Desi Tamasha

Every serious writer has to be original; he cannot be content to do or to offer a version of what has been done before. And every serious writer as a result becomes aware of this question of form; because he knows that however much he might have been educated and stimulated by the writers he has read or reads, the forms matched the experience of those writers, and do not strictly suit his own.
- V.S. Naipaul (Hat tip: Thirty letters in my name)

True for entrepreneurship too.
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As readers of this blog already know, I crashed our Corolla into a truck a couple of months back. The car was in pretty bad shape after the accident, and was barely drivable. We were trying to figure out what to do with it. If we donated it, the organization which received the car would try to sell it via an auction. If the car managed to sell in the auction, the organization would get 65% of the proceeds; if it didn't, they'd get $60 or some measly sum like that.

Our mechanic advised us to advertise it on Craigslist "as is" and so we did. We put all the pictures and the gory details online. Buyer beware and all that.

The Craigslist ad went out on a Saturday evening. The response was immediate. A dozen emails popped up in my inbox within about 30 minutes, and more followed by nighttime.

Some of the emails had their offers spelled out -- $400 from one, $900 from another. They didn't need to see the car -- the pictures were sufficient for them.

Quite a few of the names of emailers were Muslim-sounding too. I was intrigued.

I spoke to a couple of the correspondents. The first guy explained the story -- Corollas, he said, were very popular in Afghanistan. He was going to ship it there. He mentioned something about $2,500 being his upper limit. He didn't need to see the car. He would come by with $1,200 in cash right away and buy it off of me. I suggested he come by the next day with all the others. He feared that he'd be getting into a bidding war "with the same people" whom he competes with for other Corollas.

The second guy also wanted us to sell him the car the same day. He said he'd seen a few fistfights break out over other Corollas. "When they're done beating each other up, those guys would come after you and beat you up too." This was getting more exciting.

We asked the interested parties to come on Sunday and make their best offer then. The first guy came and made an offer for $1,500. Another guy came and made an offer for $600 and raised it to $900 (he was planning to use the car for himself; not ship to Afghanistan).

Then two more guys showed up -- one from over 80 miles away and the other from over 40 miles. One bid $1,500 and the other bid $1,550. But they both wanted to outbid the other by $100. We should have really had an auction. A $2,000 bid seemed within reach, but we sold it for $1,550. I assume the buyer made some fixes for $100 or so and pocketed $850 (difference between $2,500 and $1,550+100) or more. Not bad for a car with 150K+ miles on it.

Corollas rule.

Ten years ago, whenever I flew domestically within the US, I thought the security level was exceptionally low. You could pretty much walk up to to the gate to drop/receive the travelers. The carry-on baggage checks were perfunctory, and the traveler herself went thru no checks at all.

9/11 changed all that, and we had high security theater for a while, with travelers being put thru a variety of checks, and all sorts of new technology tried at different airports, who were all looking for expensive ways to spend all the new Homeland Security $$.

The security theater is pretty much over. What we currently have has a bit of a theatrical element to it, and security experts will find 1001 ways to fault it, but it seems reasonable and passes the smell test for me. Airports have also been streamlined to handle the current set of procedures.

But unfortunately, the security pendulum cannot stop: it has to keep swinging, and now it's swinging in the other direction. Even seemingly good ideas are being criticized now and we will soon -- in the next 10-15 years, say -- find ourselves in the same place where we were prior to 9/11. This LA Times story, for example, is titled "CIA staged mock execution, wielded power drill in interrogations, secret report says."

Maybe I'm naive about how police states are created, but shouldn't mock executions (or mock anything for that matter) be allowed in interrogations of some of the most dangerous people on Earth? To me, this is definitely not remotely close to torture.

It's depressing how the security pendulum is almost inexorably swinging to the laxer extreme again.
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Texting while driving is very dangerous. Switching between calls or dialing calls while driving is equally bad:

That study, which is undergoing peer review and has been submitted for publication in The Journal for Human Factors, also found that drivers took their eyes off the road for around five seconds when texting.

Yesterday, I read this article by Maureen Dowd, who, in turn, was quoting the hidden National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) report on driving while on a cellphone:

Studies show that drivers who talk on cellphones are four times more likely to be in a crash and drive just as erratically as people with an 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level.

In one study cited by the highway safety agency, “drivers found it easier to drive drunk than to drive while using a phone, even when it was hands-free.”

The agency buried its head in the sand, keeping the research to itself for years and ignoring the fact that soon nearly all Americans would own cellphones and that the phones are always getting smarter and more demanding, putting a multimedia empire at your fingertips while you’re piloting a potentially lethal piece of artillery

I agreed with everything she wrote and swore to cut down drastically on my cellphone use while driving. This was yesterday. I even took action on it.

I had a 9:00am call this morning, and a 9:30am meeting. I decided to get up really early, start driving to my 9:30am meeting well in advance, reach my destination, and take the 9:00am call from the parking lot.

I did get up on time, but then I kept slipping, and slipping further, until it was 8:40am and I would have to take the 9:00am call on the phone after all. I was dreading the idea, but "didn't have a choice." I tempted fate.

Bang. Really loud bang and no idea where it came from. Except that I felt some impact on my thumb. I was switching between two calls and I had driven straight into the truck in front of me. The truck was unscathed, but my car is hurt rather badly.

I need a more drastic solution. The cellphone will go into the backpack and the backpack will go into the trunk of the car. No exceptions. Wish I'd done this a day sooner.
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The Chinese "growth" story in recent months, it seems, is a total mirage, built upon reckless government spending that is about to come crashing down:

I thought I’d seen insane excess in the past – 200 thousand square meter malls completely empty next to apartment complexes with 40 thousand units and 30% occupancy rates, etc. etc. But what we saw over there is rather hard to fathom. It seems the Guiyang city mayor had the same idea as the Shenzhen mayor – to move the old downtown to a piece of undeveloped land.

Of course Guiyang has a quarter the population and probably a quarter the per capita income of Shenzhen. They built sprawling new government buildings about a 20-minute drive north of town. And then the residential high rise projects started going up. From driving around the area, Tom and I figured well over 100 20+ storey buildings.

What was most distressing was that the development has been totally uncoordinated – a project with 15 buildings here, in another field two miles away a project with one building, another mile in another direction three buildings, sprawled over what was easily over 30 square kms. of farmland well north of town. Every building we got close enough to see was either incomplete/under construction, or empty. Our tone gradually went from “Haha, another one!” to “Oh my God, another one.” We conservatively guesstimated that we saw US$10bn of NPLs in one afternoon. The only buildings that were occupied were six-storey towers built to accommodate the peasants who had been displaced by the construction.

The global economy, it seems, could be in for yet another major shock in the coming months and years.

PS: More on the Chinese "bubble"...

Labels: bailout, bubble, china

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