Paris Werewolves

Harry's New York Bar in Paris' 2nd Arrondissement has been serving cocktails to ex-pats and other fellow-travelers since 1911. Starting in 1924, way before Americans abroad were able to vote in US presidential elections, Harry's has conducted a straw vote among citizens who stop in for a drink. According to lore , the "winner" of the Straw Vote has lost the "real" election only three times in 96 years.  Being traditionalists living abroad in a very traditional country, we decided to take the métro over to Place de l'Opéra and cast our straw ballots over Manhattans and Daiquiris (the normal, decent kind, no blender abominations here). The voting operation was very professional, with tight ballot security measures and and strict identification requirements--only American citizens who produce their US passport for the serveur are provided a paper ballot and a pen.   Chain-secured, padlocked ballot box, passport mandatory. Oski, the official polling pl...

Excel charts make for an ugly blog. So why not a gratuitous photo of Sugar in front of a mid-1960s Facel-Vega III? IEM VS: IEM vote share contracts; WAF VS: Werewolves Adjustment Factor applied to IEM VS At the end of September 2024, IEM voter share contracts averaged $0.56 for the Democratic presidential candidate (Harris), and $0.47 for the Republican presidential candidate. By applying the Werewolves Adjustment Factor (WAF) to account for traders' historic over- and under-valuations of Democratic and Republic vote shares, at the end of September 2024, a good guess might be 53% of the votes for Harris and 48% for Trump (which adds up to more than 100% of the vote share--but hey, the smart money had spoken, if not amongst themselves). Maxim Lott and John Stossel's Election Betting Odds  site tracks presidential bets made on commercial gambling sites. On September 30, their method gave Harris a 52% chance of winning. In the case of both Lott-Stossel and WAF VS, there's ab...

Note: red sparkline bars indicate aggregate losses on IEM vote share contracts by month. Blue sparkline bars indicate aggregate gains.  Since my last post  about the discreet charms of gambling on election outcomes, I was kindly directed by IEM to its historical vote share contract prices for the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The table above shows that with these additional data, traders had still tended to overvalue Democratic candidates from August through October, while undervaluing Republican candidates. The extreme overvaluations of Hilary Clinton in 2016 still exert an influence, but it is much less pronounced. Excluding 2016 prices, Democratic candidates would still be overvalued in each month, but never by as much as 2%. Republican candidates would not be undervalued at all, except in August by about 3%.  Hence from a gambling perspective, the IEM market appears reasonably accurate to the extent that there are not many information gaps left to exploit. Let...

It was just a matter of time before the vortex of politics sucked me in. Since arriving in France, we've been through: An intense period of social security "reform" that resulted in weeks of protests and a long, stinky garbage strike The resignation of a sitting prime minister A European Union election that led to ... The dissolution of the French parliament followed by ... A snap parliamentary election that produced no governing majority, culminating in ... The appointment of a new prime minister from the coalition that won the fewest seats in the snap election There was also a little sideshow vote on whether electric scooter services like Lime would be allowed to operate any longer on the streets (and by extension, the sidewalks) of Paris. A whopping 13% of voters turned out, 90% of whom voted to get rid of them. And it happened: one day, all the rental  trotinettes were gone. But what recently focused my mind on politics was the receipt of my overseas absentee ballot....

Porto as an idea. Porto in reality. How I felt nearly all of the time in Porto: besieged by werewolves. More and more places are realizing that they're ill-equipped to deal with the number of people who want to visit them. Venice, Barçelona and Amsterdam are probably the best-known examples of locals turning on the droves of tourists who descend each vacation season--seasons that are getting longer and longer to the point where the idea of an "off-season" starts to seem like a quaint relic of a more innocent age. Our first night in Lisbon, we made an ill-fated choice to walk down Rua Augusta , which turned out to be one of the cookie-cutter retail streets you see anywhere in European cities now, marked by chocolate shops and "luxury" brand outlets. But Rua Augusta also had a lively trade in street merchants, selling everything from clothing to handbags and liquor from blankets spread out on the ground. Between the vendors, the tourists, buskers and break-danci...

Some vendeurs à la sauvette , Quai Jacques Chirac, 7th Arr. I've lived in tourist-dense places pretty much my entire adult life. If you don't work in the hospitality industry, there is no direct upside to having masses of people descend on your city. I can accept that tourism might bring a place some net-positive indirect effects--local tax revenues, construction jobs when attractions and hotels are being built--but I guarantee it's more complicated than the tourism industry and economists generally would have you believe. Just look as San Francisco for an example of how revenues from tourism don't boost investments in infrastructure or local services. But if you are lucky enough to live anywhere that is interesting for its local culture, its natural beauty, or its architectural heritage, tourists are like the hangover you must inevitably endure from enjoying booze. Except, in principle, you can quit drinking booze when the hangovers become too miserable.  Paris' 7t...

  Place Salvador Allende, 7th Arr. The Mairie de Paris (city hall) placed wreaths outside the Chilean embassy to commemorate 50th anniversary of the assassination of President Salvador Allende during the U.S.-backed coup of September 11 , 1973. There are memorials and commemorations all over France for people who died in war or through acts of political violence--fitting, for a place whose history was one of pretty much continuous warfare until the end of the Algerian war in 1962. In Paris and in some smaller places, just about every parish and mairie has a large, prominent war memorial, many that list the names of local residents or parishioners who died at war. A partial list of the war deceased of the parish of Sainte-Clotilde, 7th, Arr., which also honors parishioners killed in WWII.  This personalization of the dead seems to have started in WWI, and occurs less consistently for casualties of WWII and later wars such as Indochina or Algeria. And except for fallen militar...

  Dis is gonna hoyt! Funny how six years in New York gave me very little appreciation of its architecture--besides that it occurred on a grand scale and that there was a lot of it. The day-to-day grind of living and working in the city partly explains this. When it's freezing rain or 90 degrees with 90 percent humidity, and you're trying not to get hit by a cab or trampled by crowds of shoppers, it's hard to notice the small gems that adorn the buildings. That and much of the city is hidden by scaffolding most of the time; when it goes up, it never seems to come down. You might notice some grandeur in off-moments, like the tops of the skyscrapers that robber-barons adorned for each others' envy, or the brick and masonry brownstones of lower Manhattan. But we lived in a "charming" 19th century walkup on Leroy Street, up four flights of crooked stairs, with paper thin walls, and slanting floors. Once a rainstorm knocked out the phone service to the building. Aft...