France – Page 5 – artdiamondblog.com

French Government Wastes $68.5 Million Ordering Trains Too Wide for Many Platforms

(p. B3) PARIS–France’s state-run railway system on Wednesday admitted failing to mind the gap, after realizing that a fleet of new trains it has ordered are too wide to fit many of the country’s stations.
Confirming a report in satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, train operator Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer and network owner Réseau Ferré de France said about 1,300 of France’s 8,700 railway platforms must be trimmed to make way for the wider rolling stock.
It will cost about €50 million ($68.5 million) to alter the platforms to fit the new trains by 2016, when they are delivered, SNCF and RFF said.

For the full story, see:
WILLIAM HOROBIN. “French in Uproar Over Train Snafu.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 22, 2014): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 21, 2014, and has the title “Mind the Gap: New French Trains Too Wide for Many Platforms.”)

“Et La Liberté!”

(p. C7) [A] milestone in the diary comes in 1943 when [Guéhenno’s] students are drafted into compulsory work service in Germany; many escape to Spain or join resistance groups. Nor was Guéhenno exempt from the repression. That same year he was demoted by the Vichy education minister to the rank of a beginning instructor, assigned to teach 17 hours of class a week rather than the usual six and faced with supervising hundreds of students. “Stammering with fatigue,” he wondered how he would have time to keep his diary going. But he cheered up whenever he contemplated how many of the authors in his curriculum were bona fide revolutionaries: “Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Danton, Robespierre, Chénier, Hugo, Michelet …, I have nothing to discuss but suspects.” He liked to end his class sessions by shouting “Et la liberté!”

For the full review, see:
Alice Kaplan. “Shedding Light on Nazi-Occupied Paris.” The New York Times (Thurs., JUNE 26, 2014): C7.
(Note: ellipsis in original; words in brackets were added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 25, 2014.)

The book being reviewed is:
Guéhenno, Jean. Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944: Collaboration, Resistance, and Daily Life in Occupied Paris. Translated by David Ball. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

French Protest Amazon, but Buy There for Low Prices

(p. B1) LONDON — On weekends, Guillaume Rosquin browses the shelves of local bookstores in Lyon, France. He enjoys peppering the staff with questions about what he should be reading next. But his visits, he says, are also a protest against the growing power of Amazon. He is bothered by the way the American online retailer treats its warehouse employees.
Still, as with millions of other Europeans, there is a limit to how much he will protest.
“It depends on the price,” said Mr. Rosquin, 49, who acknowledged that he was planning to buy a $400 BlackBerry smartphone on Amazon because the handset was not yet available on rival French websites. “If you can get something for half-price at Amazon, you may put your issues with their working conditions aside.”

For the full story, see:
MARK SCOTT. “Principles Are No Match for Europe’s Love of U.S. Web Titans.” The New York Times (Mon., JULY 7, 2014): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 6, 2014.)

In France “‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ Means that What’s Yours Should Be Mine”

Guillaume Santacruz is among many French entrepreneurs now using London as their base. He said of his native France, “The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 1) Guillaume Santacruz, an aspiring French entrepreneur, brushed the rain from his black sweater and skinny jeans and headed down to a cavernous basement inside Campus London, a seven-story hive run by Google in the city’s East End.
. . .
A year earlier, Mr. Santacruz, who has two degrees in finance, was living in Paris near the Place de la Madeleine, working in a boutique finance firm. He had taken that job after his attempt to start a business in Marseille foundered under a pile of government regulations and a seemingly endless parade of taxes. The episode left him wary of starting any new projects in France. Yet he still hungered to be his own boss.
He decided that he would try again. Just not in his own country.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Why would you ever leave France?’ ” Mr. Santacruz said. “I’ll tell you. France has a lot of problems. There’s a feeling of gloom that seems to be growing deeper. The economy is not going well, and if you want to get ahead or run your own business, the environment is not good.”
. . .
(p. 5) “Making it” is almost never easy, but Mr. Santacruz found the French bureaucracy to be an unbridgeable moat around his ambitions. Having received his master’s in finance at the University of Nottingham in England, he returned to France to work with a friend’s father to open dental clinics in Marseille. “But the French administration turned it into a herculean effort,” he said.
A one-month wait for a license turned into three months, then six. They tried simplifying the corporate structure but were stymied by regulatory hurdles. Hiring was delayed, partly because of social taxes that companies pay on salaries. In France, the share of nonwage costs for employers to fund unemployment benefits, education, health care and pensions is more than 33 percent. In Britain, it is around 20 percent.
“Every week, more tax letters would come,” Mr. Santacruz recalled.
. . .
Diane Segalen, an executive recruiter for many of France’s biggest companies who recently moved most of her practice, Segalen & Associés, to London from Paris, says the competitiveness gap is easy to see just by reading the newspapers. “In Britain, you read about all the deals going on here,” Ms. Segalen said. “In the French papers, you read about taxes, more taxes, economic problems and the state’s involvement in everything.”
. . .
“It is a French cultural characteristic that goes back to almost the revolution and Robespierre, where there’s a deep-rooted feeling that you don’t show that you make money,” Ms. Segalen, the recruiter, said. “There is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that what’s yours should be mine. It’s more like, if someone has something I can’t have, I’d rather deprive this person from having it than trying to work hard to get it myself. That’s a very French state of mind. But it’s a race to the bottom.”

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “Au Revoir, Entrepreneurs.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., MARCH 23, 2014): 1 & 5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 22, 2014.)

‘Diane Segalen moved most of her executive recruiting practice to London from Paris. In France, she says, “there is this sense that ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ means that what’s yours should be mine.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Urban Planners Made La Défense an Architectural Statement, But a Terrible Place to Live

“La Défense can feel like a ghost town after 5 p.m. and on weekends, once the district’s office workers have left.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) . . . La Défense, begun during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s and built just west of Paris by bulldozing slums and paving over farmland, has always worked better in architectural theory than in anthropological practice.

Rather than the Parisian business hub its founders described, it often seems more like the isolated end of a spoke that has highlighted a crucial flaw in urban planning — a concern with making architectural statements — rather than an affinity for the people in and around the buildings.
When non-French planning experts assess La Défense, they say it shares the same problems as the Canary Wharf complex in London, where developers have tried to supplant the City with Big Architecture and whose artificial origins may be hard to overcome. The experts look more favorably on the somewhat organic mix of (p. B6) business and residential of Lower Manhattan, which has evolved over the last century.
“La Défense has always suffered from a creative hypothermia,” said Wojciech Czaja, an Austrian architecture critic. “It is a sad area because it is atmospherically and emotionally perceived as a business district only.”
The public agency that manages the complex has hired an architectural firm to draft a new master plan in hopes of making the grandiose vision for La Défense a livable reality.
. . .
“There is nothing good about living here,” said Carlin Pierre, 54, who works at a waste disposal center in the district and resides in one of the Brutalist communal, rent-subsidized housing blocks tucked amid the high-rise office buildings. “Sure, it’s a nice area to come as a tourist, or even to work,” Mr. Pierre said, “but it’s terrible to live in La Défense.”

For the full story, see:
GEORGI KANTCHEV. “Plan Aims to Enliven Paris’s Financial District, Long Called Soulless.” The New York Times (Tues., July 30, 2013): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 30, 2013.)

Global Warming Allows Russians to Build Liquefied Natural Gas Plant in Arctic

“A rendering of Novatek’s proposed $20 billion liquefied natural gas plant on Russia’s Arctic coast, scheduled to be done by 2016.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) YURKHAROVSKOYE GAS FIELD, Russia — The polar ice cap is melting, and if executives at the Russian energy company Novatek feel guilty about profiting from that, they do not let it be known in public.

From this windswept shore on the Arctic Ocean, where Novatek owns enormous natural gas deposits, a stretch of thousands of miles of ice-free water leads to China. The company intends to ship the gas directly there.
. . .
Novatek, in partnership with the French energy company Total and the China National Petroleum Corporation, is building a $20 billion liquefied natural gas plant on the central Arctic coast of Russia. It is one of the first major energy projects to take advantage of the summer thawing of the Arctic caused by global warming.
The plant, called Yamal LNG, would send gas to Asia along the sea lanes known as the Northeast Passage, which opened for regular international shipping only four years ago.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW E. KRAMER. “Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Natural Gas.” The New York Times (Thurs., July 25, 2013): B1 & B6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date July 24, 2013, and has the title “Polar Thaw Opens Shortcut for Russian Natural Gas.”)

For Right to Rise, French Youth Must Leave France’s “Decrepit, Overcentralized Gerontocracy”

(p. 4) The French aren’t used to the idea that their country, like so many others in Europe, might be one of emigration — that people might actually want to leave. To many French people, it’s a completely foreign notion that, around the world and throughout history, voting with one’s feet has been the most widely available means to vote at all.
. . .
When the journalist Mouloud Achour, the rapper Mokless and I published a column in the French daily Libération last September, arguing that France was a decrepit, overcentralized gerontocracy and that French youths should pack their bags and go find better opportunities elsewhere in the world, it caused an uproar.
. . .
It was a divide between those who have found their place in the system and believe fervently in defending the status quo, and those who are aware that a country that has tolerated a youth unemployment rate of 25 percent for nearly 30 years isn’t a place where the rising generations can expect to rise to much of anything.

For the full commentary, see:
FELIX MARQUARDT. “OPINION; The Best Hope for France’s Young? Get Out.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., June 30, 2013): 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated June 29, 2013.)

The French and Japanese Believe Water Cleans the Anus Better than Dry Paper

Source of the book image: http://jacketupload.macmillanusa.com/jackets/high_res/jpgs/9780805090833.jpg

(p. C34) Ms. George’s book is lively . . . . It is hard not to warm to a writer who can toss off an observation like this one: “I like engineers. They build things that are useful and sometimes beautiful — a brick sewer, a suspension bridge — and take little credit. They do not wear black and designer glasses like architects. They do not crow.”
. . .
In Japan, where toilets are amazingly advanced — most of even the most basic have heated seats and built-in bidet systems for front and rear — the American idea of cleaning one’s backside with dry paper is seen as quaint at best and disgusting at worst. As Ms. George observes: “Using paper to cleanse the anus makes as much sense, hygienically, as rubbing your body with dry tissue and imagining it removes dirt.”

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; 15 Minutes of Fame for Human Waste and Its Never-Ending Assembly Line.” The New York Times (Fri., December 12, 2008): C34.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 11, 2008.)

The book under review, is:
George, Rose. The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008.

“The French Work Force Gets Paid High Wages But Works Only Three Hours”

(p. B1) PARIS — “How stupid do you think we are?”
With those choice words, and several more similar in tone, the chief executive of an American tire company touched off a furor in France on Wednesday as he responded to a government plea to take over a Goodyear factory slated for closing in northern France.
“I have visited the factory a couple of times,” Maurice Taylor Jr., the head of Titan International, wrote to the country’s industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, in a letter published in French newspapers on Wednesday.
“The French work force gets paid high wages but works only three hours. They have one hour for their breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three.”
“I told this to the French unions to their faces and they told me, ‘That’s the French way!’ “

For the full story, see:
LIZ ALDERMAN. “Quel Brouhaha! A Diatribe on Unions Irks the French.” The New York Times (Thurs., February 21, 2013): B1 & B6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 20, 2013.)

For a similar account, see:
GABRIELE PARUSSINI. “U.S. CEO to France: “How Stupid Do You Think We Are?” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 21, 2013): B1.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date February 20, 2013, and has the title “U.S. CEO Blasts French Work Habits.”)

Government Job Protection Regulations Reduce Youth Jobs

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A7) Socialist President François Hollande has come up with a plan to ease the problem: give €4,000 ($5,276) a year for three years to small companies that hire a young person on a permanent contract while committing to keep an employee age 57 or over.
. . .
The French government hopes as many as half a million youths will find permanent jobs over the next five years due to the measure, which could cost the government about €1 billion a year when it is in place.
Economists say the number of real new jobs is likely to be much lower because the government will be subsidizing jobs that would have been created anyway. Only around 100,000 new jobs will be created, according to OFCE, an economic-research think tank in Paris.
French companies say they are reluctant to hire young people on permanent contracts because it gives employees a level of protection the companies say they can’t afford to grant–even if they get the subsidy proposed by Mr. Hollande.
“It’s great to have €4,000, but if the new recruit isn’t good, we don’t know how long we’ll be stuck with them,” said Philippe Lehmann, who runs Lehmann Sarl, a mechanical-parts factory in Molsheim, eastern France that employs seven people.

For the full story, see:
WILLIAM HOROBIN. “France Pins Hopes on Youth Jobs Plan.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., December 24, 2012): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 23, 2012.)
(Note: the online version of the last two paragraphs quoted above contains a few extra words of elaboration at the end of each paragraph, as compared to the print version. I have underlined these words in the passages quoted above.)

Entrepreneurs of Coffee, the Battlefield, and Missing Minerals

Source of book image: http://img.qbd.com.au/product/l/9780691143705.jpg

[p. 167] The book . . . contains a variety of entertaining stories and colorful facts about entrepreneurship that could potentially be used for teaching. [p. 168] Murray, for instance, explains that the word “entrepreneur” was borrowed from the French language in the late Middle Ages, a time when it was used to describe a battlefield commander (p. 88). Kuran describes how Middle Eastern coffee entrepreneurs originally faced harsh resistance from many clerics who believed that “coffee drinkers reap hell-fire” (pp. 71-72). Hudson traces early merchant activity and entrepreneurship all the way back to Sumerian cities in Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC (pp. 11-17). These cities, made rich by their fertile alluvial soil, still needed to acquire other important minerals, missing in their own ground, from the distant Iranian plateau or Anatolia. Since military conquest proved too expensive and because the Sumerian cities really needed these resources, they pioneered international import-export activities in their temples and palaces.

For the full review, see:
Bikard, Michael, and Scott Stern. “The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times.” Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 1 (March 2011): 164-68.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the page numbers in square parentheses refer to the review; the page numbers in curved parentheses refer to the book under review.)

Book being reviewed:
Landes, David S., Joel Mokyr, and William J. Baumol, eds. Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.