Mon, 29 Aug 2005
Housing Bubble Fun
I spent way too much time figuring out how to use ImageMagick for that last
post to let it go to waste.
Right Now Pricing
There's a Jiffy Lube around the corner from my apartment. Sometimes when I walk to lunch in the afternoon, the mechanics are standing outside on the street with signs advertising their oil change service to passing cars. I think that's a good idea; rather than just hanging out waiting for customers, they're out touting.
But I didn't realize something even more interesting about their sales technique until yesterday. A few days ago, I pulled into the Jiffy Lube to ask how much an oil change was; it was $29.95 or $29.99. That seemed a bit expensive so I passed.
Yesterday, while I was walking home from Starbuck's after enjoying my free
latte from Insider Pages, I read the signs that the mechanics were holding.
They read:
Right Now
$19.95
Oil Change
When they don't have any customers, they cut the price by $10 bucks. That seems pretty smart. Other companies might want to try that. What other errands would you take care of at the vendor's convenience for a hefty discount?
I was at Chicago For Ribs last week with Denisa. It was about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, and there were 4 or 5 tables of customers. On staff were two servers and a bus boy. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but Denisa pointed out that the management should send home the bus boy and one of the waiters. She briefly worked in the Chicago For Ribs in Santa Monica. That one was always over-staffed, and closed a few months after opening. (They also had a problem in that they gave away buy-one-get-one-free certificates on Third Street Promenade every day so every customer came in with a coupon.)
If they didn't want to send some of the extra staff home, why not have them stand outside with a sign advertising a Full Rack of Baby Backs for $10 Right Now?
Mon, 22 Aug 2005
How Spaghetti Breaks
Some researchers in France figured out why, when a piece of spaghetti is bent, it breaks into multiple pieces, rather than just breaking in half. They have a number of videos of their experiments. They found that even releasing one end of a bent piece of spaghetti can cause it to break.
The multiple breaking of bent rods, like dry spaghetti pasta, can then be understood as a cascade of releases (loss of cohesion upon breakings) followed by stress increases leading to new cracks.
Fri, 19 Aug 2005
More Housing Bubble T-Shirts
Barry at The
Big Picture points out another popular housing bubble t-shirt, a
parody of Mr.
Bubble.
Barry thinks that the fact that because there are declarations of the bubble everywhere, that it is must not be a bubble.
I find that somewhat ironic -- the same people who missed the largest stock bubble in human history have now become expert in spotting bubbles. And they now are spotting bubbles everywhere.
…
I cannot quite put my finger on precisely why the entire world declaring a housing bubble exists makes it less likely to be so at the moment.
I think, because so many people lost their shirts in the nasdaq bubble just a few years ago, it makes sense that many would be able to recognize the housing/credit bubble. I find it remarkable that so many people have been party to the current bubble. It's not like previous bubbles where there have been multiple generations between bubbles, causing the lessons of the past to be forgotten. There must be a propensity among people to assume that if the banker wants to give them a loan for 10 times their income, it must be in their best interest.
Thu, 18 Aug 2005
Plazes
Plazes is pretty cool new service that tracks
your physical location based on the MAC address of your default gateway. The
idea is that when you connect to a network, a litle program on your computer
called a launcher checks your
default route, looks up its MAC address in your arp cache
(doing something like
netstat -rn | grep '^0\.0\.0\.0' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs /usr/sbin/arp | tail -1 | awk '{print
$3}'), and sends it to Plazes.
If it's a MAC address that Plazes doesn't know about yet, it lets you put in a name for the location and an address. Then you can share your location, perhaps by integrating it into an IM client or on your blog.
You can also look up the location of a Plaze user using a url such as http://beta.plazes.com/whereis/xn, and you can look for people within a certain radius of your location.
Note that if you're using the GTK launcher on Debian, it expects to find arp in /sbin.
Hocus Pocus
In response to Kansas becoming the latest state wanting to teach "Intelligent Design" in a science classroom, one of Denisa's professors, Robert Cleve, suggested that doing so is akin to splitting a physics class in two, and teaching magic during the second half. I thought that was a clever and apt analogy.
Opt Out of Social Security
Join a church. Separate from state.
While doing my taxes this year, I discovered IRS Form 4029 which allows an individual to opt out of social security and medicare. To do so, you must be conscientiously opposed to accepting benefits of any private or public insurance that makes payments in the event of death, disability, old age, or retirement; or makes payments for the cost of medical care; or provides services for medical care. While I am conscientiously opposed to public insurance, I have no objections to private insurance. Of course, there are a couple other stipulations. You must also join a collectivist organization with a belief in the supernatural which has been in existance since at least 1950.
Individuals who wish to be self-sufficient or participate in private insurance programs rather than be part of the state's welfare system are unable to do so. I find this to be egregious. I have contact my elected representatives in Congress to let them know how I feel, but I'm not expecting much considering that both Senators Boxer and Feinstein have petitions on their home pages to preserve social security as is.
Here's the short note I sent to Congressman Sherman and the Senators, and the non-responsive form letter response from Ms. Boxer.
Congressman Sherman, As President Bush and Congress are currently working on the reform of Social Security, I would like to propose that one of the reforms include the ability of citizens to opt out of participation in the Social Security and Medicare insurance programs. Being a responsible individual, I plan to save enough money during my productive years to fund my retirement until death. I am conscientiously opposed to accepting welfare from the state and would be happy to waive all rights to Social Security benefits in return for not being required to contribute to the program. Such an option is available to members of certain religious organizations, and I would appreciate your support in ending such unconstitutional discrimination. Thank you for you time and I would be delighted to hear your thoughts on the issue. Sincerely, Christian Warden
Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 09:21:31 -0500 From: senator@boxer.senate.gov To: cwarden@xerus.org Subject: Responding to your message March 4, 2005 Mr. Christian Warden 18531 Prairie Street, Apartment 214 Northridge, California 91324-3156 Dear Mr. Warden: Thank you for writing to express your concerns about President Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security. I appreciate hearing from you. Social Security is a crucial insurance program and an indispensable safety net for our people. It has been enormously successful. Before Social Security, over half of all seniors were poor. Today, 10 percent live in poverty. That is still too many, and we want to take care of that. What we do not want to do is go back to the days when 50 percent of our seniors were living in poverty. Under the President's plan, Social Security benefits would be cut by 45 percent. The average yearly payment would be only $5,700, which is 35 percent below the poverty line. That would be a tragic reversal of fortune for our people. Certainly we know that Social Security needs periodic adjustments. However, President Bush is misleading the American people by calling this a "crisis." According to the Social Security Trustees, there is enough money to pay full benefits until 2042. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, there is enough money to pay full benefits until 2052. Now more than ever -- as we are faced with an aging population, the imminent retirement of the baby boom generation, the costs of the war on terrorism, 40 million Americans without healthcare, and a ballooning budget deficit of well over $400 billion -- we cannot afford to divert needed funds away from an already stressed Social Security system. ^L This is too much of a risk to take with funds that so many workers are counting on for their retirement. Privatization would also impact people with disabilities, survivors of deceased workers, and 3 million children who depend on Social Security benefits. I feel strongly that we should not weaken Social Security or compromise its financial condition. Rest assured, I am committed to preserving the integrity of Social Security for generations to come. And it is not difficult to solve this challenge, just as we did in 1983. Again, thank you for taking the time to voice your concerns. Please continue to keep me informed about the issues that matter to you. Sincerely, Barbara Boxer United States Senator
Disclaimer: As a child, my mother received welfare. And while it allowed her to spend time raising me, given the choice, I would not want to be a burden on my neighbors.
