March 29, 2016

Yesteryear
One year ago today: March 29, 2015, making too much sense.
Five years ago today: March 29, 2011, Windows 7/Vista sucks.
Nine years ago today: March 29, 2007, Jay-Jay, the sportsgoof.
Random years ago today: March 29, 2009, a trip in planning.

MORNING

           [Author’s note: I am still off kilter for the day, so the pictures in today’s journal are random shots of the trip to Arcadia on the weekend. It’s a rural setting, I saw one house only, so these are stock photos. You can see the sandy substrate of the big yard, and the fishing shack on the canal. If that shack is only five grand, I may pick it up as a hobby.]

           Where am I? It’s a good thing the scooter knows the way to the coffee shop. I’ve decided on some improvements and modifications to the cPod. While it was comfortable, I want another half foot of headroom and there were two things I had to contend with that are not present in South Florida. Fog and morning dew. I get this jet lag in batches, then I can go for months and be fine. It is vertigo, not dizziness, evidenced by my hobby of doing celestial calculations over morning coffee. Never confuse dizzy with dozy. And check back later, I think my new starter arrived.

           Nope, it did not arrive. I was still over there when a call came in from the property up north. Looks like we’ve figured out what was going on. Some over there are miffed, others are impressed. Actually, and this is off the record, I had just finished explaining the situation to all the police that get their motorcycles worked on the same place I do, and one of them looked up the real story on the place for me. I was right 90%, and in this life anything over 51% is good enough.
           JZ was on the horn within five minutes and unless something goes horribly wrong, we will be on the way to central Florida by this time tomorrow. We can repair rafter damage. This will be made the more expensive by the fact somebody tried to shingle over the damage. Asphalt shingles, as if that stuff could disguise structural damage. I must have mentioned that both JZ and I have truss building experience.
           Then I went to the Russian store and had brunch on garlic dills and made my own pork and paprika sandwiches. And counted the money. Yes, we have the cash if this one goes though. What a relief on my system if we get this place, since ownership frees up a lot of cash I won’t be wasting on this joint. This is a major move, but it’s been in the planning for years now. I’m not forgetting whenever this has happened before, I make it up so well that in no time at all, I’m back in a new city with lots to spare.

Wiki picture of the day.
Portland, Oregon.
NOON
           I’ve checked in with everybody in the chain of command to know exactly that I could be out of here by end of next month. But heads up. If my offer is accepted, I don’t have to move. Now or later. And I backed the $275 out of my former offer, making sure the seller understood the reason for that is because they had failed and/or neglected to give us factual information about the property, necessitating the expense to go see for myself.

           Over toast and coffee, I calculated the Sun’s position to within 2 nautical miles just now. I’m still weak on plotting, since I don’t have a nice big flat work area to spread out the sheets. This was a needed mental exercise, because despite 12 hours of sack time to early this morning to get back into local time, I keep thinking this is Wednesday. So I bought me a nice detective mystery book and I’m about to sit down under the air conditioner (89F out there today) and drink raspberry tea.

           Don’t we all hate those for-profit reverse telephone outfits that have squeezed out the free but perfectly adequate “white pages” . Especially that “Intelius” scum outfit that advertises under fifty different names. It is so obvious they are tracking the trackers but people must be falling for it. And that slimy Google chrome is forcing all other searches to be “compatible”. If I knew how to write search software, I would put something out there and adamantly refuse to comply with Google.
           So the book I’m reading is called “Swallowing Stones”, I find it an astonishingly realistic style. I’ll give away the plot, since it is unlikely any of you will ever read this book. A kid fires a rifle into the air on July 4th and the bullet kills a man shingling a roof a mile away. This is a recent book, since it mentions the kid’s fear of being questioned by the police because it would kill his chances of getting into a good college. And how even if it was an accident, he would be convicted of manslaughter. So he buries the rife in the back yard.
           The title is from the way the kid becomes paranoid of every accidental death. A few years earlier, a girl his age had died at the lake, where she and her girlfriend had been playing a game of picking up stones with their teeth. The one girl accidentally choked on a stone and there had been talk if she had swallowed it, she would have lived.

NIGHT
           A day indoors but I can’t beat this jet lag. You’ll probably notice a lag in reporting time until the episode with this latest house is over. There is a travel budget of several hundred dollars not even touched yet, so I would not mind if it becomes a bit of a real holiday. The woozy condition rarely bothers me on the trips, but waits until I get back. I’m stuck with it and NPR, Libtard radio. No matter what they say, Trump is a tidal wave and there ain’t a thing they can do. They’ve preached for years about these changes but are now stuck with somebody who has a good chance of doing more than talking about it.

           I pondered the plan of slapping a 35% tariff on Ford and Carrier and Nabisco. That’s one of the conundrums forming a staple of macroeconomics. If the tariff is charged, the company cannot stay in business long without passing the full cost of the tariff on to the customer. This makes the product uncompetitive unless a similar tariff is charged on all similar products, again an increase in the cost of the product.

           However, the other side of the coin is that if the manufacture was not done overseas, then the company would have used American labor and the resulting rise in cost would likely be similar. I don’t believe, as Trump states, that these companies maliciously closed down their American operations. They probably took a solid and sober look at the costs of foreign labor and realized they could not compete with the Walmart formula.
           The solution? Raise the tariff on imported products to match the prices of domestic production. This smacks of regulated monopoly, because it gives local producers a bit of a free hand to raise their prices knowing the competition can’t undercut them by much. Either way it goes, America is headed for a terrible round of inflation. Prices have been artificially kept low for decades by the importation of “cheap Chinese junk” while our own labor force became less efficient and more “service” oriented.

           I think if left alone without having the government allowing the flood of cheap labor across the southern border, by now American average hourly pay would probably be in the $40 per hour range. That’s a guess, with semi-skilled prices touching on $60 per hour. But that labor force would necessarily be highly efficient in order to keep those jobs—and as a result the individual product would not be that much more expensive. The plants would keep re-tooling and automating to stay economical.
           As it is, my experience is with a unionized atmosphere. Yes, I worked in a union, just like Frank Roosevelt said to do. Unions are not concerned with efficiency and had many policies that I disagreed with. I won’t go over any examples, but once you get into the company, you find that the majority of the union “benefits” are not equally beneficial to all and, importantly, are least beneficial to single white males. You’ll quickly conclude that you are not getting the annual raises you deserve because the company is full of soccer moms demanding equal pay.

           It was not with sexism that I used to remark how I agreed with equal pay—that any man doing a woman’s job should have his pay cut back to their level. I was being sarcastically realistic about the facts. I was there, you were not. I was many times more productive than most of my co-workers of either sex, but we all were paid the same. You could look it up in the shop manual, $28.67 per hour in 1995. Part of my performance was explainable because I never called in sick, never had bad days, never needed time off, and continually got better at things. There is nothing sexist at all about who did the better job.
           Um, there is something I can add that isn’t so nice. Just like my family when I grew up, being mediocre was not a comfortable thing around me because it invites so much comparison. You might say it can be hell on a lazy person to be my brother or pull a shift with me on in the repair department. It’s going to become obvious to the world if even one shortcut has been taken. Of course, the company was prevented by the union from acting on it, but only the deaf and blind would not be aware. And Patsie. Patsie and Wallace. They’d convince themselves they were just as good as I was, fooling only themselves.

           [Author’s note: this is where I get to say, in a rare chance to borrow from Mr. Trump, without being braggadocious, the company did have to hire eight people to replace me. The department staffing went from 18 to 26 people to cover the same total amount of work once I left].

           And job performance or not, there was also the aspect of money management. You cannot get around this one, I am a top level money manager. Everyone made the same as me, but I did the best. I drove a Cadillac, lived in a mansion on the south slopes, took twelve vacations per year, and ran a very lucrative payday advance scheme on company time, often doubling my income on seasonal holidays. I was the moneybags, running the office lottery, and paying cash for everything. It was well known I did not have or need a credit card.
           I also played in a band that I had created and at one stretch, banked my paychecks for three years running. (I had nearly $200,000 cash in my savings account.) That was before direct deposit and I often had several uncashed checks waiting for a chance to get to the bank. Yet, I went out every night, never missed a party, dated only the nicest of women, and a host of other telltale signals that used to really irk others of a certain disposition. Yeah, the disposition of my family, if you must be reminded.
           Show me your union card, and sure, I’ll lend you a hundred bucks till payday. Those were the days.


Last Laugh
Pick the Millennial.

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