Use Your Peripherals!
Nap Time!
Face Reading
They Lost me on some of the Chemistry
No Comment From Me:
As a response, we get something often misattributed to Churchill:
Francois Guisot (1787-1874): “Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head.”
New Yorker on Krugman
Very interesting profile via Tyler Cowen, who, I think, dances around the most interesting issues in the article and comments on Krugman’s travel habits and his Sci-Fi love instead. Maybe he’s worried about engaging with the prickly stuff. He teases us, however, with this:
and there is an interesting discussion of how his wife edits his work
Interesting? I’ll say (quotes below are from the New Yorker piece):
these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier.
and this:
On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant.
And he even jumps between grammatical persons when discussing ‘their’ work:
“When Robin and I started writing about health care, single payer was clearly the way to go. And then bit by bit you start saying, ‘O.K., you take what you can get.’ There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into—you let your vision of what should be get completely taken over by what appears possible right now—and that’s something I’m trying to avoid.”
Is Krugman’s famed brilliant yet mean-spirited persona really a combination of his and his wife’s views? Is she the mean part and he the brilliant part? Yikes, don’t want to touch that, but we should probably at least consider “Paul Krugman, NYT Columnist” an avatar for the Krugman couple together.
Would Robin Wells still want her avatar to be so angry if it was her name at the top of the column?
Retirement Drives you Crazy
Managing Firms
Separating Issues
I think the island airport is awesome. Porter Airlines runs all the slots right now, which means, yes, they have a monopoly. Air Canada is looking to wipe that out:
Montreal-based Air Canada
launched legal proceedings Wednesday, accusing Porter of having an “improper anti-competitive advantage” at Toronto’s downtown island airport.
I’m sure there are lots of weird details that the public don’t know anything about (why the monopoly in the first place? Why didn’t Air Canada look to develop this airport years earlier? etc), but one thing that irritates me is that people seem to confuse Porter Airlines with the Island Airport. Very different things.
Yes, Porter serves beer on its short haul flights and yes, the lines are shorter at the island airport. But I’d say that most of the sustainably great things about the Porter experience fall under the heading of “Great Things about the Island Airport” and those that are left are possibly unsustainable loss leading marketing gimmicks designed to secure share.
If it’s the airport that gives Porter its edge, then Air Canada should be able to deliver just as great an experience. Right?
Not Unreasonable 