Posted by Seth on March 31, 2011 under Book Review, Review | 
I prefer to welcome back baseball each year with a trip to Spring Training. Sneaking away from the cold of New York City in the middle of March for a couple days of fun and sun in Florida is never a bad thing. Sadly, however, it did not come to pass this year. Instead I welcomed back the baseball season through the eyes and words of one of their own, Dirk Hayhurst.
Hayhurst pitched for the San Diego Padres organization for a couple years, both in the minors and, eventually, in the majors. His story, The Bullpen Gospels
, tells the life of a ball player as it exists for the majority of guys with a uniform on their back, trying to eke out a living and make it to the big leagues and live out their dream. And it is hysterical.
There are stories of bad roommates at spring training and on the road, of practical jokes and long bus rides through the night from stadium to stadium and game to game. There is the pain of almost getting cut and the triumph of winning a championship.
For the most part the story is good-humored fluff. Nothing too serious and plenty of ridiculous stories that read quickly and leave you with a smile on your face. There are a couple serious moments, too, including this bit that Hayhurst acknowledges after an evening in the bullpen hanging out with a three year old who had terminal liver cancer:
The burden of players isn’t to achieve greatness, but to give the feeling of it to everyone he encounters. It was wrong of me even to try to separate life and the game. They were intertwined, meant to be, one affecting the other, one teaching the other, even when the mixture occasionally blows up. It takes a real person, one who understands himself, to use the tool of baseball for something good. For that person, as long as he has a jersey on his back, he has a chance.
It isn’t literary genius, to be sure, but it is a quick, fun read.
Posted by Seth on March 28, 2011 under Book Review, Review |
There are three main lessons that I learned from reading Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next:
- Logistics and speed are unstoppable forces that will define the next several generations of economic development globally;
- The United States has already lost most any chance of keeping pace; and,
- The global economy may never actually cash in on the investments it is making.
The first of these observations is not particularly surprising and the conclusions there are pretty reasonable. The second and third scare me to no end. Indeed, reading a couple steps down the line in the global economic environment laid bare in Aerotropolis, it is quite easy to see the whole system collapsing on itself in a matter of years, assuming we make it that far. That small bits have already experienced such a decline is of little comfort.
The premise of the areotropolis is rather simple. Rather than try to explain it myself I’ll let you understand it in the words of its greatest proponent, John Kasarda through the lens of author Greg Lindsay:
…[R]ather than banish airports to the edge of town and then do our best to avoid them, we will build this century’s cities around them. Why? Because people once chose to live in cities for the wealth of connections they offered socially, financially, intellectually, and so forth. But in the era of globalization we choose cities drawing closer together themselves, linked by fiber-optic cables and jet aircraft.
…
In essence, the aerotropolis of [Kasarda’s]imagination isn’t necessarily a city but a superconductor, a piece of infrastructure promising zero resistance to anyone wanting to set up shop there. Examine [Kasarda’s] initial sketches for one – with the carefully arranged waves of white boxes and office cubes – and you’ll find a city expressly planned on behalf of the companies expected to populate it. An aerotropolis isn’t an airport either, and building one isn’t a matter of having the longest runways or the largest landmass. Frictionlessness is the product of a whole host of attributes, many of which are invisible: tariff-free trade zones, faster customs clearance, fewer and faster permits, and a right-to-work workforce that knows what it’s doing. ‘It’s the way you reduce time, the way you reduce costs, the way you reduce space,’ Kasarda says. ‘The aerotropolis is where the elastic mile, the friction of space, community without propinquity, and trade routes all come together.’
…
[A] third of the value of all the goods made in the world, three trillions dollars’ worth, travels by air while composing barely 1 percent of their weight. Air cargo’s growth outpaced world trade’s by a factor of four-to-one over the last thirty-five years, and blew past global GDP growth by nine-to-one, meaning more and more of what’s worth making and moving (including half of American exports) is aloft. In the Instant age, Kasarda says, ‘The price of oil matters less than the price of speed.’
Building an aerotropolis is a relatively easy thing to do, assuming no political or environmental concerns. Find a plot of land, clear it out and build a world-class airport in the middle. From there, add on industrial, commercial and residential bits in the appropriate ratios and then watch as industry beats down the doors to show up and open shop inside your free-trade zone. Free of tariffs and , in many cases, free of local laws, these aerotropolii represent the free market economy at its most basic level.
The problems that arise are, of course, plentiful. Starting with the political and environmental concerns, there are plenty of reasons for many in the western world to object to such developments. Still, looking at the present evidence, there is no doubt that such developments have been successful. Louisville and Memphis are essentially subsidiaries of UPS and FedEx, respectively. The area surrounding Amsterdam’s Schipol airport is a testimony to the efficacy of global trade and just-in-time delivery of flowers on a scale that is yet to be matched, though Addis Abba is one of several hoping to edge in on that market.
Dulles, Denver and Dallas-Fort Worth are all representative of this not-so-new approach to urban planning. Centralize around a transportation hub, just like ports in the days of yore and train terminals in the not quite so distant past. Today that hub is the airport large enough to easily handle frequent service from Boeing 747F freighters laden with cargo inbound from manufacturing hubs in southeast Asia or agricultural hubs in South America. It is not at all difficult to see how this progression has been made and Lindsay does a phenomenal job of explaining in detail some specific examples of why certain areas have succeeded and other have failed in developing these aerotropolii.
The concept of what makes an aerotropolis is just half the story, however. The economic impact that they can bring to the developing world is the other half, and it scares the hell out of me.
Asia, Africa and the Middle East are the main development targets today. China is in the midst of an unprecedented infrastructure build that is dedicating a tremendous portion of their GDP to highways, high-speed trains and airports. Many of those airports are destined to be aerotropolii. Thailand started a similar effort with Suvarnabhumi, the new international airport in Bangkok. Ho Chi Minh City is doing the same with their new international airport.
In China the development is easy. The local, provincial or national government decrees that an airport will be built on a specific plot of land and that’s the end of the story. It happens – quickly – and those currently there are relocated. In Thailand, however, a similar set of plans resulted in relatives of ministers suddenly operating real estate and logistics operations. When word got out of the coming aerotropolis everyone tried to get in on the deal and real estate prices shot through the roof. The recent coups can be related, in part, to the failure of these plans to get off the ground or the revolt of the people against the abuse of that power.
So there is the risk of political upheaval as the working class feels they’ve been wronged. This potential is more pronounced as those same workers start to profit from the business that the aerotropolii bring in now have the means to afford to protest, rather than to accept whatever they are told to do. And now that the protesters know that the airports are the life-blood of their economies (e.g. the recent Bangkok protests that saw both sides seize airport terminals at various points to stymie the ruling party) the risk is that much more real.
But that isn’t the part that worries me the most. What scares me is the potential for all this investment to be a very efficient and expedient means to spend billions of dollars of someone else’s money in hopes of a return that is impossible to realize. And Lindsay outlines exactly how that will come to pass as the aerotropolii develop and multiply.
There are currently scores of such projects in various stages of development. Can they all possibly be successful? Dubai already almost collapsed once as the highly leveraged construction efforts there saw money and credit dry up in the recent financial crisis.
In effect, Dubai was a giant arbitrage play, a pure experiment in funneling and funding globalization. A tiny city-state with literally nothing – no oil, few people, and little education – sought to become a global capital in a single generation…. That’s why everything was so oversize, including Dubai’s ambitions.
Bangkok failed to move swiftly enough and to avoid corruption, leading to the failure of the aerotropolis there, though not to the collapse of the economy. FedEx has been wooed by China to move their Pacific sort hub from Subic Bay to Baiyun International Airport near Ghangzhou.
First, [the Chinese] drained the pond covering the site – the only reason urban scrubland hasn’t subsumed it already. Then they diverted a river, paved over its marshes, and pumped concrete into caves underneath. FedEx had sought equally drastic changed to China’s legal code, rewriting customs and aviation statutes to grant itself an unlimited number of flights…. True to form, doing so required a year of tortuous negotiations with more than a hundred agencies and bureaucracies. Once given the green light, construction of the six-lane highway linking the hub to the Delta’s factories had taken all of six months.
But what does such a shift mean to Subic Bay? Or to the other local facilities that have been operating as regional cargo hubs? For now, they are struggling to fight back, to find tenants for the space and to keep their economies alive. Why have similar projects in Hanoi or Saigon failed (or not been as rapidly successful)? They can offer cheaper labor, but the total pool of raw materials and labor is still larger in China. So the Vietnamese versions strain to get sufficient traction and businesses in their aerotropolii. But the cost of developing them is already sunk.
But even the shift of FedEx into the airport is no guarantee. There are still other areas desperate for similar growth and they are somewhat ruthless in their pursuit of the business.
As the Hong Kong economist Steven Cheung once explained their attitude, ‘You want a business license? The locality will assign someone to do the walking and talking for you. Want a building permit? They will give you one with money-back guarantees. Unhappy about that dirty creek passing through the site? They may offer to build a small lake for you…. They sell their cheap electricity, sell their parks and entertainment, sell their easy transportation, sell their water supply, sell their glorious history and even sell how good looking their girls are – no exaggeration!’
There are hospitals operating in India that see themselves as the far end of a long-haul commuter healthcare road. Just like the Polish doctors who commute to England to work the weekend shift and are home Monday morning on a cheap flight, these hospitals are luring in patients from abroad with the promise of top-quality healthcare at bargain prices. Infrastructure is being built but there is no guarantee that the Ray Kinsella-styled plan will come through. What if they build it and no one comes?
The danger is that someone else will siphon [patients] away with lower costs and better connectivity in the form of nonstop flights; layovers are not an option when you’ve just come out of traction.
Indeed, Hyderabad is already trying to steal the market from Mumbai and Bangalore. The brand new airport in Hyderabad was built with an eye towards being a Healthport, among other things.
The book highlights tells several other stories, from a man-made city built literally in the middle of the ocean in Korea to the amazing fresh flowers market that is centered in Amsterdam, though showing signs of sprouting in Africa and China. And in each example precious little attention is paid to what happens to the legacy locations as the new sites go up. No book can cover everything, but at least mentioning the potential for billions of dollars of invested funds to end up with no return is a worthwhile acknowledgement to make in my book.
And that’s what ultimately has me scared. Not all of these aerotropolii will be successful. There are simply too many competing to offer the same services in concentrated regional centers. Some will almost certainly succeed and it will provide a boon to the local economy of the winners. Right up until the competitor down the road offers up cheaper, faster and better services a couple years later. Moving the factories is an expensive undertaking, with short-term effects on to the balance sheet of the company in question and with potentially devastating long-term repercussions to the aerotropolis that loses the business.
The book is an interesting read and definitely worth checking out, both from a global economics and a aerophile perspective. And I actually believe that most of the predictions of growth are likely to come true; all current evidence certainly supports them. I just fear for the fallout that comes with those developments and its impact on the global economy. For someone to win big in these efforts someone else is likely to lose badly.
Posted by Seth on January 21, 2011 under Book Review, Trip Reports |
Here we and all who shall hereafter live in freedom will be reminded that to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful remembrance of their sacrifice and with the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live
Thus reads the inscription at the entrance to the North Africa American cemetery and memorial in Tunisia. Located just outside of Tunis, near Carthage, the cemetery is significant in size and in its impact on visitors. There are 2.841 bodies interred within its walls, each under an incredibly plain white marble marker laid out in perfect alignment. Brothers buried next to each other, at least on Medal of Honor awardee and 240 stones with the incredibly sad phrase, "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God."
Another 3,724 names are engraved along a wall, names of those who perished in the region but who’s bodies were unaccounted for. The cemetery is both a beautiful and incredibly moving reminder of the sacrifices made by these and many thousands more young men during World War 2.
One of the bleached white crosses bears a tiny bit of decoration. Private Nicholas Minue from Careret, NJ, has his headstone embossed with gold paint, the mark of a Medal of Honor recipient.
For distinguishing himself conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the loss of his life above and beyond the call of duty in action with the enemy on 28 April 1943, in the vicinity of MedjezelBab, Tunisia. When the advance of the assault elements of Company A was held up by flanking fire from an enemy machinegun nest, Pvt. Minue voluntarily, alone, and unhesitatingly, with complete disregard of his own welfare, charged the enemy entrenched position with fixed bayonet. Pvt. Minue assaulted the enemy under a withering machinegun and rifle fire, killing approximately 10 enemy machinegunners and riflemen. After completely destroying this position, Pvt. Minue continued forward, routing enemy riflemen from dugout positions until he was fatally wounded. The courage, fearlessness and aggressiveness displayed by Pvt. Minue in the face of inevitable death was unquestionably the factor that gave his company the offensive spirit that was necessary for advancing and driving the enemy from the entire sector.
The battle for North Africa was a roughly six month affair. It was the first major engagement for the Americans in the Atlantic side of the war and it was, in many ways, a great lesson in what not to do when going to battle. The Romans, a group that held this same land thousands of years prior, were incredibly successful in their conquests in large part because of their logistical skills, always able to supply troops with the correct materiel. That was just one of many areas that the Americans and the English fighting along side of them faltered at.
Operation TORCH, the beginning of the campaign, was a massive effort that saw thousands of troops ferried across the Atlantic and deposited on the shores of Morocco and Algeria. Not all the troops even made it on-shore. They were the earliest names recorded on the wall of the missing, those lost at sea before the battle even began. Those who did make it on shore were initially beset by logistical problems that were rather significant. Rather than having 8,700 trucks on the ground in Oran as planned in mid-November there were only 1.800. Officers were spotted wandering around town offering $5,000 in silver for anything resembling a functional truck. Just one of many examples of things not going quite as planned.
Months later the battle was still ongoing. The numbers of dead, injured and imprisoned are staggering. Battle by battle, hill by hill, the soldiers marched on. Underequipped, both in quantity and quality of gear, they nonetheless inched forward (and backwards on occasion). Eventually the victory came, but not without tremendous losses.
The saying goes that history is written by the victors in battle and certainly most history of World War 2 is told that way these days. Stories of the great American battle leaders, names that have been immortalized in our collective conscience, focus on the incredible successes and accomplishments those men achieved. It is rare, for example, to hear a story about Patton that details his inability to effectively command and control his platoons. Similarly rare are the stories of Ike being pilloried as an ineffective, inexperienced and generally confused commander in battle.
But reading back through primary source material, from those commanders and from others around them, the reality is quite clear. They grew quickly as leaders and their tactical skills improved rather impressively, but the initial pains were very real and rather significant. A great telling of the history of the battle comes from Rick Atkinson’s An Army at Dawn. The book is incredibly detailed, including not only the views of the victors but also details from the the German side. Tales from command tents are intertwined with tales from the trenches and the tanks.
Reading of the shortcomings of the commanders, seen by their colleagues, adversaries and partners is definitely and educational and eye-opening experience.
Eisenhower would complain that his ad hoc orders to support the British with American troops ‘were not clearly understood nor vigorously executed.’ To his brother Edgar he confided, ‘I suffer from the usual difficulty that besets the higher commander – things can be ordered and started, but actual execution at the front has to be turned over to someone else.’
At the end of the day the Allies won and eventually things turned out reasonably well, but not without many false starts, blundering snafus and significant casualties. Reading the story and standing on the ground there in Carthage, mourning the fallen soldiers, certainly puts many things in perspective.
More from Tunisia here!
Posted by Seth on April 28, 2010 under Book Review |
Spending as much time as I do on airplanes has done wonderful things for my reading habits. I’m reading more than ever and loving it. The majority of my reading is travel-related. Not necessarily travel guides – those are more fun to write than to read for me – but the stories I’m reading, both fiction and non-fiction, are set in destinations that I’m excited by. They might be places I’m going or places I’ve just been or just places I’m intrigued by. I often find inspiration for my travel obsession in the stories being told in these books. Most recently I’ve been reading about India. I got started late last year when I thought I’d be going back this spring thanks to a great sale offered by British Airways. That fell through, but my desire to read more about the country didn’t nor did my desire to return for another visit. In fact that desire continues to grow, based mostly on my reading of two books during the intervening months.
Maximum City is a collection of stories told by a Bombay native who returns to his hometown from New York City twenty years after having left as a teenager. His return finds the city reborn as Mumbai and many differences but also enough similarities that he is able to settle back into the routines and find his way. During the couple years he spends with his family in Mumbai he follows a few main story lines and characters around town.
There are stories of gangsters responsible for extortion and contract killings – they come as cheap as $10 on the street – and there is the story of the police commissioner responsible for tracking down and prosecuting such criminals. Whether taking a meeting with men responsible for dozens of murders and inciting riots around town or with the man who ultimately broke open the case of the riot organizers and drives the prosecution, the story is engaging and riveting. There are movie stars and producers under the protection of the governments from the extortion schemes of the criminal organizations which are run by leaders who are based in foreign lands and there are occasional efforts to actually reign in the crime waves, though mostly the efforts focus on just keeping enough people alive and financially sound so that there isn’t a revolt in the communities.
There is the tale of the beauty queen, working in one of the many dance clubs that Bombay has to offer, trying to break out of that world and into the realm of professional modeling and acting. And there is her counterpart, a man who dances as a woman and who is known for the energy and excitement she exhibits while dancing. The story tracks her home life where she lives as a relatively normal man, married and eventually a father. These two stories surround a world of women being exploited and, when successful, turning that exploitation back on the men who effect it, becoming rather wealthy at the expense of the men who would take advantage of them.
One story follows a family seeking enlightenment. A successful diamond merchant, the patriarch of the family ultimately decides to devote his life – and that of his family as well – to the pursuit of moksha, the Jain concept of enlightenment. They are millionaires who divest themselves of everything, literally throwing their money and possessions out into crowds, as they pursue this spiritual cleanliness.
The author gets invited to help write scripts for movies in Bollywood, rubbing elbows with the star directors and actors and giving a view into the way that industry works, both on the financial and human side of things. The author tells of working with a director to write an “A-level” movie and following the gang-funded development of a lesser film, tracking the hopes of an aspiring actor and the stories of woe of the thousands who move to Mumbai each year in hopes of breaking into the business.
There are other stories as well, each its own tiny piece of the whole story that makes Mumbai such a magnet for immigrants from the countryside. And each of the stories makes me want to discover just a bit more of Mumbai for myself. I know I’ll never get close to most of the people described in the book, but I want to see the city and experience my version of the life that can be had in those neighborhoods.
Were this simply a novel built from the imagination of someone who decided to disappear into the underworld of Mumbai the story would be fascinating. Considering that the tale is loosely based on the author’s actual experiences, it is simply phenomenal. I didn’t know that it was a mostly true story until I was about 80% of the way through (sorry for the spoiler if that ruins it for you) but once I found out I actually spent a couple hours just remembering some of the crazy situations that the author recounts. Even if they are only half true the fact that one man experienced so much is awesome.
Shantaram is the story of an escaped convict living on the lam in Mumbai. He did time in prison in Australia before escaping to New Zealand and eventually to India, a great place to get lost in the underworld for a few years if you’re willing to make some sacrifices. Unwilling to risk living in guest houses and hotels – locations where passports must be registered – the protagonist befriends, or is befriended by, a local who lives in one of the many slums around the city. He moves in to the slum, living on what he can drum up in various gray and black market businesses. And those are the least crazy parts of his time in town. His time in town starts with meeting a guide as he comes off the bus from the airport. That brief moment in time, a gutsy decision to trust a random stranger, turns out to define most of the rest of his time in Mumbai.
Of course, he falls in love with a woman; there is the long chase of that love. There is also his indoctrination into the true underworld of crime in Mumbai. He becomes an expert in black market currency exchange, the smuggling of gold into the country and the production and sale of false passports and other documents. He breaks into the movie business, arranging for funding of some films and working to cast extras – westerners he initially meets for drug or currency deals – in others. He sets up a small medical clinic in the slums based on his limited first aid training, eventually becoming the initial doctor for thousands of folks living in the neighborhood, people who otherwise would never receive medical treatment. Oh, and eventually he travels off to Afghanistan, smuggling huge caches of weapons along the way, to become a fighter in the war there, fighting along side natives who had previously transplanted to India and set up shop as gangsters.
He serves time in the Indian prisons, accused of a crime that he might have committed. But the accusations are secondary to the corruption in the prison system. Although he eventually manages to bribe his way out – the fingerprints taken at his initial processing return his true identity as an escaped convict – the stories of the treatments inside the prison are harrowing.
There are heroin dens and hashish bars, great meetings of the mafia dons and trips to meet with the lepers who can provide him with black market medicines for his clinic in the slums. How do you stop an epidemic from spreading through a community where an eight foot by eight foot room is home for a whole family? You simply hope to contain it and isolate the sick long enough that the others can survive. Such tales are heart-wrenching but also tell the story of the communal spirit to survive that permeates the poorest of the Mumbai communities.
And then there’s the fact that he actually wrote the book more than once. The notes, scribbled on random slips of paper accumulated over the years and eventually committed to a manuscript were all lost after he returned to prison for real, his history finally catching up with him. Still, with everything lost he wrote the stories again and weaves a tale that, while probably not 100% factual, is close enough that it is easy to feel yourself alongside him as he tries to move past the previous life and simply reinvent himself in a city that seems built for such a task.
The story is incredibly long but reads quickly. It is a page turner that is hard to put down. And the stories are compelling.
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