Category: Culture
Driving VW’s icons, the Beetle and Bulli
Cruising through Berlin in a 1959 VW 1200
The perceived contrast between the cream vintage Volkswagen Beetle and the New Beetle MkII is as extreme as the difference between candle and LED, typewriter and PC, DC3 and A380. The rear-engined original, built in various forms and generations between 1949 and 2003, was an early personal mobility assistant: more spacious and less susceptible to bad weather than a motorcycle, more independent than a tram, more flexible than a train, more grown up than the Lloyd, Gutbrod and Fiat microcars it competed against.
Over time, VW sold more than 21.5 million units of its air-cooled icon: European Beetle production ceased in 1979 when the Cabriolet was phased out at Karmann, but the Mexican-made Bug continued to thrive until 2003 when crash and emission regs finally squashed it. Contrary to common belief, the Ur-Beetle was not at all about cult, image, even driving pleasure. It was a totally pragmatic A-to-B connector, virtually indestructible, totally affordable, utterly practical. The people’s car made history because it became the official personal transportation appliance of the Wirtschaftswunder generation (the hippie movement) and, eventually, if only as 1303 Cabriolet, for the nouveau riche who were not quite rich enough to obtain an MG or a Porsche.
Obama outpaces fundraising activity of predecessors
President Obama has headlined 127 fundraising events for himself and others, significantly outpacing the fundraising activity of the previous five presidents during their first terms, new research obtained by USA TODAY shows.
By comparison, President George W. Bush had held 88 fundraisers and President Clinton, 76, at this point in their first terms, according to data compiled by Brendan Doherty, an assistant professor of politicial science at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. Doherty, who also studies presidential activity with the non-partisan White House Transition Project, examined fundraising going back to President Carter.
The upswing reflects the soaring costs of campaigns and politicians’ abandonment of the presidential public-financing system that limits what candidates can raise from private sources in exchange for receiving taxpayer money, Doherty and other experts say.
“We have entered the era of the permanent campaign,” said Anthony Corrado, a campaign-finance expert at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “This is a reflection … of the enormous sums that are anticipated for the election.”
A Guide to Mobile Apps
This page is a growing collection of all the mobile app coverage that has appeared in The New York Times, both in print and online. Check back often, as this page will be updated regularly. We will also feature lists of favorite apps from Times writers. Click on any of the headings below to see all the coverage of a specific app category.
Model airplane legend Maynard Hill dies at 85
Maynard Hill, a pioneer in unmanned and model aircraft who sent an 11-pound airplane across the Atlantic in 2003, died June 7 at his home in Silver Spring, Md., The Washington Post has reported. He was 85.
Hill, a member of the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) Hall of Fame and former president of the academy, earned 25 world records for speed, distance, and altitude over a long career of modeling. He led a team that flew a balsa-wood model airplane carrying 5.5 pounds of Coleman lantern fuel from Newfoundland to Ireland, a distance of 1,882 statute miles, on Aug. 11, 2003.
Taibbi, the SEC & Wall Street
A whistleblower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals.
Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.
That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation’s worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – “18,000 … including Madoff,” as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency’s records – “including case files relating to preliminary investigations” – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term “Orwellian,” devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or “Matters Under Inquiry” – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission’s internal website. “After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation,” the site advised staffers, “you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI.”
Many of the destroyed files involved companies and individuals who would later play prominent roles in the economic meltdown of 2008. Two MUIs involving con artist Bernie Madoff vanished. So did a 2002 inquiry into financial fraud at Lehman Brothers, as well as a 2005 case of insider trading at the same soon-to-be-bankrupt bank. A 2009 preliminary investigation of insider trading by Goldman Sachs was deleted, along with records for at least three cases involving the infamous hedge fund SAC Capital.
Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA
Take the story of Dell Computer [DELL] and its Taiwanese electronics manufacturer. The story is told in the brilliant book by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription:
ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: ‘We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for 20% less.’
Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. On successive occasions, ASUSTeK came back and took over the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. However the next time, ASUSTeK came back, it wasn’t to talk to Dell. It was to talk to Best Buy and other retailers to tell them that they could offer them their own brand or any brand PC for 20% lower cost. As The Innovator’s Prescription concludes:
Bingo. One company gone, another has taken its place. There’s no stupidity in the story. The managers in both companies did exactly what business school professors and the best management consultants would tell them to do—improve profitability by focuson on those activities that are profitable and by getting out of activities that are less profitable.
Epic Founder Judy Faulkner Named to US Government Health Information Technology Policy Committee
A federal committee that includes a major donor to President Obama and whose company stands to profit from the panel’s recommendations holds in its hands the future of health information technology policy.
Judith Faulkner, founder and CEO of Epic Systems Corp., secured a seat on a panel charged with recommending how $19 billion in stimulus money dedicated to health IT be spent, despite opposing a key administration position on the issue.
Faulkner and her company oppose the president’s vision for health IT, but Epic employees are massive Democratic donors. They’ve given nearly $300,000 to Democrats since 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
That may help explain both Faulkner’s appointment to the 13-member Health Information Technology Policy Committee as a representative for health IT vendors, and the accolades her company regularly enjoys from prominent Democrats.
The Federal Government should not be subsidizing Health Care Information Technology with our tax dollars. Organizations should choose automation services that make sense, for them, not for tax reasons….
Mass Appeal: Rick Warren Takes his Evangelism to Europe
It’s a cloudless summer Sunday and the vast parking lots are filling early at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, 50 miles south of Los Angeles. New SUVs, guided by marshals, queue for the best spots before their occupants spill out happily into the sunshine, heading for a huge auditorium.
They make their way up imposing steps, past palm trees and crystal-clear waterfalls tumbling down artificial rocks. The children’s play area has a stream that parts like the Red Sea, courtesy of two invisible plastic sheets. On a nearby hillock, a replica of Jesus’s tomb has a hydraulic stone that can be rolled away.
The Saddleback campus, opened in 1992, has the eighth-largest congregation of any church in the United States – expanding from its first gathering of 200 in a high school gym in Easter 1980 to a current average weekly attendance of 17,500.
Inside, the only religious symbol is a wooden cross and, during the service, there is no communion and none of the familiar liturgy. Instead, there’s slickly executed Christian rock from a live band.
Saddleback’s founder is Rick Warren, 57, the US’s most famous pastor. He bounds across the stage wearing his trademark goatee, a black T-shirt, Converse trainers and jeans. He is preaching about self-examination: “If you’re doing something that’s messing up your marriage or destroying your finances, it’s because there is some kind of emotional pay-off. I don’t know what it is – maybe it’s to mask your pain, maybe it’s to cover up a fear, maybe it’s an excuse to fail, maybe it’s to compensate for guilt.”
Reinventing Conferences, Again
Is it time for a new twist on the TED model? The esteemed Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference, soon to be pushing 30, has become a juggernaut–what with sellout events, the viral success of online TED Talks, and the spin-off of smaller TED-X conferences. But the conference’s original founder, Richard Saul Wurman, is working on a new creation that radically overhauls the formula used by TED–much as TED itself reinvented the standard business conference model when Wurman launched it in 1984.
Wurman, who is no longer affiliated with TED (he sold most of the rights to Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation back in 2002 and broke off his remaining ties with the spin-off TEDMED Conference earlier this year), recently announced plans for his new WWW.WWW conference, slated to debut in Fall of 2012. So far, he has lined up some heavyweight collaborators—R/GA’s Bob Greenberg and @radical.media’s Jon Kamen are on board, GE is an early sponsor, and Yo-Yo Ma and Herbie Hancock will see to the music. Featured guests are still to be determined, though Wurman promises that the conference will be “like a dinner party with a hundred of the world’s greatest minds having a conversation, two at a time.”
But here are a few things the show won’t have: Speeches, slide shows, or tickets. Wurman’s plan is to stage a series of improvisational one-to-one conversations, held in front of a small invitation-only audience and then disseminated to the outside world via a high-quality, for-sale app that captures the event.