Business/Economics
Anything to do with business and economics, kind of like what would qualify for CotC
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Wednesday, February 23, 2005
United No Way
When I was a baby, the year I was born my medical expenses were almost half of my father’s income. Which is pretty good compared to now, when it would be multiples of the equivalent income.
My mother has always been opposed to the United Way, dating back to that time, and in her job at the post office was a holdout in the drive to get everyone to donate to them. What Liberty’s boss did was wrong, yet understandable from a goal accomplishment at any cost, failure to embrace other people’s principles sort of perspective.
As I understand it, and for all I know her memory of the details is so clouded with time that it was entirely different. When they had me in the hospital in Boston, and/or when they were taking me into Boston a couple times a week subsequently, there were wealthy people at the hospital that United Way (it may have been one of their supported agencies or something) was helping, but they wouldn’t help us. She was disgusted by the whole thing.
I picked up a healthy skepticism of United Way from that, but also there are the other factors Liberty mentions. They might as well be considered nothing more than a paid fundraising service for other organizations.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Will The Court Right Property Wrongs?
Via James Joyner, the Supremes are coming up on the case of government theft of private property for the purpose of turning it into different private property and increasing tax revenues.
I barely accept that eminent domain has any valid place in our government and sociaty as it exists, never mind how it more ideally ought to be. I’ve come to live with the idea of it being used for things like road construction.
That despite my initial horror as a child when I first learned that eminent domain existed; the earliest autonomic libertarian impulse I can expressly recall.
If the Supremes rule in favor of the wrongful taking, which I see no legal or moral basis for them to do, then this country is in rougher shape than I might have imagined.
Then again, there was no valid, conscionable reason for the 1954 ruling that let them bulldoze “blighted” areas either. To paraphrase Palpatine, “there is no property, only politics.”
I am also in the school of “if a regulation reduces the value of your property, it’s a recompensable taking” thought. If you buy some land and it has restricted use, that will be reflected in the price. No harm done. If you buy some land, then the use becomes restricted, you’re the one who takes the hit to the value if you want to sell it. You should get the difference, just as much as you should get at least the market value of the property if it is all taken. But I digress.
Are Blogads Worth It?
We keep running into sites not loading due to their Blogads. Michelle Malkin’s is a good example (click for larger in new window):
That doesn’t capture the full page. It comes up one big column to the left, with ads at the bottom. No content. At one point I tried inserting the www in front of the URL and it worked, but not anymore.
Deb seems to catch more of these than I do, and has seen it at Rosemary’s and elsewhere too. Even sites that do it frequently don’t always do it, though Michelle Malkin’s seems to be on its way there.
Day By Day is another example, but different (click for larger):
Sometimes it simply won’t load, but more often Day By Day loads, then refreshes itself and shows the above page that lacks content and only shows ads. That isn’t so bad, as hitting the back button takes you back to the latest witty, brilliant, amusing strip so you can get your daily fix. But still, it’s easy for someone to be confused, not notice the back button is available after the reload, and go away annoyed.
Are Blogads really worth this? Assuming the basic methodology is sound, I see a great business opportunity for a competitor with superior bandwidth and server capacity, and whatever other changes are necessary to ensure that ads don’t fail to load, slow down the host page, and otherwise mangle or hog the host page.
Seeing the problems has kept us from signing up for Blogads. Nevermind that we are on the low side, hit-wise, and could justify all of $5 - 10 a week for an ad, so it’s not much of a loss. We might experiment with our own ads, in addition to the link ads we recently sold. We just can’t see ruining the site experience for them.
Update:
Here’s another example. Sometimes Smash (The Indepundit) simply won’t load. Other times it loads, then spontaneously reloads and stays forever in the state you see below:
Update:
This post added to Beltway Traffic Jam.
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Someone Needs Poofreaders (And Not To Spam)
Papa Gino’s has been resorting to spam, sending out printable coupons for it and D’Angelo.
Is it still spam if it’s something good you might actually want and use? I love Papa Ginos, even without family working at their headquarters anymore.
Well, if you ask me, it’s still unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail and as likely to turn people off as not. I know I’m sure thinking I will start trying the other eight or so pizza places near me, one by one, if I can ever afford pizza again. After all, for one delivery from Papa Gino’s, I can feed the three of us for as much as five days without totally scrimping. But then, I was thinking that before I first got the spam.
Anyway, the funniest thing is the typo. Their slogan is “Pizza at its best.” Check this out:
Come on folks, “Pizza at it is best”? Oops. This is why marketing materials need proofreaders too. Ones who know the language being used, which is recognizably English in this case.
Anyway, if you’re in Papa Gino’s country, the coupons are here (as well as being in the spam itself), as is the full size version of the graphic I shrunk to fit the post. They are essentially the same as coupons you might get when they deliver you a pizza, whereby they encourage future orders.
If you want to encourage spamming from them, that is. I would bet the coupon numbers are distinct and used to track the success of the spam, er, I mean e-mail marketing, campaign.
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Computer Guys Have Expenses And Want Something Leftover Too
On a whiteboard in my office, I have a list of places that do similar work and their hourly rates, and at the bottom of the list I have mine. They are $120, $99, $85, and $80.
Today someone sought me out because the $99 place was so expensive, and they estimated cleaning up the machine, malware infested and otherwise in need of attention, would be a three to five hour job.
Instead of being pleased to be saving 20%, I got begged not to charge so much. I was humorous about it, but it offends me. I’m sure the CPA whose employee it was would think I was nuts if I begged him to charge only half his going rates. I can’t imagine someone being all shocked on learning an attorney I work for charges $120 or more.
It’s not that I don’t expect that some people will consider that a lot of money. It’s just that a surprising number, even in business, don’t expect to have to pay real money for computer-related services. Even I think of it as a lot, because of the price level time warp factor I was discussing with Deb recently. Otherwise I might very well increase it to match what my math says would be more appropriate. Not to mention my annoyance when I encounter people who charge more and are less capable. However, competing on price says to leave it the same as it’s been since 1997.
Anyway, I managed to clean things up quite sufficiently in under two hours; none of this three to five stuff. Go me! Now back to the work I interrupted…
Beware The AMT
The Alternative Minimum Tax needs to go.
Okay, that will never happen, so let me rephrase that: It needs to be reformed, adjusted, and probably indexed going forward.
Ugh. I used the term “going forward.” That’s like something right out of buzzword bingo. Very sad.
Anyway, via The Ranting Raven, it turns out that strange things can happen when you declare as income your loot from a court case.
First, if you’re over what is now a quite modest gross income, you have to compute AMT and pay that if it’s more. It’s supposed to close loopholes for “the rich,” who greedily use all the tax avoision they can muster, so that they can keep what is rightfully the government’s. Thus it pretty much takes away deductions and recoups a larger share of the government money the taxpayer would otherwise have tried to horde shamelessly.
The problem is, when you win a bunchabux in court or via a settlement, the legal fee is part of your cost of “earning” that money, just like any business expense. Under AMT, they are not an expense, and you pay money on the whole thing, including what it cost you in legal fees. Which is grossly unfair on the face of it, since the lawyers then also have to pay tax on whatever they net out of their share of your winnings. But if the legal fees are a sufficiently large proportion of the total, you can wind up owing more money than you made. Shades of the options nonsense that came to the fore when people ended up with worthless dotcom options during the bubble and owed more in paper taxes than they’d ever be able to pay.
How bad does it have to get before things reform completely?
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Extending the Future
The other day Last week,* Deb blurted out “you know, our kids are gonna live forever!”
I started to say “yeah...” and launch into a discussion of life extension, when she elaborated about our genes.
People in my family generally last a long time, especially the women, with some exceptions. For instance, my grandmother who had a massive heart attack when she was about 65. On the other hand, her sister, a spinster great aunt I always adored, lived to a ripe old age of ninety-something. On the other hand, my grandfather outlived my grandmother by about 14 years, making it to about 84 as a sedentary, heavy smoker. Went from perfectly healthy to complete system shutdown and death in a matter of days. My other grandmother will be 89 this year, and I would not be surprised if she makes 100. My mother had a great aunt who missed her 105th birthday by a week. My other grandfather fell a few months short of 90, though the last several years were pretty bad. That despite many heart attacks and strokes starting by the time he was around 50, diabetes, almost dying of pneumonia and being sick for something like a year when he was in his twenties. He was just too stubborn. My great-grandmother, the Sadie namesake on my side, was in her nineties. Her rogue husband lived similarly long. And on it goes. Not quite the Howard Families, but pretty good for randomness.
I guess Deb’s family isn’t too shabby in that regard either.
That’s what she was talking about. Even going just from that, adding modern nutrition, medicine and all into the mix, yeah, they should do extremely well, barring bad luck.
My first thought was completely different.
I was thinking of the high chances of a relatively near-term singularity in life extension; the point at which the speed of discoveries on how to make people live longer and healthier surpasses the rate at which death catches up. Suppose we find we can add 20 prime years as of 2020. All we have to do is discover how to add more years before another 20 have passed, and so on, to be ahead of the curve. It doesn’t have to be a big bang of instantly millennial lifespans.
The way I figure it, my kids have a good chance of having that enhancement. Since Sadie was born, I’ve not only had what I consider must be normal thoughts about the child being my connection to the future; my infuence traveling through time, but also thoughts of how majestic and far-reaching and fascinating it could be. Even if she doesn’t invent FTL, with a lifespan in the hundreds or beyond, she could still get off the planet and range far. Heck, even without the planet-leaving option, to me it would be nice to have all that time to experience.
Obviously there will always be accidents, murders, things that aren’t treatable, and so forth. I wonder if it would make us all too cautious, knowing how much we are potentially throwing away with a preventably early death.
Even if this doesn’t come about, even if we hit 120 and that’s the upper limit within modest deviation, knowing what this past century has been in the scheme of things, knowing what I have seen in my life, I am in awe of what my children might witness. It would still mean a good chance of peeking beyond this century, into the 22nd. Given how far we’ve come, it’s exciting to think about where we’re going, if the forces of evil don’t stop it.
Starting with life extension itself. Opposition to it is inherently anti-life and anti-human, because if you’re going to object to technology that makes us last decades longer, or hundreds of years longer, or more, then you are objecting to the technology that has already allowed us to add decades, and save lives. Seeing who objects will be quite telling. We’d certainly have to rethink the entire concept of Social Security! We may have been too foolish to adjust for expectations in lifespan previously and created a warped entitlement that was never intended to be that way, but if everyone suddenly could be expected to live healthy decades more, nobody would be able to ignore the trend and the implications.
The sad thing is, whenever it hits, at least if it’s a marked enough leap, there will be a first generation for which it’s applicable, and prior generations for which it is too late. I feel bad for those born just a bit too soon, at the same time I feel joy for those who will have a chance to bend the bonds of time.
Even if none of that comes to pass, even if we do nothing more than muddle our way slowly to centenarians being as common as septegenarians are now, our children remain our gift to and extension of ourselves into posterity.
* I started composing this a couple days after the event. Now it’s been a week or so.
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Google My World
We are number two for “chocolate is better in color”, after an official M&M’s page. Without the quotes, we’re number three.
At one point we were getting a lot of hits associated with our favorite of the M&M’s commercials, discussed in this post, featuring Renee Cologne.
Mmmm… M&M’s!
Thursday, February 10, 2005
All I Can Say Is…
Heh.
One of my first jobs was in the shipping department at a factory that paid well and was a great place to work. They were one of the area’s “big employers” and getting a job there was relatively… not prestigious, but sought after and respectable anyway.
The industry became increasingly competetive, more of the work was done in the south where costs were lower and equipment was newer. It became harder and harder to maintain plants in Massachusetts, long and storied history or not.
There was always muttering about unionization, ranging from jocular disgruntlement that was not at all serious to genuine efforts, and repeated rejections by the workforce, by union organizers.
Eventually they succeeded. At a company that was already treating people fairly well, struggling to stay open as much to keep people in jobs as because it made the slightest business sense, they then proceeded to fail to ever negotiate a contract in the months before the place shut down. Whatever work they were still doing in Massachusetts moved to another state. The end would have come anyway, but I thought the employees were unmentionably stupid for hastening it, and they weren’t too happy with the union negotiators stonewalling the company and never actually getting them a contract.
The Wal-Mart link via Kate at Outside the Beltway.
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Great Fun
I had fun today, giving a senior attorney a lesson about copyright. He’s an excellent attorney and great guy, but it’s not an area he deals with or has had any reason to be familiar with at all. It’s always great to be able to sound smart.
Still very busy. Hopefully I can get home for West Wing. Actually, between billable and unbillable work, I could probably do 50 hours a week for the next couple months, no problem. Since most of the billable is for the big client, and I try to mete it out at a pace under 100 hours a month, it makes things interesting. This’ll be a big month no matter what, given I will have done most of the work of constructing their new web site this month, besides the more mundane. The web site is a great work at home project, on which I did about 18 hours in the past two days. Yay for work! Because it means money. When I eventually get around to billing…
Family Arboriculture
We get some interesting search hits these days, which will probably be a more extensive post sometime.
This morning we were number eight on Google for:
irving oil family tree
I had mentioned the relationship in the past, which is distant, but not that distant. The way I understand it, Kenneth Colin (K.C.) Irving was my grandfather’s cousin. Now, this could actually mean he was first cousin to my great-grandfather (Arthur Melborne Irving). Or it could mean he was an older first cousin to my grandfather; the age is about right. I don’t actually have information that detailed. However, unless what I have been told is completely outrageous, we at least have the same common ancestor, Jeremiah Irvin, if I recall the first name correctly. After a generation or two, the name changed to Irving. Amazing how often that happens. My grandmother’s father was a Tranmer, but the name was one of those “changed at Ellis Island” ones, originally Cranmer.
Anyway, those Irvings understandably will have nothing to do with our set of the Irvings. Ironically, on the other side, my father’s first cousin’s husband knows them personally. Assuming he’s still kicking, since he didn’t look too good when I last saw him, in Prince Edward Island in 1998. I’d expect my father to have heard if he died, but you never know. I always liked him and thought he was a character. For some reason I never figured out, he was always comparing other places to Peabody, Massachusetts. He visited down here sometimes, but actually lived in St. John, New Brunswick.
Of course, the real character and generally nice guy was my great uncle, Stan, who liked to play jokes on people and was as jovial as they come. When he visited us, when I was a kid, he had a gag device you wound up and sat on. Then you’d lift a butt cheek to release it and let out a fake fart sound. He drove my staid grandmother crazy.
But I digress. What I found interesting to read, when I checked the Google results that brought someone here, was the K.C. Irving Wikipedia entry. The three entries about the sons are cookie cutters of each other, just saying their his kids and run things now. The K.C. entry details the history and scope of the conglomerate. Even I had no idea it was that huge. I also found it another example of rich people being strangely liberal.
Monday, February 07, 2005
Pardon The Lack
I’m engrossed in working on a beta web site for the big client, based on what their marketing designer gave me, and at the same time feeling guilty about needing to visit another client Real Soon Now.
Speaking of which, I’ve been meaning to post about how much I enjoy working with design people like that. It’s like we’re on the same wavelength, with the same fundamental grasp or appreciation of design and marketing considerations. I’m just the one who doesn’t have the graphics skills to put it all together.
So posting from me will be lighter than it might sometimes be. But hey, there’s a giant blogroll if you’re feeling starved for blog content…
Topnotch Employees
These employees, if not a piece of the franchise as McGehee suggests, should get to fend off (or accept, as the case may be) offers of other jobs from eager prospective employers. That is some serious dedication and creativity in the face of adversity.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Reflecting On Rand
Ian Hamet has posted fascinatingly about today’s hundredth anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth. It sounds like he has read more of her than I have. At least, I haven’t read The Romantic Manifesto, though I believe I eventually got my hands on a copy. I agree with much of what he says, and I, too, fall short of agreeing with her completely. Some of the fanatics struck me the same way, clubby - I’d probably use the word cliquish - if not downright cult-like.
I never went through that phase of hating her as he did. My introduction was through seeing her mentioned many other places. Someone wrote a work - I don’t remember if it was an article or longer, or where it was published - titled It Usually Starts With Ayn Rand. For me it started with Robert Ringer, if I recall correctly, and rapidly moved to Rand.
I had read The Fountainhead first, I forget when. In the fall of 1981 I read 1984. That gave me nightmares, something I was never prone to having before then, and helped tip me into a months long bout of depression. What brought me out of that was reading Atlas Shrugged, even though I couldn’t get all the way through “the speech” until a later reading. I’d absorbed an extrapolated enough to know what the speech was all about anyway, and didn’t need the repeated beatings with a cast iron clue bat it represented.
I found We The Living especially depressing, but a good book, clearly formative and different from the others. I pick on public schools, but my late cousin Wendy say We The Living in my collection, got all excited because she had read it in high school, and borrowed it to read again. How amazing! A public high school in relatively northern Maine was assigning Ayn Rand as reading as little as about 20 years ago. Not bad, showing what communism wrought.
I went through a phase of collecting any of her books I could find, and even reading some of them. One of the clearest indicators of why Rand was needed is represented by one store clerk’s reaction to my asking for The Virtue of Selfishness. Understandable, given the common definition and connotation imbued into the word, but silly in that it’s ultimately what we’re all about, what makes us tick and keeps us alive.
Anyway, go read Ian’s post. It’s better than mine.
Friday, January 28, 2005
Dear Shaw’s Supermarket
I went to Roche Brothers again last night. You know; your competition? Yeah, them. The fantastic new one in Easton, close enough to at least four of your stores to be competition with those in particular.
I went there last time I shopped, too. Heh. That trip, not only did they charge me the correct prices on everything, they even made a 22 cent mistake in my favor. And I didn’t even need a card to shop and get the sale prices! How cool is that.
Oh Shaw’s, once upon a time, you were the best. You were the “not Stop & Shop” store. You were the pioneer of computerization and scanning registers tied to inventory. You gave my college money for the management science department to buy computers, after their marketing students did a big study for you as part of their course work. You were always the low prices, not the frills, just plain good.
Now? After a long stretch of time in which I’ve observed you trying to be Stop & Shop, raising your prices, getting obsessive about store brands, adopting that assinine card program that most customers hate, there’s nothing special about you anymore. Unless you are trying to be special by overcharging me.
See, I didn’t take seriously the word out there that each register tape needs to be examined for errors, and much of the time one can be found. But recently there was a cash flow crunch, so I knew exactly what the price of each item had been labeled at the shelf, and what the total ought to be. Two visits in a row you let me down, overcharging. It’s downright vile to buy something you would never buy but for the labeled sale price, only to get home and find it was charged at full price. Hey Shaw’s, tear down those sale signs! If you don’t mean them, take them down, stop misleading people.
Roche Brothers is a ritzy store. They don’t pretend otherwise. Their employees routinely help customers load groceries in their cars and retrieve the carts before they can litter the parking lot. One end of the store is practically a restaurant, the way they specialize in prepared food that I can’t afford and seldom buy, but which is excellent. They are well staffed, well stocked, well price labeled, friendly, helpful, clean… and they are in it to compete with you by having excellent sales. But you knew that; I can tell by comparing the sale fliers.
Guess what! They actually charge the sale prices when things are on sale. Always. It’s not a game of pricing roulette.
Your store is walking distance. Their store is a few miles away. After the last couple visits, your store doesn’t even get proximity preference anymore. That’s pretty sad, for a store that has been my primary grocer for as long as I have been buying groceries. When I lived nowhere near a Shaw’s and Stop & Shop was amazingly the best of three competitors, I used to drive my friends crazy: Shaw’s this, Shaw’s that; it’s a dollar less at Shaw’s, yada yada. They had to insist I stop the wistful price comparisons.
I can only hope that Albertson’s will straighten you out as they take over. Save you from yourselves, as it were.
Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Assimilated By Gillette Of Borg
So I finally gave in. I used to use the Gillette Trac II. They came out with the Sensor. I resisted briefly, then bought it and found it was vastly superior.
The Mach 3 came out. I resisted. Really didn’t see the point and chose to ignore all the raves.
Last year I saw they had 3-bladed refills for the Sensor. Not much more, so I tried them. Wow! Big improvement, even without buying the new system. Been using them ever since.
Last week I found the price of those cartridges was higher than the Mach 3 cartridges. Both of which are absurdly overpriced, by the way, thank you Gillette. I finally caved. It was only $7 for the system, which after all isn’t the latest anymore now that they have the moving blade version. That came with a couple cartridges, which makes the handle almost free. I also got refills then and there.
I’ve now used it a couple times.
Wow.
Just wow.
There really is a difference. The previous models seem to have just been amateurs. It glides as if it’s doing nothing, cuts effortlessly, and easily leaves a smoother, more obviously shaven result than the others. I have yet to see how the blades stand up to my being cheap money-conscious enough to use each one for more shaves than Gillette probably had in mind, but I doubt that will be a problem.
Go figure. A new and improved that really is.
UPDATE: Added to today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
And In Other Things I’ve Long Wondered…
Aubrey Turner has the scoop on why a pathetic nine minutes is so standard as a snooze button time on alarm clocks. I’d long wondered, and wished for a clock with a settable snooze length, perhaps with a variable length, perhaps with a variable volume as well.
When you think about it, taking new technology and doing something the same because of a limitation of the old technology is silly. It’s not uncommon as an approach, however.
For example, when electricity was relatively new, factories would use electricity rather than, say, water power, but would still deliver the power to individual machines through a series of drive belts powered from a master source. Eventually the idea of bringing the electricity directly to individual, motorized machines became dominant, in the course of electricity changing everything and delivering productivity that might not have been obvious at first. But I digress.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
Doctors Versus Dentists
The Glittering Eye speaks of experiences with dentists versus doctors. The key part:
I’ve got quite a few dentists who are clients. In my professional capacity I have found them personable, respectful, grateful for services rendered, not technology-averse, and extremely hard-working in improving their businesses as businesses. For dentists the greatest business challenge is finding and retaining good staff.
I’ve had medical doctors as clients, too. They’ve been smart, peremptory, technology-averse, knew more than I did about my own specialty (or gave that impression at any rate), jealous of their prerogatives, and slow to pay. I’m not sure what the greatest business challenge for medical doctors is today. It may be reimbursement.
This brought back memories of doing support for Microsoft products and finding that doctors were disproportionately arrogant, impatient, and fanciers of themselves as more experts than you on what they were calling for help about. We all dreaded getting calls from doctors.
This is not to say all of them were like this. Just that stereotypes tend to form for a reason.
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Tipping and Self-Serve Cost Control
The topic of tipping regularly comes up for discussion in the blogosphere. Coyote Blog is no exception, discussing it in the context of a post about reducing costs by outsourcing effort to customers.
I am a strong supporter of tipping well in industries where tipping is the traditional way for the workers to earn much of their money. Restaurants and newspaper delivery, for instance. Been there.
On the other hand, there are situations where it is milked, both by employees and proprieters. The valet service he mentioned is one such instance. Not that it isn’t standard practice to tip the valet, but the sign more or less demanding it is rude. It sometimes bothers me to see tip jars, especially pointedly labeled ones, out in places one might not expect to tip.
Typically in a restaurant where someone is waiting your table or your spot at the lunch counter, it’s tippable service. You expect the employees to be paid restaurant rates and to need to earn the extra to make the job worth doing. Typically in a step up to the counter, order, get food, carry it away place, you don’t expect tips, and if it’s not much more than minimum wage, you can assume the staff is not being paid sub-minimum restaurant rates.
I have mixed feelings about the specific instance. Could you consider the $4 what you would pay for parking anyway, and the tip a standard valet thing? When you go to Arisia at the Park Plaza Hotel, if you use the valet parking it is something like $18 a day with unlimited in/out, which is similar to or slightly more than what you’d pay for do it yourself parking in the closest garage. This seems like plenty of money for them to pay the valet staff, but do they? I don’t know. I do know that when I have used the service, I have tipped at least a couple bucks, might have been as much as five, on retrieving my car. I might actually be less inclined if a sign were visible urging me to tip.
Anyway, the bulk of the post is about putting things onto customers to save money. Paying valets zero and putting up a sign saying as much to provoke tips is an example of a rather offputting way to do it. Cafeteria or buffet style restaurants strike me as another way. Fewer employees, largely self-serve, and the added bonus of less or no tipping expected. In the area we once had a chain called York Steakhouse, one of my favorite places to eat, which was cafeteria style and expressly forbid tipping. Besides the great food and ability to select a wide combination of sides, drinks and desserts, it was unique and fascinating to me when I was a kid. Fast food places do this in a small way with self-serve drink stations. In the scheme of things, that fractional amount of time saved by the employees on each order must add up.
I like the firewood scheme. In fact, I would prefer it to the packaged wood. If it saves the campground own money, all the better. If most of the crates get returned, then there’s minimal offset cost and it works well. I haven’t camped somewhere and bought firewood since I was a kid. If I remember right, it was mostly freeform; just grab a bunch. Though that may have been places where the wood was free.
Anyway, sounds like a great plan. I had never thought about “outsourcing to customers” as a coherent concept before, so in that regard the post provided a bit of a eureka moment for me. Don’t listen to me though. RTWT
Spam News
This is fantastic news on the comment spam front. Make the spam useless for the intended purpose and voila, no more reason to spam comments, for the most part. I like it.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Housing Bubble
Regular readers will recall that I speculate periodically about whether there is a housing bubble, be it regionally or generally. Via Glenn, the WSJ has an article today that discusses the possibility, which remains unclear but increasingly likely.
What I look at is the fact that the rent I pay is not unusual, but I can barely afford it. Extrapolate from that to a mortgage likely being around double what the rent is, and you’ve got trouble. Put another way, I wonder at the sustainability of an up and up and up and up housing market in light of what real people earn and can afford, in places where incomes aren’t wildly inflated to match, or become unsynchronized.
If we’re lucky, the bubble, if it is one, will have burst, be it a hard or soft landing, by the time we can be in the market. Or I’ll have written a wildly popular book or two and have money from that. Hey, it could happen.
At least we shouldn’t have to worry about not getting the benefit of tax deductions because we don’t itemize. With how much a mortgage will be when the time comes, I will have to make enough, and the interest and taxes will be so insane, that itemizing will be a no brainer.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
What’s In A Name
The boxing day tsunami had some surprising results beyond the sad loss of so many lives.
What if your product or business is named.... Tsunami? Ouch.
But will the negative implications remain for the long term? I am not convinced.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Keira Knightly Is Making Sense
Keira Knightly is on the same page as Acidman, and one sensible girl. Having trade skills would serve better on an island, and definitely better for always finding employment.
It just makes sense to know some things that aren’t going to fail you if you need a backup skill or need to survive unglamorously. I doubt her acting career will fall so flat as that, but it shows she’s as sensible as they come, in that profession.
I can’t say that bricklaying would be my first choice, but hey.
He Said Sapolio
From the timeline I mentioned earlier, this sounds like a brand straight out of Bevis and Butthead:
1869 - The first advertisement for Sapolio soap is published.
As far as I can tell without reference beyond the timeline, the brand became huge and then disappeared. Most of us have undoubtedly never heard of it. Either that or I am extrapolating way too freely from myself as a referent. I do that sometimes.
Commercial History Is Our History
I could write a whole pile of posts based on items seen in this fantastic and educational timeline. I sat here at great length, periodically boring Deb by quoting years and events, and sometimes commenting on them. That included reading two items from 1913 and then singing “when it was 1913, it was a very bad year...” in vaguely Sinatra-like fashion.
It is heavily commercially oriented, and particularly in the realm of advertising and marketing, but does not consist exclusively of business items. That gives it more context. Besides, ultimately it all connects.
What kept surprising me were historical items that happened earlier than I thought. For instance, the first transatlantic cable. Or things I didn’t know. For instance, that Quaker Oats was the first commercial breakfast food.
The third item is a “nothing new under the sun” eye opener that made me think of the introduction of the Beatles to America more than 100 years later:
1850 - Phineas T. Barnum brings Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale” to America, employing newspaper ads, handbills, and broadsides to drum up extraordinary interest in this, until now, unknown-to-Americans international singing star. From being relatively anonymous six months prior to her arrival, she is met at the docks by 30,000 New Yorkers - a result of Barnum’s advertising campaign.
As they say in the blogosphere, read the whole thing. Oh wait, this is the blogosphere! So of course you should. I look forward to reading some posts by fellow bloggers, commenting on individual items from the timeline.
Saturday, January 08, 2005
Special Protection For Janitors?
This proposal by Massachusetts politicians is just absurd. A company changes hands, they can do whatever they want. They ought to give you a chance to prove yourselves or have modest notice, but maybe their policy is to grant all cleaning contracts to a particular vendor, or to have in-house staff. It is absolutely no business of the state’s whether a cleaning company retains its work.
On a related note, the building my office is in has gone through probably six cleaning companies in as many years. Most of them were primarily non-English speaking crews. Invariably they’d start off doing a great job and making the previous cleaners look bad. Then they’d slack or get sloppy. Not just with cleaning, but with things like forgetting to lock doors and set alarms.
All of them seemed to have ways of cutting corners or neglecting things in order to do the work expediently enough to make it worth the money the building owner was willing to pay. It looks like it’s a thankless business. What I didn’t like about my stint as a janitor at one of my first jobs was the repetition. I like doing a task and having it be done. I hate having to do the same thing over and over and over, having it not remain complete. Or at least look obviously accomplished, with a superior job being clearly superior when people look at it.
I always found it disturbing that things that might not be treated as trash and thrown out without being labeled usually had to be labeled “basura” so the cleaning people would know it was “trash.” Can’t they at least learn the word “trash” for the sake of their employment?
One of the cleaning crews that had the account in my building was one guy and his two little kids; a girl about 5 and a boy about 8, at my best guess. The work that was done by crews of as many as six people, he would fly through by himself, with his kids emptying trash barrels at each desk (they do the public areas of the building plus a couple of the tenants) and doing some of the toilet cleaning.
The current crew started out being three women who looked like they were college students. They were great, until one of them left and was replaced by a teenage boy who obviously hated being there and went through the motions glumly. Their trade secret seems to be using such strong smelling cleaners in the bathrooms, you hopefully won’t notice they didn’t really clean properly. I think they clean the urinals every couple months and hope nobody notices the stench in between.
My employment as a janitor didn’t go well because I couldn’t bring myself to do a cursory, corner-cutting job that most people would consider passable. The work was structured with just that expectation. Made sense for the company. In my world, they needed seven or eight janitors for some 30 apartment building. They employed five. Probably a smart business move. I just wasn’t cut out to fit into the scheme. As, apparently, most people weren’t. They went through eleven people in four of the five janitor positions (the other guy was a lifer) in the course of a year.
But I digress.
No reason at all that people should be unable to change janitorial services, or hire and fire individual janitors, at will. Just like any other job. No reason to give illegals who work for cleaning services any special dispensation.