More Good Old Days: Going Postal by Terry Pratchet

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There's another, huge difference between how businesses were run half a century ago (okay, laugh; brave new world, right?) and how they are run today, and more importantly, by whom.

When the Stock Market was invented, it was a way for entrepreneurs to be connected with development money, essentially directly from investors.  (It used to be the case that you had to get a bank to finance your project, and being under the thumb of a single bank was too difficult, not to mention open to abusive practices.)  You sold a symbolic fragment of your company --called a share--to each of a number of investors, and you paid them a share of your profits.  (You could, in principle, buy back those shares, at the going rate, when you were rolling in dough someday.)

When a better mousetrap began to be successfully marketed, the inventor and his sons (and maybe daughters, if he was soft in the head) would migrate into more of an oversight role, and let younger people, and assistants, take over the actual running of the company.  The Head Family, to coin a phrase, became the nucleus of a Board of Governors, added in some outside experts, a few representatives of the stockholders, a lawyer or two, and they elected you Chairman.  By now your son (or son-in-law, or daughter) was the Manager of the company.  So there was (1) The Board, headed by the original developer, (2) The Stockholders, who had given the money for development, and now simply sat back and raked in the profits, but kept an eye on how the company was run, and (3) the folks in the workshop, who kept churning out the mousetraps.  Of course there were (Appendix 1) marketing folks, who dream up fanciful names for your newer models, do research to choose the best colors for everything, accountants to keep the records, lawyers to make sure you stayed within the law, receptionists, coffee-brewers, etc etc.

Somewhere along the line, companies decided that small companies had it hard.  Big companies were better able to fight to stay alive, and survive the changing fashions of public buying patterns.  Who knew whether mousetraps would sell over the long run?  Better get a share of your biggest competitors: the Cat Breeders, just in case Cats became the fashion.

Once the idea of buying out your competition gained ground, it became the main interest of both the Board, and the Stockholders.  And so a fourth group of people came into being: Upper Management.  Their job was to diversify.  In other words, there were specialists to look after everything that had nothing to do with mousetraps.

One of my favorite authors is Terry Pratchett, a Briton, who writes in a genre that subsumes science fiction, fantasy, and parody.  For his own inscrutable reasons, he has invented a "corner of the universe" in which there is a planet that is shaped like a disc, called Discworld, all the better to emphasize the fact that any resemblance between anything that takes place there and anything happening on a more familiar planet is entirely coincidental.

In one of his more recent books: Going Postal [2004], Pratchett vents his frustration at this changing pattern of corporate governance.  In that book, a company that invents something akin to the Telegraph (but based more on a network of heliograph stations) is bought out by a new management, which drives it into the dust through business practices that one reads about with increasing recognition and mounting fury.  It is a mixture of deceit, financial maneuvering, blackmail (which almost never happens in modern finance, actually;), strong-arming, and murder.  Reading that book makes the forces in modern finance far more transparent than I can make them.  It is nothing if not a simple, funny story, in case my readers begin to suspect that it is a lecture.  Pratchett very occasionally falls into a brief lecturing mode, but in this case, the editorializing is usually confined to maybe a couple of sentences, and then we're back racing through the absolute riot of a story.

The story (spoiler alert!) is as follows: our hero, a confidence trickster named Moist von Lipwig at birth, finds himself on Death Row, but is plucked from oblivion by the Tyrant of the City.  (Tyrant simply means a cross between Mayor and Governor, in this world.  For all intents and purposes, the City may as well be a large country.)  Moist is charged with resuscitating the Postal Service.

Anyone who is impatient with inefficiency is unlikely to be amused by this book.  The first half of the book is essentially a rollicking introduction to the way Pratchett can describe almost mythic inefficiency, as well as a cast of toweringly wacky protagonists.  But, while this is going on, we begin to learn about the vicious crew that "runs" the telegraph company across the way.  Murder, mayhem, fraud, romance, chain-smoking, labor laws, all are paraded before our disbelieving eyes.

Unseen University Stamp

To be perfectly honest, a reader unacquainted with Discworld will be definitely left mildly puzzled by some of the inside jokes.  But only very mildly.  All the more reason to read this one a second time, after you've learned up the private jokes.  They are not very funny, but they have a lovely cumulative effect.  The rules of magic, symbolized by Academia, in turn represented by Unseen University and its breezy Archchancellor, are pretty much What You See Is What You Get.  It seems an enormous waste of time to read all the Discworld books, just to pick up a few inside jokes.

(Incidentally, another marvelous Pratchett story, The Truth constitutes a sort-of prequel to this one.)

Anyhow, to summarize, I recommend Going Postal with all my thumbs and my Big Toe up, as a brilliantly entertaining allegory for all that is wrong with modern business and the modern corporate culture, and its infuriating Too Big To Fail-ness.  The resolutions of all the inconsistencies are too Discworld, and sentimental (and satisfying) to give a hint of direction to resolution of our own real-world problems.  But recognition and understanding are first steps.  Modern Corporations do not represent American Ingenuity anymore; they simply stand for institutionalized greed.  It is a frightening thought that my own pension plan is cradled in the gentle hands of a modern corporation.

(Postscript: Evidently Going Postal was shown as a two-episode TV series in May 2010, something I just learned a minute ago.)

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The Good Old Days!

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When (most) conservatives talk about the good old days, they give the impression that they were better: that's the essence of (cultural, at least,) conservatism.  Keep the old ways.  When liberals talk about the good old days, it's usually to point out how far we've come.  But, of course, what has happened is that the conservatives have had a field day for 30 years, so I guess that would be several field decades, so that things are not as good as a liberal would like.

I'm going to be ambiguous about it; some things are better, some things are worse.

One thing that has changed a lot is everyday life.  For instance, buying groceries.  Of course, prices used to be unbelievably lower, you got a lot of local food from farms close by.  You ate mostly food you cooked at home from scratch, and most folks knew to cook (even the guys, though they kept this kind of a secret).  These days, the prices are higher; the cost of college and the cost of food are the things that go up the fastest.  But there is a lot more variety of food, and it doesn't cost as much as you would expect, once you're used the prices.  How is this?  Some of the food is even half-cooked; you only need to go home and, you know, add water, or whatever.  What has changed?

Enormous trucks.  Enormous farms.  Corporations that get food from all over the world, and sell it to your supermarket.  The people who make the most money out of all this are the big food companies (e.g. Kraft, ConAgra, General Mills, Hormel, Perdue, and the usual suspects), with the trucking companies coming next, the Supermarket chains coming after that, and then the providers of plastic containers and packaging, etc etc.

What about the local farms?  Well, now they're competing with the big farms out west, which means that they have to sell their produce at much lower prices than they would if they got to sell directly to the grocers.  This is a tragedy that is well recognized.  The Economists would say that the small farms were mismanaged and simply ran at a loss.  The rest of use would say that the workers were paid a fair wage, the animals were kept under much more humane conditions, and the food was actually superior.

Another thing that has changed is the roads, and vehicular traffic.  The traffic is heavier, the vehicles are bigger, there are more of them, and they're going a lot faster, and it is more dangerous.  In addition, of course, people are actually conducting phone conversations while they drive.  On the other hand, more people have (more) cars; some of them several cars per person, one for work, one for off-road, one for cruising for chicks, one for towing the boat, one to go with your red jacket ...

Cars are, generally speaking, more sophisticated, and pollute a lot less, per car.  Of course, with a trillion cars out there, there are a hundred cars helping to pollute the air in the place of one car from around the sixties, so there has not been any net improvement.  (In the special case of Los Angeles County, however, apparently there has been improvement for some time.  However, a recent news story revealed that, since cars in California hardly rust out at the rate in colder climes, many older cars (of pre-1980 vintage) are still on the roads, so that the pollution control in some legal vehicles are well below the standards for new cars.  They are sliding standards, which are more lenient for older cars.  Maybe it's time to stop the sliding?)

When you buy most products whose use or consumption has an impact on your health, labels are now required, to let you know facts about the product.

Cars, for instance, must report miles per gallon.  Flushes must tell you water use per flush.  Food has to tell you saturated fats and lots of little details per serving.  Products potentially harmful to children have to be labeled.  Most amusingly, of course, cigarettes and alcohol are labeled as being harmful, something we have known for a century.

Recently, legislation was passed in Pennsylvania that large diesel vehicles (more than 5 tons in weight) are not permitted to idle while parked in public areas.  Hallelujah!  Not only are rest areas on Interstate highways going to be quieter at night, they are going to be a trillion times less noxious.  It became fashionable for diesel truck drivers to keep their enormous engines on all the time in the seventies, and it was so much fun for them, it became the norm, a sort of macho thing.

What about family life?  Were the good old days better for people?  For children?  For women?  Men had a lot more power in their homes, and women took greater responsibility for keeping the family together, and looking after the children.  This was arguably better for the children, in an ideal middle-class family.  But many women were unhappy staying at home, and in poorer homes already both partners had to work.  Women's occupations were uninspiring, repetitive jobs: answering phones, making coffee, slaving over stoves, looking after children, sewing clothing, weaving, and of course, farm work.  The more rewarding jobs, such as teaching, nursing, etc required long hours for pay considerably less than their male counterparts.

In the last analysis, many of these conditions have changed only in small ways.  The income gap is still present, though it has narrowed; a woman teacher would earn almost the same as a man.  A nurse earns considerably less than a doctor.  Women doctors: do they earn as much as their male colleagues?  It is difficult to know.

Alcoholism and smoking were difficult issues.  These vices disrupted homes across demographic lines; one could almost guarantee a typical woman that her husband would be a heavy drinker in the earlier parts of the last century.  The situation is somewhat better, mostly because drunken misbehavior on the part of men is not as widely tolerated anymore.  On the other hand, women have started drinking much more heavily.  Drinking among women starts in college, and it seems to me that it is getting very heavy indeed.  Smoking, I believe, is now a bigger risk for women than for men.  Certainly, a greater percentage of people smoking outside college buildings, in my observation, are women.

Education?  The dropout rate has gone down.  But what does it signify?  If a typical college graduate of 2010 was as well-educated as a typical college graduate of 1960, we could claim that things were looking up.

On the plus side, students have to be prepared for a more complex society today than the one their grandparents lived in.  Health insurance, the stock market, college, computers, even obtaining phone service, are all more complicated, and we can safely say that modern kids manage these things OK.  On the other hand, at the simple things of life, such as running a family, educating your children, maintaining your home, repairing your car, holding down a job, our grandparents would have been vastly better.

But we are comparing apples to oranges.  These days, everybody completes high-school; we're comfortable ignoring those who do not.  But fifty years ago, close to a quarter of the population (and it could be even higher) did not have a high-school degree, and a high-school degree was not required for many jobs.  Those who did not have a High-School Diploma were, some of them, quite able to do a lot of things that would probably defeat a typical modern adult, e.g. fix a leaking roof.  On the other hand, there were undoubtedly many others, around the 1950s and 1960s, who might have been capable, but never made it through high school, and led miserable lives.  So the formal education system has improved to accommodate a wider variety of ability and family background, but the education content has not kept pace with the needs of the workplace.

The awareness of health issues: being overweight, cholesterol, exercise, high blood pressure, environmental pollution, smoking, highway safety, drug safety; these things make it easier to live a healthier life.  There are more effective drugs today: Ibuprofen, diabetic drugs, drugs for asthma and allergies, childhood diseases.  There is greater awareness of how American business, commerce, economics impacts quality of life in other countries: Mexico, Colombia, Africa, Palestine, China, etc.  On the other hand, lifestyles are far more sedentary; people do not even need to leave their homes to watch a movie.  Is this progress?  Well, yes.  But the physical exertion of earlier times undoubtedly helped to offset some of the disadvantages of poor diet.  Our modern diets are, on the average, actually worse, though access to good food is far, far greater.  So we eat bad food out of choice, not out of necessity.
Finally, for many older people, the memory of older times are memories of growing up in homogeneous neighborhoods.  The racial homogeneity of the neighborhoods of the last century are undoubtedly a part of the yearning at least some of us feel.  For some, the richness of the demographics of many urban and suburban neighborhoods are pluses they do not recognize.  Children consider hanging out with black, Latino, Asian and Oriental kids the normal state of things, but for the adults: this is now, but that was then, when everyone on your street was almost exactly like you.  So, it's neither better nor worse; just different!

Summary for the Busy Executive: Your Metabolism

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You've probably seen these headings: "Summary for the Busy Executive."  Most times it is tongue-in-cheek --as it is here-- but one does get the impression that Executives do not like to read much.  On the face of it, it seems to be because their time is so precious, but mostly it is because they read so little that they've lost the ability to read fast.  I'm a little like that, and I'm not even an executive.  I just sit here, writing blogs, with as many words in them as I can manage, except this one.

For your muscles to work, they have to get power from somewhere, just like an appliance.  There are two sorts of work (usually, and a third sort of work that you can safely ignore for the moment, which I will describe later):

Brief, low-intensity work.  Just getting up from your chair and walking across the room to turn the TV on, or the radio off, or eating, or reading the newspaper; this is all low-intensity work, and usually proceeds in spurts.  Reading, of course, can be a protracted (long-duration) activity, but it still falls into this class.  All this kind of activity is fueled by plain old sugar.

Moderate-intensity work for long periods.  This includes anything that is moderately strenuous, such as walking, slow running, swimming, rowing, riding (a pushbike or even a horse, I suppose), and easy hiking, as long as you do it for some time.  This sort of activity starts off burning sugar --we always have a little sugar in the blood-- but, after about 20 minutes, the body starts to dig up fat from all the places in which it has been stashed, e.g. big arm and leg muscles, and around your waist, and starts burning that, very slowly.  A gram of fat --as far as I know, and don't quote me on this-- has as much energy as ten grams of sugar, so once this process has begun, you sort of cruise along.  This is often called the second wind, which cuts in after you've been walking or running or yelling or singing or swimming for more than about 20 minutes.

It seems that, with training, people can get into the fat-burning zone a little faster.  This just might be an old wives' tale.

At any rate, burning fat needs a little more oxygen than burning sugar.  You have to breathe a little harder, but not enormous gulps of air, or anything.  When you're walking your dog for any distance, you notice them panting; part of that is that they perspire through their breath, so they have to cool down that way.  But some of it is, yes, getting into the fat-burning zone, and you might get just a bit breathless, too.  This is why it's called aerobic exercise; fat-burning uses up more oxygen than sugar-burning.

If you are very short of breath, that's different.  Your muscles are craving the oxygen, but your heart can't do the job.  It's trying to pump like crazy, but your arteries are all clogged up, and the body blames the lungs, so the lungs work harder, but all for nothing.  Ironically, the treatment of this situation will probably involve a combination of drugs, exercise, and, unfortunately, possibly surgery.  I would have it done, because it is a serious quality of life issue.

Once again, let me emphasize that the amount of fat you burn is proportional to the amount of time you exercise after getting into the fat burning zone.  So if you get into your fat-burning state after exactly 20 minutes,
You burn zero grams of fat if you stop right then;
You burn twice as many grams of fat if you exercise for 10 minutes more than if you exercise for 5 minutes more.

This morning, I went for an easy walk out to Dunkin' Donuts.  Predictably, I started breathing a little harder just around the 25-minute mark.  It was nearly half an hour into the walk when I hit the old doughnut-and-coffee hole, at which point I bought a cup of coffee, which was singularly disappointing.  It was weak, and I had asked for milk, and they must have put in skim milk, or something like that.  So it was healthy, but tasted horrible.  The things I do for my health!

Then I turned around, and walked home.  This time around, I suspect that I hit the aerobic state more quickly, and I got the benefit of another good 20 minutes of exercise.  Notice that those first twenty or so sugar-burning minutes do not burn fat at all.

Finally,

Brief, high-intensity activity.  I mean things like a sudden sprint, or lifting a very heavy object a short distance, or playing a point in tennis.  For these short bursts, the body actually burns protein.  The body is left with a little lactic acid, which, if it accumulates, gives you a painful cramp.  Obviously, unless you want to actually burn off your muscles rather than your fat, you don't want to do this sort of thing for therapeutic reasons.  If you just have to do it as part of your job, or something else that is important, like spring cleaning, well, okay.  Competitive tennis is hard on the body.  Recreational tennis, on the other hand, could be an aerobic activity, depending on how you play.

In all that preceded, I avoided actually making suggestions; but the principles are easy enough for someone who is in moderately good health to know what is beneficial and what is not.  If your health is poor, you need expert advice to avoid activity that your body is not ready for.  Generally speaking, slow walking for 25 minutes would be the least dangerous exercise, only coming next to slow swimming for 25 minutes.  The water supports your weight, taking some of the load off your heart, but also gives a little resistance, which is good.  This is especially suitable for people with very small feet, which would have trouble supporting your weight for long distances.  Small feet look lovely, but are rather a curse when you want to walk.
 

If you want to walk, get the best supporting sneakers you can afford.  'Nuff said.

If you're diabetic, don't go more than a 3-minute walk from a source of sugar, or take a source with you, e.g. an emergency can of orange soda in your backpack.  (And drink sparingly as needed; most orange soda contains like 30 grams of sugar.)

A Culinary Adventure!

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Hello, boys and girls!  Today is going to be special, because we're going to do something a little different!

First, I would like to take a brief survey.  How many of my readers have just come home from the grocery store (or even the supermarket!) with a packet of Muffin Mix, and thought to themselves: Oh dear; I just don't want to heat the house up with a lot of baking!  Let's see ... I thought I saw some hands going up ... yes!  Isn't that so true?  Just heat up a slice of pizza in the oven, and suddenly it's so hot, you've got to jump in the pool!  (And, sometimes, you don't even have one.  A pool, I mean.)

This is exactly what happened to me, only I have this little set up that works really well for me.  See, I have this little keyboard, and it came with --well, it didn't exactly come with it; I had to go out and buy it, you know?  Anyway-- it's this little stand thing; it's sort like of one of these Star Wars X wing fighters, you know what I mean?  One of those things, but of course it isn't going anywhere; it's just parked in my living room not doing much of anything.  But it really is a stand, but I don't use it for the keyboard any more.  So I put it out in the  back porch (which is another long story), and then, I bring out my convection oven!!  I don't think they make them any more (because I think little tots kept swallowing them, or who knows) but it is about the size of a small microwave, and much lighter.  So, I'm all set to go, and it's outside, so the house stays cool!  They say: preheat to 400 F, so that's the first thing to do.  (When the muffins are ready, I'm just going to throw them in, because, well, it's a convection oven, and it bakes in a hurry.)

The method is easy.  You put in some water --at least in my packet, which is KrustEaz, or something like that, you start with a cup and a quarter of water.  Then you add the mix, mix it up (I just use a beater from an old mixer that blew up one day, but the beater works fine,) then you fold in the fruit, er, stuff.  They give you a bag of, well in my case it was apple, in some sort of sticky syrup.  'Fold' means, just mix it in, but just lightly.  Now, I like just a little more fiber in my muffins.  So I crushed a tablespoonful or so of whole grain oatmeal, which of course is guaranteed to make the whole thing too dry.  So, I added a tablespoon of sugar-free Marmalade!!  So I folded those in.

Meanwhile, the KrustEaz fellows are giving me a recipe for 12 muffins, but I can make only 6.  You divide the batter up as well as you can (first you've got to grease the muffin tins.  I didn't have any spray stuff, so I just used my fingers --ew-- then I dusted the tray with rye flour.  Why rye?  Because that's all the flour I had in the house!!

Bake for eighteen minutes (I did 2o, just to be contrary), cool for five minutes, and serve!

I also bought some butter and olive-oil spread, which I'm sure will be yummy, and I will see how it comes out.  Hold on a second, while I try these little fellows ...

Oh my goodness, they are so good!  Well, what do you expect?  You add marmalade, how could you go wrong?

I mean, there are teen recipes, like: "Mix up a quart of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, a quarter cup of peanut butter, and a tablespoon of sprinkles, and top with whipped cream."  Like, this is not a recipe that can go south in any conceivable way.  Or: "Top a slice of pizza with chicken nuggets and blue cheese salad dressing, and eat with French fries."  I don't see the point in even mentioning these kinds of things in the same breath as a real recipe.

So, anyway, there's about a muffin's worth of batter still left, and I'm trying to think how to get it baked; maybe I'll just deep fry it with the chicken wings.

So, until next time, this is Arch, signing off:  Signoff!!!

The Phony Social Security Crisis

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Mano Singham, whose brilliant blog I follow, has a beautiful sequence of posts on Social Security.

Apparently, SS has become the pet-hate du jour of some people, and the Democrats are trying to fix it.  Singham described most of the popular suggested fixes.  I'll just mention two ideas, and how they were decided in such a way as to screw the working class.

Most of us do not realize that your income is taxed for Social Security only up to about $106,000 a year.  So, your ordinary millionaires are not taxed on all their income, for Social Security, just the first tiny bit.  Of course, this means that they won't get as much Social Security when they retire, compared to their present incomes.  But one expects that they will have a lot more savings than the rest of us.  One of the suggestions is that this cap be removed completely.  In other words, everybody pays a fixed proportion of their income into Social Security.  Anyone earning less than $106,ooo a year will never know the difference, except for the screaming of the plutocrats.  But there seems to be much opposition to this move.  Why?  Because most of the opposition is from fairly wealthy people (many of whom are in Congress) who have rich friends, and they're fighting for themselves.  Those who are for raising this cap e.g. progressive Democrats and other "left-leaning" folks are fighting for the poor, and obviously it is a lot harder to fight for a principle that benefits someone else than it is to keep something for yourself.  This move, to raise the cap, screws the wealthy class, so of course it is not going to work.

A very popular suggestion is to raise the retirement age to 70.

Think about this.  As Mano Singham points out, the kind of work that the upper classes do can still be done even when you're older.  You'll be stuck in an air-conditioned office, peering anxiously at your stocks losing value, every weekday from 9 to 5.  This is a hardship.  If they would let you retire at 55, you could do that at home, while the dog drools on your lap.  Honestly, a lot of upper management (read: income before taxes a lot higher than $106,000 per year) does little other than watch it's money grow on the stock market.

On the other hand, if you work in a factory, or as a waitress, or as a teacher in an elementary school, or a clerk in a store, you get to keep on working until you're 70.  Of course, it's still air-conditioned, but for these active occupations, you have to actually work, often on your feet.  This is not just dragging yourself over to the coffee machine.  Raising the retirement age is staggering for those who perform strenuous work.  For those whose work is in the mind, very few of us can actually see the work taking place.

So the move to raise retirement age screws the working classes, and of course a majority of congressmen would go for that.  After all, it is traditional that the poor must work a lot harder for anything they get than the wealthy, even poor senior citizens.  This plan is going to pass.

I personally plan to work past the usual retirement age simply because my retirement savings aren't worth a tinker's cuss.  And who made sure that my savings aren't worth a tinker's c*%&$?  A crew whose incomes are a lot greater than $106,000, namely the so-called Wall Street sons of bitches who screwed up the Mortgage industry, gotta love 'em.

A

Economics

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Economics is getting too important to be left to the Econogeeks.  It is just one of several things that people simply tinker with: dysfunctional families, ecology, unmotivated kids, etc.  In those instances, I suppose, it is justified; after all, nobody likes to prescribe to a family exactly what they ought to be doing, because you get to take on the entire responsibility for everything that will go wrong with them in the future.

But the Economy needs to be handled a lot better.  Sure, some of the same problems are there: if you take it on directly, head on, a lot of people are going to expect you to do a perfect job of it.  But it is becoming clear that "Economics" simply cannot be left to itself.

In the last week I have seen several things that have been adversely affected by the current economic climate.  Two of them are

Lilith Fair: a touring sequence of concerts by women performers.  Tickets are not selling, which is causing some of the artists to drop out of the lineup, which results in even more performers dropping out.  Obviously, when money is tight, there is still less tolerance of Mom when she wants to blow $25 on some women-only concert.  (Men do attend the concerts, evidently some very sweet guys; and we're told that there is hardly any crowding in the Men's Rooms.)

Female Imams in China: it appears that women are taking on leadership roles in the Islamic parts of China.  But again, we're told that they're being impacted by the poor economy.

I guess the more naive among us (including me) don't realize that certain things cannot be controlled too much: for instance, you can't force a performer to perform even if you cannot pay them as much as they want to be paid.  How are these things done?  Perhaps they get a flat fee, and maybe a transportation allowance, and a portion of the "gate receipts", which seems only fair.

Economics becomes this fluffy, woozy thing when a country becomes globalized to an extreme degree.  Until recently, for instance, the USA could feed itself with crops grown mainly within its borders, with inexpensive immigrant labor.  But part of the way of life here is that commodities must cost very little: cheap gasoline, cheap furniture, cheap food, cheap clothing.  The only way to do it is to get it from the third world.

Very soon, all the gasoline, furniture, food and clothing is coming from the Third World.  To begin with, the Third World is happy to provide all this, not knowing exactly how much this stuff is enjoyed over here.  But then, they would like to get computers and big cars and movies from here.  This is all very fine; they produce their stuff for cheap, we produce our stuff for not so cheap, since we're a lot more civilized, but it creates a very tight connection between their economy, and ours.

Now, there are a lot of guys who don't actually do the producing.  They actually make money on the business connections.  Every time money travels in or out, they make money.  These guys are called Wall Street.  For years they have claimed that if you mess with them, the conduit for cheap this and that will get screwed.

Well.  Leaving them to their own devices is clearly just as dangerous.  I have no suggestions as to what parts of the Economy must be controlled, or how to control it.  But consider the following:

Farmers are growing food, which they cannot sell even at prices lower than the prices charged in supermarkets.

What's wrong with this picture?  The Economy is in the hands of middle-men, who are most certainly not easy to satisfy.

Our lives become very uncomfortable if we think about this kind of problem, so we don't; the Econogeeks are only too happy to do the thinking for us, and the Wall Street Boyes are only too happy to scare the Econogeeks into gibbering idiots.

Arch

Who reads this Blog?

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I recently put in (at the suggestion of Google) an array of buttons under each post, so readers could weigh in with their assessment.  There is a "Fun" button, an "Interesting" buttons, and ... another one; I forget.  None of them have been clicked, so I conclude that the only people reading this blog are people who either are very pressed for time, or simply hate it!

There could also be people reading it, just to make sure they keep up with the latest news.  This makes me laugh so hard that I think I threw out my back again.

My family and friends might be reading it too, both of them, but they obviously want to keep it anonymous.  I read it, because my memory is getting weak and I don't want to forget what pissed me off this morning.  At any rate, we've had at least 500 visits since I put up that counter, which I did in ... when?  I have to remember, or it makes absolutely no sense.  Last week?  I had a thousand visitors a week!  Awesome.

In addition, nobody is making comments.  The reason is that someone is spamming me, and I have to delete their comments, or all my readers will end up marrying young ladies from China.  I'm sure that's a step up for some of them; who knows what they're marrying at present?  Maybe I will make comments unmoderated.  Just a warning: don't click on anything I wouldn't click on, especially if you've already got a Chinese wife!

Arch, guest blogger