of information technology. I dealt with painters. I remembered birthdays. I got the pictures framed. I bought the sheets and towels. I did the laundry. I took care of the recycling.

I suppose that, other than my being the vice president of information technology, our roles were more or less gender driven, but we never sat down and figured out who was going to do what. It just happened over time.

Most of what I miss about my husband is not that there’s no one other than me-myself-and-I to see to the little “stuff” Jim took care of.

I miss the hanging out. I miss the laughs. I miss having someone here when I come home. I miss taking the trips that Jim so meticulously planned.

But I do have to admit that, however wonderful it is to be completely self-sufficient and independent, it’s kind of a drag to have to take care of all of life’s little stuff. Plus, when I find myself having to deal with the National Grid guys, it’s just another reminder – as if I need one – that Jim’s gone.

Not that I sit around boo-hooing about it. It’s just that it really does make me sad when something comes up that was on Jim’s side of our division of labor.

Bucks for the Bang

Two gun-related stories caught my eye when I was blog-idea grazing last weekend. The first was on the nerves of some University of Texas professors that are on edge, now that that concealed carry on campus has gone into effect in their state. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want to be in a workplace where people were packing, even if the guns were out of sight/out of mind. One professor in an article I read said that discussions in her classroom sometimes became heated, and that she did have people sign up for her class just so they could attack her ideas. She’s understandably afraid. But there’s a long way between attacking ideas and attacking the professor. And if someone’s going to use a gun when a classroom bull session gets going, they’re probably not going to bother with the niceties of whether carrying a gun on campus is allowed or not. But we’ll see.

Maybe there’ll be some instance where a kid who never would have put his Smith and Wesson in his backpack if it were against his school’s code of conduct will start doing it now that it’s okay. And maybe if the debate really becomes charged he’ll decide to do more than just shoot his mouth off. Could happen.

For me, though, I’m a lot more nervous around open carry. When I’ve been in open carry states, I really get queasy when I see someone with a gun holstered to their hip. It just seems like such an aggressive, f-you thing to do. I am never going to be comfortable in any place of commerce where anyone other than the security guard is armed.

The other story that I picked up on was on the fact that the Olympian shooters aren’t feeling much love from sponsors outside of the gun industry.

The first medal that the US won in the RIo Olympics was a bronze in skeet shooting, won by Kim Rhode, who has medaled in six straight Olympics. The first woman to do so.

But Rhode’s agent can’t get any of the big time sponsors – like Coke and P&G – to back her.

Coca-Cola Co. didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Procter & Gamble Co.’s spokesperson Damon Jones said in an e-mail the company receives hundreds of sponsorship requests so it must be selective. Rhode and other shooters on Team USA think the reason they’re passed over is obvious. The rise in gun violence and mass shootings in the US have attached a stigma to shooting as a sport, they say. So while companies like Winchester, Beretta and Otis Technology support Rhode, she doesn’t have a single sponsor from outside the firearm industry.

The same is true for USA Shooting, even though the sport has since 2000 been the fifth-highest medal producer for the US team at Summer Olympics. The very first gold medal for any sport awarded in Rio went to 19-year-old Ginny Thrasher, competing in her Olympics debut. (Source: Bloomberg)

Skeet shooting and the other firearms related events aren’t exactly considered prime for the American Olympics-watching audience. Not that I pay such close attention to the Olympics, but I hadn’t even realized that they were Olympic sports. For some reason, they don’t actually seem like sports to me. But I suppose most things related to non-sexual physical activity that’s done for pleasure and/or entertainment is considered a sport.

Thus, I’d like to propose that jacks or jump rope – the only sports, by my lax definition, I’ve been any good at – should be included in the Olympics.

Lack of interest on the part of the TV audience is one reason why the P&G’s and Cokes – who tend to glom onto the athletes in the Olympic sports we do watch: swimming, gymnastics, track – don’t sign the shooters up. The other, of course, is the negative associations that Americans understandably have with guns.

The balance beam,the butterfly, and the javelin just don/t seem to get implicated in mass murders and other crimes in the same way that guns do.

Still, I don’t really associate skeet shooting with violence, either. It seems like a pretty goofy yet harmless thing that a certain class of folks take to. When they’re not watching their cousins in dressage competitions.

Anyway, the Olympic shooters just don’t get too much financial love. Which is too bad, given that they can’t exactly perform their sports with Saturday night specials or zip guns.

Competition-level firearms price between $8,000-20,000. Between ammunition, clay pigeons and range fees, a day of training can run as high as $450. “It really adds up,’’ said Vincent Hancock, one of Rhode’s teammates. “I’ve only found two sports that are more expensive -- anything to do with a horse, and car racing.’’

Because of the contribution that the shooting team makes to the US medal totals, the US Olympic Committee does fund the sport. But it doesn’t cover all the costs, and the team and its members are looking for more bucks for their bang.

I’m no big fan of guns, but even I can recognize that shooting for sport is benign and probably fun. This is “good” shooting, and, given that these athletes are representing the country (and winning plenty of medals) it’s too bad that they’re not given a shot by the advertisers. I can understand that major consumer product firms don’t want any association with gun nuts, all those accidents in which the two year old shoots his mother, cop killings,innocent civilian killings, gang murders, assassinations, mass murders, and all sorts of other madnesses that our gun-besotted culture is so understandably known for. But skeet shooting? Come on. They shoot at clay pigeons.

Good luck getting sponsors next time, guys. Maybe winning a lot of medals will give you the ammunition you need to break through.

Jaws of Life

My Grandmother Rogers died the month before she would have turned 97. Her family, the Trainors, were the most long-lived branch of my family. Nanny’s brother Pat lived well into his 90’s, and her sister Roseanne made it to 98.

On my mother’s side, my Aunt Mary’s making a longevity run of her own. Mary is 91, still completely sound of mind, still rooting for her beloved Cubbies to win it all.

I pretty much have the same long-life wish as most folks: as long as your health is reasonable, your brain still working. As long as there are still family and friends to hang with. For me, it’s also as long as there are books to read, ice cream to eat, and baseball games to watch. As long as the country hasn’t gone to the dogs of fascism. As long as life is still good, living into great old age – my nineties – sounds fine.

And, beyond, I guess.

But not forever.

I really don’t get those folks who want to swig the elixir of eternity. The world is already on its way to an unsustainable population of folks who want to drive cars, eat steak, and sit around in their air conditioned homes watching TV. We don’t really need a bunch of folks who refuse to die and leave room for someone new. At some point, don’t we all have the obligation to say ‘stop the world, I want to get off’?

So far, there is fortunately no magical formula for eternity on earth, but I’m sure those ‘hell, no, we won’t go’ Boomers who can’t stand the thought of dying will keep looking. (Forget ‘don’t trust anyone over thirty.’ It’ll be ‘don’t trust anyone under a hundred and thirty.’)

I’m sure they’ll be trying to dissect just how Greenland sharks – the longest-lived animal with a backbone -  manage to make it to great old age.

Using a novel dating technique, an international team of biologists and physicists estimated the age of 28 dead female Greenland sharks based on tissue in their eyes. Eight of the sharks were probably 200 years or older and two likely date back more than three centuries, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. (Source: Boston Globe)

The geezeriest of the geezer sharks, which was caught four years ago, is estimated to have been 392 years of age when she took the bait. That’s 392 plus or minus 120 years, which means she may have been born in 1500.

Leonardo daVinci and Michelangelo were painting. The Portuguese were “discovering” Brazil. And William Shakespeare was not yet a twinkle in his father’s eye. In fact, William Shakespeare’s father was not yet a twinkle in his father’s eye.

That’s a long time to hang on.

But not as long as some invertebrates.

An ocean quahog, a clam, lived 507 years and two different types of sponges are said to survive for 15,000 and 1,500 years.

That must have been one tough quahog when it was diced up and thrown in the processor at the Snow’s chowder factory.

And there are pine trees that made it through 5,000 years on earth. Must not get bored easily.

Anyway, I’m sure there are some ‘I wanna live forever’ folks who’ll be looking to fund shark research in hopes of grabbing that brass ring of longevity. Maybe the answer will be more shark fin soup. Maybe it’ll be wearing sharkskin suits. Or spending lots of time in the water, aimlessly moving to and fro. Maybe it will require eating raw seal. Or taking an occasional bite out of the leg of a swimmer. All I know is I’m not hoping to be a beneficiary of this type of Jaws of Life. Live forever? Ask me when I’m 99, but for now the answer is ‘no thanks.’

Plain brown wrapper

When I was a kid, if you saw an empty Lucky Strike cigarette pack on the sidewalk, you stepped on it, and hit (not hard, but a hit-hit, not a tap) the nearest kid to you in the arm, while hollering “Lucky Strike.” This, of course, attests to a few things about the 1950’s and 1960’s:

People littered. The streets weren’t full of garbage, but people routinely tossed gum wrappers, cigarette packs, soda empties, banana peels, and all sorts of other stuff wherever they were standing when they were done with it. There’s a funny scene in an early Mad Men episode in which Don, Betty and the kids are on a picnic. When they’re done eating, they shake out their picnic blanket on the grass, and leave all their trash behind.

We weren’t a littering family – the only thing we could throw out the car window was an apple core, so “the birds can get it” – but you did see people throw all sorts of trash out of their cars while tootling down the highway. Of course, back then, people didn’t have as much stuff, everything wasn’t over-packaged, and there wasn’t much by way of fast food, so it wasn’t as if we were walking and driving around in landfill. Still, roadsides and sidewalks were far more littered back then than they are today – and this is coming from someone who routinely picks up trash from the sidewalk in front of her house, and from the paths through the Boston Common. That’s thank to the ‘don’t be a litterbug movement,” which aimed to “Keep America Beautiful,” by telling people that “Every Litter Bit Hurts.” All of a sudden, littering was something that just wasn’t done.

Kids hit each other. Even when they weren’t fighting, it’s my sense that kids used to hit, shove, push, trip, kick, and otherwise whack away at each other far more than they do today. I’m not talking mean kids. I’m not talking bullies. I’m talking physical contact of the routine kind, when play was a lot less regulated, children’s activities were a lot less observed and mediated, and life for kids was a lot more rough and tumble. There was one game when you took a kid by the arm and swung them around a couple of times, and then let go. Whatever awkward position they landed in, they were supposed to maintain or they were out. In another game, you hopped on one foot with your arms crossed and tried to knock another kid – also hopping on one foot with arms crossed – on their keister. Dodge Ball. Red Rover. Making a “whip” when you were skating. These weren’t blood sports. Until they were. And is there a Baby Boomer who at one point or another didn’t go whining to a parent to complain about being hit by another kid who wasn’t told “Well, go hit him back.” I’m not advocating for violence here, or Lord of the Flies, but you did get toughened up. And knowing that the other kid might spot that Lucky Strike packet first and whack you, did keep you on the alert.

People smoked. Other than having one lunatic brother who refuses to kick the filthy habit, I don’t know many/any people who smoke. This was not always the case. Growing up – pre-Surgeon General’s Report – almost all men and a lot of women smoked. Before switching to Marlboro’s, my father smoked Luckies, and a Christmas gift might be a beanbag ashtray or, if a couple of us chipped in, a carton of smokes. My mother didn’t smoke, but some of her friends did. And some of my friends’ mothers smoked. Two of those mothers died of lung cancer, by the way. Teenagers hung around on street corners, smoking.

When we visited the glamorous teen mother, Bee, who lived in a three decker in our neighborhood, and let us hang out with her, we always hoped that her gas station attendant husband George would come in while we were there – handsome George with his slick DA, and his packet of cigarettes rolled up on his shoulder, in the sleeve of his white tee shirt.

Fast forward into the 1970’s, and I was an episodic smoker. Mostly when I was a waitress. We smoked so that we could take cigarette breaks. So that if the head waitress or manager came looking for you, you could tell them, “Just let me finish my f’ing cigarette.”

I smoked Salems, in the green and white package. Menthols. “Take a puff, it’s springtime.” I switched to Virginia Slims. A cigarette aimed at women. Mostly white packet. “You’ve come a long way, baby.” But who needed a “girl’s cigarette”?

So I started smoking Marlboros. Red and white packs. Women were getting liberated. Marlboros, with the Marlboro man, were kind of butch. “You get a lot to like with a Marlboro.”

My final stop was Mores – skinny brown cigarettes in a green packet. I have no recall of any tagline. I smoked them because a friend of mine did.

All told, I maybe purchased thirty or forty packs of cigarettes in the course of my life time. I never smoked enough to become brand loyal. But I do remember what those cigarette packs looked like.

And now some countries are trying to enforce plain packaging of cigarettes, so that they’re less attractive to consumers – especially younger ones. Togo is one such country, but Philip Morris is going after them for it, threatening that masking cigarette brands in a plain brown wrapper would be unwise.

It would risk “violating the Togolese constitution”, the firm’s subsidiary explained, “providing tobacco manufacturers the right to significant compensation.” It then outlined how plain packaging would violate binding global and regional agreements. (Source: The Economist)

That violating the constitution thing sounds like an NRA-style argument, but Big Tobacco has sued Uruguay for warnings on packaging that Philip Morris claims violated a trade agreement. Big Tobacco is appealing to the World Trade Organization, griping that not being able to use their trademarks is “an appropriation of intellectual property.”

LSMFT – Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco” -  as “intellectual property”? Never thought of it that way, but if you say so…

Australia has been the most radical in terms of their push for non-brand appealing packaging:

…banishing iconic trademarks from tobacco packs. Its law mandates that brand names—such as Marlboro, Winfield or Dunhill—appear iyn grey type against a background of Pantone 448C, a putrid green deemed the world’s ugliest colour by a market-research firm.

It’s actually more of a putrid brown color, but the point it made.

Other countries – including France, Ireland, and Canada have initiated plain packaging as well.

Big Tobacco, of course, would rather fight than switch. Given the rulings against TV advertising, and the mandates for warnings on packages:

…plain packaging clamps down on one of their last bits of advertising. The design of the box is where they must convey not only the name of the brand but abstract qualities, such as masculinity or the idea that a product is “premium”, and worth an extra outlay. If such traits are stripped from packs, consumers may choose cheaper brands. That is particularly worrisome in emerging markets…where standard packs would threaten the aspirational appeal of smoking.

The article suggests that the plain packaging movement is unlikely to impact the US, given the strength of the First Amendment. But you never know. The US did manage to kick cigarette ads off of television, after all.

It won’t impact me one way or the other. Probably not my smokin’ brother, either. But I will say I would be less inclined to pick up any product packaged in guck brown, with gray printing on it. And when the product is as rotten and dangerous as cigarettes, that’s a good thing.

IP Address Nightmare.(Out of your MaxMind)

MaxMind is a local (Waltham) tech company that provides IP intelligence. Through MaxMind data, which maps an IP address to a true or, failing that, approximate physical address, its customers can:

…locate their Internet visitors and show them relevant content and ads, perform analytics, enforce digital rights, and efficiently route Internet traffic. (Source: MaxMind)

So if I’m caught searching for, say, odd-flavored Oreos – there’s now a limited edition version with Swedish Fish filling, which is where even I draw the line – a store selling them near my zip code could pop an ad up (which I would ignore, of course), letting me know that I could get my fill there. (This example won’t happen because Swedish Fish Oreos are available only at Kroger’s, and we don’t have Kroger’s. I will note that the company’s founder, Barney Kroger, used as his mantra: “Be particular. Never sell anything you would not want yourself.” That may have worked in 1883, when there were a lot fewer items to be had in any grocery store. Can you imagine any grocery chain sticking to that nowadays? How many people are there who’d want Swedish Fish Oreos for themselves?)

There is, of course, no privacy these days. Which is sometimes a good thing, as it helps catch kiddie porn consumers and other bad guys, but is often a bad thing, as when you’re a completely innocent browser getting bull’s-eye targeted with “relevant content and ads.”

But data mining and targeting are all the rager these days, so I suspect that MaxMind’s business is doing well.

The company’s technology is not without its problems, however. And one of those problems was what to do with the 600 million IP addresses – the string of numbers associated with every device you own that connects to the Internet – that they couldn’t get a pinpoint physical address for. All MaxMind knew was that those addresses were in the US.

So why not pick a coordinate that’s more or less the dead center of the continental United States. Plunk those IP addresses in the middle of Kansas. Flyover-ville. Cornfields.

Unfortunately, MaxMind neglected to ask themselves the Kansas question “Is there anybody there? Anybody at all?”

Turns out that there is someone out there. Why, it’s James and Theresa Arnold, who rent a farmhouse near Potwin, Kansas, population 449. And those 600 IP addresses are mapped to their front yard.

Which would probably be fine with the Arnolds – who cares, they’re barely Internet users themselves -  if there weren’t some disturbing byproducts to the mapping.

Officers would show up, accusing them of harboring runaway children. Of keeping girls in the house to make pornographic films. Ambulances appeared, prepared to save suicidal persons. FBI agents, federal marshals and IRS collectors have all appeared on their doorstep. So have angry Internet users, who claimed they were ripped off by the Arnolds. (Source: Boston Globe)

All of this has been a shock to the Arnolds’ system. So they’re suing MaxMind “for turning their pastoral home into a digital age horror story.” They’ asking for $75K in ‘‘compensatory and punitive damages in excess of $75,000,’’ ‘‘plus their costs.

Having checked out MaxMind, I can say that they look like a good little company. Even factoring in my favorable bias towards local tech companies that are doing something completely nerdly, they look like a good little company. (Factoring out my negative bias towards anything that contributes to the death spiral of any privacy whatsoever. Of course, MaxMind didn’t invent the IP address, and, of course, something’s got to tell the Internet where you are. Still, I really despise all this targeted marketing stuff. Leave me alone! Which, come to think of it, they – as in the “theys” that do target marketing – are probably already doing, given the geezerly demograhic I’m in.)

Anyway, they look like a good little company. Every job they have advertised pays $100K-plus (that’s engineering for you). They plunk half of their profits into do-gooding. They’re management team all look so brainy, earnest, interesting, smart…

So even if it does cut into the share of the profits that can go to do-gooding, they should probably settle with the Arnolds.

Meanwhile, those 600 million orphan IP addresses, with no place to call home, have been relo’d to a lake west of Wichita.

Still Kansas, but no longer the Arnolds’ front yard.

Good luck to those searching for miscreants. And lucky those who’ll be able to dodge precision marketing.