The Cinematic State of Things
By A. O. SCOTT - Published: December 16, 2010
IN any given year, if you see enough movies — out of habit, ardor or obligation — you will start to notice patterns and clusters. By December the temptation will be nearly overwhelming to generalize from this data, to turn coincidences into trends and trends into matters of world-historical significance. The ad hoc, arbitrary, week-in-week-out sampling of stories and pictures must add up to something, right? Otherwise why bother?
One reason you do bother, of course, is precisely to find experiences that defy expectations and break patterns: movies that challenge your assumptions or alter your habits of perception. How often does that happen? Just enough. (At the end of this article you’ll find 30 examples — 10 best and 20 runners-up — selected from more than 600 movies reviewed in The New York Times in 2010.)
The ritual of year-end list making is a way of sifting through scattered, memorable moments and forcing them briefly into focus. A handful of movies from 2010 will still be interesting in the future, in which case the date of their first appearance will be little more than the answer to a trivia question. Was it a good year for movies? A great year? Hard to say, and finally, who cares? The movies — good and bad alike — shed a blinking, blurry light on the times, illuminating our collective fears, fantasies and failures of will. An attempt at synthesis can only fail, so in lieu of a comprehensive theory of Cinema Now, I offer a handful of postulates on the Cinematic State of Things. I trust they will stimulate sober discussion and principled argument as well as outright ridicule.
1. We are all figments of Leonardo DiCaprio’s imagination. Or Natalie Portman’s. Or Mark Zuckerberg’s. Or Banksy’s. The lines between reality and appearance, reason and madness, truth and fiction have always been blurry, but this was an especially fertile year for dreams, hoaxes and puzzles, many of them playing with fundamental questions of identity. Was Mr. DiCaprio, in “Shutter Island,” a duly appointed federal marshal or loony-bin resident? Awake or asleep in “Inception?” Was “Exit Through the Gift Shop” an elaborate conceptual-art prank by Banksy or an exposé of art-world fraud? And what about “Catfish”? Do our real selves live on Facebook? Or just our real friends?
2. It’s all mom’s fault. 2010 was a very good year for female directors, and for actresses, but also a bad year for mothers. In the maternal monster category — surely Mo’Nique, who broke the mold in “Precious,” should present this award — Melissa Leo from “The Fighter” and Barbara Hershey in “Black Swan” will face stiff competition from the cartoon villainess Mother Gothel (Donna Murphy) in “Tangled” and Jacki Weaver’s criminal matriarch in the Australian film “Animal Kingdom.”
3. But mom is miserable. There was plenty of maternal suffering to counteract such demonization. Rodrigo García’s “Mother and Child” was about nothing else, with Annette Bening, Kerry Washington and Naomi Watts acting out a braided melodrama of longing and loss. But no one suffered as grandly as Tilda Swinton in the operatic “I Am Love,” or as pathetically as Paprika Steen in the unsparing “Applause.”
4. Still, the kids are all right. The daughters in particular. It was a year of brave, tough, adventurous and sometimes reckless girls and young women, including the fearless Rapunzel in “Tangled,” who was also a pretty good singer (thanks to the voice of Mandy Moore and the songs of Alan Menken), and both Fanning sisters: Dakota in Floria Sigismondi’s underrated “Runaways,” and Elle in Sofia Coppola’s haunting, clear-sighted “Somewhere.” Not to mention Jennifer Lawrence’s fearless Ozark teenager in “Winter’s Bone,” Hailee Steinfeld’s plucky Old West avenger in “True Grit” and Chloë Grace Moretz’s lonely vampire in “Let Me In.” Perhaps the bravest of all was the sullen, chain-smoking Lisbeth Salander, incarnated (in the Swedish film versions of Stieg Larsson’s best sellers) by Noomi Rapace.
5. And the kids grow up. Not just Harry Potter. Yes, the general wallowing in male arrested development continued, with the usual comic suspects (Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis) appearing in the usual puerile comedies (one of them called “Grown Ups”). But at least two films — “Somewhere” and “Greenberg” — took a tough-love attitude toward their immature male protagonists, reckoning the emotional costs of delayed maturity and extended adolescence. (The same might be said of “The Social Network.”) And the experience of sending a child off to college, hardly a common theme in movies before now, seems to have become a touchstone. Or at least an official three-film, cross-genre trend, thanks to “Toy Story 3,” “The Kids Are All Right” and “The Kids Grow Up”: a cartoon, a comedy and a documentary. (Meanwhile the drift and ambivalence of the mid- and post-collegiate young was minutely captured in “The Exploding Girl” and “Tiny Furniture.”)
6. Superheroes take a break. Yes, there was “Iron Man 2,” but even that offered a respite from the glowering, pretentious action allegories that have dominated screens for most of the past decade. The battle between good and evil rages on in some quarters, but mostly in self-conscious, self-parodic form. In the strangely similar animated kiddie comedies “Despicable Me” and “Megamind” the heroes and villains are self-conscious role players, and the villains are actually nice as well as more interesting than their occasional square-jawed nemeses. This may reflect genre exhaustion (though another round of superhero blockbusters is already on the horizon), or a measure of real-world cynicism. The investigative documentaries that proliferated this year ("Inside Job," “Client 9,” “Casino Jack and “The United States of Money”) suggest that corruption and criminality exist virtually beyond the reach of justice.
7. The Bush era is not over. “Green Zone,” “Fair Game,” “Casino Jack” (both the documentary version and the Kevin Spacey comeback vehicle), “Inside Job,” “Client 9,” “The Ghost Writer.” So many scores left to settle.
8. But can’t the ’90s come back, or the ’80s, or some era more appealing than the one we’re in? “Love and Other Drugs,” “Greenberg,” “Hot Tub Time Machine,” “The Runaways,” “Howl,” any music documentary you can name.
9. Only a great director can make a great movie, but a good actor can make a bad or mediocre or not-quite-great movie much better. For instance: Helen Mirren in “The Tempest,” Ms. Mirren in “RED,” Paul Giamatti in “Barney’s Version,” Mr. Spacey in “Casino Jack,” Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal in “Love and Other Drugs,” Javier Bardem in “Biutiful,” everyone in “True Grit,” Vanessa Redgrave in “Letters to Juliet,” Liam Neeson in anything he was in, Rachel McAdams in “Morning Glory,” Anthony Mackie in “Night Catches Us.”
10. The discussion of movies is frequently more interesting than the movies themselves. It was more fun to read the impassioned, geeky arguments about “Inception” than to endure a second viewing of that film. Early arguments about the accuracy of “The Social Network” and whether that even mattered gave way to a series of reviews, essays and debates about Facebook, digital entrepreneurship, friendship, business, meritocracy and the Ivy League far richer and more relevant to contemporary life than Aaron Sorkin’s glib script or David Fincher’s elegant atmospherics. And as intellectually lazy and emotionally manipulative as it was, Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for Superman” nonetheless focused serious polemical attention on the problems facing American education.
The 10 Best Movies of 2010
1. INSIDE JOB (Charles Ferguson) The crisis of finance capitalism as a great crime story.
2. TOY STORY 3 (Lee Unkrich) The triumph of consumer capitalism as an epic love story.
3. CARLOS (Olivier Assayas) The failure of global revolution as farce, melodrama, erotic thriller and music video.
4. SOMEWHERE (Sofia Coppola) An eccentric, perfect poem about fame, loneliness and cross-generational need.
5. THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT (Lisa Cholodenko) An eccentric, perfect comedy about love, betrayal and cross-generational confusion.
6. GREENBERG (Noah Baumbach) A deliberately imperfect comedy about an eccentric fleeing from love, running from betrayal and wallowing in cross-generational confusion.
7. 127 HOURS (Danny Boyle) It’s all fun until someone loses an arm. And then, strangely enough, it’s even more fun.
8. LAST TRAIN HOME (Lixin Fan) The future of global capitalism, in China and elsewhere: a family tragedy in the form of a documentary, as full of anger, dignity and pathos as a play by Arthur Miller.
9. SECRET SUNSHINE (Lee Chang-dong) A family tragedy from South Korea, in the form of a melodramatic crime story. As dense and gripping as a great novel.
10. EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP (Banksy) All of the above. None of the above. Everything and nothing. An elaborate art-world stunt in the form of a documentary. Or vice versa.
RUNNERS-UP “And Everything Is Going Fine,” “Another Year,” “Black Swan,” “Boxing Gym,” “The Father of My Children,” “The Fighter,” “A Film Unfinished,” “Fish Tank,” “Four Lions,” “The Ghost Writer,” “Howl,” “I Am Love,” “Let Me In,” “Please Give,” “Solitary Man,” “Tangled,” “Tiny Furniture,” “Vincere,; “White Material,” “Winter’s Bone.”
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
AT&T Video Shows Texting and Driving Don’t Mix - An Excerpt
December 27, 2010, 7:00 am AT&T Video Shows Texting and Driving Don’t Mix
By MATT RICHTEL
“Where u at”
That was the last text message by Mariah West, who died at 18 when she skidded in traffic and flipped into the oncoming lane. She was texting at the time.
She is among the people who appear in a nearly 11-minute documentary developed by AT&T to warn young people about the dangers of texting and driving.
The wireless company planned to release the video today, before New Year’s Eve. The timing is aimed, the company says, at showing that texting and driving deserves to be considered as dangerous as drunken driving. The documentary includes intense, sometimes disturbing, images, including that of Ms. West, as she spent her last minutes alive on a breathing tube.
“Our goal is to help make texting while driving as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving,” said Gail Torreano, a senior vice president with AT&T. “We want this to be in every school in the country and for teenagers to know a text message is not worth a life.”
Research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute shows that motorists who text face a 23 times greater risk of crash or near crash. Other wireless carriers, like Verizon Wireless, in the last year have increased efforts to warn about the risks of texting and driving.
AT&T says it plans to distribute the documentary to schools, safety organizations and government agencies, and is urging people to take a pledge on its Facebook page not to text and drive.
David Teater, senior director of transportation initiatives at the National Safety Council, a nonprofit safety advocacy organization, said AT&T deserved credit. At the same time, he says, texting can be so hard to resist that teenagers aren’t likely to stop just by hearing such a message.
“The activity is too compelling,” he said, describing texting as having addicting properties. “What they need to do is start deploying technology that will prevent people from being able to text while driving.”
Still, he said: “The wireless industry is very sincere about getting kids to stop texting and driving. I applaud what they’re doing.”
By MATT RICHTEL
“Where u at”
That was the last text message by Mariah West, who died at 18 when she skidded in traffic and flipped into the oncoming lane. She was texting at the time.
She is among the people who appear in a nearly 11-minute documentary developed by AT&T to warn young people about the dangers of texting and driving.
The wireless company planned to release the video today, before New Year’s Eve. The timing is aimed, the company says, at showing that texting and driving deserves to be considered as dangerous as drunken driving. The documentary includes intense, sometimes disturbing, images, including that of Ms. West, as she spent her last minutes alive on a breathing tube.
“Our goal is to help make texting while driving as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving,” said Gail Torreano, a senior vice president with AT&T. “We want this to be in every school in the country and for teenagers to know a text message is not worth a life.”
Research from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute shows that motorists who text face a 23 times greater risk of crash or near crash. Other wireless carriers, like Verizon Wireless, in the last year have increased efforts to warn about the risks of texting and driving.
AT&T says it plans to distribute the documentary to schools, safety organizations and government agencies, and is urging people to take a pledge on its Facebook page not to text and drive.
David Teater, senior director of transportation initiatives at the National Safety Council, a nonprofit safety advocacy organization, said AT&T deserved credit. At the same time, he says, texting can be so hard to resist that teenagers aren’t likely to stop just by hearing such a message.
“The activity is too compelling,” he said, describing texting as having addicting properties. “What they need to do is start deploying technology that will prevent people from being able to text while driving.”
Still, he said: “The wireless industry is very sincere about getting kids to stop texting and driving. I applaud what they’re doing.”
Frequent Flier My Anxiety in Flight, After Free Fall in an Elevator - an excerpt
Frequent Flier
My Anxiety in Flight, After Free Fall in an Elevator
Published: December 27, 2010
Quote : I’LL be the first one to admit that I’m not a great frequent flier. It’s not just the delays and cancellations; it’s actually the process of flying.
Craig Woerz is a founder and managing partner of Media Storm.
Q. How often do you fly?
A. About three to six flights per month, all domestic.
Q. What’s your least favorite airport?
A. I don’t like any of them since I don’t like to fly. But if I had to pick one, it would be O’Hare.
Q. Of all the places you’ve been, what’s the best?
A. With all the domestic travel I do, I hadn’t ventured overseas. But two years ago, I went to Florence and all through northern Italy. It was amazing.
Q. What’s your secret airport vice?
A. I love my family and miss them when I travel, so instead of using airport or airplane Wi-Fi signals for work, I love to iChat with my kids. I know that’s not a vice, but maybe it is a guilty pleasure.
I used to be O.K. with it and even now, you’d never know I was a little fearful. But I am, although I know that flying is safer than other modes of transport.
About 10 years ago, I experienced free fall in an elevator. Everybody always talks about what they would do if they were in an elevator and it started dropping. Let me tell you, you do nothing. It all happens very quickly.
I was meeting my prospective client on the 37th floor. The elevator was crowded, but by the time we got close to my floor, I was the last person on. I had a weird feeling. Then the lights went out and the thing started dropping. The elevator stopped after it went down about 10 floors, and the doors opened and I got out.
People were milling around and I was told there was a malfunction. No kidding. Apparently, a fire alarm was triggered, and that was supposed to send the elevators down at a slow pace. This one just happened to drop more quickly.
I got back on the elevator, believe it or not, and went to my appointment to make my presentation. I didn’t tell the prospective client what happened, but he could tell something was wrong. I eventually did get his business. Ironically, he wound up being an employee a few years later.
So the elevator incident convinced me that heights and enclosed spaces really can be a bad combination.
To take the edge off of flying, I have a routine. I usually fly out of the same airports, which means I can go to the same coffee shops, clubs and often see the same ticket agents. Once on board, I’ll log on to Wi-Fi, if it’s available, and distract myself.
Still, weird things happen.
I was on a very turbulent flight last year. All of a sudden, the oxygen masks dropped down and the attendants flung themselves into their seats. I was a little freaked, but I put the oxygen mask on. I was a little more freaked when it didn’t fill up. I hit the wrong button. I wasn’t the only one.
After what seemed like an hour, but was really only a minute or two, the pilot came over the speaker system and told us that he had unintentionally hit the wrong control button while trying to send cooling air into the main cabin.
People who are relaxed on planes really have it made. But there is a point where you can be too relaxed. I was sitting next to a woman who actually took off her shoes and stockings and gave herself a little pedicure. That wasn’t fun.
Then there was a time a guy literally laid down in the aisle. I thought something horrible was happening. But then I was told he thought it would be “fun” if someone checked his blood pressure. I didn’t know you had to lie down for that, but I’m sure his was fine.
Good thing they didn’t check mine.
By Craig Woerz, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com.
My Anxiety in Flight, After Free Fall in an Elevator
Published: December 27, 2010
Quote : I’LL be the first one to admit that I’m not a great frequent flier. It’s not just the delays and cancellations; it’s actually the process of flying.
Craig Woerz is a founder and managing partner of Media Storm.
Q. How often do you fly?
A. About three to six flights per month, all domestic.
Q. What’s your least favorite airport?
A. I don’t like any of them since I don’t like to fly. But if I had to pick one, it would be O’Hare.
Q. Of all the places you’ve been, what’s the best?
A. With all the domestic travel I do, I hadn’t ventured overseas. But two years ago, I went to Florence and all through northern Italy. It was amazing.
Q. What’s your secret airport vice?
A. I love my family and miss them when I travel, so instead of using airport or airplane Wi-Fi signals for work, I love to iChat with my kids. I know that’s not a vice, but maybe it is a guilty pleasure.
I used to be O.K. with it and even now, you’d never know I was a little fearful. But I am, although I know that flying is safer than other modes of transport.
About 10 years ago, I experienced free fall in an elevator. Everybody always talks about what they would do if they were in an elevator and it started dropping. Let me tell you, you do nothing. It all happens very quickly.
I was meeting my prospective client on the 37th floor. The elevator was crowded, but by the time we got close to my floor, I was the last person on. I had a weird feeling. Then the lights went out and the thing started dropping. The elevator stopped after it went down about 10 floors, and the doors opened and I got out.
People were milling around and I was told there was a malfunction. No kidding. Apparently, a fire alarm was triggered, and that was supposed to send the elevators down at a slow pace. This one just happened to drop more quickly.
I got back on the elevator, believe it or not, and went to my appointment to make my presentation. I didn’t tell the prospective client what happened, but he could tell something was wrong. I eventually did get his business. Ironically, he wound up being an employee a few years later.
So the elevator incident convinced me that heights and enclosed spaces really can be a bad combination.
To take the edge off of flying, I have a routine. I usually fly out of the same airports, which means I can go to the same coffee shops, clubs and often see the same ticket agents. Once on board, I’ll log on to Wi-Fi, if it’s available, and distract myself.
Still, weird things happen.
I was on a very turbulent flight last year. All of a sudden, the oxygen masks dropped down and the attendants flung themselves into their seats. I was a little freaked, but I put the oxygen mask on. I was a little more freaked when it didn’t fill up. I hit the wrong button. I wasn’t the only one.
After what seemed like an hour, but was really only a minute or two, the pilot came over the speaker system and told us that he had unintentionally hit the wrong control button while trying to send cooling air into the main cabin.
People who are relaxed on planes really have it made. But there is a point where you can be too relaxed. I was sitting next to a woman who actually took off her shoes and stockings and gave herself a little pedicure. That wasn’t fun.
Then there was a time a guy literally laid down in the aisle. I thought something horrible was happening. But then I was told he thought it would be “fun” if someone checked his blood pressure. I didn’t know you had to lie down for that, but I’m sure his was fine.
Good thing they didn’t check mine.
By Craig Woerz, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail: joan.raymond@nytimes.com.
How Superstars’ Pay Stifles Everyone Else - An Excerpt
How Superstars’ Pay Stifles Everyone ElsePublished: December 25, 2010
This article was adapted from “The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do,” by Eduardo Porter, an editorial writer for The New York Times. The book, to be published on Jan. 4 by Portfolio, examines how pricing affects all of our choices.
Associated Press
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall law in the 1930s to separate commercial banking from investment banking. Standing from left are Senator Carter Glass, Senator Duncan Fletcher, Henry Morgenthau Jr. of the Treasury, Jesse Jones and Representative Henry Steagall.
IN 1990, the Kansas City Royals had the heftiest payroll in Major League Baseball: almost $24 million. A typical player for the New York Yankees, which had some of the most expensive players in the game at the time, earned less than $450,000.
Last season, the Yankees spent $206 million on players, more than five times the payroll of the Royals 20 years ago, even after accounting for inflation. The Yankees’ median salary was $5.5 million, seven times the 1990 figure, inflation-adjusted.
What is most striking is how the Yankees have outstripped the rest of the league. Two decades ago. the Royals’ payroll was about three times as big as that of the Chicago White Sox, the cheapest major-league team at the time. Last season, the Yankees spent about six times as much as the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had the most inexpensive roster.
Baseball aficionados might conclude that all of this points to some pernicious new trend in the market for top players. But this is not specific to baseball, or even to sport. Consider the market for pop music. In 1982, the top 1 percent of pop stars, in terms of pay, raked in 26 percent of concert ticket revenue. In 2003, that top percentage of stars — names like Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera or 50 Cent — was taking 56 percent of the concert pie.
The phenomenon is not even specific to the United States. Pelé, from Brazil, the greatest soccer player of all time, made his World Cup debut in Sweden in 1958, when he was only 17. He became an instant star, coveted by every team on the planet. By 1960, his team, Santos, reportedly paid him $150,000 a year — about $1.1 million in today’s money. But these days, that would amount to middling pay. The top-paid player of the 2009-10 season, the Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo, made $17 million playing for the Spanish team Real Madrid.
Of course, the inflated rewards of performers at the very top have to do with specific changes in the underlying economics of entertainment. People have more disposable income to spend on entertainment. Corporate sponsorships, virtually non-existent in the age of Pelé, account today for a large share of performers’ income. In 2009, the highest-earning soccer player was the English midfielder David Beckham, who made $33 million from endorsements on top of a $7 million salary from the Los Angeles Galaxy and AC Milan.
But broader forces are also at play. Nearly 30 years ago, Sherwin Rosen, an economist from the University of Chicago, proposed an elegant theory to explain the general pattern. In an article entitled “The Economics of Superstars,” he argued that technological changes would allow the best performers in a given field to serve a bigger market and thus reap a greater share of its revenue. But this would also reduce the spoils available to the less gifted in the business.
The reasoning fits smoothly into the income dynamics of the music industry, which has been shaken by many technological disruptions since the 1980s. First, MTV put music on television. Then Napster took it to the Internet. Apple allowed fans to buy single songs and take them with them. Each of these breakthroughs allowed the very top acts to reach a larger fan base, and thus command a larger audience and a bigger share of concert revenue.
Superstar effects apply, too, to European soccer, which is beamed around the world on cable and satellite TV. In 2009, the top 20 soccer teams reaped revenue of 3.9 billion euros, more than 25 percent of the combined revenue of all the teams in European leagues.
Pelé was not held back by the quality of his game, but by his relatively small revenue base. He might be the greatest of all time, but few people could pay to experience his greatness. In 1958, there were about 350,000 television sets in Brazil. The first television satellite, Telstar I, wasn’t launched until July 1962, too late for his World Cup debut.
By contrast, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, in which Ronaldo played for Portugal, was broadcast in more than 200 countries, to an aggregate audience of over 25 billion. Some 700 million people watched the final alone. Ronaldo is not better then Pelé. He makes more money because his talent is broadcast to more people.
IF one loosens slightly the role played by technological progress, Dr. Rosen’s framework also does a pretty good job explaining the evolution of executive pay. In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line.
This has separated the megarich from the merely very rich. A study of pay in the 1970s found that executives in the top 10 percent made about twice as much as those in the middle of the pack. By the early 2000s, the top suits made more than four times the pay of the executives in the middle.
Top C.E.O.’s are not pop stars. But the pay for the most sought-after executives has risen for similar reasons. As corporations have increased in size, management decisions at the top have become that much more important, measured in terms of profits or losses. Top American companies have much higher sales and profits than they did 20 years ago. Banks and funds have more assets.
With so much more at stake, it has become that much more important for companies to put at the helm the “best” executive or banker or fund manager they can find. This has set off furious competition for top managerial talent, pushing the prices of top-rated managers way above the pay of those in the tier just below them. Two economists at New York University, Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, published a study in 2006 estimating that the sixfold rise in the pay of chief executives in the United States over the last quarter century or so was attributable entirely to the sixfold rise in the market size of large American companies.
And therein lies a big problem for American capitalism.
CAPITALISM relies on inequality. Like differences in other prices, pay disparities steer resources — in this case, people — to where they would be most productively employed.
Despite the great danger and cost of crossing the border illegally into the United States, hundreds of thousands of the hardest-working Mexicans are drawn by the relative prosperity they can achieve north of the border — where the average income of a Mexican-American household is more than $33,000, almost five times that of a family in Mexico.
In poor economies, fast economic growth increases inequality as some workers profit from new opportunities and others do not. The share of national income accruing to the top 1 percent of the Chinese population more than doubled from 1986 to 2003. Inequality spurs economic growth by providing incentives for people to accumulate human capital and become more productive. It pulls the best and brightest into the most lucrative lines of work, where the most profitable companies hire them.
Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try. The odds aren’t on their side.
Inequality has been found to turn people off. A recent experiment conducted with workers at the University of California found that those who earned less than the typical wage for their pay unit and occupation became measurably less satisfied with their jobs, and more likely to look for another one if they found out the pay of their peers. Other experiments have found that winner-take-all games tend to elicit much less player effort — and more cheating — than those in which rewards are distributed more smoothly according to performance.
Ultimately, the question is this: How much inequality is necessary? It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.
One study concluded that each percentage-point increase in the share of national income channeled to the top 10 percent of Americans since 1960 led to an increase of 0.12 percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth — hardly an enormous boost. The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation.
The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.
Not coincidentally, Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede.
NONE of this even begins to account for the damage caused by the superstar dynamics that shape the pay of American bankers.
Remember the ’80s? Gordon Gekko first sashayed across the silver screen. Ivan Boesky was jailed for insider trading. Michael Milken peddled junk bonds. In 1987, financial firms amassed a little less than a fifth of the profits of all American corporations. Wall Street bonuses totaled $2.6 billion — about $15,600 for each man and woman working there.
Yet by current standards, this era of legendary greed appears like a moment of uncommon restraint. In 2007, as the financial bubble built upon the American housing market reached its peak, financial companies accounted for a full third of the profits of the nation’s private sector. Wall Street bonuses hit a record $32.9 billion, or $177,000 a worker.
Just as technology gave pop stars a bigger fan base that could buy their CDs, download their singles and snap up their concert tickets, the combination of information technology and deregulation gave bankers an unprecedented opportunity to reap huge rewards. Investors piled into the top-rated funds that generated the highest returns. Rewards flowed in abundance to the most “productive” financiers, those that took the bigger risks and generated the biggest profits.
Finance wasn’t always so richly paid. Financiers had a great time in the early decades of the 20th century: from 1909 to the mid-1930s, they typically made about 50 percent to 60 percent more than workers in other industries. But the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression changed all that. In 1934, corporate profits in the financial sector shrank to $236 million, one-eighth what they were five years earlier. Wages followed. From 1950 through about 1980, bankers and insurers made only 10 percent more than workers outside of finance, on average.
This ebb and flow of compensation mimics the waxing and waning of restrictions governing finance. A century ago, there were virtually no regulations to restrain banks’ creativity and speculative urges. They could invest where they wanted, deploy depositors’ money as they saw fit. But after the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up a plethora of restrictions to avoid a repeat of the financial bubble that burst in 1929.
Interstate banking had been limited since 1927. In 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act forbade commercial banks and investment banks from getting into each other’s business — separating deposit taking and lending from playing the markets. Interest-rate ceilings were also imposed that year. The move to regulate bankers continued in 1959 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who forbade mixing banks with insurance companies.
Barred from applying the full extent of their wits toward maximizing their incomes, many of the nation’s best and brightest who had flocked to make money in banking left for other industries.
Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.
Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy.
Finance will not be tamed by tweaking the way bankers are paid. But bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking. Similarly, superstar effects are not the sole cause of the stagnant incomes of regular Joes. But the piling of rewards on our superstars is encouraging a race to the top that, if left unabated, could leave very little to strive for in its wake.
This article was adapted from “The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do,” by Eduardo Porter, an editorial writer for The New York Times. The book, to be published on Jan. 4 by Portfolio, examines how pricing affects all of our choices.
Associated Press
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Glass-Steagall law in the 1930s to separate commercial banking from investment banking. Standing from left are Senator Carter Glass, Senator Duncan Fletcher, Henry Morgenthau Jr. of the Treasury, Jesse Jones and Representative Henry Steagall.
IN 1990, the Kansas City Royals had the heftiest payroll in Major League Baseball: almost $24 million. A typical player for the New York Yankees, which had some of the most expensive players in the game at the time, earned less than $450,000.
Last season, the Yankees spent $206 million on players, more than five times the payroll of the Royals 20 years ago, even after accounting for inflation. The Yankees’ median salary was $5.5 million, seven times the 1990 figure, inflation-adjusted.
What is most striking is how the Yankees have outstripped the rest of the league. Two decades ago. the Royals’ payroll was about three times as big as that of the Chicago White Sox, the cheapest major-league team at the time. Last season, the Yankees spent about six times as much as the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had the most inexpensive roster.
Baseball aficionados might conclude that all of this points to some pernicious new trend in the market for top players. But this is not specific to baseball, or even to sport. Consider the market for pop music. In 1982, the top 1 percent of pop stars, in terms of pay, raked in 26 percent of concert ticket revenue. In 2003, that top percentage of stars — names like Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera or 50 Cent — was taking 56 percent of the concert pie.
The phenomenon is not even specific to the United States. Pelé, from Brazil, the greatest soccer player of all time, made his World Cup debut in Sweden in 1958, when he was only 17. He became an instant star, coveted by every team on the planet. By 1960, his team, Santos, reportedly paid him $150,000 a year — about $1.1 million in today’s money. But these days, that would amount to middling pay. The top-paid player of the 2009-10 season, the Portuguese forward Cristiano Ronaldo, made $17 million playing for the Spanish team Real Madrid.
Of course, the inflated rewards of performers at the very top have to do with specific changes in the underlying economics of entertainment. People have more disposable income to spend on entertainment. Corporate sponsorships, virtually non-existent in the age of Pelé, account today for a large share of performers’ income. In 2009, the highest-earning soccer player was the English midfielder David Beckham, who made $33 million from endorsements on top of a $7 million salary from the Los Angeles Galaxy and AC Milan.
But broader forces are also at play. Nearly 30 years ago, Sherwin Rosen, an economist from the University of Chicago, proposed an elegant theory to explain the general pattern. In an article entitled “The Economics of Superstars,” he argued that technological changes would allow the best performers in a given field to serve a bigger market and thus reap a greater share of its revenue. But this would also reduce the spoils available to the less gifted in the business.
The reasoning fits smoothly into the income dynamics of the music industry, which has been shaken by many technological disruptions since the 1980s. First, MTV put music on television. Then Napster took it to the Internet. Apple allowed fans to buy single songs and take them with them. Each of these breakthroughs allowed the very top acts to reach a larger fan base, and thus command a larger audience and a bigger share of concert revenue.
Superstar effects apply, too, to European soccer, which is beamed around the world on cable and satellite TV. In 2009, the top 20 soccer teams reaped revenue of 3.9 billion euros, more than 25 percent of the combined revenue of all the teams in European leagues.
Pelé was not held back by the quality of his game, but by his relatively small revenue base. He might be the greatest of all time, but few people could pay to experience his greatness. In 1958, there were about 350,000 television sets in Brazil. The first television satellite, Telstar I, wasn’t launched until July 1962, too late for his World Cup debut.
By contrast, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, in which Ronaldo played for Portugal, was broadcast in more than 200 countries, to an aggregate audience of over 25 billion. Some 700 million people watched the final alone. Ronaldo is not better then Pelé. He makes more money because his talent is broadcast to more people.
IF one loosens slightly the role played by technological progress, Dr. Rosen’s framework also does a pretty good job explaining the evolution of executive pay. In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line.
This has separated the megarich from the merely very rich. A study of pay in the 1970s found that executives in the top 10 percent made about twice as much as those in the middle of the pack. By the early 2000s, the top suits made more than four times the pay of the executives in the middle.
Top C.E.O.’s are not pop stars. But the pay for the most sought-after executives has risen for similar reasons. As corporations have increased in size, management decisions at the top have become that much more important, measured in terms of profits or losses. Top American companies have much higher sales and profits than they did 20 years ago. Banks and funds have more assets.
With so much more at stake, it has become that much more important for companies to put at the helm the “best” executive or banker or fund manager they can find. This has set off furious competition for top managerial talent, pushing the prices of top-rated managers way above the pay of those in the tier just below them. Two economists at New York University, Xavier Gabaix and Augustin Landier, published a study in 2006 estimating that the sixfold rise in the pay of chief executives in the United States over the last quarter century or so was attributable entirely to the sixfold rise in the market size of large American companies.
And therein lies a big problem for American capitalism.
CAPITALISM relies on inequality. Like differences in other prices, pay disparities steer resources — in this case, people — to where they would be most productively employed.
Despite the great danger and cost of crossing the border illegally into the United States, hundreds of thousands of the hardest-working Mexicans are drawn by the relative prosperity they can achieve north of the border — where the average income of a Mexican-American household is more than $33,000, almost five times that of a family in Mexico.
In poor economies, fast economic growth increases inequality as some workers profit from new opportunities and others do not. The share of national income accruing to the top 1 percent of the Chinese population more than doubled from 1986 to 2003. Inequality spurs economic growth by providing incentives for people to accumulate human capital and become more productive. It pulls the best and brightest into the most lucrative lines of work, where the most profitable companies hire them.
Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try. The odds aren’t on their side.
Inequality has been found to turn people off. A recent experiment conducted with workers at the University of California found that those who earned less than the typical wage for their pay unit and occupation became measurably less satisfied with their jobs, and more likely to look for another one if they found out the pay of their peers. Other experiments have found that winner-take-all games tend to elicit much less player effort — and more cheating — than those in which rewards are distributed more smoothly according to performance.
Ultimately, the question is this: How much inequality is necessary? It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.
One study concluded that each percentage-point increase in the share of national income channeled to the top 10 percent of Americans since 1960 led to an increase of 0.12 percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth — hardly an enormous boost. The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation.
The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.
Not coincidentally, Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede.
NONE of this even begins to account for the damage caused by the superstar dynamics that shape the pay of American bankers.
Remember the ’80s? Gordon Gekko first sashayed across the silver screen. Ivan Boesky was jailed for insider trading. Michael Milken peddled junk bonds. In 1987, financial firms amassed a little less than a fifth of the profits of all American corporations. Wall Street bonuses totaled $2.6 billion — about $15,600 for each man and woman working there.
Yet by current standards, this era of legendary greed appears like a moment of uncommon restraint. In 2007, as the financial bubble built upon the American housing market reached its peak, financial companies accounted for a full third of the profits of the nation’s private sector. Wall Street bonuses hit a record $32.9 billion, or $177,000 a worker.
Just as technology gave pop stars a bigger fan base that could buy their CDs, download their singles and snap up their concert tickets, the combination of information technology and deregulation gave bankers an unprecedented opportunity to reap huge rewards. Investors piled into the top-rated funds that generated the highest returns. Rewards flowed in abundance to the most “productive” financiers, those that took the bigger risks and generated the biggest profits.
Finance wasn’t always so richly paid. Financiers had a great time in the early decades of the 20th century: from 1909 to the mid-1930s, they typically made about 50 percent to 60 percent more than workers in other industries. But the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression changed all that. In 1934, corporate profits in the financial sector shrank to $236 million, one-eighth what they were five years earlier. Wages followed. From 1950 through about 1980, bankers and insurers made only 10 percent more than workers outside of finance, on average.
This ebb and flow of compensation mimics the waxing and waning of restrictions governing finance. A century ago, there were virtually no regulations to restrain banks’ creativity and speculative urges. They could invest where they wanted, deploy depositors’ money as they saw fit. But after the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up a plethora of restrictions to avoid a repeat of the financial bubble that burst in 1929.
Interstate banking had been limited since 1927. In 1933, the Glass-Steagall Act forbade commercial banks and investment banks from getting into each other’s business — separating deposit taking and lending from playing the markets. Interest-rate ceilings were also imposed that year. The move to regulate bankers continued in 1959 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who forbade mixing banks with insurance companies.
Barred from applying the full extent of their wits toward maximizing their incomes, many of the nation’s best and brightest who had flocked to make money in banking left for other industries.
Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.
Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy.
Finance will not be tamed by tweaking the way bankers are paid. But bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking. Similarly, superstar effects are not the sole cause of the stagnant incomes of regular Joes. But the piling of rewards on our superstars is encouraging a race to the top that, if left unabated, could leave very little to strive for in its wake.
Disney Tackles Major Theme Park Problem: Lines - An Excerpt
Disney Tackles Major Theme Park Problem: Lines
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel
By BROOKS BARNES
Published: December 27, 2010
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press
Crowds line the way to Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom.
To handle over 30 million annual visitors — many of them during this busiest time of year for the megaresort — Disney World long ago turned the art of crowd control into a science. But the putative Happiest Place on Earth has decided it must figure out how to quicken the pace even more. A cultural shift toward impatience — fed by video games and smartphones — is demanding it, park managers say. To stay relevant to the entertain-me-right-this-second generation, Disney must evolve.
And so it has spent the last year outfitting an underground, nerve center to address that most low-tech of problems, the wait. Located under Cinderella Castle, the new center uses video cameras, computer programs, digital park maps and other whiz-bang tools to spot gridlock before it forms and deploy countermeasures in real time.
In one corner, employees watch flat-screen televisions that depict various attractions in green, yellow and red outlines, with the colors representing wait-time gradations.
If Pirates of the Caribbean, the ride that sends people on a spirited voyage through the Spanish Main, suddenly blinks from green to yellow, the center might respond by alerting managers to launch more boats.
Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait. “It’s about being nimble and quickly noticing that, ‘Hey, let’s make sure there is some relief out there for those people,’ ” said Phil Holmes, vice president of the Magic Kingdom, the flagship Disney World park.
What if Fantasyland is swamped with people but adjacent Tomorrowland has plenty of elbow room? The operations center can route a miniparade called “Move it! Shake it! Celebrate It!” into the less-populated pocket to siphon guests in that direction. Other technicians in the command center monitor restaurants, perhaps spotting that additional registers need to be opened or dispatching greeters to hand out menus to people waiting to order.
“These moments add up until they collectively help the entire park,” Mr. Holmes said.
In recent years, according to Disney research, the average Magic Kingdom visitor has had time for only nine rides — out of more than 40 — because of lengthy waits and crowded walkways and restaurants. In the last few months, however, the operations center has managed to make enough nips and tucks to lift that average to 10.
“Control is Disney’s middle name, so they have always been on the cutting edge of this kind of thing,” said Bob Sehlinger, co-author of “The Unofficial Guide: Walt Disney World 2011” and a writer on Disney for Frommers.com. Mr. Sehlinger added, “The challenge is that you only have so many options once the bathtub is full.”
Disney, which is periodically criticized for overreaching in the name of cultural dominance (and profits), does not see any of this monitoring as the slightest bit invasive. Rather, the company regards it as just another part of its efforts to pull every possible lever in the name of a better guest experience.
The primary goal of the command center, as stated by Disney, is to make guests happier — because to increase revenue in its $10.7 billion theme park business, which includes resorts in Paris and Hong Kong, Disney needs its current customers to return more often. “Giving our guests faster and better access to the fun,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, “is at the heart of our investment in technology.”
Disney also wants to raise per-capita spending. “If we can also increase the average number of shop or restaurant visits, that’s a huge win for us,” Mr. Holmes said.
Disney has long been a leader in technological innovation, whether that means inventing cameras to make animated films or creating the audio animatronic robots for the attraction It’s a Small World.
Behind-the-scenes systems — typically kept top secret by the company as it strives to create an environment where things happen as if by magic — are also highly computerized. Ride capacity is determined in part by analyzing hotel reservations, flight bookings and historic attendance data. Satellites provide minute-by-minute weather analysis. A system called FastPass allows people to skip lines for popular rides like the Jungle Cruise.
But the command center reflects how Disney is deepening its reliance on technology as it thinks about adapting decades-old parks, which are primarily built around nostalgia for an America gone by, for 21st century expectations. “It’s not about us needing to keep pace with technological change,” Mr. Staggs said. “We need to set the pace for that kind of change.”
For instance, Disney has been experimenting with smartphones to help guide people more efficiently. Mobile Magic, a $1.99 app, allows visitors to type in “Sleeping Beauty” and receive directions to where that princess (or at least a costumed stand-in) is signing autographs. In the future, typing in “hamburger” might reveal the nearest restaurant with the shortest wait.
Disney has also been adding video games to wait areas. At Space Mountain, 87 game stations now line the queue to keep visitors entertained. (Games, about 90 seconds in length, involve simple things like clearing runways of asteroids). Gaming has also been added to the queue for Soarin’, an Epcot ride that simulates a hang glider flight.
Blogs that watch Disney’s parks have speculated that engineers (“imagineers,” in the company’s parlance) are also looking at bigger ideas, like wristbands that contain information like your name, credit card number and favorite Disney characters. While Disney is keeping a tight lid on specifics, these devices would enable simple transactions like the purchase of souvenirs — just pay by swiping your wristband — as well as more complicated attractions that interact with guests.
“Picture a day where there is memory built into these characters — they will know that they’ve seen you four or five times before and that your name is Bobby,” said Bruce E. Vaughn, chief creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering. “Those are the kinds of limits that are dissolving so quickly that we can see being able to implement them in the meaningfully near future.”
Dreaming about the future was not something on Mr. Holmes’s mind as he gave a reporter a rare peek behind the Disney operations veil. He had a park to run, and the command center had spotted trouble at the tea cups.
After running smoothly all morning, the spinning Mad Tea Party abruptly stopped meeting precalculated ridership goals. A few minutes later, Mr. Holmes had his answer: a new employee had taken over the ride and was leaving tea cups unloaded.
“In the theme park business these days,” he said, “patience is not always a virtue.”
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel
By BROOKS BARNES
Published: December 27, 2010
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel, via Associated Press
Crowds line the way to Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom.
To handle over 30 million annual visitors — many of them during this busiest time of year for the megaresort — Disney World long ago turned the art of crowd control into a science. But the putative Happiest Place on Earth has decided it must figure out how to quicken the pace even more. A cultural shift toward impatience — fed by video games and smartphones — is demanding it, park managers say. To stay relevant to the entertain-me-right-this-second generation, Disney must evolve.
And so it has spent the last year outfitting an underground, nerve center to address that most low-tech of problems, the wait. Located under Cinderella Castle, the new center uses video cameras, computer programs, digital park maps and other whiz-bang tools to spot gridlock before it forms and deploy countermeasures in real time.
In one corner, employees watch flat-screen televisions that depict various attractions in green, yellow and red outlines, with the colors representing wait-time gradations.
If Pirates of the Caribbean, the ride that sends people on a spirited voyage through the Spanish Main, suddenly blinks from green to yellow, the center might respond by alerting managers to launch more boats.
Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait. “It’s about being nimble and quickly noticing that, ‘Hey, let’s make sure there is some relief out there for those people,’ ” said Phil Holmes, vice president of the Magic Kingdom, the flagship Disney World park.
What if Fantasyland is swamped with people but adjacent Tomorrowland has plenty of elbow room? The operations center can route a miniparade called “Move it! Shake it! Celebrate It!” into the less-populated pocket to siphon guests in that direction. Other technicians in the command center monitor restaurants, perhaps spotting that additional registers need to be opened or dispatching greeters to hand out menus to people waiting to order.
“These moments add up until they collectively help the entire park,” Mr. Holmes said.
In recent years, according to Disney research, the average Magic Kingdom visitor has had time for only nine rides — out of more than 40 — because of lengthy waits and crowded walkways and restaurants. In the last few months, however, the operations center has managed to make enough nips and tucks to lift that average to 10.
“Control is Disney’s middle name, so they have always been on the cutting edge of this kind of thing,” said Bob Sehlinger, co-author of “The Unofficial Guide: Walt Disney World 2011” and a writer on Disney for Frommers.com. Mr. Sehlinger added, “The challenge is that you only have so many options once the bathtub is full.”
Disney, which is periodically criticized for overreaching in the name of cultural dominance (and profits), does not see any of this monitoring as the slightest bit invasive. Rather, the company regards it as just another part of its efforts to pull every possible lever in the name of a better guest experience.
The primary goal of the command center, as stated by Disney, is to make guests happier — because to increase revenue in its $10.7 billion theme park business, which includes resorts in Paris and Hong Kong, Disney needs its current customers to return more often. “Giving our guests faster and better access to the fun,” said Thomas O. Staggs, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, “is at the heart of our investment in technology.”
Disney also wants to raise per-capita spending. “If we can also increase the average number of shop or restaurant visits, that’s a huge win for us,” Mr. Holmes said.
Disney has long been a leader in technological innovation, whether that means inventing cameras to make animated films or creating the audio animatronic robots for the attraction It’s a Small World.
Behind-the-scenes systems — typically kept top secret by the company as it strives to create an environment where things happen as if by magic — are also highly computerized. Ride capacity is determined in part by analyzing hotel reservations, flight bookings and historic attendance data. Satellites provide minute-by-minute weather analysis. A system called FastPass allows people to skip lines for popular rides like the Jungle Cruise.
But the command center reflects how Disney is deepening its reliance on technology as it thinks about adapting decades-old parks, which are primarily built around nostalgia for an America gone by, for 21st century expectations. “It’s not about us needing to keep pace with technological change,” Mr. Staggs said. “We need to set the pace for that kind of change.”
For instance, Disney has been experimenting with smartphones to help guide people more efficiently. Mobile Magic, a $1.99 app, allows visitors to type in “Sleeping Beauty” and receive directions to where that princess (or at least a costumed stand-in) is signing autographs. In the future, typing in “hamburger” might reveal the nearest restaurant with the shortest wait.
Disney has also been adding video games to wait areas. At Space Mountain, 87 game stations now line the queue to keep visitors entertained. (Games, about 90 seconds in length, involve simple things like clearing runways of asteroids). Gaming has also been added to the queue for Soarin’, an Epcot ride that simulates a hang glider flight.
Blogs that watch Disney’s parks have speculated that engineers (“imagineers,” in the company’s parlance) are also looking at bigger ideas, like wristbands that contain information like your name, credit card number and favorite Disney characters. While Disney is keeping a tight lid on specifics, these devices would enable simple transactions like the purchase of souvenirs — just pay by swiping your wristband — as well as more complicated attractions that interact with guests.
“Picture a day where there is memory built into these characters — they will know that they’ve seen you four or five times before and that your name is Bobby,” said Bruce E. Vaughn, chief creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering. “Those are the kinds of limits that are dissolving so quickly that we can see being able to implement them in the meaningfully near future.”
Dreaming about the future was not something on Mr. Holmes’s mind as he gave a reporter a rare peek behind the Disney operations veil. He had a park to run, and the command center had spotted trouble at the tea cups.
After running smoothly all morning, the spinning Mad Tea Party abruptly stopped meeting precalculated ridership goals. A few minutes later, Mr. Holmes had his answer: a new employee had taken over the ride and was leaving tea cups unloaded.
“In the theme park business these days,” he said, “patience is not always a virtue.”
Teena Marie, 1980s R&B Hitmaker, Dies at 54 - An Excerpt
Teena Marie, 1980s R&B Hitmaker, Dies at 54By BEN SISARIO
Published: December 27, 2010
Teena Marie, a singer whose funky hits in the 1980s, like “Lovergirl” and “Square Biz,” made her one of the few white performers to consistently find success on the rhythm-and-blues charts, died on Sunday at her home in Pasadena, Calif. She was 54.
.The cause was not immediately known, but The Associated Press reported that the authorities said she appeared to have died of natural causes.
Born Mary Christine Brockert in Santa Monica, Calif., on March 5, 1956, she grew up in a predominantly black area of nearby Venice, Calif., and began singing and acting while still a child. At age 8, she tap-danced for Jed Clampett on an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” under the name Tina Marie Brockert.
After graduating from high school and briefly attending Santa Monica College, she signed with Motown Records and became of protégée of Rick James, then one of the label’s biggest new stars. Teena Marie’s first album, “Wild and Peaceful,” with James as a producer and the chief songwriter — and his Stone City Band backing her up — was released on Motown’s Gordy imprint in 1979.
“I’m Just a Sucker for Your Love,” her duet with James from that album, went to No. 8 on the R&B singles chart. The two began a tempestuous love affair. Another duet, “Fire and Desire,” appeared on James’s hit album from 1981, “Street Songs.” James died in 2004.
Through the 1980s, Teena Marie developed a style that folded bits of rap (as on the 1981 hit “Square Biz”) and rock (“You So Heavy,” from 1986, has a scorching guitar solo by Stevie Ray Vaughan) into danceable, funk-driven pop.
From the start, race was ambiguous in her music. She was not pictured on the cover of “Wild and Peaceful,” which was promoted to black radio stations. With an earthy voice that pierced with power in its high registers, she was highly credible as an R&B singer, and many listeners learned that she was white only when they saw her portrait on the cover of her second album, “Lady T,” in 1980.
“I still have people coming up to me 26 years later and looking at me and all of a sudden going, ‘I didn’t know you were white!’ ” she said in an interview on National Public Radio in 2006.
But she was embraced by the R&B audience, and some of her songs have become ingrained in black musical culture. Her 1988 song “Ooo La La La” was sampled and reconfigured by the Fugees as “Fu-Gee-La” in 1996 on their debut album, “The Score.”
For many of her fellow musicians, Teena Marie’s biggest accomplishment was made offstage. Her lawsuit against Motown in the early 1980s, for nonpayment of royalties, resulted in a clarification of California law — known in the music industry as the Brockert Initiative or the Teena Marie Law — that made it much more difficult for record companies to keep an act under an exclusive contract. After leaving Motown, she signed with Epic and reached her commercial peak. Her 1984 song “Lovergirl” — featuring her impassioned squeal in the chorus, “I just want to be your lover girl/I just want to rock your world” — went to No. 4 on Billboard’s pop chart and became her biggest seller.
In the 1990s, Teena Marie’s career slowed as she raised a daughter, Alia Rose, who survives her. But she continued to release music. She was nominated for a 2005 Grammy Award for best female R&B vocal performance, for her song “I’m Still in Love” — she lost to Alicia Keys — and released her most recent album, “Congo Square,” on the revived Stax label in 2009.
Although Teena Marie’s race was hidden from the public at the very beginning of her career, she was always forthright about the black influences in her music. In an interview with Essence.com last year, she suggested that the content of the music mattered more than the singer’s color.
“Over all my race hasn’t been a problem,” she said. “I’m a black artist with white skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what’s in your own soul.”
Published: December 27, 2010
Teena Marie, a singer whose funky hits in the 1980s, like “Lovergirl” and “Square Biz,” made her one of the few white performers to consistently find success on the rhythm-and-blues charts, died on Sunday at her home in Pasadena, Calif. She was 54.
.The cause was not immediately known, but The Associated Press reported that the authorities said she appeared to have died of natural causes.
Born Mary Christine Brockert in Santa Monica, Calif., on March 5, 1956, she grew up in a predominantly black area of nearby Venice, Calif., and began singing and acting while still a child. At age 8, she tap-danced for Jed Clampett on an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” under the name Tina Marie Brockert.
After graduating from high school and briefly attending Santa Monica College, she signed with Motown Records and became of protégée of Rick James, then one of the label’s biggest new stars. Teena Marie’s first album, “Wild and Peaceful,” with James as a producer and the chief songwriter — and his Stone City Band backing her up — was released on Motown’s Gordy imprint in 1979.
“I’m Just a Sucker for Your Love,” her duet with James from that album, went to No. 8 on the R&B singles chart. The two began a tempestuous love affair. Another duet, “Fire and Desire,” appeared on James’s hit album from 1981, “Street Songs.” James died in 2004.
Through the 1980s, Teena Marie developed a style that folded bits of rap (as on the 1981 hit “Square Biz”) and rock (“You So Heavy,” from 1986, has a scorching guitar solo by Stevie Ray Vaughan) into danceable, funk-driven pop.
From the start, race was ambiguous in her music. She was not pictured on the cover of “Wild and Peaceful,” which was promoted to black radio stations. With an earthy voice that pierced with power in its high registers, she was highly credible as an R&B singer, and many listeners learned that she was white only when they saw her portrait on the cover of her second album, “Lady T,” in 1980.
“I still have people coming up to me 26 years later and looking at me and all of a sudden going, ‘I didn’t know you were white!’ ” she said in an interview on National Public Radio in 2006.
But she was embraced by the R&B audience, and some of her songs have become ingrained in black musical culture. Her 1988 song “Ooo La La La” was sampled and reconfigured by the Fugees as “Fu-Gee-La” in 1996 on their debut album, “The Score.”
For many of her fellow musicians, Teena Marie’s biggest accomplishment was made offstage. Her lawsuit against Motown in the early 1980s, for nonpayment of royalties, resulted in a clarification of California law — known in the music industry as the Brockert Initiative or the Teena Marie Law — that made it much more difficult for record companies to keep an act under an exclusive contract. After leaving Motown, she signed with Epic and reached her commercial peak. Her 1984 song “Lovergirl” — featuring her impassioned squeal in the chorus, “I just want to be your lover girl/I just want to rock your world” — went to No. 4 on Billboard’s pop chart and became her biggest seller.
In the 1990s, Teena Marie’s career slowed as she raised a daughter, Alia Rose, who survives her. But she continued to release music. She was nominated for a 2005 Grammy Award for best female R&B vocal performance, for her song “I’m Still in Love” — she lost to Alicia Keys — and released her most recent album, “Congo Square,” on the revived Stax label in 2009.
Although Teena Marie’s race was hidden from the public at the very beginning of her career, she was always forthright about the black influences in her music. In an interview with Essence.com last year, she suggested that the content of the music mattered more than the singer’s color.
“Over all my race hasn’t been a problem,” she said. “I’m a black artist with white skin. At the end of the day you have to sing what’s in your own soul.”
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
COMMENTARY: Singapore's disdain exposed - an excerpt
COMMENTARY: Singapore's disdain exposed
ANN - Tuesday, December 14
Kuala Lumpur (The Star/ANN) - Singapore's most senior Foreign Ministry official Bilahari Kausikan is heading for Kuala Lumpur on Dec 22 as a leader of a delegation to discuss KTM Berhad's land swap deal in Singapore agreed in May by the Prime Ministers of the two countries.
This is the fifth round and possibly the last meeting of the Malaysia-Singapore Joint Implementation Team (MSJIT) between officials of both countries, each side with about 20 people representing various ministries and agencies.
After the last meeting two weeks ago, a short one-paragraph joint statement was issued describing the meeting as one held in a cordial atmosphere.
Come Dec 22, the atmosphere will definitely be awkward, at least to some officials.
Simple analogy -- imagine sitting with someone that you know who has been bad-mouthing you to others. How would you feel?
Now, how about sitting down to a meeting with the very man who claimed, among others, that Malaysia was "confused and dangerous, fuelled by the distinct possibility of racial conflict"?
Not only that, Kausikan said back in September 2008 that "a lack of competent leadership is a real problem for Malaysia".
Courtesy of WikiLeaks and not exactly denied by his boss, Foreign Minister George Yeo, Kausikan's remarks are riling up officials in Malaysia.
"His remarks are crude and smack of arrogance. It is not just what he has said but how he said it. It shows his sentiment for us.
"Every time there is an MSJIT meeting, the host country will host lunch and dinner. It is going to be an awkward situation for us," said one government official.
Kausikan's predecessor Peter Ho has also made damaging remarks on Malaysia, along with the ministry's ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh whose views of Japan and India were damaging.
"Fat losers, stupid, bad leadership" are some adjectives that had been used by Singaporean diplomats to describe their neighbours.
Yeo, in an immediate attempt to play down reports, defended his officials, saying their comments were taken out of context and were interpretations of views reflected by American officials.
The comments, which Yeo described as "cocktail talk", were confidential and should not have been released.
Yeo said his ministry would not check the veracity of the remarks, nor comment on what could have gone on in an informal and confidential setting.
It is normal for diplomats to get information from others during cocktails. What is surprising, though, is that the information gathered from the Singaporeans merit attention from the Americans.
"I am sure how it was said by the Singapore diplomats and the sentiment that it merits attention," said an official.
For those who have dealt with Singapore, nothing has changed.
The general feeling among officials is that their Singapore counterparts do have condescending traits.
WikiLeaks exposes in the past weeks have caused embarrassment to diplomats and government officials around the world.
This week, it is Singapore's turn. There are thousands of documents yet to be made public by WikiLeaks and who knows if Malaysia would be next, as we are never short of politicians who may not be able to keep their mouths shut.
As Yeo said, he did not think relations with the countries will be affected.
True, but as the closest neighbour with supposedly warm ties, Singapore would do well to show some kind of regret over the remarks made by its officials.
If it had been Singapore at the end of the stick, they would not stop until they get what they want. No doubt, Malaysia will now need to be more alert when dealing with Singapore.
During next week's meeting, officials will need to remain professional when they meet Kausikan.
They have to stick to the agenda as there are objectives to be met since the leaders have given officials until end of the year to iron out details of the KTM land swap deal and other related projects.
The days of being emotional are long gone. It is time to think strategically for the long term and best interest of Malaysia.
ANN - Tuesday, December 14
Kuala Lumpur (The Star/ANN) - Singapore's most senior Foreign Ministry official Bilahari Kausikan is heading for Kuala Lumpur on Dec 22 as a leader of a delegation to discuss KTM Berhad's land swap deal in Singapore agreed in May by the Prime Ministers of the two countries.
This is the fifth round and possibly the last meeting of the Malaysia-Singapore Joint Implementation Team (MSJIT) between officials of both countries, each side with about 20 people representing various ministries and agencies.
After the last meeting two weeks ago, a short one-paragraph joint statement was issued describing the meeting as one held in a cordial atmosphere.
Come Dec 22, the atmosphere will definitely be awkward, at least to some officials.
Simple analogy -- imagine sitting with someone that you know who has been bad-mouthing you to others. How would you feel?
Now, how about sitting down to a meeting with the very man who claimed, among others, that Malaysia was "confused and dangerous, fuelled by the distinct possibility of racial conflict"?
Not only that, Kausikan said back in September 2008 that "a lack of competent leadership is a real problem for Malaysia".
Courtesy of WikiLeaks and not exactly denied by his boss, Foreign Minister George Yeo, Kausikan's remarks are riling up officials in Malaysia.
"His remarks are crude and smack of arrogance. It is not just what he has said but how he said it. It shows his sentiment for us.
"Every time there is an MSJIT meeting, the host country will host lunch and dinner. It is going to be an awkward situation for us," said one government official.
Kausikan's predecessor Peter Ho has also made damaging remarks on Malaysia, along with the ministry's ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh whose views of Japan and India were damaging.
"Fat losers, stupid, bad leadership" are some adjectives that had been used by Singaporean diplomats to describe their neighbours.
Yeo, in an immediate attempt to play down reports, defended his officials, saying their comments were taken out of context and were interpretations of views reflected by American officials.
The comments, which Yeo described as "cocktail talk", were confidential and should not have been released.
Yeo said his ministry would not check the veracity of the remarks, nor comment on what could have gone on in an informal and confidential setting.
It is normal for diplomats to get information from others during cocktails. What is surprising, though, is that the information gathered from the Singaporeans merit attention from the Americans.
"I am sure how it was said by the Singapore diplomats and the sentiment that it merits attention," said an official.
For those who have dealt with Singapore, nothing has changed.
The general feeling among officials is that their Singapore counterparts do have condescending traits.
WikiLeaks exposes in the past weeks have caused embarrassment to diplomats and government officials around the world.
This week, it is Singapore's turn. There are thousands of documents yet to be made public by WikiLeaks and who knows if Malaysia would be next, as we are never short of politicians who may not be able to keep their mouths shut.
As Yeo said, he did not think relations with the countries will be affected.
True, but as the closest neighbour with supposedly warm ties, Singapore would do well to show some kind of regret over the remarks made by its officials.
If it had been Singapore at the end of the stick, they would not stop until they get what they want. No doubt, Malaysia will now need to be more alert when dealing with Singapore.
During next week's meeting, officials will need to remain professional when they meet Kausikan.
They have to stick to the agenda as there are objectives to be met since the leaders have given officials until end of the year to iron out details of the KTM land swap deal and other related projects.
The days of being emotional are long gone. It is time to think strategically for the long term and best interest of Malaysia.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
If an island state vanishes, is it still a nation? - An Excerpt
If an island state vanishes, is it still a nation? - AP
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley, Ap Special Correspondent – Mon Dec 6, 2:27 pm ET
CANCUN, Mexico – Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. "It's getting worse," says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation's climate change coordinator.
The rising ocean raises questions, too: What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?
For years global negotiations to act on climate change have dragged on, with little to show. Parties to the 193-nation U.N. climate treaty are meeting again in this Caribbean resort, but no one expects decisive action to roll back the industrial, agricultural and transport emissions blamed for global warming — and consequently for swelling seas.
From 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) away, the people of the Marshalls — and of Kiribati, Tuvalu and other atoll nations beyond — can only wonder how many more years they'll be able to cope.
"People who built their homes close to shore, all they can do is get more rocks to rebuild the seawall in front day by day," said Kaminaga, who is in Cancun with the Marshallese delegation to the U.N. talks.
The Marshallese government is looking beyond today, however, to those ultimate questions of nationhood, displacement and rights.
"We're facing a set of issues unique in the history of the system of nation-states," Dean Bialek, a New York-based adviser to the Republic of the Marshall Islands who is also in Cancun, told The Associated Press. "We're confronting existential issues associated with climate impacts that are not adequately addressed in the international legal framework."
The Marshallese government took a first step to confront these issues by asking for advice from the Center for Climate Change Law at New York's Columbia University. The center's director, Michael B. Gerrard, in turn has asked legal scholars worldwide to assemble at Columbia next May to begin to piece together answers.
Nations have faded into history through secession — recently with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, for example — or through conquest or ceding their territory to other countries.
But "no country has ever physically disappeared, and it's a real void in the law," Gerrard said during an interview in New York.
The U.N. network of climate scientists projects that seas, expanding from heat and from the runoff of melting land ice, may rise by up to 1.94 feet (0.59 meters) by 2100, swamping much of the scarce land of coral atolls.
But the islands may become uninhabitable long before waves wash over them, because of the saline contamination of water supplies and ruining of crops, and because warming is expected to produce more threatening tropical storms.
"If a country like Tuvalu or Kiribati were to become uninhabitable, would the people be stateless? What's their position in international law?" asked Australian legal scholar Jane McAdam. "The short answer is, it depends. It's complicated."
McAdam, of the University of New South Wales, has traveled in the atoll nations and studied the legal history.
As far as islanders keeping their citizenship and sovereignty if they abandon their homelands, she said by telephone from Sydney, "it's unclear when a state would end because of climate change. It would come down to what the international community was prepared to tolerate" — that is, whether the U.N. General Assembly would move to take a seat away from a displaced people.
The 1951 global treaty on refugees, mandating that nations shelter those fleeing because of persecution, does not cover the looming situation of those displaced by climate change. Some advocate negotiating a new international pact obliging similar treatment for environmental refugees.
In the case of the Marshallese, the picture is murkier. Under a compact with Washington, citizens of the former U.S. trusteeship territory have the right to freely enter the U.S. for study or work, but their right to permanent residency must be clarified, government advisers say.
The islanders worry, too, about their long-term economic rights. The wide scattering of the Marshalls' 29 atolls, 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) southwest of Hawaii, give them an exclusive economic zone of 800,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) of ocean, an area the size of Mexico.
The tuna coursing through those waters are the Marshalls' chief resource, exploited by selling licenses to foreign fishing fleets. "If their islands go underwater, what becomes of their fishing rights?" Gerrard asked. Potentially just as important: revenues from magnesium and other sea-floor minerals that geologists have been exploring in recent years.
While lawyers at next May's New York conference begin to sort out the puzzle of disappeared nations, the Marshallese will grapple with the growing problems.
The "top priority," Kaminaga said, is to save the isthmus linking the Marshalls' Jaluit island to its airport, a link now swept by high tides.
Meantime, a lingering drought this year led islanders to tap deeper into their wells, finding salty water requiring them to deploy emergency desalination units. And "parts of the islands are eroding away," Kaminaga said, as undermined lines of coconut palms topple into the sea.
This week in Cancun and in the months to come, the Marshalls' representatives will seek international aid for climate adaptation. They envision such projects as a Jaluit causeway, replanting of protective vegetation on shorelines, and a 3-mile-long (5-kilometer-long) seawall protecting their capital, Majuro, from the Pacific's rising tides.
Islanders' hopes are fading, however, for quick, decisive action to slash global emissions and save their remote spits of land for the next century.
"If all these financial and diplomatic tools don't work, I think some countries are looking at some kind of legal measures," said Dessima Williams, Grenada's U.N. ambassador and chair of a group of small island-nations. Those measures might include appeals to the International Court of Justice or other forums for compensation, a difficult route at best.
In the end, islanders wonder, too, what will happen to their culture, their history, their identity with a homeland — even to their ancestors — if they must leave.
"Cemeteries along the coastline are being eroded. Gravesites are falling into the sea," Kaminaga said. "Even in death we're affected."
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley, Ap Special Correspondent – Mon Dec 6, 2:27 pm ET
CANCUN, Mexico – Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. "It's getting worse," says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation's climate change coordinator.
The rising ocean raises questions, too: What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?
For years global negotiations to act on climate change have dragged on, with little to show. Parties to the 193-nation U.N. climate treaty are meeting again in this Caribbean resort, but no one expects decisive action to roll back the industrial, agricultural and transport emissions blamed for global warming — and consequently for swelling seas.
From 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) away, the people of the Marshalls — and of Kiribati, Tuvalu and other atoll nations beyond — can only wonder how many more years they'll be able to cope.
"People who built their homes close to shore, all they can do is get more rocks to rebuild the seawall in front day by day," said Kaminaga, who is in Cancun with the Marshallese delegation to the U.N. talks.
The Marshallese government is looking beyond today, however, to those ultimate questions of nationhood, displacement and rights.
"We're facing a set of issues unique in the history of the system of nation-states," Dean Bialek, a New York-based adviser to the Republic of the Marshall Islands who is also in Cancun, told The Associated Press. "We're confronting existential issues associated with climate impacts that are not adequately addressed in the international legal framework."
The Marshallese government took a first step to confront these issues by asking for advice from the Center for Climate Change Law at New York's Columbia University. The center's director, Michael B. Gerrard, in turn has asked legal scholars worldwide to assemble at Columbia next May to begin to piece together answers.
Nations have faded into history through secession — recently with the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, for example — or through conquest or ceding their territory to other countries.
But "no country has ever physically disappeared, and it's a real void in the law," Gerrard said during an interview in New York.
The U.N. network of climate scientists projects that seas, expanding from heat and from the runoff of melting land ice, may rise by up to 1.94 feet (0.59 meters) by 2100, swamping much of the scarce land of coral atolls.
But the islands may become uninhabitable long before waves wash over them, because of the saline contamination of water supplies and ruining of crops, and because warming is expected to produce more threatening tropical storms.
"If a country like Tuvalu or Kiribati were to become uninhabitable, would the people be stateless? What's their position in international law?" asked Australian legal scholar Jane McAdam. "The short answer is, it depends. It's complicated."
McAdam, of the University of New South Wales, has traveled in the atoll nations and studied the legal history.
As far as islanders keeping their citizenship and sovereignty if they abandon their homelands, she said by telephone from Sydney, "it's unclear when a state would end because of climate change. It would come down to what the international community was prepared to tolerate" — that is, whether the U.N. General Assembly would move to take a seat away from a displaced people.
The 1951 global treaty on refugees, mandating that nations shelter those fleeing because of persecution, does not cover the looming situation of those displaced by climate change. Some advocate negotiating a new international pact obliging similar treatment for environmental refugees.
In the case of the Marshallese, the picture is murkier. Under a compact with Washington, citizens of the former U.S. trusteeship territory have the right to freely enter the U.S. for study or work, but their right to permanent residency must be clarified, government advisers say.
The islanders worry, too, about their long-term economic rights. The wide scattering of the Marshalls' 29 atolls, 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) southwest of Hawaii, give them an exclusive economic zone of 800,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) of ocean, an area the size of Mexico.
The tuna coursing through those waters are the Marshalls' chief resource, exploited by selling licenses to foreign fishing fleets. "If their islands go underwater, what becomes of their fishing rights?" Gerrard asked. Potentially just as important: revenues from magnesium and other sea-floor minerals that geologists have been exploring in recent years.
While lawyers at next May's New York conference begin to sort out the puzzle of disappeared nations, the Marshallese will grapple with the growing problems.
The "top priority," Kaminaga said, is to save the isthmus linking the Marshalls' Jaluit island to its airport, a link now swept by high tides.
Meantime, a lingering drought this year led islanders to tap deeper into their wells, finding salty water requiring them to deploy emergency desalination units. And "parts of the islands are eroding away," Kaminaga said, as undermined lines of coconut palms topple into the sea.
This week in Cancun and in the months to come, the Marshalls' representatives will seek international aid for climate adaptation. They envision such projects as a Jaluit causeway, replanting of protective vegetation on shorelines, and a 3-mile-long (5-kilometer-long) seawall protecting their capital, Majuro, from the Pacific's rising tides.
Islanders' hopes are fading, however, for quick, decisive action to slash global emissions and save their remote spits of land for the next century.
"If all these financial and diplomatic tools don't work, I think some countries are looking at some kind of legal measures," said Dessima Williams, Grenada's U.N. ambassador and chair of a group of small island-nations. Those measures might include appeals to the International Court of Justice or other forums for compensation, a difficult route at best.
In the end, islanders wonder, too, what will happen to their culture, their history, their identity with a homeland — even to their ancestors — if they must leave.
"Cemeteries along the coastline are being eroded. Gravesites are falling into the sea," Kaminaga said. "Even in death we're affected."
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Singapore in tough environmental balancing act - An Excerpt
By Agence France-Presse, Updated: 12/3/2010
Singapore in tough environmental balancing act
Singapore prides itself on being a clean and green city but a booming economy and a high-consumption lifestyle have made it one of the world's biggest carbon polluters per person.
As a major United Nations summit is being held in Mexico to find ways of curbing the carbon emissions blamed for global warming, Singapore's environmental balancing act poses challenging questions for the rest of Asia and the world.
Singapore's green credentials are in many ways very strong and it is establishing itself as a regional renewable energy hub.
Yet, if all Asians emulated Singaporeans' modern and often luxurious lifestyles, greenhouse gas emissions would spike alarmingly.
"If everyone in the world enjoyed the same level of consumption as the average Singaporean, we would need three planets to meet the demands placed on our resources," World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) spokesman Chris Chaplin said.
Singapore was last month listed by the British global risk advisory firm Maplecroft as the world's seventh largest carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter relative to its population size.
Ahead of it were only the United Arab Emirates, Australia, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.
Maplecroft's index was calculated by evaluating annual CO2 emissions from energy use, emissions per capita and cumulative emissions of a country over more than a century -- 1900 to 2006.
"The lack of 'clean' energy sources coupled with the growth in Singapores economy and the increasing use of cars as well as electronic appliances such as air-conditioners contribute to Singapore's emissions," Maplecroft said in a statement to AFP.
Despite a punishing auto levy and road charges, the number of motor vehicles on its roads reached 925,518 in 2009, up more than 27 percent in five years, with private cars making up 60 percent of the total, official figures show.
In a separate list, the WWF ranked Singapore 21st in the world in terms of ecological footprint, or the demand for resources per person, ahead of such countries as Germany, France and Britain.
WWF's calculation covered not only emissions -- the biggest component of humanity's carbon footprint -- but also demand placed by people on arable land, fishing grounds, forest and grazing land worldwide.
Singapore authorities insist, however, that that the country has had no choice but to rely on imported fossil fuel to power its rapid industrialisation.
The trade-reliant economy, valued at 200 billion US dollars in 2009, is tipped to expand by a massive 15 percent this year.
With a land area smaller than that of New York City, Singapore has no space among its five million citizens for wind farms, while it is devoid of hydro and geothermal power sources.
"We are dependent on fossil fuels because our small size severely limits our ability to switch to alternative energies," the National Environment Agency (NEA) said in a statement to AFP.
It said Maplecroft's index neither reflected Singapore's efforts to reduce its carbon emissions nor took into account its unique circumstances.
"As a small city-state, the use of per capita emissions inflates our carbon emissions," it said, noting that overall, Singapore accounts for less than 0.2 percent of global emissions.
Nevertheless, the government said it was committed to the fight against climate change and was taking steps to reduce the growth of its emissions, including switching from oil to natural gas to produce electricity.
Singapore is investing heavily in clean energy technologies -- it has allocated 770 million dollars to develop innovative energy solutions -- and is building a liquefied natural gas terminal that will be ready by 2013.
This will allow access to gas sources beyond neighbouring Indonesia and Malaysia.
It is also pushing its people to do more recycling, doubling its already expansive rail network by 2020 and testing electric vehicles for commercial use.
In another positive move, Singapore has offered itself as a "living laboratory" where global energy firms can develop and test new technologies before mass production.
Norway's Renewable Energy Corp (REC) opened one of the world's biggest solar technology manufacturing facilities in Singapore in November, a project costing nearly two billion dollars.
Vestas, a Danish manufacturer of wind turbines, already has a global research and development centre in the city-state.
"Singapore has been very wise in the way they are approaching this," REC's chief executive Ole Enger said. "They have made Singapore a global hub for renewable energy."
Singapore in tough environmental balancing act
Singapore prides itself on being a clean and green city but a booming economy and a high-consumption lifestyle have made it one of the world's biggest carbon polluters per person.
As a major United Nations summit is being held in Mexico to find ways of curbing the carbon emissions blamed for global warming, Singapore's environmental balancing act poses challenging questions for the rest of Asia and the world.
Singapore's green credentials are in many ways very strong and it is establishing itself as a regional renewable energy hub.
Yet, if all Asians emulated Singaporeans' modern and often luxurious lifestyles, greenhouse gas emissions would spike alarmingly.
"If everyone in the world enjoyed the same level of consumption as the average Singaporean, we would need three planets to meet the demands placed on our resources," World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) spokesman Chris Chaplin said.
Singapore was last month listed by the British global risk advisory firm Maplecroft as the world's seventh largest carbon dioxide (CO2) emitter relative to its population size.
Ahead of it were only the United Arab Emirates, Australia, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.
Maplecroft's index was calculated by evaluating annual CO2 emissions from energy use, emissions per capita and cumulative emissions of a country over more than a century -- 1900 to 2006.
"The lack of 'clean' energy sources coupled with the growth in Singapores economy and the increasing use of cars as well as electronic appliances such as air-conditioners contribute to Singapore's emissions," Maplecroft said in a statement to AFP.
Despite a punishing auto levy and road charges, the number of motor vehicles on its roads reached 925,518 in 2009, up more than 27 percent in five years, with private cars making up 60 percent of the total, official figures show.
In a separate list, the WWF ranked Singapore 21st in the world in terms of ecological footprint, or the demand for resources per person, ahead of such countries as Germany, France and Britain.
WWF's calculation covered not only emissions -- the biggest component of humanity's carbon footprint -- but also demand placed by people on arable land, fishing grounds, forest and grazing land worldwide.
Singapore authorities insist, however, that that the country has had no choice but to rely on imported fossil fuel to power its rapid industrialisation.
The trade-reliant economy, valued at 200 billion US dollars in 2009, is tipped to expand by a massive 15 percent this year.
With a land area smaller than that of New York City, Singapore has no space among its five million citizens for wind farms, while it is devoid of hydro and geothermal power sources.
"We are dependent on fossil fuels because our small size severely limits our ability to switch to alternative energies," the National Environment Agency (NEA) said in a statement to AFP.
It said Maplecroft's index neither reflected Singapore's efforts to reduce its carbon emissions nor took into account its unique circumstances.
"As a small city-state, the use of per capita emissions inflates our carbon emissions," it said, noting that overall, Singapore accounts for less than 0.2 percent of global emissions.
Nevertheless, the government said it was committed to the fight against climate change and was taking steps to reduce the growth of its emissions, including switching from oil to natural gas to produce electricity.
Singapore is investing heavily in clean energy technologies -- it has allocated 770 million dollars to develop innovative energy solutions -- and is building a liquefied natural gas terminal that will be ready by 2013.
This will allow access to gas sources beyond neighbouring Indonesia and Malaysia.
It is also pushing its people to do more recycling, doubling its already expansive rail network by 2020 and testing electric vehicles for commercial use.
In another positive move, Singapore has offered itself as a "living laboratory" where global energy firms can develop and test new technologies before mass production.
Norway's Renewable Energy Corp (REC) opened one of the world's biggest solar technology manufacturing facilities in Singapore in November, a project costing nearly two billion dollars.
Vestas, a Danish manufacturer of wind turbines, already has a global research and development centre in the city-state.
"Singapore has been very wise in the way they are approaching this," REC's chief executive Ole Enger said. "They have made Singapore a global hub for renewable energy."
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