Archive for February, 2010
Ross • 14th Feb 2010 • Living • holidays, life, skiing, vacation
I have just returned from Kitzbuhel in Austria, this year’s venue for our annual family ski trip. If I have not been in contact so much for the past week, this is why – apologies. In Kitz I recommend:
- Schloss Lebenberg, a hotel with first rate fitness facilities (including a roof-top pool and sauna overlooking the town and mountain)
- The Londoner for rowdy apres-ski, especially when the Short and Curlies are playing
- Making the link with Westendorf and checking out the neighbouring SkiWelt ski zone. The lifts and views are better than in Kitz, although it can be busier on the pistes, and you’ll need a different lift pass.
The photo above is the Wilder Kaiser mountain range, visible from the resort’s two main ski peaks. More photos here.
Ross • 5th Feb 2010 • Living • economy, house prices, investment, london, property
From the Wall Street Journal via Paul Kedrosky:
London real estate has actually bounced off the bottom in the last nine months. Prices are now down a mere 9% or so from their 2007 peaks, according to data tracked by mortgage giant Nationwide Building Society. The average home in London, including all those dreary outskirts that go on and on and on, is $436,000. That’s even higher than it was as recently as 2006, when the bubble was in its late stages.
As a homeowner in those ‘dreary outskirts’ I like the phenomenon if not the description.
(Incidentally, if a UK paper was reporting the US market, it would give the foreign-denominated price first, then the local equivalent in brackets. Is it standard US practise to show only dollar amounts? If so, that annoys me more than it should.)
Ross • 4th Feb 2010 • Living • climate change, global warming, media, radio, talk radio
Congressman Donald Schwerbitz, who represented South Dakota back in the 1960s and 70s… recognized that carbon emissions are caused primarily by breathing, and he proposed to cut those emissions in half by requiring every American to wear a device that plugs up one nostril. Congressman Schwerbitz… an irrepressible prankster… managed to get himself invited onto a talk radio program to explain how the nostril plugs would work. (The host was in on the joke.) Because talk radio audiences are dominated by libertarians and reactionaries, the response was not positive. Callers clamored for civil disobedience; one threatened that if he ever saw anyone wearing one of these devices, he’d “punch him in his other nose”. Others worried that our clean air might drift over to Cuba, where the communists could use it. A few, though, were enthusiastic. One woman wanted to know if the devices could be adapted to fit animals. Warthogs, she observed, have very big nostrils.
Although the Steven Landsburg piece from which I have stolen this extract isn’t supposed to be a comment on talk radio, I think this sums up the concerns of most talk radio callers well – at least from what I have heard when travelling in a taxi, or getting my hair cut.
Ross • 1st Feb 2010 • Living • america, automotive, cars, heuristics, opinions, transmissions, trust, usa
When I spot somebody who appears never to have left the USA…
Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics.
…I discount their opinions appropriately.
Ross • 1st Feb 2010 • Thinking • economics, government debt, politics, public finances, spending, Thinking, usa
Sometimes you read something that makes you challenge your opinions, in a positive way. Steve Landsburg’s piece on government spending vs government debt did that for me today. His argument: it’s not government debt that is problematic, but government spending.
