Month: December 2015

Comedians Censored on College Campuses

(p. A3) Stars such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld have said they don’t play college shows anymore because the audiences are too easily offended. Schools now often have contracts that forbid performers from using certain words or even broaching entire subjects.
. . .
Alvin Williams, who is from Chicago, said he did some college shows this year, after largely swearing off them for cruise ships about three years ago. He had been doing a lot of what he regarded as G-rated material, but was shocked to find even that could be offensive on campus.
“I’d never thought I’d see the day when family-friendly material is not appropriate for college kids,” said Mr. Williams.
. . .
Mr. Williams said he no longer mimics Indian or Chinese accents or tells jokes about camels. He believes the only reason Apu, the Indian convenience-store owner on the television show “The Simpsons,” still exists is because he has been grandfathered in and audiences are used to him.
The increasing sensitivity is being driven by peer pressure, Mr. Williams said. “They think, if I’m not offended by this then I’m not a good friend,” he said. “If I tell a joke about black people, whites are more likely to get more offended.”
Mr. Williams, who is black, refuses to jettison all his racial material, but is more apt to focus the joke on himself. One of his favorites: “I hate stereotypes with a passion,” he deadpans. “The problem is I love fried chicken.”

For the full story, see:
DOUGLAS BELKIN. “Comedy at College Is Often No Laughing Matter.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 13, 2015): A3.
(Note: ellipses added. The online version of the article is much longer than the print version. A couple of the paragraphs quoted above, appear only in the online version.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 12, 2015, and has the title “For Stand-Up Comedians, Shows on Campus Are Often No Joke.”)

Venture Capital Backed Unicorns that Become Unicorpses

(p. 1) The technology industry’s boom over the last few years has been defined by the rise of “unicorns,” the private companies that investors have valued at $1 billion or more. Before the term came into vogue, LivingSocial was among the biggest unicorns of its day. It now offers a glimpse of what some of today’s unicorns might look like several years down the road if things go awry.
. . .
Venture capitalists anointed daily deals as the way that the Internet would invade local business, and by late 2011 LivingSocial had raised more than $800 million and reached a valuation of $4.5 billion, according to data from the research firm VC Experts. The company counted Amazon and the mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price among its investors. LivingSocial spent heavily, blanketing the airwaves with TV ad campaigns. Riding a wave of momentum, the company explored going public.
Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn. The company never filed for an initial public offering and consumer fervor for daily deals has cooled. T. Rowe Price has written down its stake in LivingSocial to nearly zero, data from Morningstar shows. The company’s work force has shrunk to around 800 employees from 4,500 at its peak in 2011. (Groupon, which did go public, is trading at more than 85 percent below its I.P.O. price.)
. . .
LivingSocial may soon have more company. There are now 142 unicorns that are together valued at around $500 billion, according to the research firm CB Insights. Some of those highly valued start-ups are starting to show some cracks.
Snapchat, the messaging company, and Dropbox, the online storage business, were recently marked down in value by mutual fund investors. Zenefits, a human resources start-up, has said it missed sales targets and that it is slowing its hiring. On Wednesday, the payments company Square, which was valued at $6 billion by private investors last year, priced its public offering at $2.9 billion. Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital have warned that a unicorn shakeout is coming.

For the full commentary, see:
MIKE ISAAC and KATIE BENNER. “LivingSocial Offers a Cautionary Tale to Today’s Unicorns.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., NOV. 22, 2015): 1 & 9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on NOV. 21, 2015. The wording of the last quoted sentence is slightly different in the print and online versions. The version above is the online version.)

Bezos Built Amazon with Methodical Patience

(p. B1) There is a simple explanation for Amazon’s rise, and also a second, more complicated one. The simple story involves Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing business, which rents out vast amounts of server space to other companies. Amazon began disclosing A.W.S.’s financial performance in April, and the numbers showed that selling server space was a much bigger business than anyone had realized. Deutsche Bank estimates that A.W.S., which is less than a decade old, could soon be worth $160 billion as a stand-alone company. That’s more valuable than Intel.
Yet the disclosure of A.W.S.’s size has obscured a deeper change at Amazon. For years, observers have wondered if Amazon’s shopping business — you know, its main business — could ever really work. Investors gave (p. B11) Mr. Bezos enormous leeway to spend billions building out a distribution-center infrastructure, but it remained a semi-open question if the scale and pace of investments would ever pay off. Could this company ever make a whole lot of money selling so much for so little?
As we embark upon another holiday shopping season, the answer is becoming clear: Yes, Amazon can make money selling stuff. In the flood of rapturous reviews from stock analysts over the company’s earnings report last month, several noted that Amazon’s retail operations had reached a “critical scale” or an “inflection point.” They meant that Amazon’s enormous investments in infrastructure and logistics have begun to pay off. The company keeps capturing a larger slice of American and even international purchases. It keeps attracting more users to its Prime fast-shipping subscription program, and, albeit slowly, it is beginning to scratch out higher profits from shoppers.
. . .
Why is Amazon so far ahead? It is difficult to resist marveling at the way Mr. Bezos has built his indomitable shopping machine, and the very real advantages in price and convenience that he has brought to America’s national pastime of buying stuff. What has been key to this rise, and missing from many of his competitors’ efforts, is patience. In a very old-fashioned manner, one that is far out of step with a corporate world in which milestones are measured every three months, Amazon has been willing to build its empire methodically and at great cost over almost two decades, despite skepticism from many sectors of the business world.

For the full commentary, see:
Manjoo, Farhad. “STATE OF THE ART; Long Game at Amazon Produces Juggernaut.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 19, 2015): B1 & B11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 18, 2015, and has the title “STATE OF THE ART; How Amazon’s Long Game Yielded a Retail Juggernaut.”)

Do Entrepreneurial Results Excuse Entrepreneurial Arrogance?

(p. A1) Robert Whaley is a professor of finance at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management and the developer of the two major so-called fear indices — the VIX and VXN on the Chicago Board Options Exchange — that are used to make bets on market volatility.

READING Right now it’s “Becoming Steve Jobs,” by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. It has a somewhat different take than Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs.” I felt Isaacson’s version was a little negative. But what the books have in common is that Jobs was sheer genius. So what if he was arrogant? Consider what he’s done. We wouldn’t have iPhones and iPads if it wasn’t for his vision. I absolutely think that excuses his behavior. If everyone just wanted for people to look back and say you were kind, how would we move forward?

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “Download: Robert Whaley.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., SEPT. 6, 2015): 2.
(Note: the bold above is in the original. The first paragraph quoted above was written by the interviewer Kate Murphy. The paragraph following the word “Reading” is the response by the interviewee Robert Whaley.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date SEPT. 5, 2015.)

The Steve Jobs books mentioned by Whaley, are:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Schlender, Brent, and Rick Tetzeli. Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. New York: Crown Business, 2015.

Those Who Try Japanese Toilets, Praise Them with “Cultish Devotion”

(p. D12) Last year, Bennett Friedman, who owns a plumbing showroom in Manhattan called AF New York, took a business trip to Milan. On the morning of his return he faced a choice: stop in the bathroom there or wait until he got home. The flight was nine hours. He waited.
The move seems almost masochistic. But in his home and office bathrooms, Mr. Friedman had installed a Toto washlet. To sit upon a standard commode, he said, would be like “going back to the Stone Age.”
“It feels very uncivilized,” he said.
For those who own Japanese toilets, there is a cultish devotion. They boast heated seats, a bidet function for a rear cleanse and an air-purifying system that deodorizes during use. The need for toilet paper is virtually eliminated (there is an air dryer) and “you left the lid up” squabbles need never take place (the seat lifts and closes automatically in many models).
. . .
Most washlet owners, then, are converted after trying one out in the world. At a boutique hotel, say, or on a trip to Asia.
Such was the case with Robert Aboulache. Before he and his family went on a vacation to Japan, he said, friends who had visited the country told him he would love the toilets. “I thought, ‘How great can the toilets be?'” Mr. Aboulache said. “They were amazing. Some have noisemakers to cover up the sound. You can pivot that little sprayer. The water can be heated or not. We got home, and I thought, ‘This is not the same.'”
Three days later, Mr. Aboulache went online and bought a Toto washlet, which he installed in the shared upstairs bathroom of his home in Los Angeles as a surprise for his wife and son.
“We’ve been delighted,” he said. “It’s our favorite toilet.”
. . .
Mr. Friedman, too, is an enthusiastic proselytizer for washlets, in his showroom and out in social situations, something you gather he would do even if he didn’t sell them.
Whenever he talks about their virtues, he said, “I feel like one of the Apostles passing the word of God.”

For the full story, see:
STEVEN KURUTZ. “For Its Devotees, the Seat of Luxury.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 19, 2015): D12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 18, 2015, and has the title “The Cult of the Toto Toilet.”)

Spontaneous Mummification in San Bernardo Is Unexplained

Some claim that science has gone about as far as it can go. The claim is often a step in an argument for pessimism on the future of technological progress. But that claim has been made many times in the past, and so far has always proven wrong. There’s plenty of phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation, implying that there is plenty of room for the advance of science. Mostly we ignore or forget these phenomena, because it causes cognitive dissonance for us to carry around facts that do not fit into our current theories. Add spontaneous mummification in San Bernardo to the list.

(p. A14) Locals and mummification experts agree San Bernardo is a somewhat unlikely place for what’s known as spontaneous mummification, a phenomenon that occurs naturally, without embalming fluids and other techniques. The climate here is neither excessively dry, like in Northern Africa, nor freezing, like the Alpine environment that preserved Otzi the Iceman, a prehistoric body found in 1991.
San Bernardo’s temperature hovers around 70 degrees during the day, with enough rainfall to support crops like corn, onions, and green beans.
Cemetery workers here began noticing the mummification phenomenon in the mid-1960s, after a new graveyard was built. In Colombia, due to both tradition and earth that is often too soggy for proper burial, it is typical to inter loved ones in aboveground cement vaults, called bovedas. The bodies are generally removed after about five years because of space constraints and regulations.
Bodies in such vaults usually deteriorate significantly after a year or two, but that hasn’t been the case in San Bernardo–where it is believed that most of those buried in vaults are at least partially mummified.
“Hmmm,” said Ronn Wade, a member of the World Congress on Mummy Studies, an international organization, when asked about San Bernardo’s spontaneous mummification. “It could be dietary, environmental, or even the concrete of the vaults where they are stored.”
“It would be nice to have an explanation,” added Mr. Wade, who directs the anatomical services department of the University of Maryland.
. . .
“Whatever it is, it’s very local,” said Gonzalo Correal, a professor at Bogota’s Academy of Natural Sciences, who has studied San Bernardo’s mummies.

For the full story, see:
SARA SCHAEFER MUÑOZ. “In Small Colombian Town, People Love Their Mummies; Preserved bodies attract tourists, but remain a mystery; something in the diet?” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Oct. 1, 2015): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated on Sept. 30, 2015, and has the title “In This Small Colombian Town, People Love Their Mummies; Preserved bodies of people born in roughly the last hundred years become tourist attraction.”)

Health Care Mandate “Freezes You at a Time When You Need to Be Moving Fast”

(p. B4) When LaRonda Hunter opened a Fantastic Sams hair salon 10 years ago in Saginaw, Tex., a suburb of Fort Worth, she envisioned it as the first of what would eventually be a small regional collection of salons. As her sales grew, so did her business, which now encompasses four locations — but her plans for a fifth salon are frozen, perhaps permanently.

Starting in January, the Affordable Care Act requires businesses with 50 or more full-time-equivalent employees to offer workers health insurance or face penalties that can exceed $2,000 per employee. Ms. Hunter, who has 45 employees, is determined not to cross that threshold. Paying for health insurance would wipe out her company’s profit and the five-figure salary she pays herself from it, she said.
“The margins are not big enough within our industry to support it,” she said. “It’s not that I don’t want to — I love my employees, and I want to do everything I can for them — but the numbers just don’t work.”
. . .
For some business owners on the edge of the cutoff, the mandate is forcing them to weigh very carefully the price of growing bigger.
“There’s kind of a deer-in-headlights moment for those who say, ‘I have this new potential client, but if I bring them on, I have to hire five additional people,'” said Philip P. Noftsinger, the payroll unit president at CBIZ, a financial services provider for businesses. “They’re really trying to assess how much the 50th employee is going to cost.”
. . .
For businesses that use many seasonal, variable-hour or temporary workers, like those in the hospitality industry, simply figuring out how many qualifying employees they have can be a challenge.
“I think companies are going to have to work with their payroll processor for the basic data, and then their accountant or attorney about what certain items mean,” Mr. Prince said.
The expense and distraction of all that paperwork is one of the biggest frustrations for one business owner, Joseph P. Sergio. His industrial cleaning company, Polar Clean, which is based in South Bend, Ind., but dispatches teams nationally, has just under 50 core employees. One of its business lines is disaster restoration, and after a flood or hurricane, its temporary staff balloons.
Mr. Sergio offers health insurance to his permanent staff, but the premiums have risen so quickly that he had to switch to a more restrictive plan, with a higher deductible. He is reluctant to go over the 50-employee line and incur all of the new rules that come with it. That makes bidding for new jobs an arduous and risky exercise.
“I’ve had to pull my controller and a couple of top people to sit and spend days going through this,” he said. “If you ramp up, and it pushes you over 50, there’s all these unknown costs and complicated rules. Are we really going to be able to benefit from going after that opportunity? It freezes you at a time when you need to be moving fast.”

For the full story, see:
STACY COWLEY. “ENTREPRENEURSHIP; Health Care Law Leads Business Owners to Rethink Plans for Growth.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 19, 2015): B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 18, 2015, and has the title “ENTREPRENEURSHIP; Health Care Law Forces Businesses to Consider Growth’s Costs.”)

Quiet Author Founds Start-Up to Help Introverts

(p. 10) Last month, 50 executives from General Electric gathered on the fourth floor of a SoHo office building for a “fireside chat” with Susan Cain, the author of the 2012 book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” which has sold two million copies worldwide.
. . .
A talk about “Quiet” she gave at a 2012 TED conference has been viewed more than 11.6 million times online. And she has delivered more than 100 speeches since then, sometimes commanding five figures for an appearance. (She also does pro bono work, she stressed.)
. . .
“Writing a book is rewarding,” Mr. Godin said he told her. “But it doesn’t change most people’s lives.”
And so Ms. Cain, who has been coached in public speaking, is now promoting Quiet Revolution, a for-profit company she has started that is focused on the work, education and lifestyle of introverts, which she defines roughly as people who get their psychic energy from quiet reflection and solitude (not to be confused with people who are shy and become anxious in unfamiliar social situations). Extroverts, by contrast, thrive in crowds and have long been prized in society for their ability to command attention. Many people share attributes of both, she said.
Ms. Cain and Paul Scibetta, a former senior executive at J. P. Morgan Chase whom she met when they both worked at the law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in the 1990s, have set up a Quiet Leadership Institute, working with executives at organizations like NASA, Procter & Gamble and General Electric to help them better understand the strengths of their introverted employees.
. . .
Mike Erwin, a former professor of leadership and psychology at West Point who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, invited Ms. Cain to speak to cadets in 2012 after he finished reading “Quiet.” He didn’t understand students who were reticent to talk in class or who wanted to explore every risk before jumping into a task. “I’m an extrovert,” he said. “And, as I look back at my career, I wrote off a lot of people who didn’t speak up or want to be in charge.”
In May, he was appointed chief executive of the Quiet Leadership Institute, where he is helping project managers at NASA learn how to lead teams populated with introverts (a common personality type in science). At Procter & Gamble, Mr. Erwin said, executives in research and development are exploring, among other things, how to help introverts become more confident leaders.

For the full story, see:
LAURA M. HOLSON. “Instigating a ‘Quiet Revolution’ of Introverts.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sun., JULY 26, 2015): 10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 25, 2015, and has the title “Susan Cain Instigates a ‘Quiet Revolution’ of Introverts.”)

The Cain book mentioned above, is:
Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012.

How Democratic Operatives Fight Innovation-Crushing Regulations

(p. B1) SAN FRANCISCO — Over the last few years, so-called sharing companies like Airbnb and Uber — online platforms that allow strangers to pay one another for a room or a ride — have established footholds in thousands of communities well before local regulators have figured out how to deal with them.

. . .
Chris Lehane, a Washington political operative who now serves as Airbnb’s head of global policy and public affairs, framed Proposition F (p. B10) as a hotel-industry-led attack on the middle class.
In this city of about 840,000 people, roughly $8 million was raised by groups opposed to Proposition F — about eight times the amount raised by the proposition’s backers, according to records filed with the San Francisco Ethics Commission.
Much of that money was spent mobilizing Airbnb hosts and users, Mr. Lehane said. Still, he repeatedly homed in on one of the company’s most important talking points: Airbnb’s victory was a win for the middle class.
“Cities recognize where the world is going, right, they understand that you’re either going to go forward or you’re going to go backward,” he said. “They understand that in a time of economic inequality, this is a question of whose side are you on: Do you want to be on the side of the middle class, or do you want to be opposed to the middle class?”
. . .
Companies like Airbnb and Uber have become multibillion-dollar companies by employing a kind of guerrilla growth strategy in which they set up a modest team of workers in a city and immediately start providing their services to the public, whether local laws allow them to or not.
. . .
Mr. Lehane, a former political operative in the Clinton administration, was nicknamed the Master of Disaster for his no-holds-barred approach to winning political fights. David Plouffe, a former adviser to President Obama, is now a senior adviser to Uber and a member of its board.
Mr. Lehane and Mr. Plouffe have both tried to frame their companies as middle-class saviors in a moment of economic anxiety and income inequality — themes that are playing out in the presidential election as well. Jeb Bush and other Republicans have bragged about their Uber rides on the campaign trail, praising these companies as the future of self-sufficient employment.

For the full story, see:
CONOR DOUGHERTY and MIKE ISAAC. “Airbnb and Uber Mobilize Vast User Base to Sway Policy.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 5, 2015): B1 & B10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 4, 2015.)

Environmentalists’ Mandatory Green-Bins Succeed at Breeding Smarter Raccoons

(p. A1) TORONTO–Last fall, Suzanne MacDonald spent a week tempting raccoons into her Toronto-area backyard every night with rotisserie chickens locked inside organic-waste bins.
At one point, “I had like 12 raccoons on one bin trying to get in,” said Ms. MacDonald, an animal behavior researcher who was testing bin prototypes for the city. None succeeded, she said, but “they did try mightily.”
. . .
The battle between the city’s residents and its backyard wildlife is increasingly playing out over the disposal of organic waste. Residents’ green bins–which the city collects weekly at the curb–offer a smorgasbord for raccoons and have helped their numbers increase. Torontonians say it is tough to keep the (p. A8) bins sealed and the animals away.
. . .
“The members of Raccoon Nation are smart, they’re hungry and they’re determined,” Mayor John Tory told reporters in April when he unveiled the new green bins. The bins, which feature a turn lock, will cost the city 31 million Canadian dollars ($23.6 million) and are to be rolled out next year.
. . .
Toronto was one of the first North American cities to introduce a mandatory green-bin program, as part of an effort to keep local landfills from overflowing and after years of a highly contentious cross-border garbage-disposal program in Michigan.
. . .
Ms. MacDonald believes the growing intelligence of Toronto’s raccoons may be linked to the efforts people have put into outwitting them.
Her research, which has received financial backing from the National Geographic Society, suggests urban raccoons are smarter than their “country cousins,” driven to new heights of intelligence by the humans working so diligently to outsmart them by creating obstacles.
“We’re creating our environment in such a way that they have to be able to figure them out in order to survive,” she said, “and those that figure them out will be smart and survive and pass on to their offspring.”

For the full story, see:
JANE GERSTER. “Toronto Vows to Outsmart Its Raccoons; Hoping to stymie critters, city will roll out new green bins; ‘Defeat is not an option’.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Aug. 24, 2015): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated on Aug. 23, 2015, and has the title “Toronto Vows to Outsmart Its Raccoons; Hoping to stymie critters, city will roll out new green bins; ‘Defeat is not an option’.”)

The Morality of Denying Hope to 30 Million Guanggun

(p. A4) One wife, many husbands.
That’s the solution to China’s huge surplus of single men, says Xie Zuoshi, an economics professor at the Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, whose recent proposal to allow polyandry has gone viral.
. . .
By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors — called guanggun, or “bare branches.” Birth control policies that since 1979 have limited many families to one child, a cultural preference for boys and the widespread, if illegal, practice of sex-selective abortion have contributed to a gender imbalance that hovers around 117 boys born for every 100 girls.
Though some could perhaps detect a touch of Jonathan Swift in the proposal, Mr. Xie wrote that he was approaching the problem from a purely economic point of view.
Many men, especially poor ones, he noted, are unable to find a wife and have children, and are condemned to living and dying without offspring to support them in old age, as children are required to do by law in China. But he believes there is a solution.
. . .
“With so many guanggun, women are in short supply and their value increases,” he wrote. “But that doesn’t mean the market can’t be adjusted. The guanggun problem is actually a problem of income. High-income men can find a woman because they can pay a higher price. What about low-income men? One solution is to have several take a wife together.”
He added: “That’s not just my weird idea. In some remote, poor places, brothers already marry the same woman, and they have a full and happy life.”
. . .
On Sunday [October 25, 2015], he published an indignant rebuttal on one of his blogs, accusing his critics of being driven by empty notions of traditional morality that are impractical and selfish — even hypocritical.
“Because I promoted the idea that we should allow poor men to marry the same woman to solve the problem of 30 million guanggun, I’ve been endlessly abused,” he wrote. “People have even telephoned my university to harass me. These people have groundlessly accused me of promoting immoral and unethical ideas.
“If you can’t find a solution that doesn’t violate traditional morality,” he continued, “then why do you criticize me for violating traditional morality? You are in favor of a couple made up of one man, one woman. But your morality will lead to 30 million guanggun with no hope of finding a wife. Is that your so-called morality?”

For the full story, see:
DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW. “Bachelor Glut in China Leads to a Proposal: Share Wives.” The New York Times (Tues., OCTOBER 27, 2015): A4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCTOBER 26, 2015, and has the title “Not Enough Women in China? Let Men Share a Wife, an Economist Suggests.”)