March 27, 2014

Yesteryear
One year ago: March 27, 2013
Five years ago:March 27, 2009

           Still looking for a sidecar kit (that’s a kit, not a sidecar), I see these smaller units for scooters. This is a Vespa and terribly over-priced. Just the scooter shown here retails for $6,000 roughly. I can’t find the sidecar prices as shown, but I infer another $2,600. This puts them into the range of a good used car and I’m not so sure on a 150cc scooter I’d want a passenger in the sidecar. Cargo is different. My Chinese knock-off has so far cost me around $1,200 $1,600 including a new motor. The original scooter now has 11,500 miles on it. And it is starting to look like it.

           No matter how you streamline, the world is designed to make sure there are always entire days you have to do things their way. To get some nagging chores out of the way, it took me from 7:00 AM to 3:10 PM. It was like having a job. I wound up at Flippers, the movie theater out on Taft. But that is one oddball movie place in that their movies start around 1:00PM or 4:00PM, matinees I’m talking about of course. Both finish times are inconvenient for me. I missed a movie today which would have been paid for with the money I found last day.
           The Prof. emailed to say I’d left too early, in that later, they found another $105 on the floor. See, that’s why I don’t go out in the afternoon. Normally I would have looked myself. We were talking about advertising, mainly newspaper ads. The quick rundown is what I’ve said since day one on the Internet—the ads websites do not draw readership in themselves. That premise originated back when there were few sites. That's changed, website market philosophy has not. There must usually always be some exterior factor present before large numbers of people will view a web page. Fame and fortune seems to work (in which case who needs the website), but let’s talk about the rest of us, Ken.
           My research involves the cost of conversion, or whatever the proper term may be. You must usually take a customer away from his current vendors, in my case, away from what they are reading now instead of this blog. I find the cheapest untapped form of advertising is newspaper classified ads. They still exist so they are by no means out-dated as was once predicted. It is impossible to get a straight answer from those people without telling them your life story first, yet they persistently deny your personal information has any bearing on the price. That has hypocrisy all over it, but it’s been half a century since being a hypocrite bothered anyone in the American newspaper industry.

           FYI, here are some full page prices, black and white only:
           Washington Post: $100,000
           Wall Street Journal: $164,000
           LA Times: $70,000

If you want color or anything extra, expect to pay up dearly. It’s a good thing most of us don’t have to reach out on a national scale. I know that I promptly remove all visible advertising and inserts before I even begin to read the paper.
           What I’m proposing to Prof. Oz is that we place newspaper ads directing the reader to a blog which then makes the sales pitch. They say a 0.7% rate of return is successful. Thus, I returned to the offer by Nationwide to place one million ads for $180 (up from $140 last year). While these ads are meant to test an ad campaign, they would be themselves my advertising. My plan is to attract enough readers to draw attention by word of mouth, thought it is impossible to say how many that is. 7,000 new readers would make me happy. (I reject the old typsetting rule of not beginning a sentence with a number, in case anyone says otherwise.)
           Reverse mortgages. Here’s something else so many people don’t understand. Let me tell you the major downsides. First, a mortgage is a loan and loans must be paid back. In this case, it must be paid back when the borrower moves out. “Moves out” is an inclusive term for selling the house or dying. The loans were designed to take advantage of upward house prices, the premise is that the homeowner could easily pay back the loan one day from price increases alone. Then along came 2006.
           With a reverse mortgage, it is quite easy to borrow more against the house than it is worth. But the real hardship is if the owner dies and he isn’t the only family member that was living in the house. I read of one episode up north where the mortgage was $309,000 and the survivors were given 30 days to pay it back or move out. This, good people, is what you get for trusting money-lenders, yet they are not doing a thing that was not agreed to. For clarity, a reverse mortgage is a loan against the equity in your house with payments that do not have to be made until you move out. But interest accumulates from day one.
           We all hate those misleading labels that state the calories per unrealistic serving. I propose a change to the law saying the package must state the entire number of calories in the container. Let the consumer decide the size of a serving. I can hear some producers scream that will hurt sales. Well, you jerks, it is supposed to. I figure you must be the ones who have been fudging the labels over serving size. Thus, honest packagers would welcome my proposal. The dishonest will scream, because they will lose, but they had it comin’.
           I was an hour is a waiting room, reading the newspaper. Here are some of my thoughts on the articles:

           The US leads the UN committee that is condemning China for putting export duties on “rare earth metals”. History will peg the USA as the first empire to collapse because they never learned to mind their own business. Come on DC, who is more guilty of price manipulations than America?

           The Supreme Court finally agrees with my blog of November 3, 2013 where I stated it is none of a company’s business how employee’s use their health care benefits. (Read the addendum that date.)

           TSA want’s police stationed at airport checkpoints. Okay, but send ‘em the bill. The mentality of those people sucks. By that logic, maybe we should get the Russians to protect the US Army to protect the police to protect the security guards to protect the grope girl.

           Some Miami types are saying the drunk driver who killed was given a harsher penalty because the jury was anti-queer. They would say that, wouldn’t they?

           How about the condemned prisoners who got a stay because the executioner would not reveal what was in the death injection. Um, folks, when you are convicted, you give up at least some rights. And I think stays should only be granted toward proving innocence and such. Not arguing about the lead content of the firing squad bullets.

           How about that Bin-Ladin relative finally convicted thirteen years afterward. No wonder the world thinks America is screwed up. That amount of time essentially means he got away with it. Turban and all.

           What’s this some sports team is forming a union. Might as well. Get some of that $20 per beer back from the stadiums. Besides, there is hardly any chance of the fans forming their own union. Not if they are dumb enough to pay much that for a beer. If you get my drift.

           A Belgian paper apologizes for a cartoon that depicts the president as an ape. What a horrible precedent. Apologizing for a cartoon, I mean. That shows disrespect for the readership. Some pansies said the cartoon crossed the line to racism. Oh, doodness, tweetie. I’ll go so far as to admit the cartoon was probably an insult, but not so far as to specify the president or the ape. I don’t know if the president said anything, but I will say any president who is offended by satire is not fit to lead a troop of girl scouts.

           Here is the cartoon.