Antonio, with a Bay area native’s perspective, lists all the reasons why New York City will never be a tech center in a very amusing rant.

Thinking the New York tech scene will ever equal Silicon Valley is as foolish as thinking San Francisco’s puny theater district will one day take on Broadway. Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed. So far, no one’s managed to do it, and New York sure as hell won’t either. …

$2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.

There, that’s how much my first apartment in New York cost (in 2005).

Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return. My career salary high-water mark is still working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk, and I lived worse, from a quality-of-life perspective, than I did as a Berkeley graduate student. ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere. If YCombinator existed in New York, they’d have to dish 5x more than their already slim initial funding to keep new startups in Cheetos for three months.

Basically, startups flourish in the Bay Area the same reason the homeless do: decent weather, relatively cheap living, and no stigma attached to your lifestyle.

Read the whole thing.

Ouch! I don’t get to type this often…: “He had acetylene torch injury to the penis.”

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John Hinderaker from Power-Line, respects Obama’s behavior.

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Conservative cultural commentary venues The Notes and Culture11 went under. (link 1 & link 2).

Some people think they were not populist enough, but I am inclined to believe that the fact I never previously heard of either one of them could be part of the problem.

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Cigarettes $10 a pack in NYC.

New Yorkers ought to take up chewing tobacco.

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Write fiction based on your own life experience and they’ll sue you.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

When Kitty Genovese‘s rape and murder in Kew Gardens was ignored by 38 neighbors (none of whom bothered to summon the police) in Queens, New York in 1964, the entire country was appalled.

This time, in Jamaica, 25 people walked passed, or even actually examined, an injured man bleeding on the sidewalk, and again, no one called for help.

Kew Gardens and Jamaica are practically contiguous. map

New York Post:

A heroic homeless man, stabbed after saving a Queens woman from a knife-wielding attacker, lay dying in a pool of blood for more than an hour as nearly 25 people indifferently strolled past him, a shocking surveillance video obtained by The Post reveals.

Some of the passers-by paused to stare at Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax last Sunday morning and others leaned down to look at his face.

He had jumped to the aid of a woman attacked on 144th Street at 88th Road in Jamaica at 5:40 a.m., was stabbed several times in the chest and collapsed as he chased his assailant.

In the wake of the bloodshed, a man came out of a nearby building and chillingly took a cellphone photo of the victim before leaving. And in several instances, pairs of people gawked at Tale-Yax without doing anything.

Later, another man stopped, leaned over and vigorously shook Tale-Yax’s body. After lifting the victim’s head and body to reveal a pool of blood, he also walked off.

Not until some 15 minutes after he was shaken by the pedestrian — more than an hour and 20 minutes after the victim collapsed — did firefighters finally arrive and discover that Tale-Yax, 31, had died.

Firefighters were responding to a 911 call of a non-life-threatening injury at 7:23 a.m. when they found his body.

Cops said they received four 911 calls at around the time of the attack reporting a woman screaming, but found nothing. They received no other 911 calls.

1:23 video

There are certain little details that bring home to traveler the fact that he really is in a foreign country. One of these which frequently strikes Americans is the way, in European countries where the citizens are typically completely legally disarmed, the cops stroll around carrying machine guns.

The American thinks of his own police armed normally only with a pistol, and feels something akin to the way the Edwardian Englishman did about living in a country in which police officers only carried a truncheon.

Well, the recent Moscow subway bombings provoked New York City authorities to leap into action and dispatch an elite squad of officers with helmets, goggles, and fully automatic M16 assault rifles to ride the city’s subway trains.

That will show those terrorists! Try reaching under your clothing to detonate your suicide vest, and that Hercules squad stormtrooper will pull his goggles down, check to see that his body armor is securely fastened, and then spray the entire car with high velocity .223 rounds. After that, it won’t even be necessary to use the bomb.

I find the machine gun-toting cops on New York subways development symbolically appropriate. We are, after all, now just one more European-style welfare state committed to cradle to the grave benefits for everyone. We prefer equality to opportunity and growth. The state is our keeper. Our cops should all have machine guns. The state is our master and they are its representatives. They require enormous firepower to keep all of us in line.

New York Post

The rich are different from you and me”, says Nick Carraway in Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, prompting Hemingway to retort: “Yes. They have more money.”

But even the rich are not immune from the impact of the current recession and the real estate market collapse.

The New York Times reports that the price of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s splendiferous Manhattan pied-a-terre has been slashed by slightly more than half.

THE worldly and the clever gathered at the dinner parties that William F. Buckley Jr. and his wife, Pat, gave in their Park Avenue maisonette. Yet even though the chairs in the formal dining room are still covered in chartreuse leopard print, it has been quite a while since anyone but a broker or a prospective buyer has spent much time there.

Mrs. Buckley, a socialite and mainstay of the charity circuit, died in 2007, and Mr. Buckley, the writer and godfather of modern conservatism, followed 10 months later in early 2008. Their 10-room duplex came on the market at $24.5 million in May 2008, but there were no takers; in early 2009, as the real estate market was choking, the estate decided to take down the for-sale sign.

Now, more than a year later, the apartment at 778 Park Avenue has been relisted at $12 million, less than half the original asking price. And it is not the only listing in the building to have had to, ahem, adjust its price. The late Brooke Astor’s 15th-floor duplex, with 14 rooms and 6 terraces, started at $46 million in May 2008 and is now being offered for $24.9 million.

Ms. Del Nunzio is quick to point out that the apartment has “the most extraordinary suite of entertaining rooms that you could find,” with a private entrance on East 73rd Street and an 18-foot-long marble entry hall that opens onto a 27-foot-long gallery, leading to a living room, a library and a dining room.

“This is the place,” Ms. Del Nunzio continued, “where all those conversations and dinners with statesmen and political figures, not to mention film and television stars, with a quiet family dinner thrown in here and there, happened. This is a rare opportunity to acquire a piece of New York’s intellectual history.”

The listing, with additional photos.

A concert pianist may get as little as $20,000 for a Carnegie Hall appearance. One of the stagehands made $530,044 in 2008.

That kind of compensation for semi-skilled manual labor can only result from union power rising to the level of extortion. Imagine what staggering sum total of dollars is siphoned annually out of the operating budgets of all the concert halls, museums, and theaters in New York City, and how much richer that city’s cultural life would be if workers were paid conventionally generous wages and the currently misappropriated surplus applied to delivering more exhibitions and performances to the public.

Bloomberg

Kurt Hoffman finds the liberal perspective on guns just a bit bizarre.

One puzzling characteristic of citizen disarmament advocates is their bizarre apparent belief that “gun violence” is somehow “worse” than other forms of violence. One would think that being stabbed, beaten, bludgeoned, strangled, etc. to death would be just as bad as being shot to death, but apparently that’s not a universally held belief.

I was reminded of this peculiar attitude yesterday when reading “New York’s Gun Battle,” an article in the Gotham Gazette about current attempts to make gun laws in New York state even more restrictive than they are now (the Brady Campaign ranks New York the 6th most draconian state in the nation):

Bloomberg’s push to rid New York City of illegal guns has seen results. The number of guns recovered from crime scenes in the city dropped by 13 percent from last year. The number of people shot to death dropped from 347 in 2007 to 292 in 2008. Overall, murders increased from 2007 to 2008, but only due to an increase in crimes committed with knives.

The implication is that Mayor Bloomberg’s anti-gun jihad has been successful, despite an increase in murders, simply because fewer of those murders were committed with guns. Somehow, we are to believe that murders committed with knives are less tragic than those committed with guns. That’s something in which to take comfort in your last seconds of consciousness, as you bleed out from your slashed carotid artery.

Caroline Kennedy

NBC News New York:

Jennifer Lopez or Caroline Kennedy? Who is more qualified to be Hillary Clinton’s replacement as New York’s junior Senator?

Rep. Gary Ackerman, a veteran Queens Democrat wants to know.

“I don’t know what Caroline Kennedy’s qualifications are,” the 25-year Congressman said on Steve Malzberg’s WOR conservative chat-fest, becoming New York’s first prominent Democrat to openly challenge the credentials of JFK’s daughter as a potential replacement for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

“”Except that she has name recognition, but so does J.Lo,” Ackerman said, according to the New York Post. “I wouldn’t make J.Lo the senator unless she proved she had great qualifications, but we haven’t seen them yet.

I thought we’d seen Jennifer Lopez’s qualifications in several films actually.

Jennifer Lopez

Jay Nordlinger, at the Corner, finds the traditional stereotype view of the Republican Party as the party of the rich and the democrat party as the party of the workingman deserving of assignment to the category of persistent, but out-dated, myths.

I’ve just come back from a weekend in Vermont — and here’s how I understand it: Modestly off people — “real Vermonters,” as some people say — are voting for McCain and Palin. Comfortably off people, such as those who own ski chalets, are voting for Obama and Biden. And the following has been frequently noted about the city of my residence, New York: The rich are voting Democratic. And those who work for them — driving cars, cleaning rooms, and so on — are voting Republican.

Yet, when I was growing up, the Republican party was always called the party of the rich, and it still suffers from that label. Over and over, that which I was taught is contradicted by the evidence of my lived experience.

The People’s Cube documents the reaction of Manhattan Upper West Siders to the passage of a McCain Campaign march through a local street fair.

The number of middle fingers in a “progressive” crowd is directly proportional to the number of PhD degrees in the ten block radius.

5:00 video

via Rusty Shackleford.

Original 7/29 Gawker photo

Richard published at Gawker published the original news item on Tuesday alleging that the above object had washed up on a Montauk, Long Island beach, and hinting that it may have originated from the federal Plum Island Animal Disease Center, the vacation spot promised fictional supervillain Hannibal Lector were he to help recover a Senator’s daughter kidnapped by a serial killer in Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.

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The authorities at Plum Island obligingly cooperated with the silliness by issuing a denial.

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The story spread, and was picked up by CNN who ran a

2:30 video.

Over which development, Gawker’s Richard yesterday gloated.

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8/1 Newsday photo

The story went international, and the British Telegraph gravely reported:

The identity of this creature, which reportedly washed up on a New York beach last month, has captivated the blogosphere and is dividing animal experts.

The beast, dubbed the Montauk Monster after the Long Island resort where it was discovered, has a hairless, leathery body, sharp teeth and what appears to be a beak.

A photo of the animal appeared on the gossip website Gawker earlier this week under the headline “Dead Monster Washes Ashore in Montauk”, and the story has since been picked up by US networks Fox News and CNN.

The woman who claims to have taken the original photo on Montauk beach on July 12 says she had no idea what the creature was.

“We were looking for a place to sit when we saw some people looking at something,” said Jenna Hewitt.

“We were kind of amazed,” the 26-year-old added, “shocked and amazed.”

Other locals have now come forward to say they saw the animal, which has been variously identified by blog commenters as a dog, raccoon, and shell-less sea turtle.

The dog theory, which depends on the creature’s beak actually being a nasal cavity, currently appears to have most support.

An initial theory that the image may be a hoax produced as part of a viral marketing campaign has been undermined by the number of witnesses.

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All this was so much fun that today Newsday climbed on board with its own photograph and witnesses, claiming:

A. Something really did wash up in Montauk, one sunny day, two weeks ago.

B. More than four people saw it.

C. More than one person photographed it.

The surf was rough, flipping the thing, over and over, and over again.

Jenna Hewitt, of Montauk, and three friends crept up to examine one side. And Hewitt snapped the camera shot heard ’round the world.

But here’s the rub.

Her group was the second on the scene that afternoon.

The first was a quartet of sun-worshipers from western Suffolk and New York City.

“It looked like nothing I’d ever seen before,” said Ryan O’Shea, of Brooklyn. “It looked like it died angry.”

They were so puzzled by what they saw, they left and came right back, with more friends.

The second time around, Christina Pampalone, of East Northport, borrowed O’Shea’s camera. She aimed and kept on firing.

The result is lots of — ew — gross photos of a carcass that looks more domestic than exotic, a bloated dog, not the Hound from Hell.

It shows ears. A big swatch of fur. And its proportions appear to be less distorted — making the head appear to be a suitable complement to the body.

“I was telling people, all day (Wednesday), that I had better photos,” Pampalone said.

“Everybody I showed her pictures to said it looks like a dead dog,” O’Shea said.

“But looking at the claws, and at the teeth in the front, it looked like it could be something else, something vicious.”

It was relatively small, roughly 21/2 to 3 feet long, he said.

She also told our man Wargas — who had started his workday high on the hope of seeing, and no doubt, smelling, the beast’s remains — that the carcass had been moved from the backyard of her friend to another location.

Damn.

But wait.

Joann Dileardo saw it at the end of Roe Avenue in Patchogue, a few weeks ago. “I didn’t know what that thing was,” she said. “It looked like a pig.”

Another reader, Pat, e-mailed that the ladies in his office saw it on an East Quogue beach — back in April.

Elizabeth Barbeiri said her family saw it about a mile east of Gurney’s Inn in Montauk, July 14. And Ryan Kelso, via iPhone, said he spotted it — alive! — in the Montauk dunes. “It looked about the size of an average fox, gray in color, eyes like a mole, hairless and was breathing quite heavily,” he wrote, “needless to say we were freaked out by this discovery and fled the area quickly.”

Lavey Fater saw a surfer bring one to shore, near Ditch Plains.

“It was hairless and gross,” Fater reported. “… The surfer said he had no idea what it was, but that he threw it in the dunes because he didn’t want to be surfing next to it.”

Keith found something last week in Greenport; Chris found one a month ago at Jones Beach east of Field 6. (“The one I saw had a longer snout or beak or whatever you want to call it.”) Sean said he buried one, 3 feet deep, in South Jamesport.

They’re multiplying.

ArabianBusiness.com boasts that Dubai is in the process of replacing London and New York as world capital of the financial industry.

Dubai is picking up the mantle of the financial capital of the world, as global banking sectors London and New York continue to fade on the back of the global credit crises.

The new mantra in New York and London is “Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai or goodbye”, as job losses mount in both cities while opportunities in the east continue to rise.

Lehman Brothers on Tuesday became the latest investment bank moving one of its most senior positions to the UAE. Philip Lynch, the bank’s co-head of equities for Europe and the Middle East, will be relocating to Dubai after serving more than two decades in London.

The US investment bank, which has axed over 6,000 staff in the last nine months, said the move was aimed at serving the growing needs of clients in the Gulf region and the wider Middle East.

Lynch will find himself in good company. Barclays last month dispatched Roger Jenkins, one of London’s highest-paid bankers, to the emirate as chairman of investment banking and investment management.

Earlier in May Citigroup, which has so far cut 1,500 jobs because of the global credit crisis, announced it would send Alberto Verme, co-head of global investment banking from London to Dubai. …

The relocation of roles from London and New York to Dubai, and to a lesser extent Mumbai and Shanghai, reflects the reshaping of global opportunities for investment banks.

With a surge in oil revenue, rapidly rising infrastructure needs, and the emergence of sovereign wealth funds at the head of M&A activity, the Middle East and Asia have become crucial for global investment banks looking to remain profitable.