One year ago today: July 1, 2020, to be left alone.
Five years ago today: July 1, 2016, the color of the sky.
Nine years ago today: July 1, 2012, I still can’t solo.
Random years ago today: July 1, 2011, FireHow is now Crunchbase.
This messy job, a type of work I never could do right. I know about the trick of using non-ammonia window cleaner but I mess up even that. Here, I sealed up the sun roof on the van. Who needs a sun roof in Florida? This product will dry clear. Rough as this looks, I’m actually sealing over the layers of whoever did this before, and they were no handier. I didn’t look up there when I bought the van, so inadvertently opened the roof and broke the previous seal. I’m so satisfied with the van if it still leaks, I’ll goop over it until it seals. For the record, the brakes need attention this month.
Up early, I did some research on why lumber prices escalated. I met with familiar answers. In the 1990s, I took a course on JIT, a type of Japanese business model called Just In Time. Rather than tie up money in inventory, many businesses began following a Toyota model where they ordered the product only as needed. We had this in America long before, where the café doesn’t start making your milkshake until you ordered it. Everyone recognized the danger of applying this methodology to larger assembly lines. Everyone, it seems, except the people doing it.
I had written a four page report [by hand, so long filed away] concerning how vulnerable this made businesses who tried to save money by continually trimming inventory. One shortage could stop the entire facility. And that is what appears to have happened with lumber. That’s complicated, so I looked at the computer chip shortage. In American the JIT went the usual route of capitalism—when one business does it, others are forced to follow suit to compete. Soon, every gas station is self-serve. In factories, what evolves is a massive intermeshing through the entire system where each factory using JIT is relying on others doing the same, also known as the blind leading the blind.
For info on how one American business can compel another to follow its lead, read today’s addendum.
Soon, no business carries enough inventory to produce more than a short period. This saves on wastage, storage, handling, and other components that used to be part of “the American way”. I felt but could not demonstrate it has to do with being independent. You kept a large wood pile and did not contract out the chopping. One glitch in the entire procedure spelled disaster, so why would any business do such a thing? Myself, I say it is a fault in the education system. People who run large business did not normally work their way through the ranks and the caliber of graduates began to fall. I noticed the decline between when I took my first accounting course in 1979 and my degree in 1995 (with an eight-year gap).
The courses got watered down to what were once given as bad examples were now case studies. We laughed at many concepts, particularly “efficiencies” that degraded the entire business for short-term gains that did not lower production costs, but passed them on to the next guy. The ultimate next guy was the end consumer. I stress as before, we all knew what could be done, but it took a new generation of short-sighted cheapskates to implement them. Before the Internet, nobody figured you could find any large group of wrong-headed bastards who would save money by making grandmothers pump their own gasoline. Prior to 1990, gas stations were mainly owned by oil companies and competed on more humanistic platforms like clean washrooms.
With computer chips, they come cheap but not so with the factories that build them. When the pandemic hoax restricted travel, US car rental companies dumped their vehicles. The demand for chips fell and no new factories were built. But when many states did not play the shutdown game, the recovery was much faster than predicted. Up went demand and now there is a shortage of chips and instead we have announcements of new multi-billion-dollar plants in the making.
The same goes for large sections of industry who bought into JIT. One pack of idiots relied on other idiots for their raw materials. The rot permeated right down to basic industries like lumber, who did not begin sawing until an order was confirmed. JIT has strong parallels to Internet dating. Everything sails along fine until the first damn little thing goes wrong. For now, all the fake lockdowns did was ratchet up prices. You think the lumber yards will ever lower prices now that they’ve seen what you’ll pay when you have to?
Fjaδrárgljúfur Canyon.
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Once again the FCC attacks the wrong problem. You will still get robocalls, but they will still display a number that never gets answered. The solution is to cut off the money supply. Identify who and where the scammer is and fine any credit card company that collects money for that party. A Democrat judge says Internet carriers have a right to block political speech they disagree with, which still raises the question of why there is not yet a real and proper conservative provider. My instinct said screw them all and I drove to Winter Haven, where I bought a new 20V drill, the expensive model. Wal*Mart finally got me over the discontinued battery thing.
On the way home, forgetting it was payday at the mines, I see a big crowd at the Paradise or whatever they call it this year. Then I spot a truck with Ohio plates, ah, could it be our old pal Keith is playing there? On a Thursday? I park and yep, it is. He plays full time, which is up to 15 gigs per week (you heard me). In other words, it is his job. I stuck around for a listen and a chat. He’s still underplaying most of his songs but has learned his lessons about depending on other musicians, which is why he is soloing instead of fronting a group.
Whereas I won’t go on the road again, he’s past the age where it has many benefits. If you want to see what’s over the horizon and meet new women most every gig, that’s the motive. We’ve arranged a jam. I’ll run over what we intend to address. Because he strums and does not pick much, he leaves out instrumental breaks. He also has the habit of dropping chords. It makes the music sound busy all the time, but the trade-off is poor presentation and the need to learn nearly twice as many tunes. My area is laying down a solid bass track that has piano-like timing so no drummer is required. Plus, I can play the very fills he tends to omit. Due to my affinity with four-measure bass phrases, you find chord-dropping gets rapidly eliminated.
Here’s our thinking, and you know better than to bet any money on success, it makes more sense to player fewer but higher-paying gigs closer to home. Our goal is one set, that is, we work up 8 or 10 songs and I stand in as guest when he’s playing near Lakeland. I could do that. The rest would have to evolve, because I’ll tell you the obstacle. Keith is around ten years younger than me and has comparable stage time. But that stage time has not had the same effect on his presentation or song list. Roughly half the tunes he played had no response from the audience. Yet what Polk needs is a damn good small affordable party band.
ADDENDUM
Ah, American capitalism since 1990. The driving force became profit, not the high quality and low prices of the previous era. Products pricing became unbundled and it was not long before even lowly clerical workers began to spot opportunities to dodge costs by passing them on. It’s the nature of the changing American system which caters to corporations. Few really large businesses are owned by the people who work there. Instead, we now have a class of corporate heads whose concern is totally on shareholder satisfaction.
This becomes a vicious circle with the CEOs being paid in stock options where they should probably be saddled with the product or service being produced. A larger dividend draws more investment capital which scoops that money away from the competition. Thus, cutting millions of inventory costs lets business pay out more to shareholders who could care less about quality, and the CEO exercises his options, it’s one big happy family or, depending on your viewpoint, a big happy circle-jerk. Except for the workers and customers.
Hence, when one business in the entire chain pulls this stunt, guess what? It did not used to be this way before deregulation, when corporations had to at least pretend they were public-minded. I was once groomed for becoming a financial officer and knew very well how to manipulate a set of books. Everybody saw it coming. A twist was the Internet which allowed this macro-thinking to filter down to the lowest levels of micro-commerce. Why screw the customer for a hundred dollars when you could more easily screw a hundred customers for a dollar each. By 2002 it was down to pennies each and we witnessed the rise of Amazon, Google, and eBay.
It sounds cutthroat and it is. Last day when I looked at the REITs, I did not look for quality or endurance. I glanced at their market segment (hotels, data centers, office space) and went directly to look at their PE ratio and ROI. Their price to earnings and return on investment. Quality? True customer concern? Ethics? Give me a couple million first, then we can talk philosophy over coffee, and by the way, you, being the end-consumer, will pick up the tab.
