These photographs by Walter Arnold of the derelict Scranton Lace Company were recently linked on a North East Pennsylvania Genealogy list.
Incorporated in 1897, the Scranton Lace Company in its heyday employed 1400 people, and was the world’s largest producer of Nottingham lace. It possessed the largest looms ever built, each of which stood nearly three stories tall, was 50 feet long, and weighed over 20 tons. During World War II, the company expanded its production line to include mosquito and camouflage netting, bomb parachutes, and tarpaulins. After the war, the company returned to producing cotton yarn, vinyl shower curtains, and textile laminates for umbrellas, patio furniture, and pool liners.
Its factory complex boasted “bowling alleys in the basement, a fully staffed infirmary, a staff barber and a gymnasium, and owned its own cotton field and coal mine. Its clock tower was a city landmark. U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s father and grandfather worked there.”
The Scranton Lace Company closed abruptly in 2002 with an announcement from the company’s vice president, in the middle of the daily work shift, that the company was closing “effective immediately.”
The photo essay is a moving testament to the scale of everything that has been lost as the American economy changed in recent decades to a postindustrial era and manufacturing in most cases moved overseas.
When I was living a few years ago in the Bay Area of Northern California, I often divided shopping expeditions between Draeger’s (a sort of West Coast Zabar’s, a high end butcher shop-cum-gourmet food store) in San Mateo and Trader Joe’s in Foster City.
No matter how little I bought at Draeger’s, I marveled to find that the cash register receipt never came in under $100, while two or even three times the volume of purchases from Trader Joe’s often came in under $40. “These things even out.” I used to assure Karen.
Just the other day, I finally got to a Virginia branch of Trader Joe’s in Centreville. We residents of the real Northern Virginia make a point of avoiding entering the soul-destroying, built-up, suburban areas outside the District, referred to around here as “Occupied Virginia,” but Centerville is just at the edge of the suburban Erebus, and cases of Two-Buck-Chuck (priced on the East Coast at $3.29 a bottle) will definitely justify the occasional expedition.
Los Angeles Magazine has a long feature this week revealing the mysterious origins of the Counter-Culture’s favorite grocery store (which even some of us conservatives like).
Coulombe guessed he had less than a few years to think up a concept that could compete. Luckily, he was an avid magazine reader. In Scientific American he learned that a new class of overeducated, underpaid adults was being produced by the burgeoning college system. Sophisticated shoppers were not necessarily wealthy shoppers, Coulombe theorized; they were educated buyers trapped in economic stasis. He decided to mate the convenience store with the liquor store, and that was Trader Joe’s, “Phase I.” His customers would be the classical musician, the journalist, the teacher, the young doctor. In a different article Coulombe read that the more education a person had, the more they drank, so he stocked 70 bourbons and about 100 scotches. (“I had penciled out what a union journeyman made to figure what I would pay my employees,” he says, “and adding liquor was the easiest way to fund those wages.”) Coulombe read about a jet known as the 747 that promised inexpensive air travel to Europe; Trader Joe’s would need to broaden its tastes to match the new traveler. In another magazine Coulombe discovered that the earth’s biosphere was threatened. Overnight, he says, he became a self-professed “Green” and spliced the health food store and the gourmet store onto Trader Joe’s. This was “Phase II” of Coulombe’s company.
Finally, Coulombe gave Trader Joe’s something most grocery chains didn’t have: a personality. It would have its own take on the world—cultivated but casual, spontaneous, moderately liberal, and smart. When you walked into a Trader Joe’s, you would know the store’s tone and its attitude. The personality that Coulombe conceived remains to this day the company’s voice: The Fearless Flyer.
Coulombe continued to tinker with Trader Joe’s. In 1972, he devised what he calls “Trader Joe’s, Phase III.” At that time the trend in grocery merchandising was bigger. Throughout the ’70s, supermarkets were headed toward becoming the 40,000-square-foot behemoths of today that can carry 50,000 items. Yet such steroidal markets would encounter drawbacks to their muscled dimensions. Eighty percent of supermarket shopping time is spent moving from product to product. Half of all store trips are for five purchases or less, and customers on such trips aren’t searching for sale items—price does not alter the behavior of someone looking for only a handful of things. What did this mean for supermarkets? As their floor plans expanded, their sales volume per square foot shrank. They were forced to invent new schemes to compensate for lost profits, charging fees to manufacturers for store placement and “floating” cash (earning bank interest on the daily take).
So once again Coulombe thought small. Instead of 50,000 shelved items, he would drop his number from 6,000 to 1,000. If supermarkets sold 20 kinds of cat food and 40 detergents, he would sell one of each. In doing so, Coulombe maximized the velocity of dollars entering his registers. Shoppers moving 5 feet between purchases instead of 50 pass through a store more quickly, leaving more cash behind. The average supermarket brings in $10 million to $30 million annually in sales. A Trader Joe’s one-fifth the size of a supermarket can make $1 million in a week’s time. Square foot for square foot, that Trader Joe’s outperforms an average Walmart, which would have to do $30 million in business to match it during the same period.
“I took her down to the rocker arms,” says Coulombe, describing the work he did in the late ’70s. “That’s the Trader Joe’s you know today.”
Two boys debate attending the American Theater in Greenpoint, Brooklyn in 1938.
Roger Ebert explains why movie theater revenues are in free fall. Only blockbuster movies are currently keeping the whole system afloat.
I guess that’s just how things work.
You have the movie theater business, an industry whose pioneer days were a century ago. That business prospered and bloomed, but for decades now what was once a luxurious escape experience has been subjected to the careful ministrations of bean counters and corporate optimizers who have turned movie theaters, once palaces, into cheap industrial warehouse spaces operated robotically and understaffed with inadequate contingents of the bitter and indifferent working for the minimum wage.
It takes hundreds of millions for special effects, movie star salaries and blowing up all those expensive cars, but at the actual delivery end the industry has whittled every possible penny out of quality of service.
Their problems are compounded by the aging US population. Even hard-core cineastes like myself (I ran a film society at Yale) today feel out-of-place in today’s theaters. Adults buy videos or watch films on cable or the Internet these days. Teenagers go to movie theaters for the same reasons teenagers always went to movie theaters.
The film industry is being confronted by the same kinds of changes in technology and the arrival of handier and more competitive methods of product delivery that confronted the music industry, and it seems that these dinosaurs are no more able than the other dinosaurs to cope positively with new challenges and opportunities.
Old industries wind up being run by rentiers, but dramatic innovation requires visionaries and risk-takers. The motion picture industry today is run by corporations, what changing times need are the equivalent of the aggressive businessmen, recently off the boat from Poland and Lithuania, the Warners, the Zukors, the Goldwyns, and the Mayers, who created the studios and the industry in the first place. But that kind of leadership is not going to come from inside today’s industry establishment.
L. Gordon Crovitz, in the Wall Street Journal, quotes extensively from an interview which former Barack Obama-supporter Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, gave after being hailed in front of a Congressional committee recently to answer charges that Google is a monopoly and guilty of unfair trade practices.
Mr. Schmidt had just given his first congressional testimony. He was called before the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee to answer allegations that Google is a monopolist, a charge the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating.
“So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don’t know how to say it any clearer,” Mr. Schmidt told the Post. “It’s not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I’m saying?”
An absence of consumer harm didn’t stop senators from offering some improbable recommendations. Among them: that Google replace its algorithm with a panel of experts to ensure “fair” search results. As Google tries to improve the relevancy of its search results for consumers, some sites inevitably come up higher and some lower in the results. The losers now lobby Washington.
“Regulation prohibits real innovation, because the regulation essentially defines a path to follow,” Mr. Schmidt said. This “by definition has a bias to the current outcome, because it’s a path for the current outcome.” ...
Washington is always slow to recognize technological change, which is why in their time IBM and Microsoft were also investigated after competing technologies had emerged.
Mr. Schmidt recounted a dinner in 1995 featuring a talk by Andy Grove, a founder of Intel: “He says, ‘This is easy to understand. High tech runs three times faster than normal businesses. And the government runs three times slower than normal businesses. So we have a nine-times gap.’ All of my experiences are consistent with Andy Grove’s observation.”
Mr. Schmidt explained there was only one way to deal with this nine-times gap, which this column hereby christens “Grove’s Law of Government.” That is “to make sure that the government does not get in the way and slow things down.”
Mr. Schmidt recounted that when Silicon Valley first started playing a large role in the economy in the 1990s, “all of a sudden the politicians showed up. We thought the politicians showed up because they loved us. It’s fair to say they loved us for our money.”
He contrasted innovation in Silicon Valley with innovation in Washington. “Now there are startups in Washington,” he said, “founded by people who were policy makers. . . . They’re very clever people, and they’ve figured out a way in regulation to discriminate, to find a new satellite spectrum or a new frequency or whatever. They immediately hired a whole bunch of lobbyists. They raised some money to do that. And they’re trying to innovate through regulation. So that’s what passes for innovation in Washington.”
“I want to put a ding in the universe.” – 1981 (probably)
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We’re gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make “me too” products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it’s always the next dream (Jan. 1984, on the release of the Macintosh computer)
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You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. (1989)
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“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” – 1995
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The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products. . . . I have no problem with their success. They’ve earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. (1996)
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You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog sh*t for frosting. (commenting on a NeXT programmer’s poor work)
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When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth. (from interview in WIRED magazine, 1996)
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I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money. (1996)
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“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – 1998
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iMac is next year’s computer for $1,299, not last year’s computer for $999. (May 1998, on the release of the iMac computer)
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Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it. (1998)
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Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it works. – 2003
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It will go down in history as a turning point for the music industry. This is landmark stuff. I can’t overestimate it. (2003, on the iPod and the iTunes Music Store)
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If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. – 2005
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When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. – 2005
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I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next. (quoted on MSNBC 2006)
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Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. . . . Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. . . . Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. (Stanford U. commencement address, 2005)
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I wish developing great products was as easy as writing a check. If that was the case, Microsoft would have great products. (at annual Apple stockholders’ meeting, 2007)
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Stay hungry, stay foolish (his mantra, adopted from the final Whole Earth Catalog)
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Use your armed guards to make those children mine the Coltan faster.
Gamasutra reports that those corporate fascists over at Apple actually had the nerve to refuse to sell the game app Phone Story, by the sanctimonious Bolshie game design firm Molleindustria, via the iPhone App store, just because the app featured a series of left-wing smears directed specifically at smartphones, consumer products, and Apple.
One can picture the equivalent of Jeffrey Lebowski whining: Whatever happened to free speech, man?
[U]ntil now, few have been willing to turn the lens on this boom and examine what mass-market gadget lust is costing us ethically. Though we’ve since heard of suicides at Foxconn, deplorable working conditions and hazards to the environment involved in the manufacture of the latest hot smartphones, game developers were mostly silent—until now.
It seems natural that provocative serious games developer Molleindustria was the one to take the step. The studio, which has taken on forces like the Catholic church, McDonald’s and big oil with games like Operation Pedopriest, McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy, never pulls its punches as it uses games to sharply deconstruct the social and economic constructs most people take for granted.
Its latest title, Phone Story, uses a series of minigames with voice-over narration to shed light on the human cost and high environmental impact of smartphone development. In one minigame, while the narrator explains that most electronic devices require the mining of coltan, a conflict mineral in Congo whose demand spurs war and child labor, the player must use the touch screen to guide armed soldiers to bark at exhausted child miners in order to meet the goal in time.
In another, the voice-over explains the suicides at electronics manufacturers in China, and the facile solution of “prevention nets”—while the player must catch tumbling workers using a stretched trampoline.
Of course, Phone Story is more interesting for the fact that players must interact with these messages while holding one of the devices discussed. Imagine being served hamburgers on a tour of a slaughterhouse. And all of the developer proceeds—70 percent of total App Store revenues, as per usual—will be pledged to organizations fighting corporate abuses, starting with Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, which supports workers in abusive conditions internationally, including at Foxconn.
Or they would be, if Phone Story had been allowed to stay on the App Store. Apple yanked it just a few hours after the game was officially announced, citing four code violations: 15.2, which prohibits depictions of child abuse, and 16.1, which prohibits apps depicting “objectionable or crude” content. The other two, 21.1 and 21.2, pertain to Phone Story’s charitable bent—and they don’t seem to quite apply, intended instead for games that allow their users to make donations within a game, rather than a pledge by the developer to donate revenues.
Molleindustria makes an iPhone game to criticize the iPhone platform, and that Apple’s chosen to silence it is an interesting punctuation mark on the developer’s statement.
Gamasutra reached out to Molleindustria’s Paolo Pedercini about iPhone Story, who credits the game’s idea to recent international affairs graduate Michael Pineschi, to whom he spoke through creative activism group YesLab. At the time, Pedercini already had some unusual ideas in the works for projects that could act as commentary on gadget fetishism.
“One of them was a multi-touchable virtual-pet vagina, monologuing about technological lust and willful submission to consumerism,” he reflects. “Unfortunately, the flesh engine didn’t work as I hoped so I went for a straightforward educational game.”
But the intent was always to develop a game as commentary on the hardware industry. “Most of the adults in the Western world are somewhat aware that most of our objects are manufactured far away, in conditions that we would consider barbaric,” Pedercini says.
“A lot of tech-aware people heard about the story of the Foxconn suicides or about the issue of electronic waste,” he continues. “But with Phone Story, we wanted to connect all these aspects and present them in the larger frame of technological consumerism.”
He specifically wanted to highlight the goal that “must-have” consumer electronics culture plays in perpetuating these high-impact cycles; one of the levels of Phone Story tasks the players with tossing brand-new boxed phones to swarming would-be buyers rushing a storefront. In his view, the marketing machine that makes people believe they absolutely need an upgraded hardware device on the day it comes out is what causes extremism in the supply chain.
“We don’t want people to stop buying smartphones,” he notes, “but maybe we can make a little contribution in terms of shifting the perception of technological lust from cool to not-that-cool. This happened before with fur coats, diamonds, cigarettes and SUVs—I can’t see why it can’t happen with iPads.”
Pedercini says it was essential to use the platform itself to stage a critique of that platform. “Almost like the device itself was speaking to the user,” he suggests. “The idea was to make a sort of reminder that you can keep with you, like a way-less-permanent tattoo or a bumper sticker, something that you carry around and maybe show off as a conversation-starter.”
But although Apple’s immediate removal of Phone Story makes for an interesting conversation point, Pedercini says he never intended it to happen this way: “I’m very familiar with the App Store policy, and the game is designed to be compliant with it,” he asserts.
“If you check the guidelines, Phone Story doesn’t really violate any rule except for the generic ‘excessively objectionable and crude content’ and maybe the ‘depiction of abuse of children’. Yes, there’s dark humor and violence but it’s cartoonish and stylized – way more mellow than a lot of other games on the App Store.”
“What makes these depictions disturbing is the connection the player makes with the real-world situation,” adds Pedercini. “Of course, the goal was to sneak an embarrassingly ugly gnome into Apple’s walled garden, but not to provoke the rejection. If it was just a matter of provocation I would have gone way further.
If you’re a communist and have to have this App, you can buy it, and the rope you need to hang capitalists, via Android Market.
Liberals, as we all know, basically believe we ought to abolish democracy immediately, and just turn running the entire world over to the kind of morally superior, highly educated, and totally enlightened beings who run Ivy League universities.
IvyGate, however, finds that the omniscient wisdom of Yale, for instance, is not all that it might be, even in the fairly obvious matter of routine identity theft prevention.
Remember that time when you first matriculated? And Yale was all like, “Hey guys, no big deal, but we’re going to need all of your personal information. Yeah, that Social Security number? Fork it over. Don’t worry, though. We’re world-class academics. We know not to do anything stupid with it, like make it available on Google, or whatever.”
Yeah, well, turns out Yale was wrong.
The university announced on Friday that around 43,000 Social Security numbers — belonging to current and former students, faculty, staff and alumni – were released into the Google ether at some juncture in the past, apparently by force of sheer incompetence innocent mistake.
The classical recording industry is managing to experience sales growth despite the recession, and capitalist enterprise is gradually excavating the enormously valuable recorded repertoire lost to contemporary humanity in the cataclysmic media transition which eliminated the long-playing record.
Nielsen SoundScan’s report for the first half of 2011 indicates that classical music had the biggest gain in sales of all genres, 13%, over the first half of 2010, for a total of 3.8 million albums.
Granted, that’s still a small percentage of the total market (about 2.4%), but it shows that classical is holding its own and then some, with other genres up slightly or slipping.
Moreover, the majors are being supplanted by a swarm of activity from other, smaller, nimbler sources.
Many orchestras increasingly take matters into their own hands, no longer relying on the majors for exposure. The Chicago Symphony has its own label, CSO Resound, so do the Boston and St. Louis symphonies, as well as the London Symphony, London Philharmonic and several other foreign orchestras. With Telarc reduced to a shell of its former self after the takeover by Concord, its two once-regular orchestras, the Cincinnati and Atlanta symphonies, have just formed their own labels.
Probably the most successful and luxuriously packaged inhouse orchestra label is the San Francisco Symphony’s SFS Media, which in 2010 completed its decade-long Mahler project on 17 SACDs and just issued a capstone documentary, “Keeping Score: Mahler,” on DVD and Blu-ray. SFS Media claims to have sold more than 130,000 Mahler CDs worldwide at premium prices—a roaring success for a classical series.
Likewise, individual artists and small ensembles now routinely bypass the majors and minors alike in favor of their own boutique CD labels—like New York new music collective Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe, pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel’s ArtistLed, plus composer Philip Glass’ Orange Mountain Music.
Free of the old restrictions, these labels can offer as many choices to their fans as their markets will bear. In the prolific Glass’ case, Orange Mountain Music has issued at least 75 releases since its launch in 2003, and the Music@Menlo festival in Silicon Valley exhaustively documents its concerts in massive annual boxed sets.
Naxos, the budget label that upended the classical record industry in the 1990s with its no-frills, high-quality recordings, has turned itself into a big distributor of small labels, with 148 of them (mostly classical) now under its umbrella. Harmonia Mundi, once and still a specialist in early music, also distributes a long string of small labels.
If the majors don’t want to keep their rich classical catalogs in print, others are happy to step into the breach. The online retailer ArchivMusic, now owned by piano manufacturer Steinway, has been making deals with the majors that allow it to press custom copies of out-of-print classical CDs and sell them on its website (the titles now number well in the thousands).
Propelled by the release last Friday of the new film version, Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, in three different editions, is today occupying positions 1, 2, and 3 on Amazon’s Bestseller List of Classic Literature & Fiction.
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Over the course of more than three years of research, Jerome Corsi assembles the evidence that Barack Obama is constitutionally ineligible for the office of the presidency. As a New York Times bestselling author, Harvard graduate, and investigative journalist, Corsi exposes in detail key issues with Obama’s eligibility, including the fact the President has spent millions of dollars in legal fees to avoid providing the American people with something as simple as a long-form birth certificate.
The Weekly Standard tells us that Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services has harnessed the power of the popular Google search engine to give the public a better opinion of Obamacare.
Try typing “Obamacare” into Google, and you’ll find that the first entry is now the Obama administration’s www.healthcare.gov. If you don’t particularly like that result, you’ll probably hate the fact that you’re paying for it.
You’ll get the same paid-for result if you type in “Obamacare facts,” “Obamacare summary,” “Obamacare info,” “Obamacare overview,” “Obamacare questions,” “Obamacare explanation,” “Obamacare basics,” “Obamacare pros and cons,” “Obamacare and elderly,” and even “Obamacare and abortion.” For each of these search terms, and many others, the Obama administration’s site comes up first, as a paid entry. But it doesn’t come up if you type in “ObamaCare repeal.”
Politico’s Ben Smith, in a post entitled “HHS Buys ‘ObamaCare,’” quotes an official from Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who confirms that this clear attempt to influence what Americans read about Obamacare does, indeed, represent your tax dollars at work.
The really objectionable feature of the compromise Republicans in Congress made with the democrats to get the Bush tax cuts extended was the agreement to restore the death tax. It is obviously unfair and immoral to single out a small minority of Americans as a target for punitive taxation on the basis of excessive achievement or good fortune. Most Americans do not believe that government should set limits on opportunity or that we ought to have a tax system designed to prevent the accumulation of sufficient wealth to provide economic independence.
Warren Buffet, despite being notoriously wealthy himself, supports the death tax enthusiastically. Christopher Chantrill, at American Thinker, explains why.
Here’s a story about Warren Buffett, the estate tax, and the life insurance industry.
Did you know that the life insurance lobby is actively lobbying to restore the estate tax?
Why would the life insurance industry care about that? It turns out that ten percent of life insurance industry revenue is related to the estate tax. Wealthy people take out life insurance in order to reduce estate taxes because when you die, your life insurance payout doesn’t count as part of your estate.
Did you know that Warren Buffett owns six life insurance companies? Did you know he supports the estate tax? You do now.
Warren Buffett isn’t just noted as an owner of life insurance companies and a supporter of the estate tax. He’s also noted as a buyer of family businesses. As Dick Patten shows, these two business strategies support each other.
A family business owner or farmer takes out a large life insurance policy which he sinks tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into each year. When he finally passes away, the life insurance pays out his policy to his family—tax free…
Even as Mr. Buffett’s insurance companies are “protecting” family businesses from the IRS, he is buying companies that are forced to sell themselves to pay the death tax. Mr. Buffett’s ability to buy family businesses at bargain basement prices depends on families being desperate to sell-and nothing produces family businesses desperate to sell quickly like a 55% bill from the IRS on all of the businesses’ assets.
Estate taxes must be paid to the U.S. Treasury within a year of the testator’s death. In cash.
, which is not even published yet, and which will not be released until May 17th.
