Not Even Wrong

I’ve been biking in and around New York City for many years, recently doing several thousand miles a year, and this should provide many topics for the blog. Look forward to, for example, an explanation of how to best get across the Passaic River to Newark on bike. Biking in Manhattan has always been a challenge, but things have gotten exciting recently. A few years ago the city started painting lines on some of the streets, announcing that these were “bike lanes”. They’re generally filled with double-parked cars or trucks, and pedestrians hailing cabs or waiting for a break to run between the traffic. The width is carefully chosen to coincide with the width of a car door, so if you ride inside the lane you’re guaranteed to properly get “doored” by people leaving their parked cars. The act of painting the line has the added feature of making it illegal for bicyclists to ride outside of it, at a safe distance from the cars.

The latest news is that a few special, protected lanes have been created, with cars parked outside the lane. These lanes go for a few blocks, and are heavily favored by delivery people to store what they’re working with, tourists taking pictures of each other, parents changing their baby’s diapers, or basically any activity that pedestrians would complain about if it was done on the sidewalk. The new lanes have enraged some powerful New Yorkers, who are now on a “bikelash” campaign to get them removed. They’ve managed to enlist the police, who have a long history in Manhattan of fighting with bicyclists, and have started up a serious campaign of legal harassment.

I used to ride regularly in Central Park, which has a 6 mile long road winding through it, most of the time closed to traffic. A couple months ago the police started issuing $270 tickets to bicyclists for not stopping at any of the 50 or so traffic lights (it seems that when traffic is not allowed, bicyclists must obey the traffic lights anyway, runners or pedestrians no). This caused almost all bicyclists to stop riding in the park, but a few kept on anyway. The police then decided that the speed limit should be 15 mph for bicyclists, and set up a speed trap at the bottom of a hill early one morning, ticketing quite a few people. Later they changed their mind about this, and decided the law really was 25 mph. Teams of armed police were dispatched to appear at homes of the 15-25 mph ticketees in the evening and tell them a mistake was made, while continuing to make clear that if they didn’t stop at traffic lights when there was no traffic, they would still be ticketed. And if they were going faster than 25 mph at the bottom of a hill, there would be trouble. I’m sure they found this very reassuring. Personally, I’ve stopped riding in the park. It turns out though that there’s a platoon of undercover police throughout the city in unmarked cars waiting to start up sirens and go after any bicyclist who violates any rule in the hundreds of pages of regulations governing not just bicycles, but motor vehicles (their slogan: a bike is the same as a car!). Recently I ran afoul of one of these due to rolling very safely and slowly through an intersection, which got me not one, but two \$270 tickets. I’ll appear in court on these charges some day soon, and I’m sure my readers will want to hear all the details of how this works out.

Update: A commenter correctly points out that I got the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers confused, it’s the Hackensack that is difficult to cross by bike down around Newark.

Another topic I hope to write about extensively is that of New York City, including discussing the wide range of cultural events going on, as well as the amazing restaurants. On the subject of food, I should give a plug for my friend Nathan Myhrvold’s new book Modernist Cuisine. It’s been getting rave reviews, and the first printing has sold out. I’ve been promised a copy from the second printing, and Nathan tells me that, “while it’s not a coffee-table book, you could use it as a coffee table…” I’ll report once the book arrives.

I’ve been in and out of New York City since the earliest times I can remember, which were in a suburb 25 miles north. My mother was born here and my father came here by himself as a 17-year old after the war. The place has changed quite a bit over the years, and some of the changes of the past few years are quite remarkable. These days, most of Manhattan is filled with new or renovated architecture, everything fixed up to a high level of gloss, and virtually crime-free. With one bedroom apartments going for a million dollars in many neighborhoods, if you trip on your shoelace you’re likely to take down a couple millionaires. These people are not going to mug you, and any outsiders who might think of this are deterred by the intense police presence, especially since 9/11. The only exception is bicycle theft, which is rampant, and doesn’t much interest the police. Last summer I came out of a store on Broadway mid Sunday afternoon to find a group of guys with bolt cutters freeing my bicycle from its chains. No one seemed to find their activities unusual or worth doing anything about.

Back in the 1980s there was a lot of talk of “gentrification”, as poor people were displaced by well-educated young middle-class people. These days a new word is needed to describe what is going on, perhaps “plutocracification”. Someone who lives in Tribeca described to me how 20 years ago the neighborhood changed as lawyers and doctors moved in, and artists moved out. Nowadays, the lawyers and doctors are getting pushed out as the hedge-funders and investment bankers arrive. It’s hard to overstate the effect of the financial industry in Manhattan, where supposedly it provides half the personal income, with much of the rest of the economy based on catering to this new wealth. Bank branches are everywhere, often taking up four corners of an intersection, with long swathes of expensive commercial street frontage devoted to cubicles for not very well-paid bank employees, most of which are normally empty.

In late 2008, there was a blip there for a moment, and I even saw one bank branch get closed. That didn’t last long though: apartments are selling again at high prices, new bank branches are opening, and you can’t get a reservation at a long list of popular expensive restaurants. Midtown streets are impassible, filled with fleets of massive black SUVs, their bullet-proof windows tinted dark. Used to be that the rich favored limos, but no longer. No one knows how long this will last, but the city is partying like it’s 2011. Huge cuts to the budgets for schools and the city university system have just been announced, but most Manhattanites are unconcerned, since they would never have their children educated in public institutions.

One side effect of having a lot of rich people from many different countries is that the restaurants in Manhattan tend to be spectacularly good. Some are trendy and rather expensive, but for not a ridiculous amount of money you can get a fantastic meal, and you have to go out of your way to find a bad one. I’ll be writing extensively about some of my culinary obsessions, one of which is barbecue. At this point I might argue that New York has better barbecue than just about anywhere else in the world. Just down the street from here (108th and Broadway), Rack and Soul has some of the best ribs I’ve ever eaten. On 26th St., Hill Country has taken the best sausage and brisket available in Texas (Kreutz’s in Lockhart), stolen it and brought it here to the city. Over in Williamsburg, you can get great barbecue with the best pork and beans I’ve ever seen at Fette Sau. The list goes on and on….

Recently opened near here just off 125th St. is Marcus Samuelson’s Red Rooster Harlem, where I recently had a wonderful lunch. Getting a dinner reservation is not easy, and some days the restaurant is packed with the power elite. Last week Obama took over the place for a $31,000/head dinner with his friends from the hedge funds. Here’s the menu. This is a typical story of the new New York. In what used to be pretty much a slum, now there’s a beautiful restaurant with some of the world’s best food. The wealthy may sometimes monopolize it, but if you’re a New Yorker and play your cards right, you too can participate in the fun and get a fantastic meal in a gorgeous place, at a not unreasonable price.

I voted for Obama in the Democratic primary, because I figured Hillary Clinton was more likely to expand the war in Afghanistan and otherwise engage in the sort of misguided military adventure favored by the shrub. Look what happened. He appointed Clinton Secretary of State, and then sent even more troops into Afghanistan than Bush Jr. would have dared consider. Don’t even get me started about his Mideast policy and spineless cave-in on Israeli settlements. Remember Guantanamo? He’s commander-in-chief, could shut this illegal abomination down whenever he wants to, instead he intends to keep it open indefinitely. Again, W would have closed the place by now and moved on. The fact that Obama was given a Nobel Peace Prize is some sort of sick joke.

On the domestic front, let’s face it: Obama has been a disaster for the country, moving it farther to the right than it has been at any time since perhaps a period of a few years sometime back in the 19th century. He has pursued policies more or less in line with those of Bush, confusing and neutering moderates and progressives (who don’t dare criticize him). Based on his inspiring speeches, they thought they had elected a community organizer, but are slowly realizing that they’ve been had, with the White House now in the hands of a Bush clone interested not in fighting powerful interests but in playing golf with them. By doing this, he has pushed the Republican opposition so far to the right that they’ve descended into lunacy, and ensured that he’ll should have no trouble winning re-election in 2012. The only threat to him is that of the rise of a populist/fascist movement, motivated by blind hatred and the (accurate) feeling that they are being driven into poverty by a ruthless Ivy-league-educated establishment with a lock on the political and financial system of the country. At the Harvard Club in midtown there’s a huge new portrait of him set in a prominent place as you enter the building. The establishment lawyers and financial types who congregate there know that he’s their man.

The military budget is now significantly higher than during the Bush years, and taxes on the wealthy even lower (taxes on large estates are lower than under Bush). While Bush expanded Medicare significantly to cover prescription drugs, Obama’s health plan was written in partnership with those responsible for the problem (high costs): doctors, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. The great innovation seems to be to expand access to medical care by forcing people who can’t afford it to buy insurance from rapacious insurance companies. Obama’s choice for Fed Chairman: same guy as the one Bush had running his Council of Economic Advisers, before moving on to the Fed and presiding over the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. If there’s any difference between Obama’s treasury secretary (Geithner) and Bush’s (Paulson), I’m unable to see it and haven’t met anyone who can. Geithner is now in charge of gutting the few minor reforms that were passed in the aftermath of the crisis, while institutionalizing a system of government backing for too-big-to-fail financial firms of sizes expanded since the Bush years. The organized looting of these firms by their employees that brought on the mess of 2008 is now back in full-swing.

Next year’s presidential campaign is predicted to cost a billion dollars, which Obama has already started raising from the financial industry and other interest groups. He faces no progressive or moderate opposition at all, with the only question to be resolved that of exactly how extreme his Republican opponent will be. I’ll be covering all this here on the blog, but on days when I don’t get around to giving you my thoughts on what is happening, two other places you might want to consult are FireDogLake and Naked Capitalism

It probably won’t surprise my regular readers to hear that recently I’ve been getting rather tired of the usual topics of this blog. String theory has been intellectually dead for a very long time now, and continuing to point this out is becoming more and more tedious. About the multiverse, surely no one takes that seriously anymore, so, the less said, the better. Recently, John Baez decided to move away from abstract mathematical physics to write about topics of more relevance to the real world, see his blog Azimuth. Like him, I think it’s time to move on to subjects of wider interest. In the past I’ve very much restricted the topics I write about on this blog, but now have decided that I should share my views on a wide array of topics not just with my friends and colleagues, but with the wider world. This blog will be one way of doing this, but in the next days and weeks I’ll also be entering the world of Web 2.0 in a big way. There’s now a twitter feed, with much more to come.

As part of this new order, I intend to stop my previous somewhat fascist policy of deleting a large fraction of comments on various ill-defined grounds. I now encourage interaction with my readers, feel free to write about whatever’s on your mind!

Update: A podcast of the Asimov debate is available here.