The Newsweek Magazine was bought by Sidney Harman, the 92-year-old founder (in 1952) of a stereo equipment factory. Harman is planning to turn around the losing company and in the future, to expand it into the digital sphere. This NYC Jew has answered my question last week if at my age should I expand my business.
Thursday, August 05, 2010
Starting at 92
The Newsweek Magazine was bought by Sidney Harman, the 92-year-old founder (in 1952) of a stereo equipment factory. Harman is planning to turn around the losing company and in the future, to expand it into the digital sphere. This NYC Jew has answered my question last week if at my age should I expand my business.
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22 comments:
Maybe so but I don't think many will be reading the print edition of Newsweek regularly, regardless of the form in which it is presented. The internet has well and truly killed off the news magazines. High brow and middle brow publications such as Foreign Affairs and the Economist will survive but the deck is stacked against the weekly news magazines.
I Agree with Ivan.
Newsweek is worth all of the $ 1 he paid for it. The ipad will completely eliminate all print magazines.
Russ
Harman is a smart man and knows there is no real hope of a turnaround. He is also a committed Democrat and has tons of money that he knows cannot accompany him to the grave. Our press is returning to its roots, which were as organs of political parties. The impartial press never really existed but for a while they did manage to disguise it pretty well from the rubes. Now the mask has worn so thin that it has outlived its usefulness - even liberals are beginning to realize that it is counterproductive to keep insisting that liberal publications are neutral - no one believes them anymore anyway and it affects their overall credibility.
K
BTW, I happened to be on another website, one that is not particularly geared to any political persuasion (as far as I know) - the Daily Beast and saw the announcement regarding Newsweek (the story was that the numbers were really grim and that if anything Harman overpaid by paying $1 (given the liabilities he assumed as well) for something that was losing $20+ million per year and had no plan for reversing its decline. What was most revealing were the comments - 99% of them were basically to the effect that Newsweek was now a partisan liberal rag that had no more credibility so it was no surprise that it no longer appealed to the average person and was losing money. The editors of publications such as Newsweek or the NY Times are either blissfully unaware that this is how they are now regarded by vast segments of the public or they are aware but in denial or they know but they don't care and cynically keep feeding us the same stuff because they still think it is effective in promoting their agenda (if not in making $), but it's clear to me that the jig is up and the public (except for a small loyal liberal minority which is insufficient to support a mass market publication with hundreds on the payroll) is literally no longer buying their stuff and that any avowals of neutrality that they make are see as laughably false.
K
K
What is remarkable is that at age 92 (ninety two) he is entering a completely new business field. Ad meah ve-esrim!
Biz hinderd un twantzig yor!
But the sad truth is that even a multi-millionaire like Harman cannot buy immortality. At his age, a debilitating stroke or heart attack could happen at any moment, and even at best, how many more vigorous years can he expect? 8, 10 tops? There are a handful of people who indeed live to Moses's age, but when one sees them they are inevitably blind, deaf, wheelchair bound, etc. The number of people who are over 100 but who are still living active lives you can count on your fingers. There has to be an end to everything or the world would be filled with the generations. If we all lived to 120, we'd want to live to 150, but our time here is limited - that is the plan of the universe.
K
Laws, and you know it, are for ignoring them. The universe has no laws we have to obey. The man is starting a new business at 92 and I hope he will marry at 95 and invite us to the bris at 96. :-)
We sometimes ignore man made laws and get away with it if no one is watching. But universal laws (such as gravity and mortality) have their own existence whether we deny them or not, because He (whoever He is) is always watching and never forgets to enforce the laws of motion or thermodynamics or whatever. The Malach ha Moves is coming sooner or later for Harman and for you and for me and for all of us. Just like the song says -
Vita nostra brevis est
Brevi finietur.
Venit mors velociter
Rapit nos atrociter
Nemini parcetur.
K
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a less poetic representation of the same sentiment.
K, ask your daughter to have it repealed.
Anon.
Mortality is not a physical law like gravity, although I have confidence that there will come the time when it will be better known and manipulated. Regading "time to die" - we are biological machines and it is thinkable that it could be improved. The fact that already there are people who at 92 are still healthy, alert and starting new businesses shows that it can be done, that it is being done, that one of us may also try it.
There are also men who are billionaires (NOT including Harman BTW, at least not since his sale of his electronics company feel thru just as the market was tanking) and men who have slept with thousands of women, etc. The nature of the bell curve is such that most of us cannot expect to achieve the same results as these statistical outliers.
But you are welcome to try. May you live to 120 (at least)!
As far as my daughter repealing the laws of thermodynamics, I don't expect that to happen, but I recently read of one (respectable) scientist who insists that gravity is not a fundamental force at all, in the sense that say electromagnetism is, but is rather just a consequence that flows from the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. Which is not to say that gravity does not exist, just that it emerges as a consequence of something more fundamental (just as say elasticity is a real force but one that emerges as a consequence of atomic mechanics). His theory has not yet been widely accepted but he is a serious thinker, so it is not out of the question that the laws of thermodynamics could still be overturned in the same way that Einstein overturned the work of Newton (or rather showed that Newton's laws were merely a subset of more general laws, applied to certain conditions).
K
Yeah well the scientists have to earn their keep. Hence they come up will all kinds of outlandish theories. It is true that experiments are much more difficult to perform today when compared with the days of Rutherford, given the energies and fineness of the observations involved, but some of the scientists have turned this to their advantage to advance theories with little fear of contradictory experiments. They occupy the cultural space once inhabited by priests and oracles giving their emanations the undeserved aura of holy writ.
K, hence the absence (so far) of the Higgs Boson, the particle thought in Standard Theory to impart mass (ie gravity).
ASk your daughter whether she is a believer or not, in the Higgs.
Not everyone is.
Anon.
"The number of people who are over 100 but who are still living active lives you can count on your fingers."
That's not true, K. It may be true of famous active centenarians (e.g., Benjamin Graham's old teaching assistant from the Great Depression Irving Kahn, who is still picking stocks in New York), but people who live that long are probably more likely to have the sort of healthy constitutions that will enable them to live active lives for almost their entire lives. A gerontologist who recently passed away discovered a few decades ago that a lot of the supposed debilities of aging were not the result of aging per se and were often the result of neglect or disease.
My daughter is still at the "I drank the Koolaid" stage of belief in the Standard Model. Her response was "theoretically it has to exist but that doesn't mean that we're going to find it."
K
A subtle reply, for a 15 year-old, and apt for a lawyer's child; clearly she is aware that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I for one one could never accept that the Higgs could simply "convey" mass, ie I was not satisfied at the explanatory aspect of it, and although I blindly trusted the maths to make sense (to someone), I suspect it's just too glib.
I think it's a bust, and if the Giant Hadron Collider discovers something it will be something else (like Bin Laden) rather than the Higgs.
But who am I.
Anon.
My (meager) understanding is that the Higgs conveys mass the way that say a coating of heavy molasses would convey mass to a styrofoam ball. Of course not the exact same way, but by analogy.
It's very tricky to say that just because the math comes out right that you are actually describing a physical phenomena. Sometimes the math comes out right even though you are completely off base. If I recall, before Copernicus, they had worked out planetary motion based on a geocentric model fairly well using epicycles. It turned out that their model was completely wrong and yet it still had the ability to predict the position of the planets correctly. You can be right for the wrong reasons.
K
Of course this is the problem with string theory in general - it seems to have great internal consistency and explanatory power, but so far there is not the slightest physical evidence that any of it is real. And you can always say that the dimensions greater than 3 plus time are by definition invisible to us, the way that people living in a 2 dimensional world would be incapable of observing "up" or "down", indeed incapable of even visualizing what "up" or "down" meant at all. I'm sure the Medieval theories about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin also had internal consistency and the excuse that no experimental evidence could ever be forthcoming given the nature of the question.
K
This is well said.
Anon.
One of the reasons I am not so keen to spend a lot of my time on ultimate physics is that it has ceased to make sense, or to have meaning; for example, if had they said that reality has 18 dimensions instead of 11 I would have been equally non-plussed, and it would not have altered the way I conceptualize space or time. I think it is now more of a mathematical exercise, and we are in dire need of someone who can somehow make this stuff matter to those of us who like to think of themselves as scientifically literate.
As a non-sequitur I would just add that most highly educated people believe that the entire universe started as an enormous explosion in a "singularity", a single dimensionless point. I am one of those who supposes this to be true, albeit on an ex-cathedra basis. But what it really illustrates is that if you can get highly intelligent people to believe this, you can, with the right investment, get any one to believe anything.
Anon.
Somehow the universe exploding from a singularity is more intuitively acceptable than an 11 dimensional universe made up of curled up strings.
K
Perhaps because 11 seems so arbitrary, whereas it seems more reasonable that the universe should start from just one locality.
It would be very counter-intuitive, eg, if they were to announce the universe had started from "11 points."
Anon.
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