Is there really anything surprising about the diplomatic cable leaks?

Is the U.S. going after Julian Assange, founder of WikiLEAKS, by leaning on our British and Swedish friends? It is too soon to tell, but as recent history demonstrates, we will eventually know the truth. The New York Times and many other news outlets have been reporting on both the content and the legality of the release of over 250,000 U.S. government diplomatic cables. Meanwhile, Julian Assange sits in a UK jail, awaiting a bail hearing relating to an extradition request by Sweden where two women have separately accused him of sexual assault.

My real question: does anyone really find any of the information that has been released all that surprising? It shows to me a diplomatic core largely doing its job, collecting information, feeding it to their superiors for further analysis, and taking instructions. Is anyone really surprised that Saudi Arabia isn’t getting along with Iran, or that the administration has a low opinion of Vladamir Putin?

Sometimes an airing of dirty laundry has positive consequences. Perhaps other countries will think about standing up to Iran more than they have been. Perhaps Russians will reconsider their views of Vladamir Putin. Perhaps the U.S. will consider not providing a lowly private so much unaudited access to information that assuredly isn’t relevant to his job. Certainly the late night shows needed fresh material!

Airline Profits? Peter asked about airline profits

Here’s some data from Q3 of 2010:

U.S. Airline Profits for 3rd Quarter, 2010 in Millions $

Note that United and Continental have merged, but they provided a profit split in their report.

Grate Expectations! Potato Latkes

Hanukkah is a time when all good people grease their arteries with potato pancakes or latkes. Friends will remember the haze of grease that would descend in my San Francisco apartment every year around this time, for the party I called Greasefest. This would involve somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 lb (11.34 kilos) of skinned potatoes, a bunch of eggs and onions, some matzoh meal, and a vat of oil. Oh and people you care about to foist all of this on.

Here now my recipe in smaller numbers:

5 lb (2.27 kilos) of large peeled potatoes (the larger, the better)
2 eggs
two medium-large onions, quartered
1/2 cup matzoh meal
2 tsp salt (or to taste)
1/4 cup (or more) A descent high smoke temperature oil (grape seed oil is good)

Directions:

Preheat a large pan to the highest temperature you have.
Grate potatoes and onions into a large bowl. If you are making a larger amount, seriously consider using a food processor. My aunt swears that it doesn’t taste as good, but I suspect that’s only if you use the blending blade instead of a grater attachment.
Add eggs, matzoh meal, and salt. Mix.
Let sit for 10 minutes.
Add grape seed oil, and allow to heat. Important: do not add the mixture until the oil is VERY hot.
Dollup small portions (about 2 tbsp) of the mixture into the pan. Consider wearing long sleeves for this part as the oil will splatter. Flatten the mixture as best you can.
Cook for approximately two minutes or til brown on one side. Flip, and cook another two minutes.
Remove latkes to a plate covered with paper towels to remove excess oil.

Serve with apple sauce and/or sour cream, coffee, orange juice, and Lipitor.

Bread for Beginners

When I was about 10, my neighbor came over to babysit my brother, sister, and me. My sister being about one at the time, my mother left one instruction: check on the baby. Instead, we baked bread, which my neighbor loved to do. I don’t remember how the bread tasted, but I do remember my mother yelling at the babysitter,“You didn’t check on the baby!”

“But Mrs. Lear, how did you know?”, the girl responded. “Easy,” said my mother. “There are no white footprints leading to her room, while there is flour all over the rest of the house!”

This, and the fact that bread takes a long time to make, has led to a lifelong aversion to baking bread. That came to an end today, with a little coaxing from a few corners, not the least of which were my wife and daughter. I started with the simplest recipe I could find, after my wife found yeast. It’s Super Easy Bread for Beginners, which is found on about.com. This is a recipe that is nearly impossible to get wrong, and yet I almost did, by misreading the amount of salt (I thought I saw a b in tsp). It is an extremely white bread, but it’s a start. Next stop will not be a challah, as I’m still not up to either separating out eggs, or braiding. But it will be a more whole or cracked wheat bread with some fun seeds. Wish me luck.

For the record: no flour all over the house, although daughter’s shirt needed a good sweeping.

Frequent Traveller Nightmare Part 2: Traveller heal thyself

As I wrote, some people are not in a position to slow their travel. Sales people need to see customers, and indeed there is a different social dynamic that occurs in person versus remote. However.

If one visits a site like flyertalk.com, where one sees the sheer mountain of complaints against the airlines, there must clearly be a better way for many people. There was a person at my company, for instance, who would commute to his customer in New York from the middle of England – on a weekly basis. Apart from what that costs in terms of dollars to our company and greenhouse gas emissions, it costs the individual too. Why didn’t the management hire someone in the New York area to do the job? Why didn’t they insist that he use TelePresence?

Well, watch this space: video is really coming into its own. Cisco has led the way with TelePresence, and is doing its level best to bring people closer together through introduction of new products and services like ūmi. If video can be made cheap enough, it hopefully means an end to at least some routine business travel. Better placement of resources would mean an end to much more.

But beyond that, all of these people who complain about business travel on that web site look at it as if there is nothing they can do about it. Really- to read someone who travels over 100,000 miles a year and took the time to complain leads me to ask the question I asked myself when I found myself miserably traveling: why travel if it is so miserable? How about not traveling? Or at least not flying? Or at least reducing the amount you fly? You’ll make yourself happier, spend less money, and reduce carbon emissions.

Here’s one reason not to stop flying: sending a message to the airlines. They don’t care. Not only don’t they care, but they’ve learned how to make money no matter what passenger demand they have, through the ability to easily adjust their fleet size, furlough employees, and cancel flights. Load factor is the only thing they care about. You can’t affect it.

By the way, people might think I find the airline industry uninteresting. I don’t. I think it’s fascinating, how planes are designed, how they’ve learned to make money in the worst of times, and how they’ve consolidated themselves into an oligopoly. But I’ll watch from a distance as best I can, thank you very much.