The MTA transit authority, which operates the New York subway is warning of drastic service cuts, price increases and staff reductions. People are up in arms, but this is one area where even if these unfortunate measures were taken, New Yorkers would be better off than places which offer many more benefits in things like healthcare and public services.

For example, for the New York Subway to be like the London Underground:

Service cuts: The Subway runs 24 hours. The Underground shuts down around 1am replaced by a horrid fleet of scorchingly lit night buses full of kebab-eating binge drinkers. In addition, the Subway system is almost fully redundant with express and local lines, so the effects of cuts to service from non-overtime maintenance are much reduced.

Fares: The Subway costs $2 per ride. The Underground costs $5.60 per ride. It would take a mammoth increase to match that.

While its true that the overall level of disrepair in the Subway makes it look like a dilapidated open sewer in comparison with London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo etc., it is efficient and relatively cheap, just not pretty to look at.

Here are some unpleasant truths that most American’s don’t acknowledge or know, now that they are worse off than France in unemployment percentage terms and without the upside:

In the US being fired means no notice and being escorted off the premises with two months severance if you are lucky. If you are an executive with a history of litigation you normally get more from a board, because there is a risk the company will incur costs (I have been in board meeting this spineless immoral stance has been the attitude). It means that for a year or so you can pay to keep your healthcare. After that, you are pretty much screwed.

In France you will get 3 months warning, and 2 years (23 months) at 60 - 70 % of your salary up to $90K. Your pension will continue to be paid and you will get free healthcare. And after 2 years the healthcare will continue and you will not starve. You will not have mortgage payments which are more than 3 times your previous salary, because that is illegal and you will be in a minority if you use a credit rather than a debit card. You will not need to get into debt to get a credit score, and you won’t have much of a student loan. The very best schools (Henry IV) are free and so is university (although the universities are sub par compared to the Grand Ecoles or places like INSEAD).

Lastly - personal taxes are about the same and the productivity of French workers is the same as the US.

There are downsides to this of course, business taxes are higher, people exploit the system and there is a deluded and hypocritical sense of self-entitlement in France from its, ultimately Bourgeois, left who are living off the tax revenues from principal exports such as luxury goods for the rich and weapons for the oppressive. The culture is less dynamic, and there are plenty of socio-economic problems, but there is plenty to enjoy anyhow.

France has less boom and less bust, booms are smaller and longer and so are recoveries. There is, of course a happy medium in between France and America, but in the current environment it pretty clear where is a better place to be for most people. America is on the side of the extreme that will create extraordinary hardship for a large number of ordinary people that will be more familiar in Mexico City than Paris. The upside is that the US may recover quicker, but what would you rather have a three week flu or cyanide?

Link

America’s unemployment rate is now similar to France, which registered 7.5% in 2007 but the implications are very, very different. In France, unemployment benefits run at 57 to 75 percent of previous salary for up to 3 years and sometimes longer, if close to retirement.

Added to this are the huge costs of healthcare insurance in the US, which typically run at 30% of a salary, for an employer. To put it in perspective, my family self-employed healthcare costs ($12,000 plus $4000 excess), are the same as my sister’s 80% mortgage for a 2 bedroom house on the South Coast of England.

In short, America will be a terrifying place to be for those who are going to be unemployed, as this article in today’s New York Times suggests.

America’s financial system has taken a beating, all of the top brokerage firms and banks went bust or were partially nationalized in a panic that caused US banks to be rated below Namibia.

For an ordinary retail bank customer from another country, I have always found US banks surprisingly primitive. Could that really have anything to say about an endemic problem from over the counter to prime brokerage like Goldman Sachs? Why is the service at American retail banks so bad when the service at American retail outlets is so good? Why can’t a bank work like PayPal? And most of all, why is this the case in the global epicenter of capitalism?

I’ve been in America ten years now, and still use my UK retail bank because it allows me to do things by phone, that my American bank down the street won’t allow in person (such as transferring money without endless forms and pieces of paper).

There is almost nothing in europe that requires the arcane process of writing a paper check and mailing it. When I found out that my online automatic bill payment system actually resulted in a paper check being printed out placed in an envelope and mailed, I nearly fell off my chair. This is technological equivalent of finding out that there are little people inside the TV.

After moving from San Francisco to New York, I kept my Wells Fargo account, then found out that there were no branches in NY and no reciprocal agreements, no way of arranging a wire transfer without a weeks delay in sending bits of paper back and forth, no free interbank exchange and ATM withdrawals charged more than the money I made in Interest, for an entire year.

American banks do not allow credit ratings to be imported, so you have to build a new score when you move from abroad. Unfortunately, if you pay your bills on time and don’t borrow money you cannot get a credit score. In order to do so you have to borrow money. In other words to get a credit score you have to get into debt. I have a credit card that is linked to my cellphone bill and is used for nothing else. The sole purpose is to enable my credit score. This is farcical.

Today, a friend tried to transfer money to our US account from Europe only to be told that the US bank had been blacklisted. Although I find it hard to believe that this is true, my level of credulity is changing.

I could go on, but the point is that the anecdotal experiences mean that something is rotten. But we all know that now.

“Soaring Oil Prices”

Oil futures rose as high as $30.40 before falling back slightly in trading in London.

US President Bill Clinton said the rise was “deeply troubling” and refused to rule out any US action to deal with the situation.

Source

I am in London at the moment. For the first time ever, Britain feels noticeably wealthier than America, and most of the extreme wealth seems not to be banking but oil related. I suspect the only truth in the term peak oil in the medium term will be the price which will surely come crashing down.

Woodstock is a curious place. It is famous for a concert which it never held and as the spiritual epicenter of free thinking in the 60’s. Yet despite the occasional sign saying ‘hippies welcome’, on a snowy December evening before Christmas it looks more like a Republican fantasy of small town America. The setting for ‘A wonderful Life’, perhaps.

The hippies are old now, and they line up to protest the Iraq war as the bus to New York passes through.

In the background, an apathetic youth with hoodie and baseball cap perches on a mountain bike: gormless, slack-jawed and vacant.

If young people are less radical than their grandparents, society is abnormal compared to historical trends. More importantly, the historical precedent is that this kind of society is more likely to stumble into large scale conflict.

A very good speech, on the things that matter. Perhaps the Democrats will get their sorry act together at last.

Scott Kiesling of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh analyses the word Dude

Full of such classics as:

“Next we turn to investigate how this term is used in contextualized interactions among college-aged men in 1993, and to view some examples of its use in interaction, to understand how these indexicalities are put to use. I

Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, explores what happened after the Civil War, a time when the Republicans were liberal and the Democrats conservative.

Boundaries of the Contiguous United States is a fascinating animation sequence that shows US state and national boundaries as the US and US colonies grew westwards from 1650 onwards.