Monthly Archives: July 2012

Animal’s Daily News

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Here, from the always-worth-reading Dr. Victor Davis Hansen, is a treatise on the current state of affairs of his own declining state of California.  Excerpt:

George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior envisioned an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West.

In the case of the Australian film, the culprit for the detribalization of the Outback was some sort of global war or perhaps nuclear holocaust that had destroyed the social fabric. Survivors were left with a memory of modern appetites but without the ability to reproduce the means to satisfy them:  in short, a sort of Procopius’s description of Gothic Italy circa AD 540.

Our Version

Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

It’s important to note that Dr. Hansen has spent his life in California.  He obviously loves his home state and bemoans what a generation of self-absorbed, clueless government has done to it.  I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in California myself, and I understand how the Golden State appealed to people, years ago.

I don’t see how it appeals to anyone now.

Goodbye, Blue Monday

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Goodbye, Blue Monday

Travel and work conspire to make this a short post this morning.  Here are a couple of interesting stories from an abbreviated morning news-crawl:

Food Prices May Increase by 3-4% Following Drought.  That’s not good.

Social Security Disability is Going Broke.  Along with the rest of Social Security, of course.

None of the news seems good this morning, True Believers; interesting times, indeed.  But, it’s Monday.  Things have the whole week to get better.

Hang in there!  More as events warrant.

Animal’s Daily News, Saturday Edition

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There’s no better way to start a weekend than a Saturday morning on the trap range, followed by lunch at Bass Pro Shops.  After lunch loyal sidekick Rat and I replenished our ammo supply while the wives examined archery tackle and looked through the household and kids’ stuff.  A great day.  It’s too bad the weekend will be cut short by the necessity of flying to Minneapolis tomorrow, but that’s self-employment for you.

Incidentally, Bass Pro is a great place to source almost anything in the outdoor-sports world, from fishing tackle to boats to elephant guns.  It’s a great place to spend a Saturday afternoon; it wouldn’t be hard for any outdoorsman to spend an entire Powerball jackpot there.

It is an ongoing challenge to keep the Animal Clan supplied in those two precious metals, brass and lead; frequent visits to Bass Pro and Gander Mountain are in order for that reason alone.

Any reason’s a good reason.

A few news tidbits:

Some Women are Too Hot to Hire.  Who knew?

Office Help

This is a topic I’ve wondered about for some time.  Why Does The UN Still Exist?  Excerpt:

What exactly is the United Nations and, for that matter, why is there still a United Nations at all? How has it managed to survive over time, from 1945 down to the present—given its long record of underperformance, frequent outright failure, and even more frequent irrelevance?

On the United Nations’ core issues—collective peace and security, development, and universal human values and rights—its record is mediocre, unless one counts sheer institutional persistence as enough. And that record is particularly poor concerning the issue from which the collective sprang in 1945: international peace and security through the collective itself. Why, then, has not the ruthless evolutionary logic of history pruned it as a failed institutional sapling in a relentlessly competitive forest, as the League was pruned?

The UN has outlived its usefulness; it needs to be either dramatically reformed or scrapped.  They do a fair job of delivering humanitarian assistance, but only fair; the U.S. Navy is always the organization the seems to get to natural disasters the firstest with the mostest (see the Indonesian tsunami relief effort), and the UN pretty much screws up everything else they attempt.  Combine that with rampant corruption and you get an organization that should have been shut down years ago.

Animal’s Daily News, Friday Totty Edition

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Google, it seems, has unveiled a prototype of the new, improved, better and faster internet.

In Kansas City.  Well, why not?  Excerpt:

The service, known as Google Fiber, will offer residents in selected parts of the metropolitan area in both Kansas and Missouri the option of purchasing the gigabit Internet service for $70 a month or both the Internet and a television service for $120 a month. The TV service, Google said, comes with a Nexus 7 tablet that serves as a remote.

The announcement, made in a plaza on the Kansas-Missouri state line, is Google’s venture into a world of broadband providers who have looked skeptically at the company’s effort. Some have branded it a publicity stunt that will do little to advance the country’s broadband agenda. Typical broadband providers undertake the costly task of providing service to millions of homes, while Google’s prototype will reach far fewer customers – the initial round here is available to about 170,000 homes.

Technology tends to get better, faster and cheaper.  The internet has already revolutionized such things as:

1) Business.  A big part of my business, maybe as much as a third these days, is carried out from my own home office via email, VPN connections and cloud data services like YouSendIt.  And why not?  You can’t beat the commute.  As this trend grows, and it surely will, imagine the change in morning and evening traffic – in fuel consumption – in air quality.

2) Shopping.  One word:  Amazon.  You can buy anything from old, out of print books to vitamins, to computers, to clothes, to cowboy hats.  Ditto for eBay – and add cars to that latter service.  You can buy groceries online for delivery in many cities.  Order a pizza, shop for a vacation package, buy some digital music – all in seconds.  No expensive brick-and-mortar stores to maintain, no checkout clerks, no utility bills; ultimately, those things result in a better deal for consumers.

3) Dating.  It’s popular to snicker at online dating services, but many, many people have started loving, satisfying relationships with someone they met online, many of them through service like Match.com.

4) Entertainment.  From online games to streaming music to movies, there are a million ways to fill your entertainment hours on the Web.

5) Edumacation.  Schools, especially at the college level, are going more and more to an online model.  It makes sense; a brick-and-mortar establishment costs millions in utility and maintenance costs.  Why not decentralize?  Why not have professors lecture from their home offices, with students logging in from their own homes?  All the expenses of dorms, travel, all that – gone.  Maybe we can even see an end to the sale of worthless degrees in Minority Walrus Polishing and so forth.

That last one may be the most significant; so far.  The Information Revolution has only begun, and like the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions before, it will probably change our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine.

That’s not to say there won’t be some casualties along the way, of course.

Now, from good news to (maybe) bad:  Is the U.S. Headed for Recession?  Excerpt:

We know growth is painfully slow, and slowing. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last week suggested that the American job-creation machine is “stuck in the mud.” The economy expanded at a 1.9% annual rate in the first quarter. The second quarter was worse. Analysts expect the government estimate, due Friday, to be between 1% and 1.5% despite a boost from housing and auto sales.

Retail sales have fallen for three months in a row. Consumer confidence is sinking. Manufacturing, which had been vigorous, shows signs of weakening. Government belt-tightening is restraining growth. Europe, which still buys about one-fifth of U.S. exports, is in recession, and the rest of the world is slowing. Drought is sure to push up food prices, pinching consumer spending on other things.

It seem certain that the drought across much of the Midwest is the elephant in the room.  Food prices will spike if the crops are bad, and while not everyone needs new laptops, new cars or even new clothes, everyone needs to eat.

Of course, having the Imperial Federal Government adopt policies that favor producers would help, too.  American needs to be a nation that makes things; wealth is created, by and large, by the provision of value through effort, and while that can be done through the provision of services (such as my consulting business) it is generally done through the process of taking raw materials and making from them things that others want to buy.  We’ve known this at least since Adam Smith.

In the meantime, there’s work to do; and so we return you to your Friday, already in progress.

A Few Tips For Comments on Internet Forums.

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1) Be original.  Don’t repeat the same old bumper-sticker slogan everyone on the planet has seen ten thousand and six times already.  Example:   In almost every story about animal rights loons, a subject I still follow, some idiot has to comment,  “I belong to PETA – People Eating Tasty Animals, hur hur hur.”  OK.  It was mildly amusing the first time I saw it.  In 1997.  It stopped being amusing about ten seconds later.

2) Use a furshlugginer spell-check!  Taken from an actual forum only this evening:  “no coinsadence… (sic)”  Seriously?  You couldn’t take sixteen seconds to look up how the word was spelled?  You’re OK with looking like an ignoramus?  Speaking of which:

3) Don’t use lazy, stupid ‘netspeak.  “You” is two more keystrokes than “u.”  What does that take, nine nanoseconds?  Is your time that valuable?  Let me answer that – it’s not.

4) Fact-check.  Don’t post stuff that is stupidly easy to prove wrong.  Don’t pass on the stupid tinfoil-helmet horseshit your brother-in-law emailed you behind an endless string of “Fw fw fw fw fw fw…” headers.

5) CAPS LOCK IS NOT CRUISE CONTROL FOR COOL.  All caps can be used for emphasis.  Not for every word you write.

6) Don’t be a cheerleader.  Don’t post two or three word posts proclaiming “Great post!”  “I agree!”  “Right on!”  Stop it!  If you don’t have something substantive to add, don’t hit Reply.

7) Don’t spam.  I don’t care how convinced you are that the Bilderbergers are taking over the planet so they can sell it to the Quaagars from the Glixtonian Nebula; stop copy-and-pasting the same warning over and over into every forum you can find.

8) Grow up.  Don’t engage in juvenile name-calling.  From my own Rules of the Game page:  “In name-calling I include juvenile crap like “teabaggers, DemoCRAPS, Cantservatives, LIEberals,” and so on.  We’re all grown-ups here.  That kind of horseshit belongs in junior high school.  Leave it there.”

9) Don’t whiff off.  If you start a discussion, stick around to finish it.  Don’t drop a contentious statement in and run off to leave your post lying in the forum like a fresh cow pie.

10)  If you are, at present, doing any of the above – STOP.  Stop it NOW.

That is all.