Preparing for Life!

This post is for a very specific audience: students in college or university; or parents of students in college or university.  Knowing what you want to be once you finish your education has often been praised as indicating a person's future success.  I will add an asterisk here: congratulations; it is good to have a goal in life.  But prepare for anything.  Be prepared, as British Boy Scouts (or boy scouts anywhere) take as their motto.  Most people with moderate intelligence, unconsciously prepare; they learn first aid; they learn CPR; they learn how to calm a hysterical person down, how to change a flat tire.  I think most people need to learn more than this first layer of general preparedness. 

Learn as many skills as you can.  There's no way to predict the roles you'll be called upon to play.  Entertain children.  Cook meals.  Camp in the woods.  Sew or mend clothes; do complicated laundry: colors, delicates, delicate fabrics.

Teach unexpected subjects.  This is something I had to learn, being a mathematician.  I had expected to have to teach people of roughly the level at which I has been when I was a freshman.  But standards always change, and I had to adapt. 

Once you're a parent, your responsibilities become a far- reaching array of demands, and you'll be remembered for the most unexpected jobs you did. 

It will be the rare person who earns adulation for their main occupation; usually, praise is earned for the most tangential services you may have performed in passing.  The more intelligent, the more public-spirited, the more outgoing you are, the more outlandish will be the praise you receive for some inexplicable service. 

Be interested in as many things as you can, and learn what it takes to be helpful in those areas. 

Arch 

Are Businessmen Truly on Our Side?

During the election season, some candidates declare that they're on the side of 'Business.'

A lot of people either work for a business, or themselves own businesses.  They all think that, if something is good for business, it's good for them.  In an ideal world, this is definitely true.  But many businessmen (and women) are trying to slant the deals so that most transactions favor the business, and not the customer. 

Often, the businesses have a captive market; that is, the customers have to buy from one trader or seller, no matter how unfair or dear the product is.  This happens if the business has put all their competitors out of business, or sells—temporarily—at such a low price that the competition gets outsold; or has to match that low price though they can't afford it.  This is a standard trick, when one retailer is so wealthy that they can sell some product at a slight loss, just long enough to put a smaller retailer out of business, and then raise their prices, once they have no competition.  Business is a dirty game,  in general, though there certainly are businesses that do not resort to that sort of trick. 

Credit cards, for instance, play lots of games.  If you've had a particular card for many years, and have got into the habit of not paying off your balance entirely, they raise your interest rate gradually, until you're paying almost 30% a year (or 2.5% per month!), and you may not realize it. 

A common ruse of manufacturers is to reissue a product—say breakfast cereal—in a package that looks familiar, but contain less of the product, like, say, 14 oz instead of a full 16 oz.  This is called 'Shrinkflation' by whistle blowers, such as Elizabeth Warren, and Robert Reich.  A bill was written in some state house, to require that these products state on the packaging that the new package is smaller (that is, contains less) than the former package. 

I can just imagine that some conservative will argue against this, saying: it's a free country, and this is an example of government overreach!  Yes, it is a free country. But truth in advertising is usually strongly disliked by businesses, who feel that customers should find out these matters for themselves.  And that is a valid point.  But people depend on the government for this sort of information (that disadvantages manufacturers).  This is why DOGE shut down so many regulations, in the name of streamlining bureaucracy.  

So,  bear in mind.  A candidate may be a friend to business.  This only means that businesses will rush to buy television commercials for them.  But this candidate will not rush to protect consumers if these businesses trick consumers into paying for things they do not want. 

Arch 

The Semi-Quint Centennial

OK.

Most of us love the USA enough to want to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence wholeheartedly. 

We would also like to prevent Trump from interfering with the celebration in any way; that's what is needed to encourage any celebrity artists to come celebrate with us.  On the other hand, we don't want to concentrate all the talent in one spot.  That might be too much of a temptation for maniacal MAGA people to come visiting with their fancy firearms. 

One possibility would be to focus on local celebrations only.  This would be depressing, for such an important anniversary, when we would have been expected to have an enormous gathering.  But what are we to do?  If we had all gone to the polls, and prevented Trump from stealing the election, and put our energy behind Kamala Harris, things would be very different today.  But there are a great many "Never Kamala" people among our fellow liberals, and some of them Never.a.woman,.anyway people.  To give them their due, they were probably making a pathetic calculation, thinking: "nobody else will vote for a woman, so let's not waste our votes."

We could actually have a location in which to all gather.  Central Park in New York City; some spacious location in Minneapolis; somewhere in Texas; those sorts of places.  Would be easy to have ICE come in and cause havoc.  I wonder whether armed liberals are itching for an armed confrontation, but that would feed into Trump's desire to mobilize the armed services.  But we have to think of all the angles, and start planning now. 

Archeopterix 

Brucie is getting to be a Curmudgeon

There are dogs in homes surrounding ours on all sides.  Sometimes they start barking; and now Brucie is at a stage of life where puts his head on his paws, and silently endured the racket as long as he can stand it.  Then he snaps, and roars through our house, barking furiously, as if to say, don't make me come out there, and give you a piece of my mind!!!

So obviously curmudgeonly!

Arch 

It's not WHAT You Know ...

The Presidency in the US has never been, in my experience, a one man show.  The knowledge spectrum needed is wide; too wide for a single person.  With the twin problems of wealth concentration and climate change lurking in the background, a not-very-bright real estate agent and TV personality could not hope to be able to run a country like the US all by himself.  But Trump did not have a team for the White House ready.  There were plenty of eggheads in the GOP who would have been willing to help, in the first trump administration, but after how badly Anthony Fauci was treated by the MAGA, and GOP, generally, no capable person was willing to take any responsibility, especially in the area of health.  Let's face it; the people trump knows are quacks, and wall street types—and pretty shady ones, too—and Steve Bannon types (or Elon Musk types) who have more ideas about how to subvert government bureaucracy than about how to repair it.  Public health, especially, requires a certain mindset that the friends of robber barons are unlikely to have.  Your Doctor Oz, and other dispensers of TV medical advice, are probably not sufficiently weird to get Trump's approval. 

Sadly, MAGA could never have been expected to put together an administration that could get anything right; but they did not want to get anything right.  They wanted an agent for their anarchy (and racism, and Xenophobia).  It was a very short-term objective.

In other news today, the courts are getting in the way of allowing the super-grifting that trump wants to do quickly, before he gets too sick for the Oval Office.  (Or too sleepy.)  So any day now he's likely to issue a proclamation that all courts are to be shut down, since they're too hung up on laws and stuff. 

Arch 

America: Two Sides

I have lived in the USA for close to fifty years.  (On August 13, it will be exactly 50.)  You must believe me when I say: in retrospect, they were 50 totally awesome years.

Well, actually, not all of them; some of them were hard, some because of things I did; some nobody's fault.  Lots of things that go wrong are nobody's fault. 

Compared, however, to the horror stories I'm reading in the news and the popular media, I have led a wonderful life.  I have had excellent friends, who have looked out for my family and me for all these 50 years.  I was married twice, and both ladies with whom I was married were (and are) exceptional people.  I have a child (who I obviously think is wonderful) who has a number of friends who think the world of my child; I worked a single job the entire time I was employed full-time, and now I'm retired, with a reasonable retirement plan, perhaps not the sort of retirement most people dream about, but comfortable for myself and my wife, in a small home—or maybe medium-sized home—in a blue-collar neighbor-hood that's staring down the barrel of gentrification. 

But great numbers of US citizens are living with great uncertainty; people of all classes are deeply unhappy with the way things are.  We're all unhappy with the way things are being run by the trigger-happy ex-Fox News types in the White House, and the way they've derailed the technology that previous administrations had aimed against climate change. 

But I'm still convinced that life has been good to us; though I feel guilty that there are so many others who have been—and are—miserable.  Some of whom are better off than we are. 

There are some wonderful people in America.  There are also really terrible people here. 

Arch 

Stairs and Steps

I was brought up to call the cement or concrete front steps (or steps from the ground up to the back door, or the back veranda) were just steps.  Inside the house, steps to the upper floors, if any, were stairs.  If they were enclosed, they would be a staircase.

But I'm hearing people calling the front steps stairs, which is a new one on me.  Stairs are always wooden, and inside.  Outside, they're stone or concrete, and called steps.  In our town, it's possible to buy a complete flight of concrete steps for the front of your house from a garden center; a flight of five step, usually. 

But two things confuse the whole issue: firstly, some people have wooden steps for the front of their house; we do, because our front porch veranda is a little higher than usual, so an extra step is needed, or each step has to be a little taller.  Still, nobody has called our front steps stairs; they wouldn't do that unless we started doing it.

Secondly, fire escapes.   These things have metal steps, and lots of them.  So what to call them: steps or stairs?  Well, neither.  The term stairs is usually not used unless they lead from one level of a house to another, and it's a permanent installation, and it's indoors.  Fire escapes being outdoors, wouldn't be called steps.  The individual steps are certainly still steps.  But the whole flight of steps, indoors, would be stairs. 

Fire escapes can only be called that: fire escapes.  If a house has fixed outside stairs to access an upper level, they'd be called outside stairs sometimes.  You see this in homes where the upstairs part has been rented separately. 

Arch