December 2, 2011

           Modern branding, a science in itself. Look at this can. The logo is plain and bare, but nobody alive today could mistake it for anything else. It is positioned where your hand would cover the printing, which is brazenly placed sideways as if it is expected nobody needs to read it. I took a course in branding back when. The danger is over-branding, like Bayer did with Aspirin. Now anybody can call the generic product “aspirin”, (without the capital A), and the producer loses something called brand recognition. It’s enough to give you a headache.
           What’s that noise? Oh, that’s just Mike from the office flying his new helicopter. That’s the miniature radio-controlled unit that you take simulator lessons for. An excellent precaution, since the toy costs $2,200. There is a club that flies them over in TY Park and I hear some of the gear is impressive, like one guy with a 1/4 scale helicopter. These are gas-powered and equipped with cameras. I’ll wager every hobbyist who flies one has dreamt of the ultimate drug run.
           And where is our free WiFi? The antenna is up but no signal. This is a trailer court, dammit, not Appalachia. We got ‘lectric, indoor plumbin’ and 219 Spanish cable channels, so where is our Internet? Get started on it, guys. The denizens of this outfit need access to on-line job banks, database technology, instant hurricane updates and pretty near everything else the lot of them never heard of five years ago. How are we, as Americans, expected to continue without Twitter?
           I’ve getting barbs over my earlier post that there is no mechanical or electrical difference in the brains of an idiot and a genius. I was emphasizing that we have sensitive enough measuring tools to confirm that fact. I did not say that both parties had the same thoughts. I’ve composed music and driven a taxi, both of which undoubtedly involve thinking. But nobody is going to suggest they are the same thing.
           I can drive taxi, gawk at pretty girls and talk economics in Spanish at the same time. This is because in the big picture, all cab drivers generally think alike. A composer who thought like all other composers would not, by definition, be much of a composer. (He’d be a Jazz guitarist.) Another big difference is the ability to concentrate, which is largely a learned behavior. Most people never learn it, for never having done anything of the kind they don’t even know what it is.
           Other examples are religion and office cliques. They deem themselves nice people who get along with other nice people, but the reality is they think alike. Unless they are proselytizing, they have extreme difficultly even tolerating those of another opinion. This herding instinct is a necessary mass genetic pool for the less than intelligent to avoid extinction. Hey, it worked for the dinosaurs. At least a while.
           By 9:00 AM I had the scooter tire on the way to Competition Cycle on Griffin. They have a fat tire replacement and gave me a break by changing it out for free. The electric bike made the ten mile round trip in 50 minutes. See, I told you the system around here would start to return to normal. The way things proceeded had me thinking about a new twist on economic predictions. I passed five tire shops along the way and each was too expensive, some downtown atrociously so ($140).
           Now I know about shopping around for a bargain, but I’ve long perceived that too many American shops have a bad business model. They know if you have a job, there quickly comes a point you don’t have time to shop around. They stay in business because such a large portion of their customers are in that category. But what happens by 2016 when retired people become the second largest group of consumers? I’ve got all day to shop around and the equipment to do it with.
           Therefore I predict the places with the lowest prices will be the ones who thrive. Naturally there are quality issues, but I could see no difference between the $40 tire and the $45 tire. Who was it said an economist is someone sees something work in real life, then tries to see if it will work in theory? I’m really saying the shop around for the lowest price factor may well surge from a consideration to one of the most dominant purchasing criteria on a scale like nothing before.
           What’s my first-world problem for today? Six months after acquiring this laptop, I am still trying to get rid of all the junk software installed by the previous owner. The computer works only on XP Home, which I can’t reinstall. And despite deleting some 90 useless items, I still cannot permanently zap Windows Instant Messaging and around 5 other AOL-grade startup apps that grab 100% CPU usage for the first four minutes after boot-up. Die, MicroSoft, die!