Art Diamond – Page 68 – artdiamondblog.com

United Airlines CEO Gave Up on Flying United Airlines

United Airlines had major flight cancellations on Sun., June 25, 2023, on the day we were to fly United through O’Hare airport on our way to a European trip. Stress, exhaustion, chaos. United Airlines chaos continued for days. My brain has not yet totally processed the story quoted below. My gut, on the other hand, wants the CEO of United Airlines to be fired.

(p. B11) United Airlines Chief Executive Scott Kirby apologized for taking a private jet from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Denver this week as his airline grappled with widespread weather disruptions.

“Taking a private jet was the wrong decision because it was insensitive to our customers who were waiting to get home,” Kirby said in a statement Friday. “I sincerely apologize to our customers and our team members who have been working around-the-clock for several days—often through severe weather—to take care of our customers.”

A United spokeswoman said Kirby took the flight Wednesday because he was unable to secure a seat on a commercial flight. The company didn’t pay for the private flight, she said.

Wednesday was a hectic day for United: The carrier canceled over 750 mainline flights, according to FlightAware, over a quarter of what it had scheduled. The night before, a long stretch of bad storms in New York led to logjams at the area’s airports, including United’s Newark hub.

Some travelers over the past week have been stranded for days while waiting for space on flights home, in some cases sleeping in the airport. Travelers said they spent hours waiting in line for assistance or to be reunited with checked bags.

For the full story, see:

Alison Sider. “United CEO Apologizes for Flying on Private Jet Amid Airline’s Cancellations.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 1, 2023): B11.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 30, 2023, and has the title “United Airlines CEO Apologizes for Taking Private Jet During Flight Disruptions.”)

Will Humans Flourish if Easements Restrict How Inherited Property Is Used?

My mentor at Wabash College, Ben Rogge, was a friend of Pierre Goodrich, the founder of Liberty Fund. They both were great admirers of Adam Smith. Adam Smith believed that inherited property should not be encumbered with restrictions on how future generations used the property. The practice is sometimes called ‘ruling with a dead hand.’ When Liberty Fund was proposed, Rogge suggested that it be set up so that all of the funds would be exhausted at some pre-established time after Goodrich’s death. On this one proposal, Rogge failed to convince Goodrich of the wisdom of Adam Smith’s advice.

Rogge was a supporter of Schumpeter’s idea that we flourish through creative destruction. Progress through creative destruction is harder to accomplish if inherited property is encumbered by ‘ruling with a dead hand.’ Rogge feared that as the decades passed, the inheritors of Liberty Fund would eventually, and substantially, diverge from Goodrich’s original values and hopes. Liberty Fund money helped Rogge make a movie on Adam Smith. Rogge sadly joked that eventually the inheritors of Liberty Fund would probably support making a movie on a famous socialist.

(I can’t remember the name of the socialist who Rogge jokingly mentioned, but I vaguely, vaguely think it might have been Ethel Rosenberg.)

(I base the lines above on my memories of comments by Ben Rogge in conversations and lectures.)

(p. M1) “After me, there won’t be any others,” says Roland Reisley, absorbing what it means to be the last original occupant of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Reisley is sitting in his hexagonal living room on a rocky hill near Pleasantville, N.Y.

. . .

(p. M4) Despite the house’s pristine condition, the one thing he can’t do is turn it into a museum. It is part of a Westchester County neighborhood laid out by Wright himself in the late 1940s. The community, which Wright named Usonia, never achieved its founders’ ambitions—to become a kind of exurban co-op where everything was owned in common—but it is still a tightly knit community of 47 homes with shared amenities such as a pool and tennis courts. “The residents would not agree to a museum,” Reisley says.

. . .

But if he can’t turn it into a museum, he can execute a preservation easement, a legal document that will prevent future owners from making changes to the house.

. . .

Asked why he hasn’t executed an easement yet, after talking about doing so for years, Reisley says he is “trying to find language that protects what’s important but allows for some reasonable changes to be made. I am going to do it,” Reisley says. “I just haven’t gotten around to doing it. I’m a procrastinator.”

Then, too, his only living child has expressed concerns. Robert Reisley, a 65-year-old entrepreneur and private-equity investor in Philadelphia, says, “I don’t have an issue with a preservation easement on the exterior of the house.” But he says it’s possible he and his wife, or one of their adult children, might want to live in the house. “We might need to make a few necessary changes to the interior. And we might not be able to get permission. That’s my hesitation.”

For example, he says, “The hallway to the bedrooms is very dark. Wright was practical. If we’d asked him, he would have said, ‘Put a skylight there.’ But Wright’s not around, and the conservancy might not allow it.”

. . .

In Minneapolis, the Olfelt house was on the market for two years before a local couple with grown children bought it for $1.2 million in the Spring of 2018. Several months later, they filed plans with the city to add a 1,500-square-foot, $2 million wing to the original 2,600-square-foot house and alter some of the original interiors.

. . .

The Juneks created a website, olfelthouse.info, to explain their intentions. “The impetus for the addition and the minimal interior renovations,” they wrote, “is to address the meager space allocated to the master bedroom, to expand the kitchen to accommodate a large multi-generation family, and to ensure that the home be comfortable, accessible, and safe for aging in place.” The renovation was designed by the New York architecture firm Thread Collective. Photos on the firm’s website show a dining room in a space that used to contain Wright’s tiny galley kitchen, and a spacious new kitchen in what used to be two children’s bedrooms. The addition, which contains a master-bedroom suite over a new garage, is visible mainly from the back of the house. “We have now been living in the house for three years, are very happy with the results of the project,” John Junek wrote in an email.

. . .

Robert and Mary Walton chose not to burden their six children with a preservation easement, the same choice made by Gerte Shavin, Bette Pappas, and the Olfelts. All of them died knowing they had no control over the future of their houses. “Its fate is entirely in the hands of the next owner,” Paul Olfelt told me in a phone message after vacating his house in 2017. Sounding emotional, he added, “I think we were good stewards of the house, and we assume that anyone who buys it will be the same.”

Reisley still has a chance to execute an easement. Will he? The easement would operate in perpetuity, and perpetuity, the 99-year-old homeowner says, “is a very long time.”

For the full story, see:

Fred A. Bernstein. “The Last Original Owner of a Frank Lloyd Wright House.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 30, 2023): M1 & M4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 27, 2023, and has the title “Frank Lloyd Wright Built 120 Homes Near the End of His Life. Just One Original Owner Remains.”)

Unsound Trucking Firm “Blew Through” $700 Million of Federal Covid “Bailout” Loan

(p. A4) The Treasury Department erred in giving a loan to a troubled trucking company as part of a 2020 Covid-19 rescue package and should refrain from similar sector-specific loan programs in the future, according to a new congressional report.

Yellow, a trucking company, received a $700 million loan from the Treasury Department as part of an aid program for private industries included in bipartisan legislation known as the Cares Act enacted early in the pandemic.

But Treasury had to skirt the program’s rules to make the loan, the report said. The agency designated Yellow—then known as YRC Worldwide—as critical to national security even though the company didn’t meet the standard for that designation, the report said.

. . .

In exchange for the loan, Treasury received a roughly 30% stake in the company.

. . .

At the time of the loan the company was rated noninvestment grade by Moody’s Investors Service and was at risk of bankruptcy, according to the report.

. . .

In recent months, Yellow has again suffered from the broader freight slowdown.

. . .

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said the union is abiding by the terms of its contract with the company.

“After decades of gross mismanagement, Yellow blew through a $700 million bailout from the federal government, and now it wants workers to foot the bill,” O’Brien said in a statement.

For the full story, see:

David Harrison. “Treasury Faulted for Loan to Troubled Trucking Firm.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 28, 2023): A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 27, 2023, and has the title “Treasury Shouldn’t Have Given Pandemic Aid to Trucking Company, Report Finds.”)

As Worms Return to Arctic, Some Life Forms Will Thrive and Others Will Not

(p. A1) Worms are on the move, and people are nervous.

That’s because they’re taking over territory in the Far North that’s been wormless since the last ice age.

. . .

Because of changes in the chemistry and physics of the ground, grasses and shrubby plants tend to thrive, taking over from tundra mosses and lichens. That’s good news for the lemmings and voles that favor such plants, according to Hanna Jonsson, an ecology researcher at Umea University. But probably not good for other herbivores that might not adapt easily to a change in available food.

For the full story, see:

Sofia Quaglia. “Worms Haven’t Lived in the Arctic Since the Last Ice Age. But Now, They’re Back.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 15, 2023): A10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 14, 2023, and has the title “Some Squirmy Stowaways Got to the Arctic. And They Like It There.”)

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Seeks to Bury Merging Firms in Paperwork

(p. A13) The Federal Trade Commission is trying to make it harder for companies to merge by burying them in paperwork. The FTC’s proposed overhaul of a critical part of the U.S. merger review process would increase the average time to prepare a merger filing from 37 hours to 144. According to the agency’s calculations, that’s roughly $350 million in added costs for an estimated 7,100 filings a year, which would be a boon for lawyers but a burden for businesses.

The one-size-fits-all proposal to add dozens of hours of paperwork per deal—regardless of competitive concerns—is an overreach by the FTC and the Justice Department’s antitrust division that will disproportionately chill investments at the lower end of the reporting threshold.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Williams and Henry Hauser. “Antitrust Officials Pile on the Paperwork.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 5, 2023): A13.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 4, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Portland Feels “Unsafe” and “There’s Trash Everywhere”

(p. A3) PORTLAND, Ore.—Mark Rogers has made a list of things he misses about Portland—its vegan restaurants, Powell’s bookstore, public transit—and the things he doesn’t—having his things stolen, stepping in human excrement, extreme politics.

The 44-year-old artist moved across the country to Fort Wayne, Ind., last year.

“I don’t want to talk trash about my home city even though there’s trash everywhere,” Rogers said.

. . .

Andrea Lamprecht, 50, a cardiac nurse, said she was chased by a homeless man while out on a jog in her Alameda neighborhood on the east side of Portland, where the median home price hovers around $1 million.

She and her husband, Derek Lamprecht, an orthopedic surgeon, had raised their children in Portland. The chasing incident contributed to the couple’s decision to move to a quiet rural area about 10 miles outside the city in 2021. “It never felt unsafe before,” said Derek Lamprecht. “The character of the city changed.”

For the full story, see:

Zusha Elinson. “Disenchanted Portland Residents Leave the City.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, June 29, 2023): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 28, 2023, and has the title “Portland Is Losing Its Residents.”)

New 98% Reflective White Paint Can End Global Warming

(p. A1) In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.

The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside build-(p. A12)ings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

. . .

. . ., scientists have been urgently working to develop reflective materials, including different types of coatings and films, that could passively cool the Earth. The materials rely on principles of physics that allow thermal energy to travel from Earth along specific wavelengths through what’s known as the transparency or sky window in the atmosphere, and out into deep space.

Jeremy Munday, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis, who researches clean technology, said this redirection would barely affect space. The sun already emits more than a billion times more heat than the Earth, he said, and this method merely reflects heat already generated by the sun. “It’d be like pouring a cup of regular water into the ocean,” Dr. Munday said.

He calculated that if materials such as Purdue’s ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth’s surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.

. . .

While humans in such hot and picturesque places as Santorini and the aptly named Casablanca have long used white paint to cool dwellings, and municipalities are increasingly looking to paint rooftops white, Dr. Ruan said commercial white paints generally reflect 80 percent to 90 percent of sunlight. This means they still absorb 10 percent to 20 percent of the heat, which in turn warms surfaces and the ambient air. The Purdue paint, by comparison, absorbs so much less solar heat and radiates so much more heat into deep space that it cools surfaces to below-ambient temperatures.

For the full story, see:

Cara Buckley. “A Coat of Paint May Hold a Key To a Cool Planet.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 13, 2023): A1 & A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 12, 2023, and has the title “To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats.”)

Langlois’s Entrepreneurs Allowed the Masses to Flourish in Spite of Chandler’s Corporatism

(p. D7)Students of business have long argued about why managerial capitalism arose and what led to its demise. At the heart of this debate is an age-old conundrum: What should the boundaries of a corporation be? What goods and services should it produce and which should it buy from others? Executives stake careers on such questions, but economists, historians and social critics have tried to answer them as well.

It is in such a context that Richard Langlois offers “The Corporation and the Twentieth Century,” a monumental history of American business during the eventful decades when managers ruled. Among much else, he makes the argument that firms embraced managerial capitalism in response to the century’s cataclysmic events and the heavy-handed government intercessions they prompted. When the crises and related policies finally fell away, we saw the resurgence of the focused, entrepreneurial enterprise that predominates today.

Mr. Langlois, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, pushes back in particular against the explanation laid out by Alfred Chandler, the father of American business history, in his great work, “The Visible Hand” (1977).

. . .

Once established, managerial capitalism took on a life of its own. “The hierarchy itself,” Chandler wrote, “became a source of permanence, power, and continued growth.”

But Mr. Langlois tells a different story, contending that managerial capitalism didn’t truly flourish until later. He notes that, despite a wave of mergers, most large firms in the early 20th century were still controlled by their owners, thanks to the extensive shareholdings of financiers such as John D. Rockefeller or investment banks such as J.P. Morgan—owners not especially known as silent partners. The real heyday of the managers was yet to come.

Enter the reform-minded Progressive movement, which aimed to curtail the excesses of just such tycoons. Easily distinguished from today’s progressives by their capital letter and lack of stated pronouns, the Progressives held that scientific techniques had solved the problems of industrial management and would do likewise for those of government administration, which was to be entrusted to “experts.”

These Progressives brought with them a hubristic “managerial model of the world” that called forth a managerial form of capitalism, one designed to clasp the meddlesome hand of government. The ensuing era of federal regulation offered big business relief from haphazard and potentially more radical state regulation, but it also shifted power over firms toward Washington and the federal judiciary.

The ground was thus laid for managerial capitalism to be turbocharged by “the great catastrophes” of World War I, the Depression and World War II.

. . .

(p. D8) Mr. Langlois recognizes that the deregulating spirit of the 1970s was part of a change in the Zeitgeist. He describes, for example, how the Bay Area’s hippie ethos intersected with the rise of the personal computer. The resulting digital revolution upended corporate hierarchies and changed much of America’s output from the physical to the intangible. Ascendant tech firms ushered in a new entrepreneurial paradigm. The center of business gravity shifted from Manhattan boardrooms and Midwestern factories to the freewheeling West Coast.

Vietnam and inflation, meanwhile, sapped faith in government as well as in the dollar, and a series of countries (lately China) would soon replace the U.S. as the world’s factory. The unbundling of corporations was accelerated by low-cost overseas manufacturing and by the new “barbarians at the gate” from Wall Street.

. . .

The questions at the heart of “The Corporation and the Twentieth Century” . . . serve as the engine of a remarkable alternative history of what Henry Luce famously called the American Century. It’s a work propelled by vast learning, a focus on business and a consistent point of view in favor of free markets.

For the full review see:

Daniel Akst. “BOOKSHELF; The Rise and Fall of Managers.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 1, 2023): C7-C8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 30, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Corporation and the Twentieth Century’ Review: The Rise and Fall of Managers.”)

The book under review is:

Langlois, Richard N. The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

60-Year-Old Retired Musician Says She Will “Fetch a Gun” to Defend Taiwan’s Freedom

(p. A1) TAIPEI, Taiwan—People in Taiwan have been following every twist of the war in Ukraine. But, while their sympathy for the Ukrainian cause is near-universal, the conclusions for the island’s own future widely diverge.

To some, the takeaway is that even a seemingly invincible foe can be defeated if a society stands firm, an inspiration for Taiwan’s own effort to resist a feared invasion by China. Others draw the opposite lesson from the images of smoldering Ukrainian cities. Anything is better than war, they say, and Taiwan should do all it can to avoid provoking Beijing’s wrath, even if that means painful compromises.

. . .

(p. A8) “The young people are the ones who don’t want unification with China,” said ret. Lt. Gen. Chang Yan-ting, a former deputy commander of Taiwan’s air force. “But if you want independence, you need to fight, and they also don’t want to fight. Therein is the conflict.”

Yi-hao, a student in Taiwan’s National Defense University, was an exception. “Before the war in Ukraine, we were taught that Russia’s military power is stronger than China’s, and Taiwan’s military was stronger than Ukraine’s,” he said. “If they were able to resist this long, Taiwan will definitely be able to hold out.” He didn’t want his surname used because he wasn’t authorized by the military to speak.

Lai Yi-chi, who became a lieutenant after graduating from the Naval Academy in June [2023], said that she had been inspired by the bravery and resilience of Ukrainian soldiers, something often discussed in her classes. “We should also embody such spirit and determination,” she said.

Bypassing the official armed forces, some volunteer groups have decided to act on their own, preparing fellow citizens for a possible war. One such group is Kuma Academy, which received a $100 million donation from Robert Tsao, the founder of the United Microelectronics, one of the world’s biggest semiconductor companies.

“We don’t intend to build up a private army,” Tsao said. “But I think their effort will probably increase the resilience of Taiwan’s society. If we know how to hide, how to help each other, how to retain communication, we can pretty much reduce the damage in wartime.” Some of the students also like to learn more martial skills, such as shooting, Tsao said, but Taiwan’s strict gun laws make it difficult. Some 25,000 Taiwanese have been trained at Kuma.

Nico Li, a 60-year-old retired musician attending a Kuma class, said she was unnerved by growing risks coming from China, and wanted to arm herself to avoid being a burden to her children. “Taiwan is an island of treasure. I don’t want to hand it over to others without a fight,” Li said, referring to what she sees as the Taiwanese values of freedom and democracy. “If I have the ability, I would even go and fetch a gun if necessary.”

At another training session, run by the Forward Alliance, dozens of Taiwanese practiced how to stop arterial bleeding with tourniquets and stabilize major wounds. “There is a sense of impending doom, of feeling very hopeless,” said one of the students, Eric Lin. “So, instead of sitting at home and browsing the negative news, I wanted to come here—so that I would be able to do something.”

For the full story, see:

Yaroslav Trofimov and Joyu Wang. “Taiwan’s Impossible Choice: Be Ukraine or Hong Kong.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, July 6, 2023): A1 & A8.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 5, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Seaweed Blob Disappears as Unpredictably as It First Appeared

(p. 19) For months, Florida’s usually picturesque coast was plagued by a rotting tangle of seaweed, known as sargassum. Then, as quickly as the stinking mass arrived, it began to disappear.

. . .

Last month, the amount of sargassum in the Gulf of Mexico dropped by a staggering 75 percent, Dr. Hu and colleagues at the University of South Florida Optical Oceanography Lab noted in a bulletin published [June 30, 2023].

. . .

But scientists don’t know why the decline was so rapid. One theory is that strong winds caused by recent tropical storms could have dissipated the sargassum into smaller clumps, or sunk it to the ocean floor, Dr. Hu said, making it hard to see from a satellite. “There could be other reasons, we just don’t know,” he added.

For the full story, see:

Livia Albeck-Ripka. “The Blob That Threatened Florida . . . Is Disappearing.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, July 9, 2023): 19.

(note: ellipses in story added; ellipsis in title in original.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 7, 2023, and has the title “Good News, Florida. The Giant Seaweed Blob Has Shrunk.” The bracketed date was in the print, but not the online, version.)

Elderly Benefit Most from Air-Conditioning

(p. A18) The aging process makes older bodies generally less capable of withstanding extreme heat, doctors say.

“They’re at extremely high risk of heat stroke and death,” James H. Diaz, a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at Louisiana State University’s School of Public Health, said of older people. “When we look at what happens with these heat waves, most of the deaths occur in the homebound elderly.”

In many communities, including in New Orleans and Houston, officials have opened cooling centers and shelters in recent weeks, with air-conditioned shuttle buses meandering through neighborhoods, picking people up. Programs are also in place to provide or repair air-conditioners or help people struggling to afford their electricity bills.

. . .

In . . . Orlando, Veronica King, 67, said she keeps her air-conditioner running even if she can’t afford to. “I have to figure out how to cover that bill,” she said, adding that she relies on machines that help her breathe. “When it’s hot, I can’t breathe.”

In Houston, where the heat index could reach 107 degrees on Sunday, Ms. Lowry and her husband, Jasper, 72, have come up with a compromise. They have two cars, neither with working air-conditioning. But they figured they could at least spare the money to repair it in one of them.

For the full story, see:

Shannon Sims and Rick Rojas. “Rising Temperatures Could Bring More Than Misery for Seniors.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, July 9, 2023): 18.

(note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated July 12, 2023, and has the title “Rising Temperatures Threaten More Than Misery for Oldest Americans.”)