Anybody Got A Knife?

Best overheard comment while taking pictures:

How do you give a bird the Heimlich Maneuver, anyway?

In the end, it turned out not be necessary. The seagull eventually gave up on attempting to choke down the starfish. (Unfortunately for the starfish, other gulls were more than ready to give it a go.)

The Remainder

The main reason why fewer men are working is that sweeping structural changes in rich economies have reduced the demand for all less-skilled workers.
"Decline of the working man" The Economist 30 April, 2011.

These structural changes are, I think, unlikely to go away anytime soon. In part, I suspect,because we're reaching a saturation point brought on by increasing productivity. (Now, for the record, I'm not an economist, so I have to base at least some of this on random guesswork.) The basic idea is this - imagine that someone rolled up to your home with a semi-trailer full of random stuff - goods and/or services that you don't already have or make use of. Could you see yourself buying all of the stuff in that trailer, under the assumption that whatever it is, it would improve your life enough to be worth however much it costs to make? Or to put it another way - is the supposed supply-side economic mantra that "supply creates its own demand" true for you?

Here's my theory - Let me pose a hypothetical worker, Alice. Alice is in a situation where she is basically alone in a factory that can make any and everything she needs or wants. Effectively she produces all of her own goods and services (a.k.a.: stuff). I suspect that as Alice's productivity rises, she will eventually get to a point where rather than work the same amount and have more stuff, Alice will start taking more leisure time, and allow her output of stuff to remain constant. In other words, Alice has a demand ceiling, where the value of work drops to less than the value of leisure.

But the way business is structured, it's almost always more efficient to use fewer people, working full time, than to give all workers more leisure time, because each worker tends to carry certain fixed costs.

And the combination of these two factors can lead to a situation where you have, basically, excess workers in the workforce. If you image that you have ten people, each of whom reaches their demand ceiling at 32 hours a week of work, the most effective way to structure production as a business is for 8 people to work 40 hours each. So... what happens to the other 2 workers? They become a structural unemployment problem. Now, in older agrarian societies it was something less of an issue - the 2 "leftover" workers could retreat to a farm and support themselves, applying their own labor to the task of meeting their needs. But in more modern societies, that's not always an option - farming requires skills, land and so on, that not everyone has access to.

And this is where I suspect that part of our current economic trouble comes from. We're at a point where between productivity and trade, we've hit sort of a demand ceiling (which might also be exacerbated by wealth inequality - those people who want to have more stuff don't have the money to justify the costs of producing it). That pushes lower skilled people (who are also generally considered to have lower productivity) into an area where there is no demand for their labor, and an incentive to shed the overhead costs that come with employing them.

Like I said, I'm not an economist, so while this all makes perfect sense to me, it could very well have more holes in it than a Swiss cheese factory. So I'd like to actually run it by someone who knows what they are talking about. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's at least barking up the right tree.

Counting Down

I'm curious as to what will happen come May 22nd, 2011. Mainly since the world is (once again) scheduled to end on May 21st, based upon the "Biblical Calendar of Time, according to the classified ad that Family Radio placed in the local newspaper. And the internet banner ads that they've been placing. You have to give them credit for going all out.

Of course, if this time, the apocalypticists are correct, May 22nd will never come (in a manner of speaking), and Family Radio will be vindicated. But even within the segment of the Christian community that believes that we're currently living in the End Times, theirs is a minority view - presumably because each group has its own understanding of when the End of the World will occur, and a certain level of conviction that they, and they alone, have it right.

Given that I, personally, am fairly confident that this will simply be another iteration of the "Great Disappointment," I feel kind of badly for these people. It's hard to make a case for hedging one's bet on something like this, and so many, if not all, of them are likely to be completely unprepared for still being on Earth come Sunday morning.

I've asked a dozen of Camping's followers the same question. Everyone said even entertaining the possibility that May 21 would come and go without event is an offense to God.

(This stands out for me. The possibility that their leader, whom, I suspect, is only Human, might have gotten this wrong "is an offense to God," seems a bit much. I find it interesting that despite the active research that Harold Camping put into coming up with this date, it's being treated as if it were a passive process, where God simply told him what would happen, so doubting it is tantamount to questioning God's honesty.) They'll be fortunate if the inevitable (and likely quite mean-spirited, given what we're already seeing) public ridicule that will greet them is the worst of their problems.

Autopilot

The grocery store that I typically shop at has a rather peculiar way of labeling things. Well, sort of. As you may have seen in whatever grocery stores you frequent, our local market has a small space in which they make a note of a "unit price," how much you're playing per pound or per quart, whatever. Okay, so far so good. But what I noticed some time back was that the store didn't always use the same units. For instance, in the refrigerated drinks section (from which I was picking up some orange juice), some items have their unit prices listed per pint, while others are listed per liter. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this... One size of orange juice was listed per pint, while the same size apple juice and the larger size of orange juice of the same brand was listed per liter. To me, this defeats the whole purpose of the unit pricing. How can you easily compare one size of an item to another if their unit prices are delineated in different units?

I wound up taking to four different employees of the store about this fact (they seemed to travel in pairs today), and it struck me that only one of them seemed to immediately understand what I was talking about, and why it didn't make much sense to do things in that way. In fact, only the one employee seemed to understand that it was the store that created the labels with the unit prices on them - the others all seemed to think that the various items all came with the unit prices already determined.

It's easy, if uncharitable, to chalk this up to a lack of intellect or education. (Come now, don't tell me that you've never met anyone who's convinced that everyone who works in a grocery store are the dregs of society.) But since I don't really think that being a worker in a grocery store is de facto evidence of stupidity or ignorance myself, I had to come up with a new reason. And it didn't take very long.

Autopilot. We, as Americans, have structured our society so that we don't have to think about a lot of things. Most of the things that we interact with "just work," and we don't spare them a moment's thought. And so when we encounter things that perhaps don't work, we assume that they do work, and just go on about our business. I suppose though, that it might be more accurate to say that when we encounter things that we don't normally deal with, we assume that it does whatever it does for a reason, even if we don't know what that reason is. (In fact, I wouldn't have been able to convince one of the workers that the point behind unit pricing was to be able to make an apples-to-apples price comparison, if the other worker hadn't agreed with me, having noticed the discrepancy herself.)

I'm not going to say that I haven't done the same thing, myself, when I've encountered things that just don't seem quite right. Sometimes, I simply walk past it on Autopilot, assuming that it's doing what it supposed to do, rather than tracking someone down, and asking them: "Is that supposed to do that?" But it's a bad habit. If for no other reason than asking people about things can be an excellent way to learn something new. And sometimes, things aren't doing what they're supposed to do, and it needed bringing to someone's attention to have it taken care of.

It's all about engagement, really. And sometimes, I'm sure that we could all do with a little more engagement.

Wait... It's Real?

As many times as I heard the song, it never occurred to me that there might actually be a restaurant by that name in Soho in London. I don't know which came first, though. I suppose I should have gone inside to see what the food was like, but I can get Chinese food (arguably) here in the United States, so I didn't think of it.

It's always odd to come across a place like this that you've heard of, but never paid much attention to. It lends a reality to the world that isn't always there, an understanding that the places you've never been have an existence, even though you aren't yet there.