A friend is stage managing a series of one-act plays on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights here in New York. If you have time, check them out. If the descriptions are any indicator they should be interesting! Flier: pdf.
You know what people in the future used to wear? Jumpsuits and shorts. By Blade Runner and Fifth Element, we had pretty much done away with that. But in a future in which air conditioning is shunned as unhealthy for ourselves or our planet, can we assume folks will be trading in their three-season wool for three-season linen and cotton suits, and doing away with neckties?
My partner’s white shoe firm is one of several known for forgoing the white shoes and encouraging “dress casual,” and now the UN building in New York is encouraging staff to forgo dark wool so that they can raise the temperature in the building and save power and the emissions that go with it. This makes a lot of sense in a walking city like New York, where the shift from inside hits the sinuses and the wardrobe alike.
Of course, at the same time there is a push back to 3-piece suits in men’s fashion; as seems always to be the case during economic downturns, there is a swing to the conservative. Hints of Victorian formality are pushing though as well, not least thanks to the influence of goth fashion in various forms.
I doubt we’ll see a sudden influx of Bermuda shorts or more extreme above-the-knee fashions for men, but if you don’t already have some linen, cotton, and bamboo to balance out the wool in your closet, it might be time to think about it.
Went on a harbor tour last night—a hidden harbor tour. Fun stuff. I’ve always loved the shipping industry, and almost ended up going in that direction at one point. Containerization is awesome.
The photos are mostly “scenic” rather than of the working harbor. Unfortunately, I am relying on my old Minolta until they replace my new camera, but I still got a few shots. There’s also some short video as part of the set on Flickr. Would be great to go out and do this with a serious telephoto lens at some point.
Although few people know this, you were supposed to be paying taxes for all that stuff you ordered online if you had it delivered to New York State. That whole renewal of a the “tax holiday” for the internet? Doesn’t matter if you live here (or many places, it turns out).
And to make sure that you scofflaws out there who aren’t reporting your online purchases don’t keep doing so, a new law actually makes retailers charge the tax. So when you buy from Amazon, you get sales tax tagged on your purchase. Amazon has sued the state over this tax (saying that it is a regulation of interstate commerce), but for now, I have a more practical issue. There’s nothing that says I can’t go over to Jersey or Connecticut to do my shopping, and no reason I wouldn’t have things delivered there. Indeed, for Amazon, it makes sense for books to go to my office (in Connecticut) rather than my home (in New York). But what happens if I then bring one of those books home?
Or, what about those who do not have a legitimate address in Connecticut? Can they have their orders sent to a rented address (Mail Boxes, etc., etc.) and pick it up once a month. This certainly makes sense to me: the sale occurred “in” Connecticut, and you carried goods you own back to New York. The lines of cars with New York plates at gas stations Fort Lee suggest that many people engage in interstate arbitrage. I’m reminded of the tax hole that exists (existed?) in Portland, Oregon, which is just across the border from Vancouver, Washington. One state is sales-tax-free, the other is income-tax-free, making for an interesting cross-border flow. Yet, there are indications that any such workaround may not be legal.
So, next question. Would it be legal to set up a reshipping service in one of these neighboring states? Could I set up an operation that picks up goods from Newegg’s Edison, NJ warehouse and delivers things around New York City if I wasn’t Newegg. In other words, rather than buying goods delivered from Newegg, I purchase them undelivered (EXW, as it were), and then contract a separate entity to pick them up and deliver them to me in New York. That just feels wrong to me—it seems like it is a fairly direct an obvious attempt to evade a tax by decoupling the purchase and the shipping. And yet, if I hire a taxi to take me from New York City out to an address in New Jersey where I had something delivered, that doesn’t seem that strange, and on a large enough purchase—say, a television or a diamond ring—it would save a great deal in tax. That holds even when it is a question of choosing a sales tax in White Plains (7.88%) or Paramus, NJ (6%, or free for clothing) over that in New York City (8.38%), leaving aside the online issue.
Or, is your tax home determined by where you actually claim residence? That was the case when we bought our car in New Jersey. Because we lived in New York City, we were required to pay NYC tax. But this seems to be specific to automotive purchases.
Anyway, I find the whole thing too confusing. Do I have to worry now that by having books delivered to my office from Amazon, I’m illegally evading tax? Or, should I start having all my friends’ books delivered to my office and charge a “handling fee”? And we haven’t even touched eBay yet.
As an aside, I don’t think that online sales tax is necessarily a bad thing, but requiring online retailers or consumers to keep track of the tax policies of states and municipalities around the world is just stupid. If this is the way we are going, we need a federal “online sales tax”—or better yet, a federal “VAT” for all sales.
I am trying to sift through tons of paper and electronic documents, cleaning an simplifying. Lots of nostalgia stirred up by that, especially when finding things like this guide I wrote for foreign teachers in Odawara in 1994. The writing is terrible, and the remarks are far more snide than I remember being, but it’s still fun to look through and remember.
New York is a great place to live, in large part because of the informal infrastructure: the texture of neighborhoods that deftly interweaves the past, the present, and the future; the “texture,” for want of a better word, that New Yorkers seem to love, and visitors often dismiss as “grime” or urban decay. Call it “GTA IV chic.”
On the other hand, there are times when I return home from another city, and really wish that some of that texture could be ironed out. I’ve already noted that I am vexed by New Yorkers’ love of the subway—we use public transportation more than any other city in the US, and yet, almost every other subway system I’ve ridden on is cleaner and has more frequent trains. Yes, watching the rats frolic provides some level of entertainment, and who doesn’t want to pick up bedbugs from the benches, but I’ll take the modern subways of Singapore or Barcelona any day. And it’s not just a matter of age, as the subway system in metropolitan Tokyo shows, by being old, yet clean and on-time. And hey, how about a high-speed train for the Atlanta-Boston Corridor? Acela doesn’t cut it.
It’s not surprising—though it is embarrassing—that John Gapper uses the trip between JFK and Manhattan as an example of just how bad the US’s infrastructure has become:
If anyone doubts the problems of US infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and try to make a mobile phone call en route.That should settle it, particularly for those who have experienced smooth flights, train rides and road travel, and speedy communications networks in, say, Beijing, Paris or Abu Dhabi recently. The gulf in public and private infrastructure is, to put it mildly, alarming for US competitiveness.
That historical texture—”this is the way we’ve always done it”—is our bane. It doesn’t mean we do everything wrong. I heard a report from someone visiting from Philadelphia who was awed by the military precision of trash collection and snow removal. The increase in public safety over the last decade has been just short of miraculous. Nonetheless, if New York wants to remain a Global City, it can’t rest on its laurels… or on its history. Historical inertia only gets you so far.
