Park Ji Woo:

One day, my sister and I had so much fun riding the sled that I didn’t realize my shoes fell off! I looked for them for a long time, but I couldn’t find them. I was freaked out because I knew my mother would be really mad at me. I walked home on bare feet in the snow. When my mother saw me, she said nothing and just wiped my feet because my left heel was bleeding. She put my feet into a container with cold water. That was a well known remedy for frostbite in North Korea because it made your feet warm up fast even though it was really painful. I screamed as the cold water became red with my blood. My mother cried. The next day, she gave me her winter shoes and she wore her flats, which were thin shoes meant for the summer. She didn’t have money to buy new winter shoes for me. That winter, her feet were frostbitten, too.

Since the summer of 1996, the famine went worse than expected. The government still didn’t give us any food. I vividly remember that many people died in the street because of hunger. I saw many children, who were my age, begging for food in Jang-ma-dang (North Korean Market), even stealing food. We only had one meal a day for three months. Even my 6-year-old younger sister, the youngest person in my family, wasn’t spared starvation. One morning, somebody knocked on our door quietly, when my younger sister and I were eating our only meal of the day. I thought that it was my mother, who went to the farm to look for food. I opened the door happily, but who I faced was a short, skinny girl. She looked about 8 years old, same as me. She had a pale and fearful face. Behind her, a little boy was smiling at me. He looked about five years old and had a red, dirty face. They wore ragged clothes. The girl finally said “Would you please lend us some food? We haven’t had anything to eat since two days ago. My parents went to Cheng-jin to get food and said they would be back in 3 days, but they haven’t come back yet. When they come back, we will have food to eat and I can give you back your food. I swear.”

I looked at her earnest face and said “I am hungry, too. I have no food to give you.” I closed the door coldly and locked it quickly. Even though the girl kept knocking the door desperately for a while, we ate all the corn porridge, which was all we had for the whole day. Now I feel sorry for them. Sometimes it makes me cry. I don’t know where they went and if anyone gave them food or not. I hope they met good people who were willing to give them food. However, at that time, sharing food was a crazy behavior for me, and for most North Koreans because everyone clearly knew that one day we would die in the street because of hunger if we didn’t look for and save food as much as we can. We had to compete for getting one more ear of corn. Sympathy was an extravagance for us.

Smithsonian:

In the 1930s journalists from publications like the New York Times and Time magazine would regularly visit Nikola Tesla at his home on the 20th floor of the Hotel Governor Clinton in Manhattan. There the elderly Tesla would regale them with stories of his early days as an inventor and often opined about what was in store for the future.

Last year we looked at Tesla’s prediction that eugenics and the forced sterilization of criminals and other supposed undesirables would somehow purify the human race by the year 2100. Today we have more from that particular article which appeared in the February 9, 1935, issue of Liberty magazine. The article is unique because it wasn’t conducted as a simple interview like so many of Tesla’s other media appearances from this time, but rather is credited as “by Nikola Tesla, as told to George Sylvester Viereck.”

It’s not clear where this particular article was written, but Tesla’s friendly relationship with Viereck leads me to believe it may not have been at his Manhattan hotel home. Interviews with Tesla at this time would usually occur at the Hotel, but Tesla would sometimes dine with Viereck and his family at Viereck’s home on Riverside Drive, meaning that it’s possible they could have written it there.

Niels Lesniewski

When the Senate took what was generally viewed as necessary action to scale back an overly broad provision of a federal transparency law Thursday, it did so without much transparency of its own.

With most of the Senate’s attention focused on guns and immigration, the Senate quietly acted to dramatically scale back the reach of the law’s most contentious provision. Absent Congressional action or a court order, the law known as the STOCK Act requiring online publication of financial information for a slew of federal employees would take effect next week.
The Senate bill passed Thursday by unanimous consent goes beyond a simple delay. If passed by the House and signed by President Barack Obama, the measure would exclude legislative and executive staffers from having their financial disclosure forms posted on the Internet. The new reporting requirements would still apply to the president, vice president, members of Congress, congressional candidates and individuals subject to Senate confirmation.

Congress has previously delayed implementation of pieces of the STOCK Act without much fanfare, but the earlier cases came before a National Academy of Public Administration report produced at the request of Congress and released last month showed serious national security risks with publication of the information in a more readily available format.

Senator’s insider trading yields above market returns.

More via the Financial Times.

A beautiful but somewhat chilly drive. Tap or click on the images to view larger versions.

I don’t shop much. I generally don’t like malls. If I must shop, I prefer to do so online or at smaller, easy to navigate boutique stores.

That said, yesterday’s quick visit to a Madison JC Penney (Twitter) store was a surprisingly pleasant experience.

Here’s why:

1. The store was easy to navigate. It now features clean sight lines, simple to observe colors and styles surrounded by an interior that is easy on the eyes.

2. Prices were reasonably easy to find. Some stores work hard to place the tag in a difficult to find location.

3. The checkout process was fast and painless. Our customer service representative used a traditional cash register and credit card reader. I did not see any handheld devices.

4. I assume that the clothes quality is “good enough”. We shall see.

I contrast this experience with my last visit to Macys. The aisles were small and crowded. At over 6′ tall, I can easily bump into racks and clothes, often sending them to the floor or disrupting the pile. Macys had loads of clutter, which made navigation a challenge, not to mention the negative overall experience.

I don’t shop often….

Sometimes, the guy that “breaks the glass” is jettisoned due to the organizational disruption caused by the required changes. Ousted CEO Ron Johnson’s plans may be proven correct, but perhaps the path was a bit too tortuous for shareholders and possibly the staff.

Counterpoint by Virginia Postrel.

One hopes that JC Penney management continues to improve customer experience and not revert to the retail morass of so many others. I write as an “underwater” shareholder.

Wikipedia on James Cash Penney.

Jason Farago:

here is nowhere left to live in New York. Trust me, I know. Fewer apartments are on the market today in the city than at any time since records began, and if you want one you’d better be able to put up the cash. Manhattan, converted these past 20 years into an antiseptic (that’s Giuliani’s doing) luxury goods emporium (that’s Bloomberg’s), has long been out of reach; the leafier areas of Brooklyn were colonized in the last decade by brunching hordes willing to pay seven figures to live in ironic imitation of their immigrant grandparents. Even Brooklyn’s drearier northern stretches have become the territory of the 1 percent over the past five years. The first to fall was Williamsburg, a character-free, formerly working-class neighborhood now populated by bankers who pay more for the privilege of living in a gritty outer borough than they would for a place downtown. Then came nasty Greenpoint, which sits alongside a fetid, carcinogen-spewing creek. Now it’s the turn of apocalyptic Bushwick, which you should avoid visiting at all costs and where otherwise professional people pack themselves cheek-by-jowl into spaces that resemble badly administered refugee camps, but with an artisanal ramen shop next door.

Marcel de Jong.

John Lamm:

After becoming a wealthy industrialist in the 1950s, mainly through the success of his tractor company, Ferruccio Lamborghini was indulging his lifelong love of automobiles and buying Italy’s best: Alfa Romeo, Lancia, Maserati and, of course, Ferrari.

There are two versions of what happened next. One, according to an interview published in 1991 in a British magazine, Thoroughbred and Classic Cars, is that Lamborghini was insulted by Enzo Ferrari after complaining of a weak clutch in a car he’d bought: “Lamborghini, you may be able to drive a tractor, but you will never be able to handle a Ferrari properly.”

Jim Pickard:

Socialism is a dirty word in many parts of the US. After all, America is a global symbol of free markets, muscular capitalism and the small state. Yet somehow the government has turned its mortgage market into a giant nationalised enterprise on a par with China’s Red Army or Britain’s National Health Service.

US mortgage finance vehicle Fannie Mae, created by Franklin D Roosevelt to drag the US out of the Great Depression, underwrote around one in five mortgages during the 1940s. It was seen as the archetype of Keynesian intervention. Yet Roosevelt’s efforts have been eclipsed by those made by 21st-century governments around the world to pull their economies out of the post-credit crunch tailspin.

Today, in the US, almost nine out of 10 mortgages issued in the US are subsidised by the state through a bewildering array of state-sponsored groups. They include Freddie Mac, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks and Fannie itself. Housing, in other words, has become an arm of the state.

One of these groups, the Federal Housing Administration, is so integral to the market that without it prices could have fallen a further 25 per cent, according to Moody’s Analytics.

And at the same time the Federal Reserve is soaking up some $40bn of mortgage debt a month – through “quantitative easing” – with more than one eye on the housing market.

Ed Wallace:

“How come some tiny little California startup, run by guys who know nothing about the car business, can do this, and we can’t?” – General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz, Newsweek, Dec. 22, 2007

In the last week of March I made my annual trip down to see my financial advisor, Josh Foster at Wells Fargo, to deal with my retirement accounts. I’ve known him for decades and, because his in-laws were among the finest individuals for whom I’d ever had the pleasure of handling automotive needs, I was a guest at his wedding. (We had a close enough relationship that I provided numerous vehicles for family members coming in from out of town for the wedding.)

Typically these annual trips don’t take much time. We talk for a few minutes, I write the check, and it’s over. I try to take as little of his time as necessary, because I know he’s extremely busy and I have no great investment plans to discuss. But this year was different; I no more got into his office than, for the very first time, he asked me an automotive question: “Have you reviewed a Tesla yet?”

Two Weeks, Two New Teslas
He was referring to the new Tesla S electric car, from the company founded by Internet billionaire Elon Musk. In fact I hadn’t reviewed it. But I have closely watched that company since its founding a decade ago. Personally, I’ve marveled at the visionary genius of what Musk has accomplished, but I also have a businessman’s appreciation for his company’s likely long-term capability of success.