Presenting the $5 Slice

Mayor Koch would have organized a boycott, I'm sure. The conventional wisdom, however, is that Di Fara Pizza is a treasure. More...

The White Male Recession

One of the memes floating around out there is that this recession is hurting white men disproportionately. Here's an article in USA Today that points out that the unemployment rate among older white men is at an all-time high of 6.5% while black women have it great at 12.55 unemployment because historically their rate has been around 20%.

Those poor white men suffering almost half the unemployment rate of the black women! More...

The Great Recession

We are now officially in the longest post-war downturn. More...

Most Interesting Shots (Today) #7

Every day Flickr ranks all of my photos based on an algorithm they call "interestingness." Here are today's "most interesting" shots.

17 of the 30 are taken in New York City
6 are taken in Fire Island Pines, NY
6 feature my dogs (#14 is brand new)
5 show the old Met Life Building
4 feature the Empire State Building
4 are shots of the reflecting pool in New York's Madison Square Park

Previous versions here. The actual Flickr page is here. More...

Dream-on Liner

The Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" is plagued by yet more problems. More...

Hidden New York

It's amazing what's hidden in plain sight in NYC, like this beach house on a roof at 1st and 1st just off Houston More...

The Longshot

New AOL chief Tim Armstrong has unveiled his strategy at an all-hands meeting in Dulles this morning. I wish them well, but this will be the mother of uphill battles.

Pretty cool they got Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, Martha Stewart, AND Warren Buffett (left) to attend. Perhaps some of these will be on AOL's board? More...

Recession Spirituality

Who is behind these uplifting billboards? More...

Empire State Building, July 22 2009

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Another Modest Proposal

Madison Square Park is truly a wasted space. A heliport would be much preferred. More...

ABCs of New York

Here's an alphabet made of satellite images from around New York state. More...

A Modest Proposal

Problem: Lots of underutilized open space right in the middle of Manhattan next to some of New York's most desirable neighborhoods.

Solution: Get rid of all that greenery and replace it with something useful like an airport More...

Yahoo! then and now

1994







1997






2006 More...

Cellphone cum cigarette lighter

Presented without comment.

More here. More...

Big Mac Index

The Big Mac Index is an attempt to measure purchasing power parity among currencies. The theory is that a Big Mac should cost the same no matter where you buy it. If it costs much more to buy in a country than in the US, then the idea is that the currency of that country is overvalued compared to the dollar.

The current index shows that the European currencies are generally overvalued and the Asian currencies generally undervalued compared to the dollar. More...

NYC unemployment

For quite a while, the unemployment rate in New York City has been lower than the national average. Now that has changed. More...

Empire State Building July 14, 2009

NAACP

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Lies

Among the things that irk me the most is the use of badly drawn charts to mislead readers. In today's Economix blog the chart at the left appears. It purports to show that veterinary spending and healthcare spending in the US have grown neck and neck, when it fact the underlying data shows nothing of the sort.

This chart is scaled so that the trendlines match (i.e., so that the visual picture matches the conclusion the blog is drawing). If it had been scaled in a neutral fashion (e.g., by indexing vet spend and health spend at 100 in 1984) the chart would clearly show that healthcare spending has grown significantly faster than vet spending, which is a very different conclusion than the one this chart purports to show. More...

Empire State Building July 12, 2009

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Health Care

The U.S. not only outspends every other OECD nation on health care, that trend is accelerating More...

Jobs Ratio

This chart shows the ratio of unemployed people to job opening. There are now nearly six unemployed people for every job opening. More...

Announcing Club Wagner

For 30 years the GOP has attacked taxes of any kind and we see where that's gotten us. Now, here's a group who wants taxes as a whole to rise. More...

Ad Market Deflation

The advertising market continues to unravel. As I written before, I think advertising is not only going to shrink with GDP, but it will also shrink as a percent of GDP due to the inherent deflationary characteristics of digital media. More...

Borrowing from Posterity: Oil Edition

One of the defining characteristics of our age is that we have devised countless ways to consume more stuff by borrowing money that posterity will have to pay back and by consuming non-renewable resources without regard for the effect their depletion will have on future generations.

This graph is an attempt to lay out how much fossil fuel remains on earth and when it will be depleted. The End of Oil trope has been around for a long time and has been "disproven" every time the price of oil falls, so the timing of this chart is naturally speculative.

What is indisputable, however, is that we will run out eventually. This graph says we have 90 years left. The accompanying article says, basically, we don;t have a plan B. More...

Chart of the Day: Job losses

By some measures, the recession is far worse than others based on Job losses. More...

Chart of the day

Uh-oh. More...

Papercraft

This thing is awesome. More...

8.36 Million New Yorkers

New York has more people than ever before. 360,000 more than the last census. More...

On hiring the unemployed

It seems that many companies would prefer to hire only people who are currently employed, reasoning that they are more likely - in this economy - to be survivors and top performers. More...

An Amish Bank Run

What happens when modernity strikes a very traditional community? More...

Old devices

The Sony Walkman is 30 years old today More...