"One's outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one's inner life passes in solitude hounded by masks of oneself." -- Eugene O'Neill

New howler from Greenspan

Alan Greenspan, his reputation in tatters as the bubbles that he helped to build up continue their long collapse, can't believe anyone could hold him to blame, telling Bloomberg:

"Markets are becoming aware of the fact that the decline in house prices is not stopping. I have no particular regrets. The housing bubble is not a reflection of what we did, as it is a global phenomenon.''

It couldn't happen in America, could it?

Am I the only one to wonder if, having seen the news that Jacques Chirac, the former French president, has been placed under investigation for alleged dirty dealings, the same thing might not happen to the current occupant of the White House?

On progress

"There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself."

(Charles Baudelaire, from Mon Coeur Mis À Nu, 1897)

The big strike Tuesday

Le Monde has a nice item on the so-called "special regimes" that are at the heart of the strike that has disrupted transportation in France over the last week.

Interestingly, President Nicolas Sarkozy is fighting to overturn not some recent handouts of the modern welfare state, but institutions that go back hundreds of years, in some cases. The "régimes spéciaux" were created to compensate workers in dangerous or especially difficult jobs, or perhaps, as in the case of the theatre workers, jobs with endless and inconvenient hours. Some jobs, I would argue, do indeed merit special retirement. Imagine being a fishermen, for example, in the sailboat era, going out into the English channel or the Atlantic to brave January seas. In the United States, one can retire after 20 years of service in the military, with half pay and full PX and commissary privileges, among other things.

The special retirement regime for l'Opéra national de Paris was created in 1698 by Louis XIV; that of the merchant marine and fishermen was created in 1709. The Banque de France (what's so hard about banking?) got its special regime in 1806, the Comédie-Française got its in 1812, civil servants got theirs in 1853, railway workers got theirs in 1855, and miners -- surely the most deserving of all, got theirs in 1894.

When the modern system of sécurité sociale was created in 1945, the beneficiaries of the regimes were allowed to keep  some of their advantages, and a law was passed that year maintaining the status of the regimes for certain professions.  Now, with the population aging rapidly, the piper must be paid. Le Monde says the early retirements already require the government to write a 5 billion euro check every year, and that will only grow.

There's nothing fair about giving a central bank employee or a civil servant the same dangerous work retirement benefits that a coal miner gets, but in the politics of entitlement, fairness rarely plays a part...

Strike blues

A friend has been planning for months to visit Paris. Now, with the start of a strike set for tomorrow, Wednesday, 14 Nov.,  the day before his arrival, he's not certain it's worth the pain. Most people would probably skip it, knowing that just the act of getting from the airport into central Paris. My friend is a curious, intelligent man who enjoys learning about the politics of places he visits. Will he find this teaser, which I sent him today, irresistible?

dear friend,

based on what we know now (that is, it's likely to be
a mess, right on schedule), i offer this sincere
counsel:

if you are prepared to "embrace" the strike, your trip
might still be pleasurable. the strike is a robust
demonstration of the vigor of democracy here, and it
will be a time of great interest, in terms of
political economy and society, i think. the students
are getting in on the act, and no one knows quite
where it will go. if you made this a study trip,
seeking opinions from people who will no doubt be
eager to share them, following the papers, etc., you
might be able to laugh when we have to hop through
hoops, walk to or from cdg to paris, or whatever dumb
adventures befall us. i would most certainly recommend
traveling light.

otherwise, knowing your reluctance, i think it will be
more pain than you want to deal with.

in any case, we hope to see you soon.

ton ami,
"marichaux"

Latest movie in the War on Terror™

The Kingdom is not the worst movie Hollywood ever made. That prize has hundreds, if not thousands, of more worthy claimants. It could even be one of the top products of the year for the "entertainment industry."

The plot boils down to this: Maverick FBI agents led by Agent Fleury (the good, but not quite correctly cast Jamie Foxx) go to Saudi Arabia to solve a case in which hundreds of resident American civilians have been killed and wounded in a bombing attack. Along the way, the intrepid, wisecracking heroes must overcome the difficulties of operating under extreme security arrangements in a hostile environment, not to mention the opposition of the U.S. State Department and a horde of evildoers.

Only there is this one Saudi cop, a good guy (yes, that was a hint that he will be killed in the end). He helps them to overcome all obstacles to crack the case.

From our heroes' arrival until the start of an orgy of violence that makes up most of the last 15 minutes of the film, director Peter Berg's movie is equal parts "CSI: Saudi Arabia" and every lame cop TV series you ever saw --- transplanted, of course, to the territory of the world's biggest oil producer. The cop show part of the film was occasionally fascinating.

In the final 15 minutes, the crime scene investigators magically metamorphose into a crack team of Special Forces, and fortunately, since they are called upon to blast every last bad guy out a Saudi slum in a horrific sea of gore and blood. The combat scenes employ the fake realism typical of contemporary Hollywood -- the bad guys end up splattered to cinematically exact bits, while the good guys escape from RPGs, machine guns, machetes at the throat, etc., in the nick of time with a few scratches.

For good measure, the screenplay by Matthew Michael Carnahan makes sure to through in as many cliches and as much kitsch as the 110 minutes allowed. It is not possible to call this as a good movie.

And yet, there is a nice bit of potted U.S.-Saudi history at the beginning, and the film goes out of its way to show Arabs as human beings with families, and, as mentioned the hero who buys the farm is, in fact, an Arab, the cliched "good cop," a sympathetic trope in the mind of the moviegoer. It has enough finesse and humanity to avoid a failing grade.

By the time the final bloodbath was under way, however, I was ready to walk out. There wasn't any doubt that the good guys would win, and the only suspense was about who was going to get killed.

The Kingdom is not the worst movie Hollywood ever made; but that's not saying much.

Bruised feet

In my experience, the only way to avoid stepping on toes is to stand still.

Bill Clinton

A show worth seeing

I just got back from an interesting exhibition at the Maison de la Culture Japonaise à Paris, De Kuroda à Foujita – Les peintres japonais à Paris.



Predictably, perhaps, the stuff by Foujita is the most interesting, but there's a lot of fascinating history here, in terms of the development of Japanese painting and the adventurous artists who left Japan to study in Paris. 

I was a little disappointed with how small the show was, but then again, it was free...

Return

Getting back from the Other World isn't the half of it. You pick up the sticky, precarious thread of your days just as you left it dangling. It's waiting for you.

Celine

Here's an interesting article on problems facing Paris by Andrew Hussey, a British historian of Paris, that appeared in the Sunday Observer. 

Good stuff, though I note that he gets the bit about smokers wrong ("smokers are still beyond being a persecuted race in Paris, as a visit to any bar will prove.")

If all goes well (and nearly 70 percent of French people support a ban on smoking in all public places 
according to a survey I saw last year)  the smoky days will end on Feb. 1, 2008. Currently, there is no smoking in offices and public spaces. Bars, cafes and restaurants have until the end of January to ready for the transition. See this BBC article. 

Mother Theresa's Missionaries of Charity

An article that appeared in the International Herald Tribune this morning about volunteering in Calcutta.

Politically correct

"Tout le monde est d'accord pour critiquer la pensée unique."

Gustave Parking

The horizon

My grandfather died on Thursday, at 92. He had survived my grandmother by less than a year, and he was the last of my grandparents to die. That is the definition of generational change.

Speaking with my uncle by telephone, I got a sense of what it felt like to be on the front line of life, so to speak. With both of his parents dead, he is, he said, "an orphan." Because he had been living with my grandfather and because he has struggled financially, my grandfather's death presents him with the possibility that he'll have no place to go. "I remember when I was a little boy in Sudbury," he said, referring to his childhood home in Massachusetts. "It was sunny and warm outside, and I had a sandwich, and I went to sit on the back porch. Nothing could ever go wrong. My mom and my dad were there to take care of me, and it was always going to be just like that..."

I lost my mother 13 years ago. I have only my father left. How will I stand up when I'm in my uncle's shoes?

Is pigeon poop really lucky?

Today, sitting outside a Starbucks (yeah, I know -- and there are 29 of them in Paris now!), I was shat upon by a pigeon. SPLAT! Right on the shoulder. Fortunately, my not-very-tasty coffee (small Americano, woefully overwatered) was spared, but I was left with a very nasty feeling after I had wiped the greenish-white goo from my shirt, such that I didn’t derive much joy from my prime people-watching spot on the boulevard Saint-Michel.

Nonetheless, I was very excited, having long known that pigeon poop brings good luck. So as soon as I got home, I changed my shirt, and went out to buy a lottery ticket. I excitedly explained my situation to the guy at the cash register and said that I wanted something that paid off immediately, owing to my lucky circumstances. Naturally, I sauntered out of the store confident that I'd be picking up the champagne tab tonight.

But something must have gone wrong. I scratched off all of the scratchy spots on my lottery ticket, and ended up with zilch. I came one number from winning 10,000 euros, but unfortunately that wasn’t close enough. Perhaps the pigeon poop was just lucky enough to get me my numbers that close, but no closer. Maybe it was the wrong kind of pigeon or something. I was sitting fairly close to a woman with a lot of shopping bags. Could that lucky pigeon poop have been meant for her? Or maybe I was fated to have some terrible accident on the way home, and my lucky pigeon encounter averted it.

Time Out ruins a date with Pippi Longstocking

There we were in Stockholm‘s Hedengrens bookstore, the 2 ½ year old boy at my side demanding that we leave “Right now!” But I really wanted to obtain a guidebook, and I had a few to choose from -- Rough Guide, Fodor‘s, Lonely Planet and Time Out. Which would it be? “We not moving, we not moving!” the little guy began to whine. The pressure was on. How to decide?

I used a Rough Guide once, in Japan, I think, but vaguely recalled it as being second-rate. Maybe they’re better now, who knows. Fodor’s has always struck me as mainly a souvenir; lots of pretty pictures, but not sufficiently full of information.

Using a Lonely Planet guide is like going to McDonald’s, even if just to use the restroom: It deserves a certain grudging respect, and everyone has to do it at some time or another, but it’s embarrassing to be seen in the act, and should be avoided when possible.

That left the Time Out. I’d had such good luck with London guide in my year in that city that when I moved to Paris, I more or less learned the Parisian guide by heart. So I felt pretty safe in choosing their Stockholm book, especially since, with a publishing date of 2005, it was the newest of the lot.

Bad choice. I was buying the guide for two reasons: one, to learn about the city for the sake of learning; the other, reason, though, was to immediately find something memorable to do with my son that very day, as we were leaving in the morning and wouldn‘t have another chance at the glories of the city. That’s where Time Out Stockholm let me down.

I had heard that the Junibacken, or Pippi Longstocking, museum was Sweden’s best museum for children (they say so themselves), and that was backed up by Time Out. In a country with the kind of weather Sweden has, there has to be something special for kids to do indoors, and the Junibacken has a train, a theatre, a kid-friendly restaurant and everything you ever wanted to know about Pippi Longstocking (Astrid Lindgren, who wrote the Pippi books, helped to set up the museum). But, as in most European cities, many Stockholm museums are closed on Monday, and I wanted to check before basing our very limited schedule on the Junibacken. It was Monday. Sitting in the café after having purchased my Time Out, I quickly consulted the chapter on kids. I emphasize “quickly.” My son has an attention span that lasts approximately the time it takes him to put away a little croissant. Voila! Right there on page 189: Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Friday, September - May. Decision made, no time to waste, off we go.

With a little help from the friendly locals, we were soon on our way, timing our arrival for about 11 a.m., time to wander around a bit before having a leisurely lunch, I figured, then time for a little more wandering before heading back in time for the dreaded 2 p.m. nap deadline. Any later and my offspring would turn into a little monster.

Of course, the museum was closed. The website shows that it’s closed Monday all year around, except June, July and August (the good weather months? go figure). Fortunately, the Vasa Museum, just down the road, was open. I have no complaints about this place, where a fully intact 17th century ship is on display indoor. It’s truly fascinating -- for adults. The little guy enjoyed it for a few minutes, but then he lost it. Maybe it was a little too spooky inside that dark and cavernous building.

Moral of this sad story: While the Web has made it possible to get by without a guidebook, they are still nice to have, and they don’t require electricity. But when you have a kid in tow, or only one day in town, doublecheck on the phone or the Web.

Of oil, technology and beautiful women

Something makes humans vulnerable to what I'll call "the quick-fix scam." Our desire for get-rich quick schemes is well documented: Why should I save when I can retire on my Internet stock investments?

And something happens to a lot of otherwise intelligent people when they're faced with, for example, bogus advice about dieting. If my doctor tells me that I have to eat less and exercise more, I'll dismiss him with sincere promises and take no further action. But if a skimpily clad starlet in a supermarket magazine explains that eliminating carbohydrates from her diet has made her look young and beautiful, you can be sure that I won’t be alone in following her advice, at least for a while. (Someone once pointed out that the young and beautiful woman is young and beautiful because she’s young and beautiful, but that’s a topic for another day).

Then there are the twin crises of energy and climate change. The energy crisis is the rising price of energy and our inability to safely keep up with growing demand. The climate change crisis results from the build-up of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, that is rapidly altering the climate. If the accepted scientific models are right, the results will be disastrous for millions of people in coming years. There is a common element to these crises: consumption of oil, coal and gas.

What do we do when the times demand hard choices and painful action? Why, we fantasize, of course.

Worried about your gas guzzler‘s damaging impact? Why not trade it in for a “water-powered car.” Or hey, why not a “biodiesel” Hummer! 

A few years ago, I was editing a column by a fairly well-known economics journalist, a man with a Ph.D. from America’s most prestigious university. With the deadline breathing down my neck, I realized that the entire premise of the column was flawed. He had breezily claimed that practically all the technology existed to create the so-called “hydrogen economy” and how this would solve all of our energy problems.

I called him and pointed out that to obtain the hydrogen needed to operate fuel cells (the building blocks of this hydrogen El Dorado), current technology requires that we burn oil, coal or gas to power electrolysis, the process by which we separate hydrogen from the oxygen in water. And not only that, we get LESS energy from the hydrogen that we derive this way than we have to burn in order to obtain it. His response was simply to assume the problem away, in the time-tested fashion of economists, with a vague reference to an unproven technology for obtaining hydrogen more easily than is currently possible, one that no doubt will be available very soon. Right.

Then there is the eternal siren call of nuclear power.  Like the stock market, the housing bubble, Vietnam-Iraq, every generation must learn anew the lessons of its elders. Let’s just hope that the dangers of nuclear power are remembered without a horrifying accident.

It is with this in mind that I propose a few simple rules for evaluating energy policies:

1) Reducing energy waste presents the easiest target for cutting both fuel consumption and the production of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. The use of cars by individuals for transportation is extraordinarily inefficient and has led to a developed-world social model based around extremely inefficient arrangements that is rapidly spreading to the rest of the planet. So any serious plan must aim first at getting millions of vehicles off of the world’s roads and keeping them off, while sharply raising the efficiency of those that remain. Sorry.

2) If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Most of the really half-baked ideas -- replacing petroleum with “biodiesel,” ethanol from corn, sequestering carbon dioxide underground, etc. -- do not to stand up to any serious scrutiny. The truly "green" fixes -- solar and wind power -- laudable as they may be, are largely irrelevant, considering the growth in petroleum demand; that is, they may moderate demand growth, to some extent, but they will not seriously affect the current demand for oil and thus the output of pollutants, which are, after all, the problems.

3) We can’t count on technology to bail us out. Not in the short run, not in the long run. Of course, disruptive innovation in energy technology is not impossible, but the laws of physics cannot be broken, and prudence dictates that we assume that most advances will be incremental. Intelligent planning should consider technological improvement, but it must focus on what is available TODAY if it is to be useful.

4) Hydrogen is hype.

5) Finally, there’s no free lunch. Any plan that claims to solve the energy-environment problem but doesn’t accept that doing so will cause traumatic dislocation -- that is, severe economic distress, affecting the livelihoods of tens of millions of people around the world -- cannot be taken seriously.

Now,doesn't that make you feel better?

Suckers, Part 2

As a follow-up to my post yesterday about consumers, I propose this link to Mother Jones. My favorite factoid: The average U.S. household owes $9,659 on its credit cards.

Obviously, individuals get sucked into debt for lots of different reasons, including things well beyond their control -- health disasters and lost jobs, etc. -- and but when an entire society is operating on short-term debt, that, my friend, is a society made up of "Consumers."

Understanding consumer sentiment

"There's a sucker born every minute."
Attributed to P.T. Barnum (1810 – 1891)

Just what or who is a consumer? I regularly hear that consumer sentiment is rising or falling, or that consumers are waiting in line for the newest gadget from Apple Computer. Who are these people? Why do we care that they're more optimistic this month than last month, or that they're willing to get up at 3 a.m. to buy a cellphone on which no one will ever call them anyway?

Here's what www.dictionary.com has to say:

Con·sum·er -- 1. a person or thing that consumes. 2. Economics. a person or organization that uses a commodity or service. 3. Ecology. an organism, usually an animal, that feeds on plants or other animals.

Since all three of those definitions fit everyone at one time or another, that doesn't take us very far. I wonder if there isn't a fourth, more interesting definition that goes unspoken.

Spending by humans is a factor in the make-up and growth of the economy and economists study their behavior in order to derive laws or test theories about their discipline.

But when marketers refer to people as "consumers" they are usually talking about people in terms of their shopping behavior. When we see the economic indicator "consumer sentiment," what, actually is being measured? In the United States, the data usually comes from telephone surveys in the Index of Consumer Expectations of the Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers.

In August, "The Index of Consumer Sentiment was 83.4 in the August 2007 survey, down from 90.4 in July, and just above the 82.0 recorded in August of 2006. This is the third year that confidence has recorded lows around mid year, with confidence recovering by year-end in 2005 and 2006. The Index of Consumer Expectations, a closely watched component of the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, was 73.7 in the August 2007 survey, down from 81.5 in July, and well above last August’s low of 68.0. The Current Economic Conditions Index was 98.4 in the August 2007 survey, down from 104.5 in July, but well below the 103.8 recorded in August of 2006."

Think about it for a moment: People's confidence dropped 7.0 index points in one month -- to 83.4 in August from 90.4 in July. Set aside the question of how obvious it is, and how hard to measure, when someone's personal confidence index slides (Does he suddenly began to shuffle nervously, adopt a harried look, bite his lip? Are the pollsters trained to detect those things over the phone?). Short of losing their jobs, what could make "consumers" change their attitudes so quickly? I have an answer: More than likely, the people referred to, the consumers in question, are SUCKERS. The marketers know it, the economists know it, and now you know it.

Suckers, in my imagination, anyway, are swept up by every fad and fashion, are capable of holding mutually contradictory beliefs with no cognitive dissonance, and are at the mercy of the marketing messages with which they are ceaselessly bombarded. Shopping is what they do.

Does anyone care about my shopping habits? I doubt it. I try to go shopping (other than for necessities like food) at least once a year, whether I need it or not. But if I were a consumer in the sense being used here -- i.e., one of those people I see on TV who are waiting at the doors of Wal-Mart before dawn a day after Thanksgiving (so-called Black Friday) in order to max out their credit cards a month before Christmas -- why, I should think the marketing professionals would be very interested in my habits. Manipulating me would be very lucrative indeed. And [sniff] it is this mass of suckers that has made of America the greatest retail market in the world.

"Consumers" howled when Apple stiffed them by cutting $200 from the price of "the year's most sought after gadget." But honestly, did anyone with a modicum of sense really believe that it was worth standing in line to pay $600 for a cellphone? That $200 price cut represented the "Sucker Premium" that each of those "consumers" paid to have the rebel image that comes with their favorite brand. Apple offered them each -- get this -- a $100 store credit in recompense. Teehee.

Another place where it is easy to see why "consumer" means "sucker" is, of course, Wall Street. People are greedy; and even if cases where they aren't stupid, they're usually lazy. Ergo, it follows that separating people from their money should require only that you promise them something for which they don't have to work, and more often than not, you can count on them not to do their homework to find out if what you're saying is reasonable. Only a "consumer" could think that an Internet company could simultaneously A) have no revenue or any sort of business model that would someday allow for revenue, and B) undervalued. I once got into a very silly argument with a consumer who was trying to explain why prices could only go up for Beany Babies (a toy of the sort that McDonald's gives away with Happy Meals). She believed, sincerely, I think, that she was doing me a favor by helping me to get in while the getting was good. Alas, Beany Babies aren't doing too well these days. Subprime loans, anyone?

Suckers are not necessarily bad people. In fact, some of my best friends are suckers. Really. And maybe experiences like the iPhone scam will have the effect of educating an entire generation. But the historical evidence suggests not.

And remember, if you have to ask who the sucker is, it's you.

Hungary and Austria

Hajduboszormeny, Hungary, 14 Sept. 2007

Deep in eastern Hungary, nearly to the Ukrainian border. I'm accompanying an old friend who lives in Budapest, as he participates in a corporate PR/Habitat for Humanity activity here. I'll get the full report later about what exactly he's doing, but it appeared, when I left him and his comrades, to involve digging a hole. It's a gorgeous day, the kind of day that makes any town look eminently liveable (it was a day like this, a fair August afternoon in 1996, that tricked me into believing London was liveable). Since I'm only here for an afternoon, there's no way of really getting to know the place. But I imagine that around, say, mid-January, when virtually no part of Europe north of Rome is fit for human habitation, the quaint towns of eastern Hungary become as sluggish as can be imagined, with the consumption of television and alcohol for most people the leading escapes from the relentless dreariness. But that seems far away at the moment. The sky is mostly blue, and only the noticeable drop in temperature that occurs every time a cloud skitters across the sun serves to remind the skeptic that it isn't always gorgeous and happy here.

Surviving in such a place requires integrating rapidly into the local "scene" -- there's no cafe, no movie theater, etc. -- just a hotel restaurant with which one would quickly grow tired, where bad old pop music is played remixed and too loud, I grew up in such a place.

Budapest, 15 Sept. 2007 -- It's wonderful to be here in this city, long among my favorites in Europe. I first came here in March 1989, on my first European journey. This was about one week after the Iron Curtain started to physically come down. My then girlfriend, Cathy, and I visited my brother in Graz, Austria, then went to Vienna and on to Budapest. We arrived late, after a long delay at the border, and thought we had a place to stay, with the sister of an American woman that we met on the train. But no, the older sister was not happy with the prospect of two unannounced guests, and she sent us packing, after midnight, to stay in a state-run hotel. The place was filthy and inhospitable, the staff sullen. I remember waking from a poor night's sleep and going to the common male bathroom for my shower. Rubble was strewn around the floor of the locker room style shower from an unfinished construction project. We were at our limits, wasted from exhaustion and the shock of being in this srange place where things were going very badly. But the shower was hot, I remember. And things took a decided turn for the better when we called a man we'd met on the train, whose family owned a private guest room. Sure enough, it was a great place, with all the comforts of home, and the woman of the house served us up a phenomenal chicken cordon bleu, complete with good local wine.

I've tried to come back to Austria and Hungary every year since. An American friend in Seoul tries to visit Kyoto every autumn with his Okinawan wife. These kinds of little traditions give our lives continuity and perspective, and run up our travel bills.

This may explain why you're always in trouble

Steven Shapin quotes Herbert Spencer in a recent (and very worthwhile) New Yorker article:

"[P]ronounced individuality is necessarily more or less at variance with authority."

Efficiency and the joys of low-cost airline meals

35,000 feet over Northern Europe -- Aboard our lunchtime SAS flight from Paris to Stockholm, we suddenly realize that there is no lunch service, just a list of not very exciting menu items for which we may pay top dollar. (One our party, having booked our tickets, and, owing to her employment, something of an expert on air travel, might reasonably have been expected to have known this. However, this person shall not be identified so as to ensure the continuation of domestic bliss).

So we opt for the "venison wraps," a tiny can of Pringles potato chips and two free plastic cups of tap water. Total bill: 8 euros, or a little more than $11. We are prepared for the worst, but the venison wraps are not terrible. Indeed, they would probably rank among the top 50 percent, quality-wise, of the sandwiches in the refrigerated section of a large gas station. Mrs. Marichaux describes them as tasting "like bologna." And the water and Pringles are exactly what I expect.

I have resisted flying on the low-cost carriers in Europe, which Mrs. Marichaux describes as being little more than airborne bus travel. To my knowledge, Air France, my regular carrier, still serves meals. And my recent trips to and from Budapest on Malev included food that, while more processed than I would prefer, had the advantages of being both edible and free. SAS, I had imagined, was still an old-line carrier. But no, Mrs. Marichaux explains, SAS has had to take drastic steps to cope with financial difficulties. There are other signs, literally. A large advertisement is tastefully stuck to the back of each seat: "Doing business in the Nordic region? Swedbank." Unfortunately, the sticky, dirty, imprint of the previous sticker remains in place, visible behind them.

Someone, somewhere, an airline economist, has concluded that serving the meals and charging each passenger separately, instead of just adding his food and drinks cost to his ticket price, is the way to go. There are perhaps 100 passengers aboard, each paying, let's guess, five euros apiece, on average. It certainly holds down the drinking, according to my observations, though I noticed that most of the Swedish passengers appear to have skipped the sandwiches and gone with the always-popular alcohol and potato chips lunch.

But I wonder if it really is really more efficient for the airline to do it this way. The poor flight attendants have to tally up the bills, charge in either Swedish crowns or euros, or by credit card, depending on what each passenger is carrying, and of course deliver the food and drinks. That's a lot of individual bills and a lot of hassle.

But thinking about that venison wrap, I suspect their food products actually DO carry a sufficiently high margin...

Book discussion: A History of God

Some of us have agreed to discuss Karen Armstrong's "A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam." Here's a link to the book.