Tuesday, July 25, 2023, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

No Comments

Are Big Cities Dying?

I’ve been writing a lot about the demise of America’s big cities: Chicago, LA, New York, San Francisco, Houston, etc. Crime is up. Property values are down. COVID lockdowns taught corporations and their employees that they don’t really need to be downtown to make things happen.

It feels to me that we are five to 10 years away from the end of multimillion-person urban centers. I wouldn’t be surprised if, by 2030, the US would have only two cities (LA and NYC) with populations above a million. NYC would be down from 8.6 million to… hmmm… 3.6 million. And LA would drop from 4 million to about 2.5 million. (LA will retain more on a percentage basis because it is already a sprawling suburb.)

In the last three years, we’ve seen big, scary changes. On top of the list are the hysteria-fueled, power-grabbing government lockdowns, which unintentionally revolutionized the way businesses and employees think about work. Nobody wants to commute 30 or 40 minutes to work in a nondescript cubby in a nondescript city tower anymore. The future is two- or three-day in-office workweeks. And that is probably optimistic.

BLM riots, which destroyed blocks and blocks of formerly healthy retail businesses, including hundreds of Black- and Brown-owned businesses, are gone and don’t seem to be coming back. And there are stretches of formerly upscale retail streets that are eerily half boarded up.

The rise in violent crime in the big cities isn’t of much interest to anyone because it is mostly drug-related and Black-on-Black crime. What’s scaring businesses away is the huge increase in all forms of theft effectively allowed by city mayors and their DAs that believe there are too many people of color in jails.

On top of that, you have big inventories and higher interest rates that have a greatly negative impact on commercial real estate. In New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, and Madrid, luxury office towers are only half-filled. And some landlords are walking away from their debt rather than pouring good money after bad. In San Francisco, for example, the owners of the largest shopping mall have abandoned it.

Even as stock markets rally and interest rates ebb, the problem for commercial real estate in cities is getting worse every week. The center will not hold.

Click here and here and here.

Continue Reading

Worth Considering

No Comments

Who Is This Taylor Swift Person?

If I’ve ever heard a Taylor Swift song, I wasn’t aware of it.

I’m just too old. And, happily, out of touch with the pop music scene today. I’m not embarrassed to admit that. I mean, by the time she hit the charts, I was in my sixties.

When you get to a certain age, the brain is tired of doing the thousands of things you made it do for so many years. Like remembering why you ended up here, in the hardware store. Or why you interrupted such a nice dinner party to blurt out what you just said.

It’s time, you think, to air out the knowledge warehouse and reduce the number of memories that have, over the years, cluttered up every nook and cranny. By having fewer memories, you reason, your brain will have more time and energy to do what it still must do. Like find the car keys. Or remind you to put on your shoes.

Purging the brain is the order of your age. So, you do that, even if you would prefer to hoard it all. But even if you have that mentality, it still makes zero sense to take in more memories. Especially with music. In your adolescence and young adulthood, you collected more music memories than you will ever need.

Which is why, despite her rising fame, I never gave Tayler Swift any of my attention. Furthermore, her clean-cut, wholesome, “pretty” look suggested to me that she would be a quickly passing fad.

I was wrong. Swift signed her first record contract in 2005, at the fragile age of 14. Teenage stars – TV stars, movie stars, and music stars – generally have a short arc of fame. Two or three years. Five years, at best. But here we are, 18 years later, and Taylor Swift is more famous and more popular than ever. In fact, there is an argument to be made that she is the most successful rock/pop star of all time.

Here’s a good example: Take a look at this amazing list of the amazing number of music industry records broken by Taylor Swift.

Continue Reading

News & Views

No Comments

The World Is Getting Older. Fast!

It’s not just my generation, it’s the Baby Boomers. And it’s not just in the USA. The population of the entire world is aging. And aging fast. To get a feel for how important this is, check out this chart.

 

Better Than Plastic!

Driver’s licenses, credit cards, bank cards, and even gift cards are fast becoming obsolete. In three to five years, we’ll all be using a simpler and much less risky way to carry around our most sensitive information and pay our bills.

A harbinger: Amazon and Whole Foods have teamed up to launch a new technology that will allow shoppers to transfer all their credit information by passing their hands under some newfangled machine. Read about it here.

 

Lights! Camera! Inaction? 

American films brought in $592 million in ticket sales in China in the first half of the year. That sounds like a lot until you learn that last year, at the same time, they earned $1.9 billion!

 

How Rich Is Elon Musk? 

Rich enough that he lost $13.6 billion in net worth July 20th (on account of a Tesla stock dive) and still has a $40 billion lead on Bernard Arnault, who is No. 2 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Click here.

Continue Reading

Readers Write

No Comments

From SL, re the action movie clichés in the July 21 issue:

“Great list, but you forgot this! At the final battle to the death between hero and arch villain, the hero actually saves the villain (after proving that he could have killed him or let him die), only to then have the villain, showing truly poor sportsmanship, try once again to kill the hero with a sneaky move, at which time, the villain somehow causes his own death by accident, thus proving that he was truly on the dark side and hence must face karmic justice.”

My Response: Ah, yes. A classic!

Continue Reading