The Daily Parker

Before going to Shanghai, I picked up James Fallows's Postcards from Tomorrow Square, a collection of his essays from living there 2006-2009. (Yes, he lived in the building that houses the hotel where our CCMBA cohort stayed.)

First, I'd like to call attention to page 76:

The easier America makes it for talented foreigners to work and study there, the richer, more powerful, and more respected America will be. America's ability to absorb the world's talent is the crucial advantage no other culture can match—as long as America doesn't forfeit this advantage with visa rules written mainly out of fear.

Second, the book should be required of CCMBA students visiting Shanghai to complement Travels of a T-Shirt in a Global Economy, which we had to read for our Global Markets and Institutions (GMI) class. In the essay "China Makes, the World Takes" (available at The Atlantic.com in shorter form), Fallows looks at the Chinese side of Livoli's traveling t-shirt. Computer accessories, for instance:

The other facility that intrigued me, one of Liam Casey’s in Shenzhen, handled online orders for a different well-known American company. I was there around dawn, which was crunch time. Because of the 12-hour time difference from the U.S. East Coast, orders Americans place in the late afternoon arrive in China in the dead of night. As I watched, a customer in Palatine, Illinois, perhaps shopping from his office, clicked on the American company’s Web site to order two $25 accessories. A few seconds later, the order appeared on the screen 12,500 km away in Shenzhen. It automatically generated a packing and address slip and several bar-code labels. One young woman put the address label on a brown cardboard shipping box and the packing slip inside. The box moved down a conveyer belt to another woman working a “pick to light” system: She stood in front of a kind of cupboard with a separate open-fronted bin for each item customers might order from the Web site; a light turned on over each bin holding a part specified in the latest order. She picked the item out of that bin, ran it past a scanner that checked its number (and signaled the light to go off), and put it in the box. More check-weighing and rescanning followed, and when the box was sealed, young men added it to a shipping pallet.

By the time the night shift was ready to leave—8 a.m. China time, 7 p.m. in Palatine, 8 p.m. on the U.S. East Coast—the volume of orders from America was tapering off. More important, the FedEx pickup time was drawing near. At 9 a.m. couriers would arrive and rush the pallets to the Hong Kong airport. The FedEx flight to Anchorage would leave by 6 p.m., and when it got there, the goods on this company’s pallets would be combined with other Chinese exports and re-sorted for destinations in America. Forty-eight hours after the man in Palatine clicked “Buy it now!” on his computer, the item showed up at his door. Its return address was a company warehouse in the United States; a small Made in China label was on the bottom of the box.

Finally, a bleg: what book or books do you think, dear reader, should be required reading for visitors to your city? For example, I'd say Nelson Algren's prose-poem City on the Make and Mike Royko's Boss for Chicago. Thoughts?

We all scratched our heads today as the Dow plunged almost 1,000 points in 15 minutes...then rebounded. Still no explanation:

Traders and Washington policy makers struggled to keep up as the Dow Jones industrial average fell 1,000 points shortly after 2:30 p.m. and then mostly rebounded in a matter of minutes. For a moment, the sell-off seemed to overwhelm computer and human systems alike, and some traders began referring grimly to the day as “Black Thursday.”

But in the end, Thursday was not as black as it had seemed. After briefly sinking below 10,000, the Dow ended down 347.80, or 3.2 percent, at 10,520.32. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index dropped 37.75 points, or 3.24 percent, to close at 1,128.15, and the Nasdaq was down 82.65 points, or 3.44 percent, at 2,319.64.

But up and down Wall Street, and across the nation, many investors were dumbstruck. Experts groped for explanations as blue-chip stocks like Procter & Gamble, Philip Morris and Accenture plunged. At one point, Accenture[1] fell more than 99 percent to a penny. P.&G. plunged to $39.37 from more than $60 within minutes.

More:

The height of panic on Thursday was reached shortly after lunchtime in the United States. First some currencies began to fall rapidly, with the euro suffering especially against the Japanese yen.

That could have been an indication that some large traders were unwinding positions. It has been popular to borrow yen at low interest rates and then use the money to speculate in higher yielding assets denominated in other currencies. Anyone unwinding such a trade would buy yen to repay the loan.

Then there's the U.K. election, which didn't go as planned for the Liberal Democrats:

The swing so far from Labour to Conservatives with 250 results in the bag is a little lower than before, at 5.6%. The Tories' share of the popular vote is 34.9%, Labour is on 28.3% and the LibDems on 21%. Compare that with the average of nine main pollsters' final predictions before the elections: 35.6% for the Tories, 27.6% for Labour and 27.4% for the Liberal Democrats. The Tories a little down, Labour a little up and Lib Dems bafflingly down. Still more than half of all seats to go, though.

That was about an hour ago. It's dawn in London right now, and no one knows who'll be in Number 10 at dusk. If no party has an outright majority in Parliament at the end of voting, Gordon Brown will have the right to form another government—but you can bet the UK will have elections again in a few months. This is the most exciting UK election since 1974.

[1] Disclosure: Accenture owns most of Avanade, my employer.

Bruce Schneier gives three main reasons:

One, terrorist attacks are harder to pull off than popular imagination -- and the movies -- lead everyone to believe. Two, there are far fewer terrorists than the political rhetoric of the past eight years leads everyone to believe. And three, random minor terrorist attacks don't serve Islamic terrorists' interests right now.

... So, to sum up: If you're just a loner wannabe who wants to go out with a bang, terrorism is easy. You're more likely to get caught if you take a long time to plan or involve a bunch of people, but you might succeed. If you're a representative of al-Qaida trying to make a statement in the U.S., it's much harder. You just don't have the people, and you're probably going to slip up and get caught.

Via one of my classmates, an graphic depiction of the differences between Germany and China by graphic designer Yang Liu. For example, the evolution of transport over the last 40 years:

Apparently United danced with USAirways just to make Continental jealous. It worked:

"What happened here is very simple," Continental President and Chief Executive Jeff Smisek told analysts and reporters on a Monday conference call. "I found out through the news media that Glenn [Tilton, CEO of United] was looking at a potential other combination. I recognized that United is the best possible partner for Continental...I didn't want him to marry the ugly girl. I wanted him to marry the pretty one, and I'm much prettier."

... Executives added on Monday that they expect US Airways to continue being a "valued partner" in the Star Alliance.

Of course, major business combinations like this one happen because of cold, hard finacial logic, not because of petty gossip. But does anyone really think American hasn't started passing USAirways notes in study hall?

Brilliant:

If the TSA Were Running New York

- All vans or SUVs headed into Midtown Manhattan would have to stop and have their contents inspected. If any vehicle seemed for any reason to have escaped inspection, Midtown in its entirety would be evacuated;

- A whole new uniformed force -- the Times Square Security Administration, or TsSA - would be formed for this purpose;

- The restrictions would never be lifted and the TsSA would have permanent life, because the political incentives here work only one way.

... The point of terrorism is not to "destroy." It is to terrify. And for eight and a half years now, the dominant federal government response to terrorist threats and attacks has been to magnify their harm by increasing a mood of fear and intimidation. That is the real case against the ludicrous "orange threat level" announcements we hear every three minutes at the airport. It's not just that they're pointless, uninformative, and insulting to our collective intelligence; it's that their larger effect is to make people feel frightened rather than brave.

It always strikes me that Israel, which has actual, ongoing terrorism, doesn't x-ray people's shoes.

For some reason, the Cultural Disconnect I just wrote for the Shanghai residency was the hardest. I don't know if that's good or bad.

Full text follows:

Cultural connect?

I reviewed my ICE profile and the regional Cultural Dimensions the week before arriving in China. What interactions should I worry about? Where would the disconnections come from? China has high in-group collectivism, high power distance, and relatively low uncertainty avoidance, contra the U.S. My ICE profile spells out a hybrid Midwestern-East Coast sensibility, being across-the-board direct in the relationship context, having a mixed direct-expressive communication style, and an almost completely reserved space context. (My time context is all over the place, but that’s a different essay.)

I expected China would bang away on my communication style and space contexts especially. From everything I’d read about them, I expected Chinese people to be much more reserved in communication style but much more expressive in space context than I am. I looked forward to being trampled by the teeming masses in the Metro and engaging in indirect negotiations that never quite began, and never quite ended.[1]

As soon as I got onto the China Eastern airplane at Narita (as alien a place to me as I had ever experienced, at least since leaving O’Hare a few hours earlier), I started looking for Cultural Disconnects. OK: there’s a sullen-looking Chinese person already sitting in my seat on the plane! That’s because of the expressive...because the attitude towards...because she just didn’t know that A is the window and B is the aisle? Point, point, shrug, shrug, we’re in our correct seats. It differed from similar interactions I’ve had on American Airlines only because I can usually communicate orally in the U.S., even though pointing and shrugging politely and with good humor works just as well as saying “I’m sorry, you seem to be in my seat.”

Next opportunity: Passport control. OK, looks a little different than the U.S. Much better run than Miami, less crowded than O’Hare...short, orderly lines...signs in English. Huh. The immigration officer and I had a brief conversation in English, she stamped my passport, and I left. In the annals of culturally distinctive immigration experiences, this rated somewhere between Dublin and Schiphol.[2]

Next: navigating Pudong Airport to find the Maglev. Huh. More signs in English. Many of them say “Maglev” with arrows pointing to, I found out, the Maglev station. That the signs also had Chinese characters on them doesn’t really have ICE or CD significance, does it? It looked cool, though.

Buying a Maglev ticket: with the RMB I’d bought at an offensive markup in the terminal (again, pretty common in airports world-wide), I whipped out my Mandarin phrase-book and walked up to the ticket counter. “One way or return?” she asked, in perfect English, before I’d even opened the book. She could have been selling tickets at Penn Station, except that no train leaving Penn Station has ever got up to 430 km/h. Security screening to get on the train: now we’re getting somewhere. I’ve never had my bags X-Rayed before getting on a train, let alone a Metro. But does this fit into the definition of “cultural disconnect?” It’s a different trade-off between security and convenience than we make in Chicago, sure. But Shanghai was just a week from opening the World Expo, so heightened “security theater” should be expected. The police at least looked at the X-Ray monitor, unlike in Dubai where one screener was actually asleep when I put my bags through.

Getting out of the Metro at People’s Square, I got accosted by a pimp. Cultural disconnect? I could argue that my expressive “avoid disagreement” and “avoid conflict/tension” communication styles, not to mention my direct “ambiguity in communication” style, explains my clearly disagreeable, tense, unambiguous response; and maybe it was his in-group collectivism (I wasn’t “one of us” and therefore a target) that made him follow me halfway to the hotel even after I’d told him where he should go instead. But no, I think he was just a pimp harassing a traveler and got told off. I’ve spent nearly my entire life in the three largest cities in the U.S.; I can assure doubters that his was not culturally-distinctive behavior, nor was my response.

Next day: a nice-looking young couple “on vacation” chatted me up “to practice their English” and, inevitably, invited me to a tea ceremony. How droll. Again: where there are tourists, there are scammers, only this time I told them “I am afraid it will not be possible to go with you at this time” instead of what I told the pimp. (Ah, but how did I know they were scammers? Could my wariness have been a cultural disconnect? Or might I have read about the “tea ceremony” scam in the Lonely Planet guide on the flight over?)

On and on it went for 10 days. Cultural disconnects just didn’t seem to happen. Of course, I’m sure I had dozens of them—but I wasn’t aware of them. I think, instead, that consciously looking for cultural disconnects dissipated them before they could start. I anticipated things being radically different in China, so maybe I kept looking for big disconnects like I had in Dubai and Delhi and missed the countless little ones in Shanghai. Or maybe I should have gotten farther away from Shanghai than Zhouzhuang.

The last is the most likely. And there are compelling historical reasons for this. Shanghai has had an openness to foreigners (not, of course, entirely voluntarily) for centuries. Western interests in particular dominated Shanghai from the 1800s until the Japanese turfed them out in the 1930s. Flash forward to the more open economic policies of Deng Xiaoping starting in the 1980s continuing through Hu Jintao’s today: China’s desire to prove itself equal to the West, and Shanghai’s historical Western orientation (occidation?), led to a conscious effort to develop Pudong as a modern city center. Puxi, with its Victorian and Third Republic architecture, benefitted as well. Shanghai’s growing reputation as a Chinese city with Western sensibilities encouraged more Western visitors to Shanghai, which made it a more Western-feeling place. In short, a virtuous cycle.

Still, I think Shanghai was simultaneously too alien and too similar for me to experience differences as disconnects. Alien, because forget it, Jake, it’s China.[3] In Shanghai, the thick language barrier prevented me from taking any communications for granted, and kept me so focused on the instant conversation that I forgot about the larger cultural context. Cultural disconnects disappeared from my forebrain when I had trouble saying “forty five” without it sounding like “death decade company.”

Similar, because for innumerable reasons, Shanghai felt like Chicago—except when it felt like New York. Sure, people do things differently in Shanghai than we do here, but people do things differently everywhere. But people in large, cosmopolitan cities have ways of behaving that are more similar than not. I’m not really joking when I say Raleigh sometimes feels more alien to me than Shanghai did. My disconnects in North Carolina come not from my direct-expressive communication style and time context smacking into their reserved Southern counterparts, but rather from thinking, because we’re all from the same country, we should all act the same, and then being surprised when we don’t. That was not a possibility in China.

[1] Most of my cultural priming came from James Fallows’ Postcards from Tomorrow Square. Fallows spent three years in Shanghai as the Atlantic’s Asia correspondent. The book collects and extends the columns he wrote about living in China for the magazine.

[2] In fact, my two most unusual interactions were at a land crossing into Canada, where I had my car searched, and at De Gaulle, where the immigration officers had to deal with simultaneously arriving flights from Boston and Nigeria. The solution in the latter case was to shout, in perfect English, “Americans, British, Canadians, EU, this way please” and then shoo the European-looking folks past the counters without a second glance or even a look at our passports. I will leave to the reader to sort out what may they may have been thinking, and if this is really the way we want cops to behave.

[3] Cf. Nicholson, Polanski, et al., 1972.

United and Continental have officially voted to merge, which won't suck for Chicago:

The new United's operations headquarters will be located in Chicago's Willis Tower, which was formerly known as the Sears Tower. United will move forward with plans to place its crucial nerve center and 2,800 staffers in the skyscraper starting in October.

The combined airline would have revenues of $29 billion, based on 2009 results, and hold an unrestricted cash balance of about $7.4 billion. The carriers said in a press release Monday that they expect to complete the transaction in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Unlike the earlier merger that United had contemplated with US Airways, this deal isn't expected to involve large-scale cuts since United's and Continental's networks have little overlap. The carriers expect to continue serving the 370 cities where United or Continental currently fly, and will operate 10 hubs, including bases in the four largest cities in the U.S.

(The photo above shows the new color scheme on a Boeing 787, of which Continental has ordered 25 and United has ordered none, as of November.)

American and USAirways will have to merge, really. Or USAirways will have to join oneworld. That will leave three major international airlines in the U.S., which won't do a lot to help prices.

By 2013, the EU will stop confiscating your lunch:

Liquids, gels and aerosols will instead be run through a new generation of explosives scanners able to screen them for harmful materials. Getting these machines up and running will be very expensive, and the technology is not yet foolproof. But nothing in aviation security is foolproof, and anything is better than the chaotic confiscation policies now in place.

Why are the Europeans always one step ahead of us?

... The 3-ounce container rule is silly enough -- after all, what's to stop somebody from carrying several small bottles, each full of the same substance -- but consider for a moment the hypocrisy of TSA's confiscation policy. At every concourse checkpoint you'll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place? So why are they dumped unceremoniously into the trash? The agency seems to be saying that it knows these things are harmless. But it's going to take them anyway, and either you accept it or you don't fly.

Smith also, bless him, acknowledges another problem with the US enforcement regime: "The maximum allowable container size is actually 3.4 ounces, by the way, or a hundred milliliters."

In other aviation news, United is eating Continental. That will cause American to eat USAirways, leaving only three major airlines in the US, and a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index climbing to heaven. Lovely.

I haven't had a lot of time to go through all the Shanghai photos. These two caught my eye, though. First, the Urban Planning Museum in People's Square:

And, just because I thought it looked cool, Terminal 2 at Pudong International Airport: