inkbluesky

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jessica biel studio portrait 2000×3000

Diesels Are the New Heroin

Aaron’s is the basic business model for all e-bootleggers. Each week, he visits the Mah Boon Krong mall, known as MBK — one of Bangkok’s most popular shopping centers, complete with multiplex and bowling alley. In his favorite store on the sixth floor, the jeans, shirts and accessories are stacked 8 feet high. Styles are current, stitches are tight and the counterfeit labels will pass casual inspection.

After some tough negotiating, one pair of “Diesels” costs 550 baht, or about $14.30; it will sell for between $45 and $100, plus shipping. Without breaking a sweat, Aaron can run 20 auctions per week and clear upward of $1,000. In 2005, one of his more ambitious friends pulled in an estimated $100,000 — tax-free, risk-free.

Risk-free, because no one is doing much about it. In the high-profile crackdowns across Asia, it’s the manufacturers and brick-and-mortar shops that are targeted. Even then, it’s the pirated movies and software that usually get them in trouble.

Crazy way to make a living and while I didn’t look up the cost of living in Thailand, I imagine 50,000 dollars a year goes a long way. Still people like Aaron are one of the reasons I don’t buy on eBay.

I’ve always like paintings and photographs that use perspective to create the illusion of depth or distance, this site takes that idea a step further - Perspective art at a subway. The photos take a while to load but worth the wait if you like that kind of thing.

It used to be that plain ordinary folks like me could read Paul Krugman on-line, but NYT decided to put him behind a pay wall. It turns out that a blogger here at WordPress has access to his columns, I found this one today, Class War Politics

So what’s our bitter partisan divide really about? In two words: class warfare. That’s the lesson of an important new book, “Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches,” by Nolan McCarty of Princeton University, Keith Poole of the University of California, San Diego, and Howard Rosenthal of New York University.

“Polarized America” is a technical book written for political scientists. But it’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what’s happening to America.

What the book shows, using a sophisticated analysis of Congressional votes and other data, is that for the past century, political polarization and economic inequality have moved hand in hand. Politics during the Gilded Age, an era of huge income gaps, was a nasty business — as nasty as it is today. The era of bipartisanship, which lasted for roughly a generation after World War II, corresponded to the high tide of America’s middle class. That high tide began receding in the late 1970’s, as middle-class incomes grew slowly at best while incomes at the top soared; and as income gaps widened, a deep partisan divide re-emerged.

Both the decline of partisanship after World War II and its return in recent decades mainly reflected the changing position of the Republican Party on economic issues.

The rest of the column is at the link and well worth a read….and this They Knew…

Catherine Bell’s ankle tattoo