Postcards on the Edge

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

from the BBC . . .

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Don,

watched that live here the other day. What it shows is the underlying structural problem is a complete lack of understanding of the cause; right at the top of the financial and government institutions. Draining out the natural prosperity of the United States, into other nations has deeply damaged the prosperity of the nation. Indeed, almost every western nation is to some extent similarly damaged. A very few have justified this as a natural element in the progress of the economy.

Everyone should be sat down to watch this. - The United States as a Third World economy.

[davidstvz]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Globalization averages the market worth of employees across the entire globe, but it also eliminates employee bargaining power. It's no shock that it is destroying privileged western working conditions from the bottom up and concentrating wealth at the top. Of course, it gives us the privilege of consuming poorer countries resources. It seems to point to a real problem with perpetual exponential growth that no one wants to own up to.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

occupy this, MF . . . .

‘Full Auto’ in Las Vegas

“We want it to have a Melrose boutique feel to it,” said Genghis Cohen, referring to the upscale stretch of quirky shops along Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Mr. Cohen, a nightclub impresario, is a managing partner of Machine Guns Vegas. “It would be like a boutique-style of guns,” he said as he led a tour of his latest venture. “We will have artwork on the walls.”

“This is our V.I.P. area,” he said. “Look — a cappuccino machine, nice big leather couches. Let’s say you’re the vice president of the Palazzo or the Wynn,” he continued, referring to two of the city’s fanciest resorts. “You’re like, ‘Oh, it’s lunch break. I’m going to grab a sandwich and go shoot my gun for half an hour.’ ”

There is not much to eat, though the club plans to sell prepackaged food eventually. But one can spend a lot of money here at a club that — and thank goodness for this — does not serve alcohol. (Not that you need to be Lewis and Clark, exactly, to find yourself a drink in Las Vegas.) For $699, the top-of-the-line package, a client gets an array of 16 firearms, 1,550 rounds of ammunition and a pass to the V.I.P. lounge.

Machine Guns Vegas — an upscale indoor shooting range complete with skimpily dressed gun-toting hostesses — opened last week a half mile from the Strip.

With its provocative mix of violent fantasy (think blowing holes through an Osama bin Laden target with an AK-47) and sexual allure, it is the latest example of how the extravagances and excesses that have defined Las Vegas are moving beyond the gambling table.

[dbarberic]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

this may be it . . .

leaving Jim Kunstler heartbroken . . .

An update to the saga of this downtown Cleveland mall.

YMCA to move downtown branch into Galleria, taking 30 percent of the former mall's retail space

Published: Friday, March 02, 2012, 7:00 PM Updated: Monday, March 05, 2012, 6:43 AM
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The YMCA of Greater Cleveland will move its downtown branch into the Galleria at Erieview, illustrating how developers and tenants are dreaming up creative ways to remake old retail space.
A 40,000-square-foot fitness facility, including a three-lane lap pool, will fill the southeast section of the glassed-in former mall in downtown Cleveland.

Building owner Werner Minshall plans to donate the space to the YMCA, which will undertake a $9 million renovation that could be finished in early 2014.

The deal is a much-needed win for an iconic property in a key downtown district.

For years, the Galleria has scrabbled to stay alive by leasing space to non-retail tenants and booking weddings and events. As owners of empty shopping centers have turned to churches, offices and business incubators to fill space, the greenhouse-like Galleria has garnered attention for growing herbs in its central atrium for local restaurants.

The YMCA will fill a large hole, once leased to stores including The Limited. The downtown gym, which has 3,650 members and hopes to surpass 5,500 members at the new location, could boost traffic in the parking garage, the food court and the neighborhood.

"It has been what I would call a loss leader for us for seven or eight years," Minshall said of the property. "We've managed to make do, and now with this deal we've finally turned the corner. Once it's done, the Galleria will be profitable."

....http://www.cleveland.com/business/in..._branch_i.html

[davidstvz]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

I wonder what the AC and heating cost of a mall are. Certainly more than just dealing with individual stores.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

"It has been what I would call a loss leader for us for seven or eight years"

Always be spinning.

Not hard to envision the "Y" reverting in time to its historical function of cheap housing being added to its other services. What's old is new again . . . .

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Grubby greed, moral posturing, a no-escape environment among the sheeple, where buying a lottery-ticket is the chief conveyance to the American Dream . . .

Has lottery buys gone up? Anybody know . . .

Mich. Yet to Ban Food Stamp Use by Lottery Winners

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DETROIT (AP) — Michigan lawmakers last year vowed to crack down when they heard an $850,000 lottery winner was buying groceries with food stamps. Now comes news of another lucky player getting food on the public dime — and the Legislature still hasn't passed a law to easily detect and clamp down on the abuse.

"We were on this already but now we have two cases. I'm hoping it will hurry us along," state Rep. Dave Agema, a Republican from western Michigan, said Thursday. "It demonstrates the entitlement attitude we have in the United States. They want something for nothing."

Amanda Clayton, 24, of Lincoln Park, chose a $700,000 lump sum last fall after winning a $1 million jackpot on "Make Me Rich!" a Michigan lottery game show. A Detroit TV station approached her this week and asked why she still was using a debit-style card to make purchases under the food-stamp program.

"I thought that they would cut me off, but since they didn't I thought maybe it was OK because I'm not working," Clayton, a mother of two, told WDIV. "I feel that it's OK because I have no income, and I have bills to pay. I have two houses."

In a statement, the state Department of Human Services said it was Clayton's responsibility to report her dramatic change in wealth within 10 days. She has been dropped from the food program.

The state "relies on clients being forthcoming about their actual financial status," director Maua Corrigan said. "If they are not, and continue to accept benefits, they may face criminal investigation and be required to pay back those benefits."
Authorities have yet to announce if Clayton will face charges.

Clayton and her mother, Euline Clayton, did not immediately return messages seeking comment Thursday. Euline Clayton told The Detroit News that her daughter is "stressed out" from all the attention.

Clayton wasn't the first Michigan lottery winner to keep public benefits. Last spring, a TV station reported that Leroy Fick, 60, of Bay County, was using the food program despite winning an $850,000 lump sum prize in 2010. He told state officials about his wealth but was allowed to temporarily keep his card because lump-sum windfalls at that time were not counted as regular income under the program.

The state has since banned anyone with assets of more than $5,000, excluding a car, from the food stamp program. That ban knocked Fick off the program.

Outraged members of the Republican-controlled Legislature said they would also require the lottery agency to notify the welfare department about winners. Nearly a year later, separate bills have passed the House and Senate but the work still isn't finished.

"We should have passed it last year," Agema, a sponsor, said. "It has to go to a committee. Then it has to be sent to the floor. It takes time — too much time."

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012...ef=global-home

So You Won $38.5 Million? Not So Fast, Co-Workers Say


Five men say they chipped in for a winning lottery ticket: from left, Candido Silva Jr., Candido Silva Sr., Jose Soosa, Carlos Fernandes and Daniel Esteves.

By C. J. HUGHES

ELIZABETH, N.J. — Talk about the potential for an awkward workplace moment.

Five New Jersey construction workers are suing a longtime colleague and friend, accusing him of fraud because, they say, he cashed a $38.5 million winning lottery ticket that belonged to all of them.

To make matters worse, they say, the colleague, Americo Lopes, 52, hid the win from them for more than four months after the Mega Millions jackpot was announced on Nov. 10, 2009, according to the suit, which is being heard in Union County Superior Court.

The plaintiffs, who worked in the same crew as Mr. Lopes pouring concrete for sidewalks and had pooled their money to buy lottery tickets with him since 2007, claim that the prize money should be divided evenly.

That would mean that the after-tax total of $24 million would be split six ways, so each person would take home $4 million, according to the suit.

Through his lawyers, Mr. Lopes concedes that he and his co-workers, who were employed by Berto Construction in Rahway, used to chip in $2 each every few weeks to buy lottery tickets. But he says the winning Mega Millions ticket was one that he purchased on his own. This was not unusual, he said, because he would frequently buy his own tickets over the years. So the winnings should be his alone, he said.

The trial, which began Tuesday, is being heard by an eight-person jury before Judge Miriam K. Span.

The plaintiffs were devastated to uncover Mr. Lopes’s alleged deception, said Rubin Sinins, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. On Wednesday, the lawyer called Margarida Lopes, Mr. Lopes’s wife, to the witness stand. Under questioning, Ms. Lopes spoke about the day in March 2010 when her husband finally told his colleagues that he had won the lottery, in the form of a phone call to one co-worker, Daniel Esteves.

Initially, Ms. Lopes refused to say that Mr. Esteves had cried when her husband told him the news. “If you have feelings, water’s going to come out,” she said at first, though she finally agreed with Mr. Sinins’s account that he was sobbing.
A lawyer for Mr. Lopes, Michael Mezzacca, said that a lack of any record-keeping called the plaintiffs’ accusations into question. He said that because the crew did not write down who had bought what, none of the workers could say with any conviction who had paid for the winning ticket.

There was an emotional moment as Mr. Mezzacca cross-examined Candido Silva Sr., one of the plaintiffs and the foreman of the group. Mr. Silva took off his glasses and wiped his eyes before saying, through an interpreter, that Mr. Lopes had been like “a son, so I would never have thought he would do what he did.” He, like the other workers, is from Portugal, and he speaks only Portuguese.

Throughout the proceeding, Mr. Lopes (pronounced LOHPS) stared straight ahead and sat somewhat slumped in his chair.
The plaintiffs contend that Mr. Lopes continued to work for two more days after discovering he had the winning ticket in order to deceive his colleagues into thinking nothing was different.

On Nov. 12, 2009, Mr. Lopes told his boss that he needed to have foot surgery, and that he planned to take a leave of absence in the winter, according to the complaint. But he never had the surgery.

During that winter, Mr. Lopes continued to act as if nothing had changed, according to the suit, even when his colleagues helped him work on the driveway at his home, in Elizabeth. Mr. Lopes also went to visit Jose Soosa, another plaintiff, when Mr. Soosa’s wife had a baby, and later borrowed some wine-making equipment from Mr. Soosa without mentioning that he was newly rich, the plaintiffs contend.

In March 2010, Mr. Lopes quit Berto for good and told his boss he had won a lottery, but played down how much money was involved. The others learned about it within weeks. On Wednesday, the translations, which were provided by interpreters who stood next to the witness box, lent the proceedings an unusual tempo. There were also a few unintentionally comic moments, as when a clanking radiator forced Judge Span to call a break for more than an hour.

During the break, she passed a message by way of the interpreters to two of the plaintiffs, asking if they could help fix the radiator. They did not.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/ny...l?ref=nyregion

[mmr]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

And the social safety net frays a bit more...

Putting Out Fires For a Fee

When fires or medical emergencies beset this rural county in the Appalachian foothills, the volunteer fire department races to the scene—seemingly free of charge.

But residents can't take their fire service for granted much longer. Declaring it needs a hefty cash infusion to continue to operate, the Bell County Volunteer Fire Department this year started asking residents and businesses to pay a voluntary, annual subscriber fee, ranging from $60 to $150. Without the help, "we've got two years, max," said David Miracle, assistant fire chief.

A growing number of volunteer fire departments, most of them in the rural South, are asking residents to pay an additional fee for firefighting service, though not for such things as responses to medical emergencies, which make up most fire-department calls. This throwback to a centuries-old practice comes as public budgets get slashed and local donations dry up.

Firefighters in South Fulton, Tenn., have let two homes burn to the ground over the past two years since the city commission started enforcing a rule that the department serve only subscribers who pay the $75 annual fee. The city commission is expected to vote Thursday whether to amend that policy to allow the fire department to put out all blazes and then bill nonsubscribers $3,500 for the service. Paying members wouldn't be billed.

South Fulton Mayor David Crocker didn't respond to requests for comment. The town's fire chief, David Wilds, when asked how the crew reacted as it watched a home burn down, said: "They didn't like it."

Volunteer departments get most of their funding from public budgets, which come from taxes or fees paid by insurance-policy holders that insurers route to municipalities. Less than one-fifth of their budgets come from fund-raising efforts like spaghetti dinners or bake sales, according to the National Fire Protection Association, a group that advises municipalities on safety guidelines for fire protection. That means that subscribers in these communities are generally paying a supplement, on top of taxes or other fees, for assurance that a blaze on their property will be doused.

While most insurance plans would cover losses from a fire, insurers typically wouldn't cover a fire-service bill for $3,500. Property insurance "is built upon the assumption that fire protection is a general public service that's made available by taxpayer dollars. All people benefit, all people pay," said David Snyder, a vice president at the American Insurance Association, a trade organization.

When a fire department pulls service, as Bell County did by shuttering two fire houses, the lack of fire protection can lead to higher home-insurance rates.

The number of volunteer fire departments using a fee-based system isn't known but is in the hundreds, said Janet Wilmoth, editorial director of Fire Chief Publications. About 85% of all fire-department crews, serving one-third of the U.S. population, are staffed mostly by volunteers.

The fees raise questions of whether residents should be entitled to fire service. "If you go to a pure subscription service, that community is saying fire service is not a public good anymore," said Adam K. Thiel, the fire chief in Alexandria, Va., who is critical of the fees....

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

House break-in? Pony up a co-pay . . .

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

can you say . . . black market? . . .

Law enforcement officials across the country are puzzled over a crime wave targeting an unlikely item: Tide laundry detergent.

Theft of Tide detergent has become so rampant that authorities from New York to Oregon are keeping tabs on the soap spree, and some cities are setting up special task forces to stop it. And retailers like CVS are taking special security precautions to lock down the liquid.

One Tide taker in West St. Paul, Minn., made off with $25,000 in the product over 15 months before he was busted last year.




“That was unique that he stole so much soap,” said West St. Paul Police Chief Bud Shaver. “The name brand is [all] Tide. Amazing, huh?”

Tide has become a form of currency on the streets. The retail price is steadily high — roughly $10 to $20 a bottle — and it’s a staple in households across socioeconomic classes.

Tide can go for $5 to $10 a bottle on the black market, authorities say. Enterprising laundry soap peddlers even resell bottles to stores.

“There’s no serial numbers and it’s impossible to track,” said Detective Larry Patterson of the Somerset, Ky., Police Department, where authorities have seen a huge spike in Tide theft. “It’s the item to steal.”

Why Tide and not, say, Wisk or All? Police say it’s simply because the Procter & Gamble detergent is the most popular and, with its Day-Glo orange logo, most recognizable of brands.

George Cohen, spokesman for Philadelphia-based Checkpoint Systems, which produces alarms being tested on Tide in CVS stores, said: “Name brands are easier to resell.

Most thieves load carts with dozens of bottles, then dash out the door. Many have getaway cars waiting outside.

“These are criminals coming into the store to steal thousands of dollars of merchandise,” said Detective Harrison Sprague of the Prince George’s County, Md., Police Department, where Tide is known as “liquid gold” among officers.

He and other law enforcement officials across the country say Tide theft is connected to the drug trade. In fact, a recent drug sting turned up more Tide that cocaine.

“We sent in an informant to buy drugs. The dealer said, ‘I don’t have drugs, but I could sell you 15 bottles of Tide,’ ” Sprague told The Daily. “Upstairs in the drug dealer’s bedroom was about 14 bottles of Tide laundry soap. We think [users] are trading it for drugs.”

Officials at Tide are trying to keep their hands clean.

“We don’t have any insight as to why the phenomenon is happening, but it is certainly unfortunate,” said Sarah Pasquinucci, a spokeswoman for Procter & Gamble.

http://www.infowars.com/it’s-a-dirty-job-police-nationwide-take-on-soaring-tide-detergent-theft/

An economy going directly into the toilet . . . do not pass go . . . .

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Still Flaunting the Luxe Life

today's back-of-the-postcard word is Parvenu . . . .

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Last year, Joseph C. Nunes, a professor of marketing at the University of Southern California, published a paper with two colleagues in the Journal of Consumer Psychology titled “Conspicuous Consumption in a Recession: Toning It Down or Turning It Up?” Examining product lines from Louis Vuitton and Gucci developed right before the financial crisis of 2008 and during the recession, the researchers concluded that despite the predictable musings of the popular press forecasting diminished ostentation, showiness was thriving. Logos were far more prominently displayed on products introduced during the recession than they were on products that went out of circulation, they determined. Prices were raised, and the profits of the companies hardly suffered as a result.

While those living in TriBeCa lofts furnished with reclaimed wood, folk art and flax bed linens might find this paradoxical, marketing theorists do not. Citing previous research on luxury shopping that divides affluent consumers into two groups — “patricians” and “parvenus” — Dr. Nunes and his partners argued that the latter group, ever intent on deriving status through what it buys, remained resistant to the pressures others felt during difficult times to appear restrained in their habits.

While patricians (by which we mean both third-generation occupants of Park Avenue apartments and those who might shop at ABC Carpet) seek an even more quiet tastefulness, parvenus angle to dissociate themselves more obviously from the less-well-off. Some luxury companies, realizing this, begin to focus more aggressively on those unburdened by sensitivities to distress.

Few experiences in New York could have lent this theory greater credence than the peculiar event known as the Luxury Review, which took place at the Metropolitan Pavilion, an event space in Chelsea, on Thursday night. Created by Bradford Rand, who is in the business of putting on job fairs, particularly for the intelligence community, the Luxury Review is a trade show for high-end jewelers, watchmakers, boat builders, automotive dealers and so on who come to market themselves to people who buy expensive things and also to market themselves to one another in the hope of forging various alliances.

Outside the pavilion, a stretch of West 18th Street was given over to two Aston Martins — a 2011 DB9-Volante and a 2012 Vantage S Coupe — and a 34-foot Hacker-Craft runabout, a mahogany boat that took 2,000 production hours and costs $289,000. Midway through the evening, guests were asked to turn their attention to the debut of a Champagne (actually from Champagne) called Billionaires Row.

Inside was a new Bentley, the Silverlake 2012 Bentley Continental GTC convertible, eventually unveiled, and beside it was the president of Bentley Americas, Christophe Georges, who informed me that sales of Bentleys in the United States increased 32 percent last year over sales from 2010. The United States is now the company’s biggest market.

When I asked Mr. Georges to outline in specific terms the profile of his customer base, he explained that the Bentley owner typically has five or six luxury vehicles. These are the kind of wealthy people, he said, “who want to reward themselves for their great achievements.”

The scene at the pavilion begged for broad generalizations about what those achievements might be. One young woman in a lace minidress, orange platform stilettos and a Hermès Kelly bag — a uniform one has not come to associate with Meg Whitman — wandered about aimlessly deflecting male attention. Another woman, Natalia Darialova, 20 or so years older, described herself in quick succession as a fashion designer, a television executive and, as she said some referred to her, “the Oprah of Russia.”

She was there as the guest of Sean Koh, the scion of an entrepreneurial family whose holdings include Manhattan Woods, a golf club in West Nyack, N.Y., that had a booth in the pavilion. If you are the kind of person who might be reluctant to join a club that would have you as a member, then you would presumably ingest your 9-irons, spit them out and repeatedly stab yourself with the prongs of your golf shoes before you would affiliate yourself with one that sought to promote itself at a miniaturized convention at which Ivanka Trump’s jewelry line was also on display. Mr. Koh seemed to realize his predicament, stressing that “we are not here actively seeking membership,” and describing the club as “very exclusive.”

The difference between New York and a place like Los Angeles or Moscow or Chengdu is that we believe patrician tastes dominate here. We believe that a certain ambivalence about money still clings to some fraction of the well-to-do. The city is more virtuous in part because its excesses are less visible. We might walk down Fifth Avenue in the 80s knowing we are walking past some of the most expensive real estate in the world, but because we are not bombarded by a view of gates and fountains and garden attendants, we imagine ourselves in a more sacred place.

And yet, hasn’t this view become ever harder to maintain? On Thursday evening, I met only one person who seemed aggrieved by what surrounded her, Miriam Luan, a former investment banker who divides her time between private-equity work in Manhattan and winemaking in Argentina. “This,” she said, surveying the room, “is not luxury.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/ny...1&ref=nyregion

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

From Cubicles, Cry for Quiet Pierces Office Buzz

By JOHN TIERNEY

The walls have come tumbling down in offices everywhere, but the cubicle dwellers keep putting up new ones. They barricade themselves behind file cabinets. They fortify their partitions with towers of books and papers. Or they follow an “evolving law of technology etiquette,” as articulated by Raj Udeshi at the open office he shares with fellow software entrepreneurs in downtown Manhattan.

“Headphones are the new wall,” he said, pointing to the covered ears of his neighbors.

Cubicle culture is already something of a punch line — how many ways can we find to annoy one another all day? — but lately the complaints are being heard by the right people, including managers and social scientists. Companies are redesigning offices, piping in special background noise to improve the acoustics and bringing in engineers to solve volume issues. “Sound masking” has become a buzz phrase.

Scientists, for their part, are measuring the unhappiness and the lower productivity of distracted workers. After surveying 65,000 people over the past decade in North America, Europe, Africa and Australia, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, report that more than half of office workers are dissatisfied with the level of “speech privacy,” making it the leading complaint in offices everywhere.

“In general, people do not like the acoustics in open offices,” said John Goins, the leader of the survey conducted by Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment. “The noisemakers aren’t so bothered by the lack of privacy, but most people are not happy, and designers are finally starting to pay attention to the problem.”

When Autodesk, a software company, moved into a an open-plan building in Waltham, Mass., three years ago, it installed what is known as a pink-noise system: a soft whooshing emitted over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices.

Autodesk ran the system for three months without telling the employees — and then, to gauge its impact, turned it off one day.

“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. They were being distracted by conversations 60 feet away. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”

The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. But it turned out that too much communication sometimes had the opposite effect: a loss of privacy, plus the urgent desire to throttle one’s neighbor.

“Many studies show that people have shorter and more superficial conversations in open offices because they’re self-conscious about being overheard,” said Anne-Laure Fayard, a professor of management at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University who has studied open offices. “Everyone is still experimenting with ways to balance the need for collaboration and the need for privacy.”

Take Mr. Udeshi’s office, at the N.Y.U.-Poly business incubator, a SoHo loft with dozens of start-up companies housed in low cubicles. The entrepreneurs there say they sometimes get useful ideas from overheard conversations but also find themselves retreating to a bathroom or a broom closet for private chats. When they have to discuss a delicate matter with someone sitting next to them, they often use e-mail or instant messaging.

“You talk to more people in an open office, but I think you have fewer meaningful conversations,” said Jonathan McClelland, an energy consultant working in the loft. “You end up getting interrupted a lot by people’s random thoughts.”

Despite complaints like this around the world, the open-plan design remains the norm, partly because it is cheaper and partly because many managers believe the plusses outweigh the minuses. It is especially popular in workplaces that require continual informal collaboration, like newsrooms, trading floors and political campaign offices.

At least one famous advocate of the open-plan office, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, is not backing down, and it seems that the wall-free “bullpen” he set up in City Hall has won favor with many who use it.

“The bullpen really allowed free-flowing communication and efficiency,” said Edward Skyler, a former deputy mayor who sat several feet from Mr. Bloomberg. “It eliminated gatekeepers. You didn’t have to make an appointment to see someone.”

Paradoxically, a bustling place like City Hall can be less distracting than a subdued office. Many offices are now pin-drop quiet, thanks to silent ventilation systems, the demise of clattering typewriters and the victory of e-mail over the telephone. With so little background noise, cubicle dwellers cannot help overhearing anyone who does dare to start a conversation.

Researchers at Finland’s Institute of Occupational Health have studied precisely how far those conversations carry and analyzed their effect on the unwilling listener: a decline of 5 percent to 10 percent on the performance of cognitive tasks requiring efficient use of short-term memory, like reading, writing and other forms of creative work.

“Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory,” said Valtteri Hongisto, an acoustician at the institute. He found that workers were more satisfied and performed better at cognitive tasks when speech sounds were masked by a background noise of a gently burbling brook.

Office designers have begun adding soundproofing materials to cubicles and experimenting with layouts that give workers quiet places to retreat. One common tactic is to set aside a small room for conversations and phone calls. But sometimes the room is monopolized by one person who seizes it to work in all day, and other times the room is barely used at all.

Dr. Fayard, the N.Y.U. researcher, has found that some meeting rooms are avoided because they seem too formal and intimidating.
“People feel self-conscious, as if they’re retreating to the room to hide something or to talk about some problem,” she said. “It’s often better to have a mix of proximity and privacy by having an in-between space, like an alcove where people can go for a quick chat.”

Another example of that in-between space is the booth, which office designers have recently appropriated from restaurants. At the East Village office of What If, a consulting firm, people who want to chat can retreat to diner-style booths at the edge of the communal open space.

“There’s something very satisfying about a booth,” said Barrie Berg, the chief executive of the firm’s American operations. “You can see what’s going around you, and people can see you, but you can still have a private conversation without disturbing anyone around you. We’re a culture of people who work better with a buzz around us, but that buzz needs to be manageable.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/sc...ef=todayspaper

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Welcome to the Hacker Hostel, where young entrepreneurs find the space to dream . . .

Phillip Cohen in the bedroom of a “hacker hostel” in Menlo Park, Calif., where aspiring computer entrepreneurs live cheaply.

By BRIAN X. CHEN

SAN FRANCISCO — From the outside it’s just a beige three-story building in a quiet residential neighborhood. But inside, in a third-floor apartment, there are enough Ikea bunk beds to sleep 10 people, crammed into two bedrooms. The living room is bare except for a futon, a tiny desk and laptop power cables strewed across the hardwood floor like a nest of snakes.

The tenants, mostly men in their 20s, sleep next to heaps of dirty laundry. There is no television set; the men watch online video, on laptops with headphones. On a recent afternoon, 23-year-old Steve El-Hage, who came here from Toronto in May, ate slices of ham straight out of the package: “As you can see, I was going to make a sandwich, but I didn’t get there.”

This is not some kind of dorm, but a “hacker hostel.” It’s one of several in the Bay Area that offer short- or long-term stays for aspiring tech entrepreneurs on the bottom rung of the Silicon Valley ladder, those who haven’t yet achieved Facebook-level riches. These establishments put a twist on the long tradition of communal housing for tech types by turning it into a commercial enterprise.

The San Francisco hostel is part of a minichain of three bunk-bed-stuffed residences under the same management, all places where young programmers, designers and scientists can work, eat and sleep.

These are not so different from crowded apartments that cater to immigrants. But many tenants are here not so much for the cheap rent — $40 a night — as for the camaraderie and idea-swapping. And potential tenants are screened to make sure they will contribute to the mix. Justin Carden, a 29-year-old software engineer who is staying in another hostel, in Menlo Park, while working on a biotech start-up, talks about the place as if it were Stanford.

“The intellectual stimulation you get from being here is unparalleled,” Mr. Carden said. “If you’re wanting to do something to change the world and make it a fundamentally better place, you need to be around the right people.”

Hackers — the Mark Zuckerberg variety, not the identity thieves — have long crammed into odd or tiny spaces and worked together to solve problems. In the 1960s, researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory slept in the attic and, while waiting for their turn on the shared mainframe computer, sweated in the basement sauna.

When told about the hacker hostels, Ethan Mollick, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, said they reminded him of his days in the last decade studying at M.I.T., where graduate students would have bunk beds inside their small offices.

“We work so hard and we don’t care about where we’re staying,” he said. “That’s how you learn. People always complain that academic study of computer science doesn’t do a lot for you as a programmer. What does are these sorts of environments.”

Airbnb, a popular Web rental service for apartments or single rooms, has helped commercialize this idea. A quick search for “hacker” on the site turns up dozens of listings in the Bay Area. Not all the operations are above board. Katy Levinson, who runs another hacker house, declined to give its exact location because she had heard about several houses being shut down after running into trouble with landlords.

The other houses run by the operators of the San Francisco apartment, who call themselves Chez JJ, are in Mountain View and Menlo Park. Each one has a host, or “captain,” who sifts through the requests pouring in on Airbnb from would-be guests.

The captains, all women, screen for personalities and occupations, rejecting applicants who are not techies or simply have a poor attitude. Sasha Willins, a 26-year-old graphic designer who is captain of the San Francisco apartment, has a gentle way of saying no. “It’s not so much rejecting as it is asking so many questions until they withdraw their application,” she said.

New guests get a pillow, comforter, sheets and a towel. The captains occasionally cook meals for everyone, like a pancake brunch with mimosas. As payment, the captains get free rent and a private room.

The idea for the minichain came from Jade Wang, a 28-year-old neuroscientist who has worked at NASA and started Chez JJ with her friend Jocelyn Berl. She said she once rented out a spare bedroom through Airbnb and realized that “nerds” like herself want to be around their own kind.

“It’s not that nerds are necessarily socially awkward among normal people,” Dr. Wang said. “If you have a large room of 99 percent nerds and you have that one normal person, they’d be the ones who are socially awkward.”

Each Chez JJ house has a different vibe. The Mountain View house tends to be oriented toward start-ups, with many of the residents working on new apps or Web sites. They try out their sales talks on one another before pitching investors.

The house in Menlo Park, which is moving to Palo Alto this summer, is more science-oriented. The captain, Casey Greene, is a 26-year-old molecular biologist, and some of her guests are science students in summer programs at Stanford. They run a journal club, where guests huddle together to discuss scientific papers.

The San Francisco apartment is considerably smaller than the others. On a recent stay there, it felt dormlike, with occasional grime in the bathrooms and piles of dishes in the sink. Some tenants stay a few days; others settle in for months while they search for more permanent housing.

Mr. El-Hage and his business partner Nelson Wu, a 27-year-old electrical and computer engineer, lived there for two months, using it as the headquarters of their start-up, MassDrop, which helps people buy items as a group to get a better price. Mr. Wu spent most of his days sitting on the living room futon and pounding away on his MacBook Air, often until 3 or 4 a.m.

When the site started in May, $12,000 in orders for a car diagnostics device poured in right away. PayPal, which the founders used to process payments, decided their account was “high risk” and suspended it, freezing their money for six months, Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Wu and Mr. El-Hage maxed out their credit cards to fulfill the orders. Without investors backing them, they nearly went broke. MassDrop has recovered to “above-ramen status, but not that much higher,” Mr. El-Hage said.

But the two men have since moved out of the apartment. They recently hired their first employee, an 18-year-old student they had met there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/te...ef=global-home

[ProdigyofZen]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

So the affluent immigrants want their kids to be ridiculed, beat up and antagonized every day at public school? Obviously that happens at private schools as well but if you are affluent and everyone else is affluent that is a common bond.

At the public school they have no chance whatsoever.

Not to mention the racial tension. I know a lot of my chinese friends who went to public school in NYC absolutely hated it because of the way the african americans would beat them up on a daily basis.

But it does happen every where. I grew up in a rather rural community an hour outside DC where my school was public and about 98% white. There was rarely a day that went by from elementary school to my senior year that something didnt happen.

On a side note, the most popular kid in school was a 3 sport athlete and one of only 4 black people in the entire high school when I was in 10th grade.