What’s New with Wu

“Looking back on my time as CEO, I don’t believe AIG could have done anything differently,

Robert Willumstad, former CEO, AIG (Martin Sullivan on the right)

This blog seems to have been infected with spam problems of some kind.  Need to fix it somehow.

Tonight at the New York city car pound, I finally gave up on my first and favorite motorcycle, a classic 1974 CB-125 seized by the city. (pictured below, in happier times).

I bought the bike in the East Village years ago, by putting a note on it asking if it was for sale. It was, and I got it for a small cash payment. It needed work, and was without title. After fixing it up I used to ride it to school at UVA and just loved it, though it did break down an awful lot.

Moving it finally to New York city this fall, I decided I’d just use it for decoration or something. Unfortunately one day the city seized it off the street and put it in the car pound.

After four fruitless and painful visits, I’ve developed something of a literary appreciation for the car pound. At 39th St. on the West Side highway, its an enormous structure, like an aircraft hangar, guarded at various checkpoints. The lobby is not a happy place. At all times there is someone is shouting at the staff.

As for the staff, sullen is the word that was invented to describe them. They used to make me angry but I’ve slowly started to feel bad for them. Behind their bullet proof glass, the staff has slowly been robbed of their humanity. They have the job of seizing people’s property and selling it back to them, and that can’t exactly be a line of work you’re proud of.

My problem was lack of the precise kind of documentation they needed to charge me money and release the bike. As they said through the bullet-proof glass, how can we know its your motorcycle? I managed to find and give them the bill of sale, but that wasn’t enough. There had to be proof of clean title. This could be anyone’s motorcycle, they kept saying.

The end result is that its going to be no one’s. After 4 months all unclaimed motorcycle are taken out of the city and crushed.

Of course I don’t have a shred of a legal case. I accept that a motorcycle, if left on the street without title, is liable to be seized and destroyed. And of course, in the end, its just a piece of metal and rubber, albeit one I was attached to. Compared to the real tragedies people have in their lives, this is minor.

But its sad to lose things, and perhaps the best thing I can say about the episode is that it makes me more of a libertarian and also gave me better insight into Kafka. At points I felt like the sad souls who spend their lives in the court waiting room, as in this section from The Trial.

“They don’t show much concern for the public,” he said. “They don’t show any concern at all,” said the usher, “just look at the waiting room here.” It consisted of a long corridor from which roughly made doors led out to the separate departments of the attic. There were only a few people in the corridor, probably because it was Sunday. They were not very impressive. They sat, equally spaced, on two rows of long wooden benches which had been placed along both sides of the corridor.

None of them stood properly upright, their backs were bowed, their knees bent, they stood like beggars on the street. K. waited for the usher, who was following just behind him. “They must all be very dispirited,” he said. “Yes,” said the usher, “they are the accused, everyone you see here has been accused.” “Really!” said K. “They’re colleagues of mine then.” And he turned to the nearest one, a tall, thin man with hair that was nearly grey. “What is it you are waiting for here?” asked K., politely, but the man was startled at being spoken to unexpectedly, which was all the more pitiful to see because the man clearly had some experience of the world and elsewhere would certainly have been able to show his superiority and would not have easily given up the advantage he had acquired. Here, though, he did not know what answer to give to such a simple question and looked round at the others as if they were under some obligation to help him, and as if no-one could expect any answer from him without this help. Then the usher of the court stepped forward to him and, in order to calm him down and raise his spirits, said, “The gentleman here’s only asking what it is you’re waiting for. You can give him an answer.” The voice of the usher was probably familiar to him, and had a better effect than K.’s. “I’m … I’m waiting …” he began, and then came to a halt. He had clearly chosen this beginning so that he could give a precise answer to the question, but now he didn’t know how to continue.

I was well on my way to becoming that grey-haired man.

I managed to take a last photo of the motorcycle in the pound:

I don’t spend much time on health care policy.  But this following from the National Review blog — suggesting we assume away the problem — is really astonishing:

There simply are no longer genuinely “poor” people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you’re poor today, it’s almost always for behavioral reasons - behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the “needy” out there that only the government can rescue.

Its true: if we assume there are no such thing as poor people, many of the nation’s problems are much easier to solve.  Even better, if we assume that we won’t get sick, we don’t even need a health care system at all.

This kind of writing is a sad parody of neo-classical economic reasoning.  Academics do make assumptions sometimes to simplify a problem.  But no one who is responsible or an adult thinker thinks that that makes the assumptions true.

I honestly thought this was a story in the Onion when I saw the headline out of the corner of my eye.

But the Onion actually has good record for predicting the future - reread this from 2000: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’

King of Kong is pure entertainment.  Yet almost as interesting is reading the discussion of the Donkey Kong high score at the Twin Galaxies discussion board:
A sample:

The juggernaut called king of kong is so slanderous and untrue it is forcing us into action. We didn’t know where inactivity was going to head in the future much like the roy shildt (censored). For all of those who think steve weibe is naive and a victim you are clueless. He is a very clever guy and a manipulator. We didn’t know till recently the guys who made the film were his friends. We were told they were making a different movie. We were play by the filmmakers and steve weibe. Victim my ass! They set up all these crying episodes in the movie. Believe me there are evil people in this world but it isn’t us at the scoreboard. We have given this guy many chances over and over most are unaware because we respect people who can play games, but when you cross the line into the realm of lies and cheating for personal gain and lie all the way publically to try an villianize another player and the scorebaord itself.

This case, Carla Yuknis v. First Student Inc., which I picked off Project Posner recently, is vintage Richard Posner:

The plaintiff had complained, initially to the company’s regional vice-president, that “all levels of personnel” at the facility at which she worked “show blatant disrespect for their marital vows, watch pornography, use foul language, tell vulgar jokes,. .. [and] gamble openly.” She accused one of her coworkers of giving an assistant manager of the facility “red underwear made to look like an elephant’s head, with a sexually-suggestive trunk” at an office party, and accused another — the manager, no less — that among other enormities he had referred to a female bus driver (not the plaintiff) as a “fat ass,” had had an affair with another female driver, sold Avon products at work, told the plaintiff that his teenage daughter had watched him walk from the shower to his bedroom naked, and described an incident in which his male cat “raped” his female cat. There is more but this recital will give the flavor.

[...]

One is put in mind of the distinction famously drawn by John Stuart Mill, in chapter 4 of On Liberty (1859), between “self-regarding” and “other-regarding” conduct. The former term refers to acts that inflict a direct harm on one, such as an assault, or a breach of contract, or an insult, and the latter to acts that harm one only in the sense that one is offended to learn about the conduct. The example Mill gave of an other-regarding act was the distress that people in Britain felt upon learning that Mormons in Utah (this was before the Mormon Church renounced polygamy) were practicing polygamy six thousand miles away. The counterpart today would be a worker offended by the fact that a coworker was of a different race or religion. The manager’s watching pornography was likewise in the nature of an “other-regarding” act so far as the plaintiff was concerned.

…

I’m not usually inclined to post about films. But the film King of Kong (a fistfull of quarters) — on the struggle to become the world champion of Donkey Kong — is so great beyond description that I’m helpless not to praise it.

Mind you, I have Donkey Kong as my cell-phone wallpaper, so I’m hardly impartial. And I’m happy to say that my high score — not shown here — is somewhere north of 50,000.

Click on the picture for the trailer.

Like everyone else, impossible not to write about the iPhone. I have a new piece in Slate arguing that the iPhone — at least this incarnation — is revolutionary in terms of interface, but much less in terms of industry structure and business model.

I want to respond to two things that people have said about the piece — trying, though probably failing, to not be too ornery:

1. Yes, I know that today’s “at&t” isn’t exactly the same company that was founded in 1878.
However, it has more of the components of the old AT&T than any other company; and to my mind it is worth connecting today’s AT&T with that company.

2. I am also well aware of the difference between CDMA and GSM phones — and that unlocking the iPhone, as it exists right now, would not necessary mean much for someone who wanted to use the iPhone on Verizon’s networks. However, the broader point is that Apple could try to create a phone that works on any network (CDMA or GSM) — or at least build an open CMDA phone, and also an open GSM phone, and sell those — and perhaps one day it will.

The real point of the piece was the “trojan horse” argument at the end of it. That is, I think Apple is playing by the rules now — but once it gets deeper into this industry, it will start changing things.

Larry, who was my original mentor back at law school, says he is leaving copyright, cyber-law and related fields.   Instead — his considerable energies are directed to “corruption” of the political process.   He mentioned this to me in Bonn earlier this year but  I didn’t quite realise it was happening.
I can’t help feeling that its like that part in the Lord of the Rings when the elves start leaving middle-earth…