Mutton-headed princesses.

I've worked on a few books for young readers over the years, most of which are targeted toward girls. Publishers will tell you that they barely bother with books for boys above grammar school age because boys don't read for fun. So they neglect boys' books and the spiral continues. 

I mention this because I don't want someone to think I'm just picking on fictional princesses today. No doubt there'd be plenty of fictional princes to pick on too, if boys were reading, and if boys were encouraged to believe in themselves beyond all reason the way girls are. 

That's the rub, right there. In almost every girls' book these days, there comes a time when the girl hero (we don't call them heroines anymore because that's a diminutive), who has been shoved aside by her oppressors, has a chance to sound off and show everyone how wrong they are. She doesn't have to know anything, as long as she believes in herself. Of course, the young lady's brilliance and goodness and courage dazzles everyone, and the bad guys are eschewed while the princess is tiara-cized. 

you go girl

We call this the Greta move, after Greta Thunberg, who may not be aware that the only reason she was able to tell off the UN when she was a child was because she was doing the bidding of the very adults she was telling off. But that's a longer, larger, more lousy story. 

What really bothers me, though, is that as bright as the young princess is, she can't be any smarter than the writer, and that's a problem. I remember one book where the princess discovers how poor the peasantry in town is, and resolves to fix this by looting the royal treasury and throwing gold out to everyone higgledy piggledy. 

No one in the book is smart enough to explain the concept of devaluation, how if you give every peasant five pounds of gold, two gold coins will no longer be enough to buy a fine horse. Sure, the princessdom will look nicer, with everyone making gold utensils and things, but the value of gold will plummet. Whatever's left in the treasury will lose value as well. Of course, brigands from elsewhere will be happy to come rob from the easy-pickin' peasants and take the loot back home where gold still has value. 

These things are simple economics, not hard to understand, but they are not as obvious as knowing that if you let go of an object it will drop. Many things in life are like that. If you're in a sealed room and you turn off the light, why does it get dark? The room is sealed; where did the light go? Guess what: It won't stay bright just because you think it should and really want it to. Neither will the peasants be prosperous because you give away the store.

Sadly, the princesses in these books are also a model for political figures who cannot understand why people stay poor when you print so much money for them. 

It makes me sad, it truly does, that the basics of economics are not taught in schools, or at least not taught well enough to act as a counter to this kind of magical thinking. Prosperity is difficult. Poverty is easy. How people get through high school without understanding even that is beyond me.

The public good?

One of the things I was once called on to do was review a report on companies and their charitable giving. A lot of what they consider charity is not what we would classically consider charity -- going to the Latin root of the word caritas, giving to the needy from Christian love. A lot of it is DEI-based (legal discrimination, in other words), encouraging grievances and tribalism; some goes for education, doing the same; and a lot goes for climate change and other green causes that will never make a difference in anything and never improve lives of anyone except for people in those industries. 

But that's only part of the problem, as I see it. 

When America made stuff: Too busy inventing to hector people 

The main practical problem is that while these companies are making themselves feel better and handing out awards to one another for their good deeds, they're making their products and/or services more expensive. You know the money isn't coming off what the officers get paid. So the company that's pledging 15% to fight climate change or 3% to promote equity or 12% to fund abortions for transwomen or 7% to fight normalcy is just making their stuff pricier. It would be like you insisting your boss pay you 20% more, which you promise you will send to Leap for the Cure! to save victims of Jumping Frenchmen of Maine disorder. Your boss might do that... or might sack you and hire someone who doesn't insist on the extra 20%. 

But isn't it a tax write-off? One may ask, and I thank you, One, for that thought. The answer is: Yes and no. U.S. companies may deduct up to 10% of pre-tax income in a given year, so yes. But the real value is in the publicity. The Harvard Business Review noted a couple of decades ago that "Tobacco giant Philip Morris, for example, spent $75 million on its charitable contributions in 1999 and then launched a $100 million advertising campaign to publicize them." 

Of course, these bighearted types will try to use their good intentions as cover when the chips are down -- like the walking tumor Harvey Weinstein trying to hide behind his support of gun control when the walls were closing in, or the so-called effective altruism touted by the now-disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried. 

One way or another, I believe that companies are using money that could be used as profits for investors (stimulating economic growth) or to lower prices (ditto), and giving that dough away to largely useless causes, then congratulating themselves and expecting parades in their honor. 

Even if they just paid the taxes and skipped the write-off, they would in theory make the tax burden on you and me less heavy. But instead, the cost of their beneficence is passed on to the consumer.

If everything is being made more expensive so companies can give money to a lot of charities or less worthy causes, then the rest of us have less spending power with our money. And as we know, a lot of "good" causes turn out to be only good for their officers' wallets. 

On the whole I suspect corporate giving does more harm than good. I'd like to see a genuine economist like Thomas Sowell do the math on this, and I'd bet a burger than I'm right. 

But it hardly matters. Companies don't really care if anyone is helped. The real importance is the puffery from Doing Public Good, even if it does the public bad. 

Aaaahhh, freak out!

I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but I come from a long line of worriers. They had a lot to worry them. Many fled poverty in Europe, working hard in America to be Americans, pushing back the fear of famine and freeze with every push of a mop or swing of a hammer. Fathers died too young, leaving their families in disarray and terror. The national economy tanked. World Wars broke out. Recessions, depressions, lost babies, feuds, failed businesses. Worry, worry, worry.

And people say, stop worrying. It's bad.

Okay! 

Actually, I agree that I should. When people say worrying is your mind pretending to solve a problem without actually doing anything, like expecting to walk to Pittsburgh on a treadmill, I say: Yep! When they say worry is worshipping the problem, I say: Right you are. When they say worry is just fear hiding just out of reach so you can't attack it with courage, I say: You betcha! When they say worry is a tool of the devil, I say: Amen!

And I still don't know how to stop worrying. 

Maybe the problem is that worry does feel like you're doing something. It certainly has one redeeming quality, in that it is motivational. Only an idiot wants to be the grasshopper: 

One fine day in winter some Ants were busy drying their store of corn, which had got rather damp during a long spell of rain. Presently up came a Grasshopper and begged them to spare her a few grains, "For," she said, "I'm simply starving." The Ants stopped work for a moment, though this was against their principles. "May we ask," said they, "what you were doing with yourself all last summer? Why didn't you collect a store of food for the winter?" "The fact is," replied the Grasshopper, "I was so busy singing that I hadn't the time." "If you spent the summer singing," replied the Ants, "you can't do better than spend the winter dancing." And they chuckled and went on with their work.

Aye, aye, Aesop. 

Also: Ants are jerks, but we all know that.

The problem is, worry has no internal stopping mechanism. Once you engage the worry, there's always something it can find to act upon. That's where I run into trouble. Everything may be looking rosy, but there's always some possibility you can dread, and if all else fails there's death and taxes. 

Alcohol used to be a good solution, but it ended up causing even more worries. So now I just have to find a healthier means of dealing with it.

When they say: If you're gonna worry, why pray? If you're gonna pray, why worry? And I say: 

Well, I say, you're right. But it'll always be like a second language to me, because my people were worrier kings from ancient times. 😨😱👑

Fred: Thought Leader.

I got an invitation to a meeting about thought leadership. Of course they would want my ideas. 

Nah, JK, LOL, it was from LinkedIn. They don't care.

"The Value of Thought Leadership in Economic Uncertainty" is the topic, and I'm not saying it's a bad topic. The times are economically uncertain. And as I've written here before, I am convinced that true leadership is more talent than knowledge, but like any raw talent it A) needs honing and practice and B) hasn't alighted on many of the people who believe it has. It can be faked to some extent with intelligence and experience and learned skills, but there’s a reason we talk about “born leaders.”

Worse, though, is that few people devote a lot of thought to anything.

The buzz phrase "thought leadership" annoys me, anyway. According to LinkedIn, where they know these things, there's a big difference between thought leading and regular nonfat leading:

The difference between regular leaders and thought leaders is that thought leaders have a large following while their regular counterparts don't. Your followers help catalyze a movement that spreads your ideas from one person to the next.

So, a thought leader makes money whereas a leader leader just makes success. 

Or, a leader can direct people but a thought leader changes the way they think. Okay, I can dig it. I hate it, but I can dig it.

First of all, the American Revolution may have featured the last great thought leaders, putting the rights of the individual as sovereign. Since then a great many impactful "thought leaders" have sucked. Marx, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Xi, Pol Pot, Jim Jones, those French Revolution guys, all thought leaders, all the worst bastards to ever come out of the bastard machine. 

Second, one may wish to lead thoughts, but few people have either original thoughts or leadership skills. So how is one to be a thought leader in economic uncertainty? I would guess it boils down to the same old inspirational, motivational rah-rah in a barely new package: trouble = opportunity and all that. Sure. Maybe.

I wouldn't want to open a new restaurant at a time when people can barely buy groceries, although some people will find a way to make it work. But everyone knows deep down that if sticking to it and believing in yourself was all it took, this world would have 100 times more Hollywood stars and 1,000 times more billionaires. 

If I were LinkedIn, I'd be glad that Mr. Fred Key turned down this opportunity to share my thoughts on the topic. Like most people who consider themselves realists, whether we are or not, I have a strong cynical streak and an expectation of disaster. But, as the old man once observed, if you're a pessimist, at least you're guaranteed to be right eventually.

Screeeeech....

I don't want to startle people, but we're all gonna die.

Plus, we're going to have an enormous economic crash.

How do I know this? It's not that I have any great economic knowledge; I just know what everyone ought to know. 

I was reminded recently, though, that not everyone does have such knowledge. A highly intelligent friend, an accomplished young man for whom I have tremendous respect and whose company I enjoy, said that he couldn't blame Trump for anything good or bad on the economy, and similarly Biden shouldn't get blame for inflation or gas prices. Presidents can't control that stuff. 

He is, of course, a Trump hater and is a liberal Democrat. So I was faced with the choice of explaining how inflation works when money is not tied to anything hard -- that every dollar printed is borrowed by the government, and makes every other dollar worth a little bit less, and how supply and demand affect fuel prices, especially when the government adopts anti-supply policies, and how fuel prices raise the price of everything else -- or enjoy dinner. So for a change I kept my mouth shut. (Trump was a spendthrift in office too, of course, so he didn't help in that regard either, even if he was not at anything like Biden levels.)

Thus even smart people don't understand why the current picture is as bad as it is, and fated to get worse. But that only matters tertiarily to my prediction of economic doom. And no, my prediction is not based on the fact that the Phillies are in position to win the World Series, and the Wall Street Journal claims that every time a team from the City of Brotherly Love wins a championship, the nation goes into a recession.

My prediction is based on my observation that so many things around look like the Internet boom of the 90's, only without the concurrent economic flourishing. What I mean by that is, there is an absolute torrent of software startups out there -- all founded by "disrupters" and "innovators," of course -- who are based in expensive cities and whose main success so far lies in getting rounds of funding. As in the 90's, half of them can't explain what they actually do in 5,000 words or less. 

What I'm not seeing, unlike the 90's, is everyone rushing straight to the stock market for an IPO. A bunch of worthless stocks from startups like TwoGuysAndAParrot.Com (not real) helped cause an avalanche of losses spread widely among investors. If companies are flush with cash from funding rounds A through Triple H, only the big-money guys are on the hook if these startups go under. 

However, that's still a problem. For one reason, your savings may be linked to funds that invest in these companies, looking to strike gold. For another, the big-money guys can go on a profit-taking spree to make up for investment losses, which could easily lead to a big fun selloff pile-on that further squishes your 401(k), which is already losing value faster than a herd of cattle diagnosed with Mad Cow Disease. 

What to do? Well, naturally, I recommend putting all your cash into Fredcoin, the Favorite Cryptocurrency of Guys Who Live in My House!

Its value is still solid!
1 Fredcoin = 1 Fredcoin!

Buy now and use your Fredcoin to help fund your new backyard fallout shelter. Call today and our pals at Stiiv's Friendly Bunkers will schedule you for an estimate. 

Act fast! That "market correction" could be here any day now!

Moments and mements.

Yesterday I was out and about, rather busy being social. (Me! Out amid the populace! Can you imagine?) Therefore all I can offer you this morning are some stolen moments and stolen memes, collected with the utmost care over the latter part of October. 

And, because I got my first Christmas catalog of the year in the mail yesterday:

Gas attack.

Ouch.

Behold, the cost of fill-up for lowest octane gasoline at the cheapest station in our New York town.

No one knows why it's so pricey just now! It's so bizarre! And yet people who are not insane or lying know that printing money and restricting goods causes inflation, and Washington is doing both, especially for gasoline. Wages rise due to inflationary pressures too, but prices always rise faster than wages. 

Since I don't drive 80 miles round trip to work anymore, I don't fill up very often, but plenty of people I know do a lot of driving and not for fun. They can't restrict the amount they drive. But whether we fill up or not we will pay, because gas prices make everything else more expensive. I'd guess that oil is more important to inflation than any other commodity, because everything has to be delivered. 

That's right, you Goop-loving Coachella-going ladies; even the quaintest little bobo shop has to bring things in. That place that makes its own chocolate, the one that brews its own beer, the one with the amazing florist who makes such adorable arrangements, the place that throws its own pots or makes its own candles -- none of these is mining and farming for supplies in the shop cellar. 

Leonard E. Read's famous essay "I, Pencil" should be mandatory reading in middle school, and again in high school. Materials have to be delivered. Rising fuel prices mean higher wholesale prices, and more money that the shop owner has to charge.

Unfortunately it's not the class who thinks we can replace gas and nukes with windmills, solar, and other bronze age tech that suffers. It's people who have to keep a close eye on spending or face the possibility of ruin, however harder or smarter they work.

But it's all fine for our wealthy elites. You know, I always thought "FU money" meant having enough dough to be able to tell those who would impinge your freedom to go jump in the lake. Turns out that to our elites, "FU money" means the rest of us can go F ourselves.

WINning?

This American artifact may ring a bell for those who lived through the 1970s.  

For those whom 1974 is as distant as World War II or the reign of Ramesses II, here is the story, from the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan: 

President Gerald R. Ford inherited a nation in dire economic straits. A debilitating recession that combined high unemployment and a stagnant economy with rampant inflation posed many difficult challenges. With a degree in economics and 25 years of Congressional budgeting experience, President Ford plunged headfirst into the crisis. His first and most public move was to combat inflation. He declared inflation “public enemy number one.” Ford’s economic advisors devised a Whip Inflation Now or WIN program in the fall of 1974. It focused on a variety of voluntary anti-inflationary initiatives that individual citizens and businesses could embrace. Early enthusiasm for the program generated massive quantities of handmade and mass-produced material, including buttons, signs, clothing, stickers, ephemera, and much more. Unfortunately, enthusiasm waned by the New Year as the program failed to generate the results people had hoped for and the program quickly died out.

Inflation was and often is pretty damn serious. At the time it was a disaster for people on a fixed income, like many who had been paying into the Social Security fund for thirty years. The dollars that they received were worth far less than the dollars they had paid in; a dollar in autumn 1935, when Social Security was implemented, was equivalent to $3.65 in autumn 1974, but the recipient got that same dollar back -- which had depreciated by 83 cents, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Inflation Calculator. News stories of little old ladies surviving on cat food led to the general cheerfulness of the era. 

And the little old ladies were just the tip of the dwindling iceberg. Inflation was eating invested money faster than it could be returned, which was discouraging all sorts of investments. As Amy Farber of the Federal Reserve Bank writes: 

In October 1974, with consumer inflation running at more than 10 percent annually, President Gerald Ford gave a now famous speech (watch video or read text) in which he proclaimed: “There is only one point on which all advisers have agreed: We must whip inflation right now.”

    “Whip Inflation Now” was not just a speech—it was a public relations campaign to enlist American citizens to hold back the increases in wages and prices of the 1970s, supposedly by increasing personal savings and taming spending habits. The symbol of the campaign was the large round red button with bold, white uppercase letters: W I N.

    According to the American Presidents blog, “The campaign did not work as President Ford had hoped. Inflation remained a threat to the economy well into the Reagan presidency … the pins were widely mocked and it gave Ford’s opponents an easy target for criticism.” 

Was the WIN campaign a failure? Economists may argue the point, but I think by every conceivable measure there's no question that it was. Inflation got worse into the late 1970s, and Ford's successor (just like his two predecessors) were incapable of formulating a policy that went beyond Ivory Tower economics and rather encouraged economic growth. This appears to be at least to be part of the massive, crushing failure of academia to teach the truth from at least the start of the postwar era to the present day. They were and are in love with socialism, and every policymaker who falls for that inflicts misery on his constituents.

I believe most of the disastrous ideas of public and social policy have come out of Western universities. I'm far from alone in that belief. Maybe WIN would have looked better in retrospect if a non-nuclear nation had declared war on us, just as FDR's New Deal looks like an economic powerhouse because war was breaking out and someone had to make all those tanks and planes.

For Ford, personally, the WIN campaign was a disaster. People may note that WIN was mocked, and Ford made fun of by Chevy Chase (a one-time show business personality), but most Americans thought Ford was a decent man. There was a lot of talk (in my family, for one) that if Ford had not pardoned Nixon he might have been elected in 1976, but I have my doubts. I think Ford was right on that one, that most Americans didn't want a Nixon clown show trial sucking all the oxygen out of the room. 

I think if Ford had not studied economics, and had a better plan than a vague FDR-ish call for normal people to go out and whip inflation (how does one do that? No one who was an adult at the time has ever been able to explain what they were supposed to do), the economy might have improved. He still would have had an uphill fight in 1976, with the swine flu disaster and the general hatred and fear of Washington everywhere, but an improving economy might have saved him from the juggernaut that was James Earl Carter. Despite everything, Ford carried 27 states in the election, but lost by about 1.7 million votes and got clobbered in the Electoral College.

I mention all this today not just because it's an excuse to talk about what was briefly a major cultural item -- WIN buttons -- but also to show that good intentions and college degrees don't always make for good results, especially in government. Reagan was an economic wonder in spite of rather than because of his economics degree from Eureka College; he spent decades learning about economics in the real world as his acting career dwindled. And Trump's bachelor's is also in economics, but I'm not sure he ever paid much attention in school. He probably learned more about economics at his father's knee. 

In the end, you can call for the people to rise up and whip that inflation, beat that poverty, conquer that cancer, declare war on bad weather, stop the tide from going out, but some battles can't be won by good intentions. 

Fred's Book Club: Hell on Earth.

Hello, book fans, and welcome to today's amazing entry in our Wednesday Humpback Writers feature, the feature named for Hump Day, not for the writers, some of whom may have humps of one sort or another, but I've never asked. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Today we have a classic of journalism by a writer who was not afraid to get down in the mud (sometimes literally) to dig for information, who has probably had more guns pointed his way than the average mid-level drug dealer, and yet has retained his sense of humor through it all.

Holidays in Hell, originally published in 1988, is a collection of pieces by P.J. O'Rourke, the one-time National Lampoon writer whose career has been headlines by two constants:

1) Go to places in the world that completely suck, or don't suck, and find out why they are the way they are; and

2) Make fun of them.

This book, which is a pretty good snapshot of the state of the world in the eighties, features essays of his visits to horrible places like Lebanon, El Salvador, South Africa, the Gaza Strip, and Epcot. He would go to these places so we wouldn't have to, and God bless him for it.

O'Rourke is a keen observer with a great eye for detail and a sharp wit, some of which would ensure no large modern New York publisher would go near him these days. Here's P.J. on ...

LEBANON 

Miss Phillips was gone for two hours. She emerged from the donnybrook perfectly composed and holding three bus tickets. I asked her what all the shooting was about. "Oh," she said, "that's just Lebanese for 'please queue up.'" An ancient horrible Mexican-looking bus pulled into the crowd smacking people and punting them aside. Amal was carrying a co-ed's full complement of baggage in two immense suitcases. I handed my kit bag to Miss Phillips, grabbed these and made for the bus. Or tried to. Three steps put me at the bottom of a clawing, screeching pile-up, a pyramid of human frenzy. I heard Miss Phillips's voice behind me. "Don't be shy," she said, "it's not rude to give a wee shove to the Lebanese." I took a breath, tightened my grip on the suitcases and began lashing with Samsonite bludgeons at the crowd of women, old men, and children. If you ask me, it was pretty rude, but it was either that or winter in South Lebanon. 

POLAND 

"Let's start with nightclubs," I said as soon as the cop had given up on us. Zofia raised an eyebrow.     "There's one called Kamienolomy, 'The Quarry,'" said Tom. The decor was budget Mafia. Because of the name, I guess, the walls were covered with Permastone house siding. There were little strips of disco lights around the dance floor, but they just flashed off and on; they didn't move around the room or change colors or anything.        A bored combo -- one singer, one guitar player and a guy on the electric organ doing the rhythm, bass and drum -- played a Ramada Inn lounge arrangement of "I Got You, Babe," lyrics in memorized English:            Ugh gut you to told me height            Bucket jute tuchus god night

THIRD-WORLD DRIVING 

Traffic Signs and Signals: Most developing nations use international traffic symbols. Americans may find themselves perplexed by road signs that look like Boy Scout merit badges and by such things as an iguana silhouette with a red diagonal bar across it. Don't worry, the natives don't know what they mean, either. 

EPCOT 

At Epcot Center, the Disney corporation has focused its attention on two things greatly in need of Disneyfication: the tedious future and the annoying whole wide world. 

The book is also educational. I would never have heard this theory of colonialism otherwise:

The historian C. H. Haring points out that there are two kinds of colonies. Farm colonies are refuges where Pilgrims, Quakers and other fruitcakes can go chop down trees and stay out of everybody's hair. But exploitation colonies are places for wastrel younger sons and sleazed-out noblemen to get rich on gold and slave-labor plantations. Farm colonists are interested in forming their own permanent institutions. Exploitation colonists are interested in getting home and spending their money. For this reason New England, Canada, Costa Rica and parts of Argentina are reasonably nice places, while Mississippi, Jamaica, Mexico and most other sections of the hemisphere are shit holes.    

Holidays in Hell was not the first book of O'Rourke's I read. Parliament of Whores, his 1991 deep dive into American politics, was an eye-opener for a lot of people and an introduction to economics too -- and funny as hell. It stated the reasons why America has been so successful -- rule of law, respect for institutions and vice-versa, freedom of enterprise, etc. -- and how fragile these things can be, as we are seeing now.

But O'Rourke lost Libertarian street cred in 2016 with his semi-endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president -- the woman of whom he once said "Every man looks at her and sees his first wife," part of the couple he called "blathering highbinders." I'm not sure if he considers himself a Never Trumper, but he's at the very least a Trump Despiser. With the backs of the conservatives against the wall as never before, this kind of attitude is hard to swallow to his longtime fans.

Be that as it is, although he's getting up there now (72 now and probably not going to any real hellholes these days), O'Rourke is one of the sharpest writers of his generation, merciless on the foibles and failings of his generation, and a real talent. If you hate his politics (or you support Mississippi), you'll still love The Bachelor Home Companion: A Practical Guide to Keeping House Like a Pig, which I also recommend without reservation.

Trouble with that particular country.

Many people think that one way we common folk can punish the nation of China (not people of Chinese descent; don't be willfully stupid, Karen) is by refusing to buy things that are made in China. And I think that's probably a good idea. It's also not new; the "Buy American" campaign goes back at least forty-five and maybe sixty years, and probably was no evil right-wing nationalist plot originally but an evil left-wing unionist plot to support American manufacturing jobs by the unions.

Basically, it's an idea Americans have been promoting from different sides but for the same reason, to keep American money and jobs in the United States. In this case, no one is calling for a widespread boycott of anything made outside our country, but just things made from one particular country -- the tyrannical nation of China, unrepentant home of the COVID-19 death virus that has screwed over the world good and hard, and for all we know backer of traitorous American revolutionary groups. Not to mention a threat to our allies, a corrupter of our universities and entertainment and politics, a vicious spy in our international brotherhood mission, a maker of crappy medical equipment, the enemy of peaceful religion, thieves of intellectual property of all kinds, and democracy-resistant thugs with a terrible history of bigotry and cruelty outstripping the worst the United States can do by magnitudes of time and numbers.

Other than that, they're okay.

But I bring all this up to tell you I have failed.

I got desperate to cut my hair. I am sick of looking like a goofy middle-aged would-be Lothario in an early-70's sex comedy; the only thing I was missing was a cheap brown suit. For quite some time in the quarantine crisis there were no clippers available online, because I was far from the only guy in this condition. But I finally scored one.

Of course it was made in China. I don't know if it's possible to buy small electronics at this point that are not made in China. But just in case the package didn't tell me that (because Amazon did not), here's some handy customer inserts.

"Best wish"

"special cleaning mellow"

AAAIIEEEEEE

Their English is better than my Chinese, of course, but this still does little to inspire confidence with me. 

Funny how China caused this mess and is selling us tons of things to get through it, from haircutting tools to TVs to microwave ovens.

So today is haircut day, and I will let you know what happened. But don't expect photographs. My wife would kill me. On the other hand, if it looks good, and I can use it again, I'll make back what I spent with two or three haircuts. But my wife is still gonna kill me.

Home eck.

Some years ago when I was between jobs, I pitched a story to a friend who was still employed at a national magazine directed to the young homeowner. At the time the economy was thought to be in terrible shape, largely because it suited the desires of politicians and the media to portray it that way, and all the talk was about economizing. (The economy had little to do with my unemployment, as the economy has been poor in publishing since the start of the widespread use of the Internet.)

My story idea was based on the old shilling gas meters that were common in rental housing the UK. The downside was that if you were without a coin when the gas stopped, you would freeze; the upside was that you knew just how much you spent to keep the place warm. It occurred to me that most of the time we spend money without even realizing it, and I'm not even talking about Amazon Prime. In days of yore, families had a rough idea of what things cost; now we may not ever even see the bill, the money being removed easily from our checking accounts after we sign up, until our credit rating suddenly falls like an anvil in a Looney Tune.

They knew home economics back then.

I proposed to calculate the amount of money spent every time one boiled some water, turned up the thermostat, did a load of whites, took a ten-minute shower, ran the dishwasher, microwaved an enchilada, left a light on in a room all night, and several other daily household activities, so that the happy homemaker would start to understand where the money all goes. The money pitch: How much would you economize if you had to insert money for the gas, electric, or water meter each time you wanted to do these things?

I confess that memory of my father contributed to this idea -- he had an undeserved rep in the house as a tightwad, but he did go around turning down the gas and turning off lights, and always worried about money.

Anyway, I never heard back, which means no. The magazine might have gone for it if I'd had a better name as a feature writer, but I doubt it. I think they thought the story would be a total downer. It would make the Nervous Nellies more nervous, it would make the Sammy Skinflints cheaper, and it would be ignored by the people who don't even want to look at the electric bill anymore because it's boring and upsetting. As I've noted elsewhere, magazines, especially those devoted to one gender or the other, have been treating their readers like retarded children for some time. Still, I confess that the magazine I pitched to liked a breezy, upbeat style, and a penny-pinching piece wouldn't have suited them.

As I think about it, hard-facts stories like mine when applied to weight loss or general health are much the same. They are devoured by the true believers who already live the kale-and-Peloton life, but ignored by the mass of people like me who squint when they have to go on the scale. And yet those articles always find a home. Maybe it's true that Americans are just weird about money. As far as I know, coin-op gas meters never really had a market here.

Getting low on anvils.

Drawing up the ol' shopping list for the week and realized that we're in need of some of the things that would encourage a trip to the ol' warehouse club -- paper towels, TP, coffee, and so on.

Good price on anvils!

I kind of enjoy my bimonthly-ish trips to the warehouse store. It's no good for the regular supermarket run; I read years ago that the club stores have about 400 different items, whereas your supermarket has thousands. Much better choices of meats and produce. But once you drag your humongous packs of facial tissues or dog biscuits home, you don't have to worry about buying them for a while. And you save money... or do you?

It doesn't feel that way when I pay the annual fee, which is about $55; it doesn't feel that way when I drag my loaded cart up to the checkout and fly past $300 (usually that high if I've bought toner for the damn printer). And of course, as the movie Wall-E wanted us to know, buying in bulk will destroy the entire planet. (If you haven't heard of Wall-E, it's a small art house science fiction film by some anti-capitalist outfit called Disney.) More practically, or at least more immediately, not everything in the warehouse store is actually cheaper than in a typical market.

My real concern is waste. Not food waste; while some economists and environmentalists are concerned about food waste from people buying enormous loads of meat and such from the club store, that's not something I typically do. I rely on the club for the less-perishable goods. Besides, the way I eat, there's little food waste in this house. In my experience, houses with children are houses where a lot of food winds up in the garbage, because parents shop in the produce section with great intentions and kids wind up snacking on buttered saltines or scooping Jif right out of the jar. No, the waste I mean is behavioral -- the way I act when I know I have a huge supply of something.

I just have a feeling that bringing home a skid of paper towels makes me overly cavalier about their use. Wash hands? Why use that towel hanging by the kitchen sink when there's a more hygienic roll of paper towels right there? Taking a shower? Here, dry off with a roll. We've got tons of it! We're rollin' in it! Hyuk hyuk.

It's the kind of attitude that makes us imagine rich people lighting $1,000 cigars with $100 bills. Why not? It's fun! There's just so many of them!

This goes completely against my upbringing. My family had not gotten over the Great Depression by the time I came along decades later. It was like it had all just happened, and was just waiting to happen all over us again. Waste not, want not would have been our family slogan, if we'd had one. (Despite that I was a spoiled kid -- a very, very guilt-ridden spoiled kid.)

But back to the wasteful habits of bulk shoppers: Has anyone studied this? I haven't found any studies, only krexing about food going to waste. I want to know about the wasteful habits for nonperishables bought in bulk. We have two big dogs and believe in self-preservation through good hygiene, but if I know I only have one roll of paper towels left I'm going to be cautious with it. Not so if I have a package of a dozen.

As much as I dislike mindless anti-consumerism, which is as fractious as mindless consumerism is dumb, I would suggest some clever economist with a means of getting grants look into this. You could start right here. When we buy anvils at the warehouse club, we go through them awfully fast. When we buy them individually at the anvil store, they seem to last longer.

Something to aim for.

Ask any guy who was around and was a guy in the 2000s about the flies in the Amsterdam airport and he will probably tell you that these were pictures of flies etched into the back of the urinals in the men's room. Men "shot at" the flies and "spillage" was reduced by 80%. Why? Because the men who used the facilities now had a target for their micturition. I don't know a guy who didn't find this news A) fascinating and B) obvious.

We'd been shooting at the little urinal cakes for decades. We wondered how many pees a urinal cake could take before a hole got worn through one. Bars where they threw old ice into the urinals as an auto-flush measure were always of great interest. How many cubes could one whiz melt? So this fly experiment seemed like one of those ideas that was so obvious that we were surprised no one had thought of it before.

It seems to be really catching on. The other day I was in one of those outlet shopping centers, like Disneyland for shopping (if that's not redundant), a place that had been remodeled extensively since the last time I'd been there. The men's room had gone from being "clean stadium" style to "fairly upscale restaurant." And check out the urinal:

The blue dot is little blue seashell, perfectly placed for target practice, courtesy of Sloan Valve Company.

It's a pretty good idea. For a generation that grew up on video games and staring at phones, there's a need for constant stimulation and activity, however dumb. Here's a game you can play while urinating, and it actually has a benefit for society at large! (Society is always benefited by having less pee all over it.)

Unfortunately the guys who promoted the Amsterdam fly experiment are also promoting something called "Nudge Economics" or "Behavioral Economics," using little manipulations (like the flies) to nudge people into the behavior their betters want them to demonstrate (such as urinating in the urinal and not on the floor). Now the jig is up, though, and we can be sure we'll start peeing on the floor again, metaphorically speaking -- humans being notoriously contrarian. Also, we don't like passive aggression from those who consider themselves superior. Anytime you think government is trying to "nudge" you to do what they want you to do, I suggest you do something completely opposite, just to confuse and frustrate them. To hell with them.

But I hope we don't actually start peeing on the floor again. Really, boys, the less pee all around the better.

Compare and contrast: thing I shouldn't eat edition.

Something I was quite surprised to find in my local supermarket:

What is that thing? Some kinda bait?

No way, man! It's chocolate! Moreover, it's chocolate and caramel! Hey, wait---it's chocolate, caramel, and crispy rice!

Say, wait a minute, that sounds a little familiar...

Interesting....

Of course, the Nestle $100,000 bar (which Wiki tells us got its name from "a series of successful game shows," which tells us very little*) is now the $100 Grand bar. Still rocks the house, though.

Let's have a look at the Catch bar, seated on my knee,

Not... not ooey gooey caramel, for one thing.

But I ate it.** It was okay. It really was like a poor man's $100,000 bar. In fact, that's almost exactly what the Catch bar is.

It may have been born in Ireland in 1976, as this site says, but is now produced in Trinidad & Tobago and is shipped to lots of other countries. That could account for a bit of the disappointment I felt -- we all know that the better the chocolate, the lower the melting point, so the more difficult and expensive it is to ship. (There's a lot about Hershey history linked to this---if you don't know the history of Milton Hershey's chocolate, I recommend you find out---very odd story***.)

Anyway, the Catch bar was chocolate---how bad could it be? So maybe it's just a $10,000 bar---that's still pretty good in my book.

--------

*Speaking of poor: The $100,000 bar was introduced in 1966, and the only game show with a name anything like that was the flopperoo 100 Grand (3 episodes in 1963); Wiki tells us that "it would be over a decade more before six-figure jackpots returned to television." So I unless Nestle adapted the name from a Swiss game show or something, I have no idea where the name of the candy actually came from. 

**Duh.

***In a nutshell: Hershey, who'd had multiple and awful failures already, was so taken with the new Swiss milk chocolate that he sold his successful caramel company to go into business making it---and he didn't even know how. The Swiss wouldn't tell anyone. (How hard is it to make milk chocolate from cocoa beans? You'd be amazed.) Hershey had to reinvent the wheel, as it were, coming up with his own unique method, which gives the Hershey's chocolate its distinct tang---it was not intended. Hershey's chocolate could ship well, but even it could not survive fighting in the South Pacific; what the GIs got was rather different from what we know of as the Hershey bar. For one thing, it was heat-resistant to 120F.

Maybe a cartoon will help.

"And what we’re saying in this crusade to raise the minimum wage is if you believe in a strong economy, the New York way – the American way – then make this economy work for everyone."

--New York Governor Andrew "Evil Eyes" Cuomo, March 4, 2015

Simple enough for you, Andy? 

He's an idiot, or he think we're idiots. Or both. Which is it?

Scary!

We hear occasionally that the economy is doing swell now, free from all the doldrums that have plagued us during the slowest economic recovery ever. But I have my doubts. Most of the evidence I can offer is anecdotal, and as we know, the plural of anecdote is not data.

One anecdote comes from Route 17 in New Jersey. As all Tri-State Areans (Areans? Is that a word?) know, Route 17 takes you through Paramus, one of the nation's great retail corridors. Mile after mile of chain stores, restaurants, mom & pop shops, fast-food joints, International House of Pancakes, specialty shops, banks, appliance stores, furniture stores, bookstores, pet stores, grocery stores, sporting good shops, etc, etc. etc. When the Internet boom started to kill off brick and mortar stores, Paramus endured. But the last seven years have seen many longstanding shops close, of various kinds (specialty sporting goods seem hard hit, from my observation). 

But don't worry! Help is on the way!

In the former location of an Eastern Mountain Sports is a Halloween store, replete with all your Halloween needs. Spirit is the largest chain of these I've seen, but this is another. They possess a dead retail location for six weeks or so leading up until October 31, then they disappear, leaving the space empty for another ten and a half months (unless lightning strikes and a new full-time tenant moves in). On a bus going north through Paramus on September 18 I counted three such temporary Halloween shops along Route 17.

On the east side of the road. There were more on the west side.

And a Party City.

I guess it's better than leaving the stores empty to rot, but this seems like an awful lot of Halloween. I have to wonder if we've reached peak Halloween. The National Retail Federation expects a big year, but spending was down in 2013 from 2012. Because of the economy. Which is doing better. Despite all the empty stores along Route 17 in Paramus.

So who the hell knows.

Interestingly, these same empty stores don't open as temporary Christmas retail locations. It's probably because every store becomes a Christmas retail location, even hardware stores---less so for Halloween, so there's a bigger opportunity.

But then again, it might be because Christmas is good...and Halloween is eeeeeeeviiiil!!!

Ooooh! Scary!