(marzipan dentures, if you were wondering...)
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Don't go to Italy in August if you want to shop
I thought that going to Milan, a mecca for fashion, would be a fun learning experience. You know, learn about what all the fuss is about the big fashion houses. But...no, no, no. At least not during August. It seems that almost all Italians go on vacation and foreigners such as Curt and I, who didn't do any research about it, are left wandering around looking each other and at many closed doors and wondering how the businesses, heck, the country can keep itself solvent with so much time off and lost opportunity for revenue generation. We spent a day in Milan today and had a wonderful time anyway. We found some cool bookstores, had a fabulous lunch and delicious cappuccino while people-watching at a cafe near the Duomo, which, by the way, has a very well done restoration process going on with its exterior.
(marzipan dentures, if you were wondering...)
(marzipan dentures, if you were wondering...)
Not One Single Thief In Italy This Trip and Other Observations
Dear Blog,
(This is a good blog entry so if you're looking for one, read this one.)
Ok, I know we're in the north of Italy, and for all intents and purposes it's a different country from the south, and for the sake of their children, posterity, and the rest of the European Union, the north should declare it's independence from the other half of the country, rather than dragging it around like a useless East Germany, and pray nightly that it becomes the next Atlantis, and Vesuvius will lose its top and toss the whole boot into the sea. But, even though it's the north, the last time we were here, even in Venice and Florence, every other person we met was trying to steal from us. Over charging at registers, counting out bills incorrectly, hiding charges until it was too late to object, serving reheated food, trying to sell refilled water bottles, lying about products, or even stealing a watch from one of our fellow travellers and running away on a scooter. The travel guides new nothing about Italian history, and I had to stuff my ears with cotton so that my obsessive compulsive disorder wouldn't kick in and make me correct them every time they spoke. I would have been hoarse by the end of the day if I had to. I mean, the number of idiotic things they said was dumbfounding. I'd think that statistically they'd get something right given that many opportunities, but their natural inclination to lie must have taken over so that when presented with an opportunity to tell the truth, they didn't. That's the only way it was possible. It's just statistically impossible to be that wrong all the time.
Anyway, on this trip, we have not had a single person do anything except treat us with respect, care and consideration. No bill has had one error. No overcharges. No hidden fees. And they're apologetic about any mistake they make. I don't know if it's just the difference between Romans and Milanese, or the side effect of being close to the Swiss border, or that we're older, or what the matter is. Personally, I think it's largely the impact of the Euro and the EU, as well as the maturation of two generations who are hooked on Mcdonalds, movies and video games. Every person you talk to can muster up pidgin English, and unlike the french, they simply consider it effective to speak it, rather than wait around for you to stumble through guttural Traveler's Italian.
I mean, all the signs, and all the advertising (which is plentiful) are in English. there are English bookstores both here and in Zurich. It's just odd, and you don't feel like you're in a foreign land. I feel more alien in the international district in Seattle, or the Indian food stores in Redmond. Not that it's bad. I am not an anti-American or anything (although, the average American is far more ignorant than the average European, at least by my experience) but it's shocking how similar globalization has made us. I think the first time I noticed it was in Paris, but you no longer feel like your exploring when you go to Europe. (Its only been three years since we've been here because of the baby, but the rate of change is fascinating.)
The countryside is absolutely stunning. Nor orderly and neat like the Swiss or Germans. Certainly not well maintained or cared for (everything is someone else's problem and besides, who can put the extra effort into a job in the heat, and with all the pretty girls walking by, and the smell of food, and pretty countryside to look at, I mean, why would I spend an extra ten percent of my effort on such a thing, when I have all these options?)
Allora tells me Pliny the Younger was born here. It must have been even more beautiful in Roman times. (If you could afford to be a Pliny instead of a slave that is.)
Everything is closed because everyone is on vacation. I mean, all the stores are closed, with metal gates, and even the homes, (most of them qualify as villa's,) have shuttered windows. Everyone is on vacation. Everyone. If it weren't for some of the more popular restaurants and hotels, the place would look like Charlton Heston would show up for an Omega Man II. (Old sci fi reference for those of you less cultured.)
While I like English and Germans the best of any people, the people here have been wonderful, kind and honest. And given that after my last trip I swore I would never set foot here again (well, except in Sorrento, or maybe one of the hill towns, or maybe Venice - I wasn't really serious) I've been thrilled with the experience.
My only recommendation is for the Italian government to import a few thousand old British ladies in their wool dresses to run the work crews that maintain everything. Because Italians build roads and bridges like madmen in the first place, then they don't maintain anything. I think it's cultural thing hung over from making stuff from stone for two and a half millenia. I mean, you don't have to maintain stone, but you do steel and concrete. Everything here is like an American bridge from the 1970's: one step from falling apart, with WW2 era electrical wiring hanging out of rusted doorways. I mean, in England, every historic site has a dozen grey haired matrons with little black bottles of enamel, touching up everything at every moment. And if you ask them who the Third Earl was, they know and can tell you a story about him.
One thing that surprises me still is how well mannered are the drivers on the road. I think this partly has to do with the fact that they drive less. I notice now that I live farther out of town, I am a more aggressive driver than I used to be. Also, since you're always negotiating small curves and such, you don't get that aggravating road hypnosis of boredom you do on the long straight highways.
Another thing that's interesting is that the people who drive fast, almost always seem to drive Audis. I have to do some research on this, and I know they're fairly fast cars, but while the little blue ford Fiesta might pass you, nine out of ten of the cars that do are Audis or the odd Mercedes. There must be something interesting in their marketing data if we got a chance to look at it.
The bookstores are far better than in the US. I found half a dozen books to read here. This is important because i don't feel like I've had a vacation unless I've eviscerated some idiotic author, and in doing so purged my psyche, like a runner who has finally healed enough to make it two miles without getting another injury. My intended victim is the head of one of the College's at Oxford who has written a foolhardy and pompous book on Identity and Violence. He is my first victim.
One thing I notice is that books on socialism are more popular in the US than they are here in Europe, at least, on the store shelves. Most university bookstores are unabashedly communist. Most university classes are steeped in socialism. The humanities are the most left wing of all. But it's odd to me in these places that have more of it, how much of the stores focus on business books. Hopefully it's a sign of ongoing prosperity.
If you go into a typical Barnes and Noble or Borders, half the store is built to support the Oprah book club or the newest Harry Potter release. ( I should start another rant on what Oprah's philosophy really is, and it's cancerous, but I would have to defend it and don't have the time at the moment.) I mean, I guess there is a place for that kind of thing, but if you go to a bookstore in Milan or Zurich (or Paris or London for that matter) and look in the philosophy, history, or science sections, there will be an intelligent selection of books that represent good thinking in viewpoints. In the US, there is either an unintelligent selection that myopically represents a viewpoint, one that creates an artificial dichotomy for two viewpoints, an massive inventory that tries to represent all viewpoints equally (thereby absolving them of editorialism), but certainly no well considered inventory representing the best of some set of those worlds.
My cut on this is that we have too many marketers. These marketers are trying to be cunning. Education in the US focuses too much on being cunning and not enough on being wise. Cunning is a fools way of avoiding the work of being wise. And wisdom is both hard to accomplish and takes a long time. Marketers who try to be cunning are simply trying to sell products that they shouldn't be. Unfortunately their demographic representing total market of fools in the US is sufficiently large enough to carry onward. It must be like soccer fans in Europe. Consumerism is our Soccer. Consumers are the US's version of idiots. It's exasperating. In other words, we don't educate our people very well and they succeed because of confidence and spending rather than because of innovation.
The US used to house the great universities, great capitalists and risk takers. Now we're the leading economy largely because the average person is profoundly ignorant, and can afford to be so simply because by spending all his or her time in the act of consuming, he's decreasing prices enough to keep people in other countries working around the clock to meet production demands. I mean, there are Ponzi schemes and Ponzi Schemes, but this one is the mother of all Ponzi's, and when the Hayekian Knowledge Bill Collector shows up, the auditors are going to have a hard time figuring out who's going to jail. Because we'll have to wall in the entire continent, even though most of the people would run out in their hiking gear, prada accessories, and leveraged automobiles crying their innocence, while their undisciplined, day-care-raised children, steeped in the religion of consumerism and socialism, drag video games, out of bookless rooms, to the sound of exercise videos promising an end to obesity, with T shirts stained in multi-colored corn-syrup flavors, and with soccer, kung-fu, and Camp-Tillamuck appointments notices flapping in their nanny's hands. The worst part of this is the destruction of the boys, who, in an effort to not offend anyone, stand open eyed and expressionless hoping they didn't offend anyone as they tripped over the cord to their electric ATV's. And they stand there, whimpering and speechless as the iron gates close and the Ponzi-Court nails the sentence to the doors of the prison. I only hope those boys can find a few copies of The Lord Of The Flies, because they're going to read it as a personal biography, or an instruction manual, or both.
That's a long way of saying that I like the social order here in Europe better, but I like our economic freedom better at home. Each man pays for his own sins. Both the US and Europe will pay for different ones. I am not sure that theirs will be so severe.
Cheers
Curt
(This is a good blog entry so if you're looking for one, read this one.)
Ok, I know we're in the north of Italy, and for all intents and purposes it's a different country from the south, and for the sake of their children, posterity, and the rest of the European Union, the north should declare it's independence from the other half of the country, rather than dragging it around like a useless East Germany, and pray nightly that it becomes the next Atlantis, and Vesuvius will lose its top and toss the whole boot into the sea. But, even though it's the north, the last time we were here, even in Venice and Florence, every other person we met was trying to steal from us. Over charging at registers, counting out bills incorrectly, hiding charges until it was too late to object, serving reheated food, trying to sell refilled water bottles, lying about products, or even stealing a watch from one of our fellow travellers and running away on a scooter. The travel guides new nothing about Italian history, and I had to stuff my ears with cotton so that my obsessive compulsive disorder wouldn't kick in and make me correct them every time they spoke. I would have been hoarse by the end of the day if I had to. I mean, the number of idiotic things they said was dumbfounding. I'd think that statistically they'd get something right given that many opportunities, but their natural inclination to lie must have taken over so that when presented with an opportunity to tell the truth, they didn't. That's the only way it was possible. It's just statistically impossible to be that wrong all the time.
Anyway, on this trip, we have not had a single person do anything except treat us with respect, care and consideration. No bill has had one error. No overcharges. No hidden fees. And they're apologetic about any mistake they make. I don't know if it's just the difference between Romans and Milanese, or the side effect of being close to the Swiss border, or that we're older, or what the matter is. Personally, I think it's largely the impact of the Euro and the EU, as well as the maturation of two generations who are hooked on Mcdonalds, movies and video games. Every person you talk to can muster up pidgin English, and unlike the french, they simply consider it effective to speak it, rather than wait around for you to stumble through guttural Traveler's Italian.
I mean, all the signs, and all the advertising (which is plentiful) are in English. there are English bookstores both here and in Zurich. It's just odd, and you don't feel like you're in a foreign land. I feel more alien in the international district in Seattle, or the Indian food stores in Redmond. Not that it's bad. I am not an anti-American or anything (although, the average American is far more ignorant than the average European, at least by my experience) but it's shocking how similar globalization has made us. I think the first time I noticed it was in Paris, but you no longer feel like your exploring when you go to Europe. (Its only been three years since we've been here because of the baby, but the rate of change is fascinating.)
The countryside is absolutely stunning. Nor orderly and neat like the Swiss or Germans. Certainly not well maintained or cared for (everything is someone else's problem and besides, who can put the extra effort into a job in the heat, and with all the pretty girls walking by, and the smell of food, and pretty countryside to look at, I mean, why would I spend an extra ten percent of my effort on such a thing, when I have all these options?)
Allora tells me Pliny the Younger was born here. It must have been even more beautiful in Roman times. (If you could afford to be a Pliny instead of a slave that is.)
Everything is closed because everyone is on vacation. I mean, all the stores are closed, with metal gates, and even the homes, (most of them qualify as villa's,) have shuttered windows. Everyone is on vacation. Everyone. If it weren't for some of the more popular restaurants and hotels, the place would look like Charlton Heston would show up for an Omega Man II. (Old sci fi reference for those of you less cultured.)
While I like English and Germans the best of any people, the people here have been wonderful, kind and honest. And given that after my last trip I swore I would never set foot here again (well, except in Sorrento, or maybe one of the hill towns, or maybe Venice - I wasn't really serious) I've been thrilled with the experience.
My only recommendation is for the Italian government to import a few thousand old British ladies in their wool dresses to run the work crews that maintain everything. Because Italians build roads and bridges like madmen in the first place, then they don't maintain anything. I think it's cultural thing hung over from making stuff from stone for two and a half millenia. I mean, you don't have to maintain stone, but you do steel and concrete. Everything here is like an American bridge from the 1970's: one step from falling apart, with WW2 era electrical wiring hanging out of rusted doorways. I mean, in England, every historic site has a dozen grey haired matrons with little black bottles of enamel, touching up everything at every moment. And if you ask them who the Third Earl was, they know and can tell you a story about him.
One thing that surprises me still is how well mannered are the drivers on the road. I think this partly has to do with the fact that they drive less. I notice now that I live farther out of town, I am a more aggressive driver than I used to be. Also, since you're always negotiating small curves and such, you don't get that aggravating road hypnosis of boredom you do on the long straight highways.
Another thing that's interesting is that the people who drive fast, almost always seem to drive Audis. I have to do some research on this, and I know they're fairly fast cars, but while the little blue ford Fiesta might pass you, nine out of ten of the cars that do are Audis or the odd Mercedes. There must be something interesting in their marketing data if we got a chance to look at it.
The bookstores are far better than in the US. I found half a dozen books to read here. This is important because i don't feel like I've had a vacation unless I've eviscerated some idiotic author, and in doing so purged my psyche, like a runner who has finally healed enough to make it two miles without getting another injury. My intended victim is the head of one of the College's at Oxford who has written a foolhardy and pompous book on Identity and Violence. He is my first victim.
One thing I notice is that books on socialism are more popular in the US than they are here in Europe, at least, on the store shelves. Most university bookstores are unabashedly communist. Most university classes are steeped in socialism. The humanities are the most left wing of all. But it's odd to me in these places that have more of it, how much of the stores focus on business books. Hopefully it's a sign of ongoing prosperity.
If you go into a typical Barnes and Noble or Borders, half the store is built to support the Oprah book club or the newest Harry Potter release. ( I should start another rant on what Oprah's philosophy really is, and it's cancerous, but I would have to defend it and don't have the time at the moment.) I mean, I guess there is a place for that kind of thing, but if you go to a bookstore in Milan or Zurich (or Paris or London for that matter) and look in the philosophy, history, or science sections, there will be an intelligent selection of books that represent good thinking in viewpoints. In the US, there is either an unintelligent selection that myopically represents a viewpoint, one that creates an artificial dichotomy for two viewpoints, an massive inventory that tries to represent all viewpoints equally (thereby absolving them of editorialism), but certainly no well considered inventory representing the best of some set of those worlds.
My cut on this is that we have too many marketers. These marketers are trying to be cunning. Education in the US focuses too much on being cunning and not enough on being wise. Cunning is a fools way of avoiding the work of being wise. And wisdom is both hard to accomplish and takes a long time. Marketers who try to be cunning are simply trying to sell products that they shouldn't be. Unfortunately their demographic representing total market of fools in the US is sufficiently large enough to carry onward. It must be like soccer fans in Europe. Consumerism is our Soccer. Consumers are the US's version of idiots. It's exasperating. In other words, we don't educate our people very well and they succeed because of confidence and spending rather than because of innovation.
The US used to house the great universities, great capitalists and risk takers. Now we're the leading economy largely because the average person is profoundly ignorant, and can afford to be so simply because by spending all his or her time in the act of consuming, he's decreasing prices enough to keep people in other countries working around the clock to meet production demands. I mean, there are Ponzi schemes and Ponzi Schemes, but this one is the mother of all Ponzi's, and when the Hayekian Knowledge Bill Collector shows up, the auditors are going to have a hard time figuring out who's going to jail. Because we'll have to wall in the entire continent, even though most of the people would run out in their hiking gear, prada accessories, and leveraged automobiles crying their innocence, while their undisciplined, day-care-raised children, steeped in the religion of consumerism and socialism, drag video games, out of bookless rooms, to the sound of exercise videos promising an end to obesity, with T shirts stained in multi-colored corn-syrup flavors, and with soccer, kung-fu, and Camp-Tillamuck appointments notices flapping in their nanny's hands. The worst part of this is the destruction of the boys, who, in an effort to not offend anyone, stand open eyed and expressionless hoping they didn't offend anyone as they tripped over the cord to their electric ATV's. And they stand there, whimpering and speechless as the iron gates close and the Ponzi-Court nails the sentence to the doors of the prison. I only hope those boys can find a few copies of The Lord Of The Flies, because they're going to read it as a personal biography, or an instruction manual, or both.
That's a long way of saying that I like the social order here in Europe better, but I like our economic freedom better at home. Each man pays for his own sins. Both the US and Europe will pay for different ones. I am not sure that theirs will be so severe.
Cheers
Curt
Zurich
(Note: I just read Max's post about his frustration with Airline Tickets, and well, I already think the guy walks on water, but, english isn't his first language, and he writes better than I do. Sigh. Something to aspire to. Anyway, I can't wait to see them in St Petersburg)
Dear blog;
Zurich. I have a new favorite city. Nice shops, sophisticated people. Well mannered. Great service in stores. The food was even better than here in Italy. Of course, one of the restaurants was Italian, but both were impeccable. Still impossible to navigate the place, even with a GPS system.
A few things I noticed:
1) The men are uncommonly fit, even for a city. Haircuts are short. Waiters are serious and fast moving. The cashier who runs the late night cafeteria on the highway is from Kansas. (I think her name was Dorothy. Either that or I needed the cappuccino to stay awake for the rest of the drive more than I though I did.) But seriously, the men are fit. There is clearly a social code here that says you have to run two miles a day if you're a banker. It must be in the Quals. The lawyers are all shoddy looking and have bad skin, but the bankers look like they play three sets of racquetball between meetings and have a shower in the back room. Their US counterparts at least in the investment banking community would wear shirts with less synthetic fibers. And you wouldn't put a client in a room without air conditioning in the US, even though they do not employ such common devices with abandon here. But they're all fit. I have gained ten pounds since May and I feel like a leper around here. On the way home I noticed a map of the alps with 35 equidistant hikes drawn out, and tried to marshal the will to do them like I was some teenager watching a bruce lee moving vowing to become a kung fu master. I am older now and know that such fantasies are just that. Instead I'll be more careful eating, and double my hikes. Not that I can do much about either while living in hotel rooms and eating restaurant food while adapting to jet lag over eleven time zones.
2) There are an oddly large number of men in their late fifties or early sixties that hang out in front of the brokerage houses and stare at tickers as if they were Amsterdam prostitutes They stand there for an hour. I mean, what's the point of making money like that? I guess if it's you're retirement and you see it as buying yourself days that's one thing, but otherwise I just don't see the whole point of living if that's what life consists of.
3) We met a woman who looks so much like someone from our office at home that it's almost disturbing. Here is her picture. She's born and raised in one of the German cantons. Same voice even. Same body language. Same smile. You know in the new version of Battlestar Galactica, how the Cylons are clones of each other? I sort of got that feeling. If I ever hear the real person say "By your command" (a Cylon favorite response) I'm going to shudder in fear and assume a nuclear attack is coming. In France, actually, in Brittany, which is technically only French by conquest, I met a dozen people that looked like me, enough that it was comforting. But certainly no dopplegangers. We live in the fantasy that we are chaotically special individuals. but in reality, there are X number of variables handed down and we do not seem to vary from them all that much. I have spent a lot of time learning about different ancient tribes and it is very clear to me that those same tribes walk around today, and while each member considers himself an individual according to the religion of the day, I simply see dog breeds acting on general tendencies that they were bred for, and tend to laugh to myself when each of us thinks we're innovative and special. I know my family well enough to know that I am a clone that goes back for a few hundred if not thousand years, and my son is an accurate clone of me only marginally different in terms of temporary experience, but his basic tendencies are as invariant as any template of such complexity could be.
4) The dollar is relatively week and it is clear why the euro is now more widely in demand than the dollar. The newspapers and magazines still see the US as the weather vane by which to run the social, political and economic universe, and English, because English is the language of the accounting, legal, finance and trade system put in place as far back as Elizabeth I. But the marginal difference in things is no where near what it was five, ten or twenty years ago. And we are NOT producing evolutionary knowledge faster than the rest of the world any longer.
5) Banking. This country is a bank. That's it's claim to fame. It oozes banking and finance. No dirty manufacturing or laborer problems here. Everything is tidy. While I'm not so happy that Germans have lost their desire to protect Europe (ne: christiandom) from "The East", and are making the country "east turkey" as fast as we are making the US "north Mexico", I am glad that this group of them chose Banking because the german character is perfect for it.
There are tickers in windows and banks the size and frequency of Starbucks in Seattle. Every designer has a store here. There are watches, watch stores, and whole magazine racks full of watch books. I wear fairly inexpensive watches (Skagen -denmark) because I break up to three of them a year, so I feel like I have a bad haircut and need to put on a hat, and deftly put my watch in my pocket so that I don't make a fashion heresy, or represent myself as some member of a lower caste.
But banking is what this city is about. And it made me wonder why we don't have relationships with our banks at home in the US. Of course, I know the answer: Computers.
Not that long ago, you didn't need a financial advisor, because the bank was run by local business people from the town, and employed fairly intelligent and talented people who could give you financial advice. Less than twenty years ago, you could still go into a bank and have them help you work out a plan to get out of debt, or finance a house or whatever. Now bankers are from the bottom third of their class, and if you're lucky they can speak English. A bank is a wallmart where you buy products, but none of those products is advice.
Want to make money? Open a chain of banks (it's quite easy really) that are franchises, where the president, and the team are local bankers, and where only a little of the money goes to the headquarters for administration expenses and necessary services like reinsurance. Let local people take the risk and reward for who they loan to. This might not work everywhere, but it would work in suburbia well, and certainly, one of the reasons we are such consumers is because we are operating in a financial vacuum. Money is everywhere, the people around us spend it, so we spend it. The government prints it for us like there is not tomorrow. The bankers lend it as if Santa delivers payments for people on Christmas morning. Few families today have had money for two or three generations and are passing down financial management knowledge as a key skill which has been done for centuries among the wealthy families. We are hiring accountants, tax men, and financial advisers to tell us common sense principles, and they are creating dogma, and code words as if they are scripture, that make these very common sense ideas seem mystical, and thereby keeping the masses ignorant, as if they are medieval catholic priests interpreting the bible for superstitious peasantry. The fact is that we cannot hide from our ignorance, or have our ignorance hidden from us forever. You want to fix our economy? Take computers out of banking centers, and make many small banks where loan officers are financial advisers. Pay them four times the median salary (they can earn it easily) plus a small commission. Let teams of wise people make decisions based upon their understanding of each individual. Make them responsible for the success of those people that they lend to. This is not an innovation.
During the computer revolution most banking became centralized. This did a couple of things. It took talent out of the local offices. And it created bureaucracies in large banks. The amount of money consumed by these headquarters offices in salary alone is staggering. On the other hand (and I don't have the reference) it appears that more than three quarters of the people in any main office of administration in any large bank, are actually useless. Meanwhile the average American has lost the one advisor that was truly important to him, and is denied a partnership with a person who can foster entrepreneurship and lifelong security.
Move computers out of large banking centers. These large banks only serve large companies and they hurt small business and consumers. They stifle innovation. They manufacture ignorance in the populace. They are one of the primary reasons for the downfall of western civilization.
I already have one company, and another in the wings. If I had one more to do, I would try to make this happen. I know that credit unions are of this variety, but there are not enough of them and there is not a good enough marketing campaign out there to redirect enough capital nationally, and to retrain our people. I could do it if I had another lifetime. Hopefully someone else will.
Now, if you're one of those people who thinks that this isnt financially viable I'll be happy to debate it with you. But it's pretty simple really.
The Swiss are not successful simply because of their privacy. Their successful for their customers service. I use schwab, and one other. But talking to them, while better than a normal bank, is still a bit like talking to the three stooges, and while they have financial advisers, trying to get financial advice out of them is laughable at best. They are simply community-college script readers following scripture from heaven and attempting to tell you that they possess some wisdom. they do not. Anyone who is very wise in this universe is not available to common people at any brokerage. and those that are cunning are people who you should not talk to. So you are left with the unwise, and the uncunning: the imbeciles who parrot what others have told them to, and they do nothing of value for you.
Curt
Dear blog;
Zurich. I have a new favorite city. Nice shops, sophisticated people. Well mannered. Great service in stores. The food was even better than here in Italy. Of course, one of the restaurants was Italian, but both were impeccable. Still impossible to navigate the place, even with a GPS system.
A few things I noticed:
1) The men are uncommonly fit, even for a city. Haircuts are short. Waiters are serious and fast moving. The cashier who runs the late night cafeteria on the highway is from Kansas. (I think her name was Dorothy. Either that or I needed the cappuccino to stay awake for the rest of the drive more than I though I did.) But seriously, the men are fit. There is clearly a social code here that says you have to run two miles a day if you're a banker. It must be in the Quals. The lawyers are all shoddy looking and have bad skin, but the bankers look like they play three sets of racquetball between meetings and have a shower in the back room. Their US counterparts at least in the investment banking community would wear shirts with less synthetic fibers. And you wouldn't put a client in a room without air conditioning in the US, even though they do not employ such common devices with abandon here. But they're all fit. I have gained ten pounds since May and I feel like a leper around here. On the way home I noticed a map of the alps with 35 equidistant hikes drawn out, and tried to marshal the will to do them like I was some teenager watching a bruce lee moving vowing to become a kung fu master. I am older now and know that such fantasies are just that. Instead I'll be more careful eating, and double my hikes. Not that I can do much about either while living in hotel rooms and eating restaurant food while adapting to jet lag over eleven time zones.
2) There are an oddly large number of men in their late fifties or early sixties that hang out in front of the brokerage houses and stare at tickers as if they were Amsterdam prostitutes They stand there for an hour. I mean, what's the point of making money like that? I guess if it's you're retirement and you see it as buying yourself days that's one thing, but otherwise I just don't see the whole point of living if that's what life consists of.
3) We met a woman who looks so much like someone from our office at home that it's almost disturbing. Here is her picture. She's born and raised in one of the German cantons. Same voice even. Same body language. Same smile. You know in the new version of Battlestar Galactica, how the Cylons are clones of each other? I sort of got that feeling. If I ever hear the real person say "By your command" (a Cylon favorite response) I'm going to shudder in fear and assume a nuclear attack is coming. In France, actually, in Brittany, which is technically only French by conquest, I met a dozen people that looked like me, enough that it was comforting. But certainly no dopplegangers. We live in the fantasy that we are chaotically special individuals. but in reality, there are X number of variables handed down and we do not seem to vary from them all that much. I have spent a lot of time learning about different ancient tribes and it is very clear to me that those same tribes walk around today, and while each member considers himself an individual according to the religion of the day, I simply see dog breeds acting on general tendencies that they were bred for, and tend to laugh to myself when each of us thinks we're innovative and special. I know my family well enough to know that I am a clone that goes back for a few hundred if not thousand years, and my son is an accurate clone of me only marginally different in terms of temporary experience, but his basic tendencies are as invariant as any template of such complexity could be.
4) The dollar is relatively week and it is clear why the euro is now more widely in demand than the dollar. The newspapers and magazines still see the US as the weather vane by which to run the social, political and economic universe, and English, because English is the language of the accounting, legal, finance and trade system put in place as far back as Elizabeth I. But the marginal difference in things is no where near what it was five, ten or twenty years ago. And we are NOT producing evolutionary knowledge faster than the rest of the world any longer.
5) Banking. This country is a bank. That's it's claim to fame. It oozes banking and finance. No dirty manufacturing or laborer problems here. Everything is tidy. While I'm not so happy that Germans have lost their desire to protect Europe (ne: christiandom) from "The East", and are making the country "east turkey" as fast as we are making the US "north Mexico", I am glad that this group of them chose Banking because the german character is perfect for it.
There are tickers in windows and banks the size and frequency of Starbucks in Seattle. Every designer has a store here. There are watches, watch stores, and whole magazine racks full of watch books. I wear fairly inexpensive watches (Skagen -denmark) because I break up to three of them a year, so I feel like I have a bad haircut and need to put on a hat, and deftly put my watch in my pocket so that I don't make a fashion heresy, or represent myself as some member of a lower caste.
But banking is what this city is about. And it made me wonder why we don't have relationships with our banks at home in the US. Of course, I know the answer: Computers.
Not that long ago, you didn't need a financial advisor, because the bank was run by local business people from the town, and employed fairly intelligent and talented people who could give you financial advice. Less than twenty years ago, you could still go into a bank and have them help you work out a plan to get out of debt, or finance a house or whatever. Now bankers are from the bottom third of their class, and if you're lucky they can speak English. A bank is a wallmart where you buy products, but none of those products is advice.
Want to make money? Open a chain of banks (it's quite easy really) that are franchises, where the president, and the team are local bankers, and where only a little of the money goes to the headquarters for administration expenses and necessary services like reinsurance. Let local people take the risk and reward for who they loan to. This might not work everywhere, but it would work in suburbia well, and certainly, one of the reasons we are such consumers is because we are operating in a financial vacuum. Money is everywhere, the people around us spend it, so we spend it. The government prints it for us like there is not tomorrow. The bankers lend it as if Santa delivers payments for people on Christmas morning. Few families today have had money for two or three generations and are passing down financial management knowledge as a key skill which has been done for centuries among the wealthy families. We are hiring accountants, tax men, and financial advisers to tell us common sense principles, and they are creating dogma, and code words as if they are scripture, that make these very common sense ideas seem mystical, and thereby keeping the masses ignorant, as if they are medieval catholic priests interpreting the bible for superstitious peasantry. The fact is that we cannot hide from our ignorance, or have our ignorance hidden from us forever. You want to fix our economy? Take computers out of banking centers, and make many small banks where loan officers are financial advisers. Pay them four times the median salary (they can earn it easily) plus a small commission. Let teams of wise people make decisions based upon their understanding of each individual. Make them responsible for the success of those people that they lend to. This is not an innovation.
During the computer revolution most banking became centralized. This did a couple of things. It took talent out of the local offices. And it created bureaucracies in large banks. The amount of money consumed by these headquarters offices in salary alone is staggering. On the other hand (and I don't have the reference) it appears that more than three quarters of the people in any main office of administration in any large bank, are actually useless. Meanwhile the average American has lost the one advisor that was truly important to him, and is denied a partnership with a person who can foster entrepreneurship and lifelong security.
Move computers out of large banking centers. These large banks only serve large companies and they hurt small business and consumers. They stifle innovation. They manufacture ignorance in the populace. They are one of the primary reasons for the downfall of western civilization.
I already have one company, and another in the wings. If I had one more to do, I would try to make this happen. I know that credit unions are of this variety, but there are not enough of them and there is not a good enough marketing campaign out there to redirect enough capital nationally, and to retrain our people. I could do it if I had another lifetime. Hopefully someone else will.
Now, if you're one of those people who thinks that this isnt financially viable I'll be happy to debate it with you. But it's pretty simple really.
The Swiss are not successful simply because of their privacy. Their successful for their customers service. I use schwab, and one other. But talking to them, while better than a normal bank, is still a bit like talking to the three stooges, and while they have financial advisers, trying to get financial advice out of them is laughable at best. They are simply community-college script readers following scripture from heaven and attempting to tell you that they possess some wisdom. they do not. Anyone who is very wise in this universe is not available to common people at any brokerage. and those that are cunning are people who you should not talk to. So you are left with the unwise, and the uncunning: the imbeciles who parrot what others have told them to, and they do nothing of value for you.
Curt
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