A Thread for Random Musings

[BlueCloud2k2]

There are times I wish I wasn't actively trying not to be an a-hole. Some people just have to make it so dang difficult to not be myself.

[death tribble]

Out tomorrow at the Salue convention. I put the board on notice not to be silly in my absence.

[BlueCloud2k2]

How is it I can eat hotsauce on most everything, but one red-pepper flake gets in my mouth on my General Tso's chicken and it is so hot it makes me sick to my stomache?

[Cancer]

Total lunar eclipse tonight, good for most of the Americas and the Pacific Basin ... not much for Europe or Asia. Weather permitting at your location, of course.

[death tribble]

Easter at the weekend and I have two weeks holiday really, spending time with the mother. So my times on here will vary quite a bit.

[Old Man]

For once, the weather cooperated and I was able to see an astronomical event.  The lunar eclipse, in conjunction with Mars in opposition, really highlighted the sheer scale of the solar system.  Frankly it was a little eerie--I almost don't blame the people in the news who seem to think it could portend the end of the world. 

 

Almost.

[tkdguy]

Too overcast where I was to view the eclipse.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Dear Customer:

 

Do you have chronic understaffing at your work place? Are you short of help and unable to get the most basic things done while on the clock? Have you never noticed these things elsewhere. If so, I certainly appreciate where you're coming from. (Mars.)

 

If you have noticed these things, I have some questions for you:

 

i) If there are lineups at every checkstand a mile deep, why do you think that standing in front of the "closed" sign at Customer Service is going to improve things? Do you think that there's someone hiding behind there who will jump out and congratulate you for figuring out the secret way around the lineups? (Although you might just want any one of a million things that our inexperienced cashiers can't do, and I am trying to be understanding here. If I am not as patient as I might be, just imagine that I have been called away from putting the milk and meat orders away in the coolers to do this for you. Because I have.)

 

ii) I presume that you will have noticed that there are no bakeries/flower shops open at this time of the night. Your local supermarket has flowers and cakes! So far, so good. But, and this might be a bit of a logical leap here, if your local flower shop is closed because it can't provide proper service at this hour, do you think it likely that your supermarket will have someone available who can "wrap this up very nicely, like you would present to a performer after she comes off stage?" It's not that I don't appreciate your needs, and am not willing to at least try. It's that I have three new merchandising ends to build tonight, and the only question is how late I have to stay to get it done.

 

iii) Presuming that you haven't thought the above through, have you considered revisiting your assumptions before you wade through the lineups to get to a cashier to demand your special wrap job? Because it would not be completely unreasonable to have this hypothetical special-flower-wrapping person trained as a cashier, so that they could be on the tills, as opposed to being free to do an ultra deluxe flower wrap for you. 

iv) I appreciate your coming to tell me that your cashier is slow and incompetent. Have you considered the possibility that we would not have hired a 55 year old with who can barely speak English with crazy-person-ticks if we could have found someone better? There are many excellent sources of information about public policy issues that might help you understand why we couldn't find someone better, and those same sources will help you direct your energies and attention in productive ways, such as writing your MP. I suggest that hectoring the night manager is not one of those productive ways.

 

v) Speaking of fighting your way through the lineups to bring your very important concern to someone's attention, but if that said person has to be paged out of the depths of the store, and emerges sweaty and holding a box cutter, perhaps there exists some benefit-maximisation-algorithm that you can run that would suggest that this is not the best way of proceeding with complaints about out of stocks. I mean, certainly if the item is not on the shelf, go for it. If the item you found is a 12 pack of toilet paper, and is not completely to your satisfaction because there's a little tear on the bottom of the packaging? Now, we are wandering into the territory of the somewhat unreasonable.

 

vi) I understand that the bakery department loses almost 20 cents an item when gourmet donuts are confused with regular donuts, and I would be the first to concede that putting self-serve boxes out for customers to use is going to result in those mistakes as well as general wastage. Still, consider the possibility that customers will respond to this not by shrugging their shoulders and deciding that they really didn't want to box up some donuts (which, again, I'm not seeing as a business optimisation strategy, but never mind) but, instead, calling for customer service.  This will result in their getting boxes (probably more expensive ones) and a lot of time being wasted. Are we really going to save that much money?

 

vii) It would certainly be deplorable if people were to use rainchecks stashed at the tills for illegitimate purposes. I can certainly see how storing them at customer service might slightly reduce such abuse and lead to savings at the margin.  But it is worth considering the possibility that either the night manager will have to waste a lot of time handing them out, or that people will go without, and be disgruntled, instead, and never shop at the store again. Have we really thought the business case through satisfactorily?

 

viii) Dear The Street: I understand that you set profit expectations in service to the shareholder. I understand that this is how capitalism works, etc, etc. But, and here you're going to have to follow along with me on a huge logical leap, what if there is a correlation between hours cuts and low sanitation score results? Oh, I know, it's far more likely that it's just laziness that leads to dirt and cross-contamination, and that you can just keep on cutting labour targets forever, knowing that if you tell the frontline staff that cleanliness is a priority, that it will be done. (Unless they're lazy.) But what if there is a correlation? I know, I know, I'm repeating myself. It's to get your attention, because this crazy hypothetical actually has some consequences that might be important to you.

 

You see, if this crazy theory is true, cutting hours to meet financial targets might lead to your food being poisonous. Just a thought.

 

ix) Somewhere, someone in the ranks of middle management is typing an email right now that says that "Your request for additional decorating/meat-wrapping/food-service/relief-management" help could not be filled.

 

We understand. Sometimes, there is no-one to do the work, either at the store or in the chain, and the consequences will be felt through the chain. Classically, one solution to this problem, to talk like an economist, is "raising the bid for the item to its clearing price." That is, if you offer to buy something, and no-one offers to sell it, you increase your offering bid. Now, imagine that "labour" is a "thing," and that its "price" is "wages." What we are seeing here is that the store is offering to "buy" "labour" with an "offer." That is, with a "wage." And no-one is offering a supply of "labour" at that "wage."

 

What I am saying here is that classical economics offers a solution to this problem.  

[BlueCloud2k2]

It has just now occurred to me that the difference between Disney and Pixar films is that (generally speaking) the Disney Characters sing songs. Pixar characters don't sing. My mind is blown that I just now realized this after how many years?

[SKJAM!]

Neighbor got drunk and belligerent and didn't understand why I wouldn't let him into my apartment.  Not helping my nerves one little bit.

[Old Man]

So this Korean ferry disaster is not going to have any kind of happy ending. God, what an awful way to die.

[Old Man]

Anyone else here playing Hearthstone?

[tkdguy]

I explained to a student how adding pickles to nachos makes you healthier.

 

Nobody will eat it, and avoiding junk food makes you healthier. 

[BlueCloud2k2]

Does it make me a bad person that I want to scream at my boss and quit because she can't manage her business in a way that doesn't make my life a living hell or does it make me a good person for putting up with her shit and biding my time?

 

Hrm....

[Old Man]

I don't know how long I can keep this up.

[tkdguy]

Years ago, I used to go to my backyard with my dogs. I'd sit on the bench while they played. My dogs are gone now, and sitting there just doesn't feel the same.

 

I got some use of the backyard again when the Zeppelin would fly across the bay. I could watch it fly over the water and disappear behind the hills. The airship company went out of business, so those days are over.

 

On a clear night, I can spot satellites orbiting the earth. And if I'm lucky, I'd spot a meteor or just go star gazing. But raccoons often come in looking for food at night, so I don't do that too much either.

 

My backyard: I don't use it much anymore.

[Lawnmower Boy]

In February of 1944, Fortune published a story about the demographic future of the human race. In a nutshell, due to cultural change, improvements in modern health and various other hand-wavy things, population growth had come to an end.

 

Oh, sure, India was likely to grow from 350 to 550 million people by 1970, and China from perhaps 450 to who knew, depending on politics; but that was because they still had "old regime" demographics. As progress spread, so would slowing population growth, one would think. (Or maybe famine and floods would do the trick.)

 

Elsewhere, America's population would stall out at 140 million, while Europe's populations were either already declining (France) or would eventually (Germany and Italy), with Britain in the middle. Its population decline would set in in the next decade. 

 

The upshot, as American economists had been warning since the late 1930s, was "secular stagnation:" the end to economic growth, and a slow immiseration of the population. The only reason that it would not end in Malthusian disaster was that population had stopped growing, too.

 

In more concrete terms, in 1944, most people predicted a depression for the immediate postwar period. Some of the people who appointed themselves as spokesmen for the common man in America (syndicated columnists have always had their heads stuck up their rears, it turns out) diagnosed hope for the future --in the short term. People were eager to buy houses, cars, radios, clothes, fur coats. And they would.

 

Others saw this as naivete. Unemployed people did not buy luxuries, and a weak manufacturing sector meant low employment. Manufacturing could hardly flourish when everyone basically had everything they needed. Once everyone had their new car, only "billboard engineering" could persuade anyone to replace it before the mid-1950s, and there would be mass layoffs in the automotive industry soon. And then.... 

 

In Britain, the story is even sadder. The interest rate had fallen well below the rise in the cost of living, implying that saving money was a bad idea. Meanwhile, it seemed that the only way of checking rises in the cost of living was through massive wage repression. The leading (and liberal, in the old sense) business daily, The Economist, was all but waging war on coal miners, the key sector whose output determined the production of all of British industry. Coal miners militantly demanded wage raises, even as coal production was flat or declining. Yet the flip side of those demands was that young people had been refusing to go into coal mining for over a decade. One of the more important reasons for poor returns in coal was that the labour force was aging and becoming ever more less productive. How could the miners be replaced if no-one wanted to be a miner? In the war crisis, the British Government had turned to diverting some conscripts into the mines; compelling them, in other words, to become coal miners. And although that was a "war emergency," British society of the era was hugely patrimonial. It tended to assume that young men (never mind young girls!) would be directed into work by their fathers, or by society in loco parentis, and stay there, reasoning that years of experience put into one field could not be thrown aside by changing careers in your mid-20s, when you were supposed to be well on your way ot establishing a family and a home for them. Conscript miners, at the end of their terms, were under huge pressure to stay in the coal mining villages and make the best of it, whether or not they wanted to be coal miners.

 

Slavery, in short. It wasn't a particularly harsh slavery, and it wasn't going to be extended in peace. 

 

You would think. But how else was "wage repression" going to be achieved? And if it wasn't, what were the economic prospects of the "rentier class," who would see their fortunes slowly eaten away by price inflation?

 

So that's the picture in 1944. We now know that it was wrong. We know that an era of unprecedented prosperity, and First World population growth, was on its way. Even in Britain, which would suffer a particularly long and harsh period of postwar austerity. But, if we turn to the papers in 1947, we find not the slightest acknowledgement that this was going on . Britain was importing coal from America. IN fact, all of Europe was! Right across the continent, miners were aging and becoming less productive, and there was a deficit of new entrants into the mining workforce. All the while, The Economist shook its head over the  miner's crazed demands for more money to do the work. Nothing could be done. Nothing at all. And without coal, Britain could not make things, and if it could not make things, it could not export them and earn foreign exchange to pay for imports with which to make things!

 

The entire global economy was grinding to a halt. You might as well buy ammunition, diesel and survival rations with your pound notes right now.

 

In America, the papers (well, The Economist, again), lugubriously shook their head over poor housing start numbers as June turned into July. Late 1945, 1946, and early 1947 had, indeed, shown the predicted, depression-level numbers for economic decline. The silly and wooly-headed, The Economist said, thought that was all transitional pain from the changeover from war to peace production. But look at the housing start numbers! So depressing.

 

Of course, there's such a thing as winter... By August, the numbers had been updated to show the largest homebuilding boom in American history that summer. The Economist shook its head. It can't last, the leading editorial said in the first week of August, confidently predicting a return to recession in the next few weeks.

 

The moral? There has never been a more complete turnaround in economic trends and activities than occurred in 1944--47. Ever. Objectively, July of 1947 saw the American economy clear the gantry of "conversion" and start its climb to the Moon. And business writers, right in the middle of it, could not even see it happening. The reason, I think, is pretty clear from The Economist's war on the coal miners. The enemy, the ultimate enemy, was wage growth. The employer would rather live in a postapocalyptic hellhole, fighting for the last drop of "go juice" then pay another cent to the working classes, the paper assumed.

 

Or, rather, told people to think. Because only wage repression could keep investment income growing faster than inflation, and so keep the kind of people who read The Economist happy. 

[Vondy]

head-scratcher: why do community colleges treat everyone like they are 18 years old?

 

I have a different rant about this from a decade ago, but...

 

"You need to talk to a counselor."

"Why?"

"You might not graduate if you don't talk to a..."

"Stop. I am 41 years old, married, a father, employed, and have a BA plus 75."

"I still think you should talk to a counselor. You'll want..."

"Do tell, what is it I want?"

"Sir?"

"I'm here to take five classes specified by my employer for work purposes."

"You don't want to graduate?"

"Madame, with respect, I told you I've already graduated from a real university."

"Well, the guidance department can help you decide what classes..."

"Does the guidance department sign my paycheck?"

"Sir?"

"I told you I'm taking the classes my employer specified."

"Well, if you don't think you need it you don't have to. But I'd really recommend..."

"Just register me for the class, would you?"

[Old Man]

Had a Dreamliner outside my office window this morning.  Surprisingly small, but pretty, airplane.

 

F-22s at full burner are really loud.

[L. Marcus]

Vlad Tepes' castle Castelul Bran is for sale. I want.

[L. Marcus]

... What would the speed of sound be in a neutron star?

[lemming]

Conflicting plans:

A ) I might have a good opportunity but it will take about a year to really develop.

B )We've kinda put in place moving from the current area in the next year.

 

Time for plan C.  (More like plan N...)

[L. Marcus]

Today, the 17th of May, is Norway's National Day. It commemorates the day in 1814, when the modern Norwegian constitution was adopted at Eidsvoll -- they celebrate 200 years as a sovereign state.

 

Huzzas are in order!

[Enforcer84]

Today, the 17th of May, is Norway's National Day. It commemorates the day in 1814, when the modern Norwegian constitution was adopted at Eidsvoll -- they celebrate 200 years as a sovereign state.

 

Huzzas are in order!

In 1814 we took a little trip. 

Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip

[BlueCloud2k2]

Kicks enforcer in the posterior for not posting the whole song.
 
*Ahem*

Battle of New Orleans
Music and lyrics by Jimmy Driftwood



Well, in eighteen and fourteen we took a little trip
along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans,
And we caught the bloody British near the town of New Orleans.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, I see'd Mars Jackson walkin down the street
talkin' to a pirate by the name of Jean Lafitte (pronounced "Zhahn La-feet")
He gave Jean a drink that he brung from Tennessee
and the pirate said he'd help us drive the British in the sea.

The French said Andrew, you'd better run,
for Packingham's a comin' with a bullet in his gun.
Old Hickory said he didn't give a dang,
he's gonna whip the britches off of Colonel Packingham.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, we looked down the river and we see'd the British come,
and there must have been a hundred of 'em beatin' on the drum.
They stepped so high and they made their bugles ring
while we stood by our cotton bales and didn't say a thing.

Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise
if we didn't fire a musket til we looked 'em in the eyes.
We held our fire til we see'd their faces well,
then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave a yell.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, we fired our cannon til the barrel melted down,
so we grabbed an alligator and we fought another round.
We filled his head with cannon balls and powdered his behind,
and when they tetched the powder off, the gator lost his mind.

We'll march back home but we'll never be content
till we make Old Hickory the people's President.
And every time we think about the bacon and the beans,
we'll think about the fun we had way down in New Orleans.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin,
But there wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Well, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles
And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn't go.
They ran so fast the hounds couldn't catch 'em
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
But there wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.