Yesterday my wife and I watched Sabrina (1956) and Sabrina (1995) back to back. They are very different movies. All things considered I think the Billy Wilder-direct 1956 version starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and William Holden the better picture but the 1995 version starring Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford, and Greg Kinnear has much to recommend it, in particular Greg Kinnear’s charming performance as Sabrina’s obsession, David, Maude Larrabee played by Nancy Marchand, and the location shooting in Long Island, Paris, and Edgartown.

But Julia Ormond’s performance is not the star-making turn that Audrey Hepburn’s was in the 1956 version. And I’m glad that we have Humphrey Bogart’s performance on film just as I’m glad we have his performance, repeating his stage triumph, playing Duke Mantee in Petrified Forest. Linus is probably more like the real Humphrey Bogart, the child of privilege, than any of the heavies he played in the movies was. Or, indeed, as Rick was.

Neither of the two movie versions has the heft of their source material, Samuel Taylor’s Sabrina Fair, although to my eye the 1995 version takes more from it.

As I think I have mentioned before to the best of my knowledge none of my ancestors has died in war. Four of my great-great-grandfathers took part in the Civil War, on the Union side. None of them were killed although I believe that two, both of whom died young, had their lives cut short by the privations they experienced during the war.

The last member of my family to have fought in war has been dead now for 17 years. That was my mother’s uncle, Ed. He was one of the lucky few to be called up for World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. He was 97 when he died, a long and, I hope, happy life.

Neither I, my siblings, their spouses, their children, or their children’s spouses have ever served in the military. I was called up for Vietnam but was ultimately rejected for service. We have all depended on the sacrifices of others. Isn’t that what Memorial Day is about? Recalling our dependence on the sacrifices of others?

A number of my high school classmates lost their lives during the Vietnam War. I don’t know the precise number but it was not insignificant in a class of 215.

I do not recall ever hearing any of my nephews or nieces speak of never having served or the sacrifices of those who did. I hope they do not take their good fortune for granted.

I just love sentences like this one from Bloomberg:

The first part of Inslee’s plan focuses on U.S. emissions, pledging to convert the country to 100% carbon-neutral electricity by 2030, and to mandate that all new buildings, cars and buses emit zero carbon.

Okay, let’s assume that starting in 2020 all cars emit zero carbon. When will the U. S. fleet emit zero carbon?

The answer is all other things being equal 2040 at the earliest. It takes at least 20 years for the U. S. passenger vehicle fleet to turn over.

There really aren’t many ZEVs (zero emission vehicles) sold in the United States. The entire boondoggle sounds like a backdoor subsidy to Tesla to me. I also wonder what the environmental impact of such a massive shift to fuel cells would be—a lot of those ZEVs will inevitably be powered by fuel cells.

I’d also like to see the net effect on emissions that would result from the mandate on buildings. It goes unmentioned in the article but producing cement is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions. Less than transportation or electricity but more than agriculture.

Many people are not aware of it but in the early federal period, in the thirty years between 1777 and 1807, women actually lost the right to vote one state at a time. New Jersey was the last state to revoke women’s right to vote in 1807.

I’ve known that for the last 50 years but I’ve never known how it happened, the circumstances, the reasons. Does anyone know?

The RAND organization has studied “news in the digital age” and here are their three main takeaways:

• Print journalism and reporting on broadcast television have been mostly consistent in tone and style over the last 30 years. But since 2000, there’s been a gradual shift toward more-subjective reporting.
• When comparing prime-time cable programming with broadcast television, there were significant differences in how the news was presented.
• “Old media” is more grounded in traditional reporting. “New media” tends to lean more subjective.

Those are merely the tip of the iceberg. To those I’d add the following:

• The younger people are the more likely they are to get their news from online sources.
• Online sources have a more subjective, agonistic style than print media.
• Print media have declined substantially over the past 20 years.
• Print media adopting the style and tone of online media has made them less reliable and accelerated their decline.

There’s a lot to study on this subject.

The editors of the Washington Post are shocked, shocked to find nasty things going on in politics, in this case President Trump’s retweeting of a video of Nancy Pelosi, purporting to show Speaker Pelosi slurring her words and showing other signs of being indisposed. The incident of their displeasure is the claim that the video has been edited in a misleading way:

These difficulties both are caused by and contribute to the erosion of trust in today’s America, where it is hard to say what there is more of: false cries of “fake news,” or viral “news” that is actually fake. Technology certainly has helped this issue along, providing both an easy means to craft propaganda and an easy means to promote it. The increasing sophistication of image editing that creates the threat of actual deepfakes filling the Web will make that worse.

In the best of circumstances, the emergence of these tools for mass deception would be disturbing. It becomes absolutely alarming at a time when America is led by somebody who is intent on deceiving. The role of a responsible leader is to be a bulwark against an assault on truth, yet instead Mr. Trump is a battering ram. That’s not a problem Twitter or any other platform can solve.

But wait! There’s more! As acknowledged by the editors, although there is a misleadingly edited video of Speaker Pelosi making the rounds the video retweeted by Trump was not misleadingly edited.

Does it matter? My opinion is that it ain’t beanbag. If Speaker Pelosi or her supporters object to the Speaker being portrayed in an unflattering light, truly or not, they should reconsider careers in politics. Or exit the public sphere entirely.

Over the period of the last 30 years we have elected the candidate with the lower character too frequently. Weighing the factors and deciding that character doesn’t really matter that much is the way you get Donald Trump elected in the first place.

I have a number of problems with this piece at MarketWatch about increasing wealth inequality in the United States but here’s my biggest disagreement:

“So in some sense the source of higher inequality is Fed policies, which pushed stock prices and home prices higher. But the lack of changes in redistribution by fiscal policy is also playing a role,” Sløk said

The first clause in that sentence is something I strongly agree with. The primary cause of inequality in wealth in the United States is Federal Reserve policy.

But the second clause is grossly misleading. What conceivable fiscal policy would lead to a redistribution of wealth? At the very best (or worst depending on how you look at it) different fiscal policy would be immeasurably more likely to result in a redistribution of income rather than a redistribution of wealth.

The article fails to emphasize sufficiently the reasons for increasing inequality in wealth which are overwhelmingly enormous housing prices in certain parts of the country, the increase in the stock market, and a very low savings rate.

In case you start scrambling around for it to be in the top 10% of holders of wealth you’ve got to have a net worth of $1.5 million. I’d be willing to bet a shiny new time that most of the wealth of that top 10% is held in the form of their houses.

I’m also skeptical that redistribution of income is a leveler but that’s a completely different subject. At least in the United States redistribution tends either to be from the relatively poor to the relatively rich, e.g. the role that FICA plays in the budget, or from one group of the relatively rich or rich to a different group of the relatively rich or rich. I’d be interested in some proof to the contrary.

Finally, making the rich poorer without making the rest of us richer would be a leveling but I’m not sure that’s a direction in which we should go.

Let’s start compiling a list of the crazy and damaging ideas that people have these days. I’ll start. Believing that opening China up to trade would inevitably cause China to liberalize politically was both nuts and damaging to the United States. The people who peddled that pile of horse-hockey should have been removed from office and, probably, been forcibly restrained so they couldn’t harm themselves and others.

The idea that we could invade Afghanistan and create a coherent modern state there where none had ever existed before was crazy and dangerous. Escalating our efforts there would lead to success? Crazy and dangerous.

I could go on like this for days.

Yesterday I attended a talk on disruption. Like most such exercises I didn’t find the speaker particularly insightful or even well-informed but it did make me start thinking so I guess that’s something.

IMO “disruption” is one of the most overused words floating around today, so trendy it’s probably already jumped the shark (to coin a cliche). I thought I’d share a few thoughts. Not much I heard in the talk for goodness sake.

Disruption is a form of competition. There are any number of forms of competition. There’s competition on price, something most commonly encountered on good or services that are commodities, i.e. one is very much like another, or perceived to be a commodity.

There’s competition on products. The Toyota Camry is competitive with the Honda Accord or the Chevy Malibu. They don’t just compete based on price but also on features and service.

Then there’s competition between companies. Apple has been competing with Microsoft on that basis for decades, one of the best examples being the Mac vs. PC ad campaign of some years ago, and epitomized by the persons of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Don’t you want to do business with the hip, creative Mac company rather than the nebbishy boring PC company?

Disruption is competition but it’s competition of a different kind. It’s a challenge to your competitor’s business model. I wonder how many people have noticed that the prime example of disruption all involve artificial scarcity created by decades of regulation? Take ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft, for example. Ride-sharing services have disrupted the taxi business, which has been heavily regulated since before World War II. The scarcity is artificial because it involves drivers and automobiles. In case you haven’t noticed, there is no scarcity of either.

The third quality, after regulation and artificial scarcity, characterizing disruption is that it must be something that is worth disrupting but not so lucrative and well-organized that the established businesses are able to mount a coherent defense.

That’s why I think that health care, for example, is not a good candidate for disruption at least not in the United State. Providers would squash any upstart like a bug.