As mentioned a few weeks ago, we bought a new car! An actual new car, as it turned out, and not just a new-to-us car. More on that later. As longtime readers of Hit Coffee know, I have been considering purchasing a new-to-us car for quite some time. Crayola, the late-90’s Ford Escort I typically drive, has been struggling over the last couple of years. Also, moving to Arapaho with an eye towards staying means that we want something with all wheel drive. Lastly, we’ve been limping along without a cargo vehicle for some time. We don’t need something that’s going to carry large furniture, but it would be nice to have something more than the Camry when it came to moving stuff and having a more towing-capable vehicle for those bigger things (the Camry has a hitch, which we’ve used, but it’s not the most comfortable arrangement).

Anyhow, we finally hit the Magic Number – the desired amount in our savings account before we were comfortable buying a car – in October. Despite having talked to Wells Fargo last year about a loan*, we really wanted to buy a car outright. Which we sort of** did. So from there it was a matter of picking a car. That wasn’t hard because all of the legwork I had done previously pointed in a particular direction: Subaru Forester***. The “where” was a little more uncertain and I figured it would come down to who made the best offer or had the best used car.

Since leaving Cascadia, it became apparent that we were likely to buy a new car. This blew both of us away because it was something we were told, since we were kids, is simply something you never do. Buying new cars was for chumps. Until relatively recently, it’s been pretty deeply ingrained in my mind. But something odd has happened since the downturn. Incentives are making new cars cheaper. A variety of factors are making used cars more expensive. The price difference between the two has collapsed to virtually nothing. In fact, depending on how you look at it, buying used can actually cost more (higher interest rates if you’re getting a loan, shorter life per dollar spent otherwise). I made a spreadsheet a while back assuming the life of a car to be 100k, 150k, and 200k miles. New cars were, if not at the top of the list (as far as price-desirability goes), competitive. The more economical pricing (on the 200k column) was on cars just over that 100k, but that doesn’t factor in the hassle and headaches of a non-reliable car. You might save money, but only if you don’t mind being left on the side of the road sometimes. Being left on the side of the road in Arapaho is more problematic than other places because you can be outside of cell phone range and outside of walking distance from anywhere.

So we’d accepted that we might have to do that thing we were taught never to do. One look at the used car market in Arapaho told us that this would assuredly be the case. Arapahoans hold on to their cars, so there are none of those low-mileage used car deals you can get where you benefit from some other chump losing the $3,000 off the lot. Instead, you’re just getting an old car. Even that might have had its perks in the name of cash liquidity (see ** below), but the scarcity of supply pushes the price up to the point that my spreadsheet told me that they were all pretty much bad deals. So it was a done deal: new car.

There were other factors to consider, like whether to get a 2010 or 2011. Only one dealership, in Alexandria, had any 2010s left. We’d decided on the medium trim, called “Premium” (“Limited” is the top trim) because it was the one that had the option for traditional roof rails (for cargo) and towing (for more cargo), as well as the all-weather package. So for an entire week I was investigating which dealerships had what available on that trim and which had the best starting price (ie the fewest unnecessary features larding up the MSRP). The nearest dealership, in Redstone, was a no-haggle dealership. So I had to somehow try to factor in what I would be able to negotiate down in Alexandria (for instance) compared to the no-haggle price in Redstone.

I’m not sure if any of you read it, but Edmunds had a great piece many years back entitled Confessions of a Car Salesman, where a reporter went undercover as a car salesman and reports back the nature of the trade and the tricks that they use. Having read all about the sales techniques, there wasn’t much news there. But one of the things that really jumped out at me was that the difference in business culture from the traditional dealership (unnamed, but leading me to believe it was either Lexus or Acura) and a no-haggle dealership (almost certainly Saturn). I came away with it thinking that between the two, I really wanted to give my business to the latter.

I had a few questions about the Forester that I hadn’t seen the answers to anywhere, so I stopped by the dealership in Redstone to ask. The Redstone dealership swore up and down in all of its literature that it was a “no-haggle” and “no-pressure” sort of place, so I figured that I could ask the questions without having to fight off attempts for a test drive and whatnot. Turns out, they lived up to their name. The salesman was extremely helpful and that was that. I decided that I wanted to do business with them if it was at all possible.

It’s easy to decry the state of car sales, but if you’re walking straight past those dealerships that are trying to buck that mentality in search of a better deal, you’re part of the problem. Even if you get a better deal for yourself, you’re still patronizing them. Of course, I wasn’t going to pay thousands and thousands of dollars on the basis of that principle. If the difference is that large, the no-haggle places aren’t just going with consistent pricing, they’re going with exorbitant pricing. So I set a price-point. If the Redstone dealership came within $x, I would give them my business.

What it looked like it was going to come down to was the 2011 vs 2010. The difference in list prices alone was over $1000 at the Alexandria dealership and there was a good chance that I was going to be able to talk them down well beyond the margin because Redstone had already sold all of their 2010s. The last piece of the puzzle came from Fighting Chance, which is a resource on all manner of relevant things for negotiating a good price. What actually jumped out at me was the complete listing of features and pricing. I discovered that, if I was willing to forgo the all-weather package, I could actually get the towing kid and traditional roof rails on the base trim. That was thousands of dollars and I had previously been lead to believe that you couldn’t get either on the base trim. So I looked back at all of the Arapaho dealerships and discovered that only one offered the base trim: Redstone.

So I got to have my cake and eat it, too. I went with the no-haggle dealership and saved a good amount of money simply because they were offering a cheaper product that nobody else was****. This left some money to get an extended warranty, the towing kid (a purchase that I was going to have to put off), and a block heater for under the target price. And I would still be under the target price if I upgraded the speaker system, which I figured I might need to do (and did in pretty short order). And as an added benefit, I even managed to get the color that I wanted. I had resigned myself to getting something I was indifferent two and had accepted that I might end up with one of the two colors I actively did not want.

And not a moment too soon. Within a week of getting the car, for a couple different reasons I am not going to get into, both of the other cars stopped working correctly. So despite having three cars, we were stuck having to share only the Forester. Had I tried to custom-order or put it off, our balancing act would have become impossible.

For future reference, due to its green color and the fact that it has one of those high-falutin’ California engines that is supposed to have cleaner exhausts and thus is supposed to be good for the environment, its name is Nader. I was thinking of going with Ahnold, due to the California roots, but I decided not to since he’s on his way out and I wasn’t going to name the car Jerry.

* – Wells Fargo more than anyone else should have been able to appreciate our financial situation and history: generally a lot of savings (more than enough in savings to buy the car outright, if necessary) with solid income interrupted by periods of unemployment. All that mattered to WF, though, was that we were unemployed right then and there. Even an employment contract in hand and the income potential of Clancy’s medical license were not enough for them consider loaning us any money. We were as sure a bet as you can get, but they have their formulas and their hands were tied. A “savings secured loan” was all they could offer us, which basically meant that they would take the money out of our bank account and then loan it back to us for less interest than a loan that wasn’t coming from money that they just took out of our bank account.

** – I add the “sort of” qualifier because we used money from the sign-on bonus provided by Clancy’s employer. Interest free, but we have to return a pro-rated amount of we leave before her contract was up. This caused a fair amount of kvetching on our part (well, mostly mine) because – even though we have no plans to leave before the contract is up – we didn’t want to be in a position where we couldn’t leave if things became unbearable. So we considered getting a loan anyway (I’m sure Wells Fargo would have been happy to comply) just to keep that money in the bank. Looking over the numbers, it seemed like I was just being paranoid about our finances. I talked it over with Bob Vis, who agreed that I was being paranoid. Mostly just a matter of confirming what I already knew, but I needed to hear from someone else that we weren’t being irresponsible by dipping into the sign-on loan.

*** – Other models I considered were the Mitsubishi Outlander, Toyota RAV4, Honda CR-V, Ford Escape, Kia Sportage, and Jeep Patriot. The Patriot caught my eye just because it was so cheap, but it didn’t take me long to decide I would rather have a used auto with some reliability than a new one with none. So it was the first I removed from consideration. The CR-V got some good reliability ratings, but I sat in one while in Cascadia and it just didn’t feel right. Visibility wasn’t really good on it and I decided if I wanted to go with Reputable Japanese, we’d just go with the RAV4. The Escape was recommended to me by a couple of people and I got to drive my mother-in-law’s and liked it and it felt right in the same way that the CR-V felt wrong. But the price-point never got low enough. The RAV4 was considered because my wife is a Toyota person and it got good reliability ratings. While the pricing wasn’t terrible on this one, it started getting really bad when I factored in what would be required for it to be able to tow anything. Really, if I wanted to spend $30k, I’d get a Highlander which has more space and all of the towing things required coming standard. The Sportage was the cheapest option, but like the RAV4 it required getting a higher trim. This put it in the same ballpark as the Forester, price-wise, but with a less reputable AWD. Also, few Kia dealerships in the state (though I discovered, within an hour after buying the Forester, that one is opening up right in Redstone). On the merits, it really came down to the Outlander and the Forester. The Outlander met all of my requirements and came in under the Forester in price (albeit barely). However, there’s one Mitsubishi dealership in Arapaho and it’s not anywhere near our part of the state. Also, unlike Subaru, Mitsubishi doesn’t specialize in AWDs and when I talked to a dealer in Cascadia they made it seem like a bit of an afterthought.

**** – You can custom order a vehicle from Subaru.com and have it sent to virtually any dealership, but since the deal isn’t done since you drive off the lot, they are free to use the fact that you have waited 6-8 weeks for the car’s arrival and that it would take another 6-8 weeks to order it again through somewhere else to reneg on the deal and ask for more money. This sort of thing was also a concern with the farther-flung dealerships across the state. They can use the fact that I have seriously inconvenienced myself by driving across the state in order to try to get another few hundred dollars out of me when I come to pick the car up.

Commented on here in the past has been interchange fees on credit cards. My position at the time was that it was probably a good thing that credit cards forced retailers not to pass on the interchange fees (because it encouraged people to get used to the concept of cards) but that maybe it wasn’t needed anymore (because we’re too comfortable with it). In the course of our conversation, Web won me over to the point of view that regardless of whether or not masking the fees was a good thing at the start that the time has come for retailers to be able to start passing these charges along.

One of the things that convinced me was the research I did based on some of the things he said, which demonstrated that one of the most damning things about the card/retailer relationship was that the latter would have absolutely no idea what the fees would be at the end of the day. That sort of lack of transparency is really problematic. As is, on a larger scale, the consumers being unaware of what the interchange fees are, exactly, is also something that I am less than comfortable with. I know people who get agitated and angry when retailers put minimum purchases on card purchases (which they’re not supposed to do, but sometimes do anyway) without any real idea that there are absolute reasons why they would do this. It also provides credit card companies the ability to inflate interchange fees without the consumer objecting, despite the fact that we get bit in the end. All of this aggravated by the fact that which card the consumer uses ends up mattering because some cut the retailers less than others. All of this provides no incentive for banks to keep charges down. After all, you can’t accept a low-interchange card without also accepting a high-interchange one if they’re under the same banner (Visa, Mastercard, etc). And so, I decided that passing these charges on to the consumer in a more transparent manner is a win/win for everyone except the card companies.

Apparently a little while ago an agreement was reached with Mastercard and Visa that allows retailers to cut slack to people that use the lower-intercharge cards. With all of the above in mind, this strikes me as a good thing. Some of the ways in which this will make things even more complicated for the consumer make me cringe, but the entire system was set up in a very complicated fashion and it’s not realistic for the consumer to be immune from this. Ultimately, I’m not sure how much good this is actually going to do since really only for the largest of the large retailers will it be worthwhile to complicate the system. But it’s a start. And it seems that it would have to provide more leeway for cash discounts, which are allowed but for which the rules are a bit ambiguous.

This would all be much easier if retailers would be allowed to do what my old comic shop used to do. They basically said that for any purchase under $10, they wanted a $.50 fee for using a debit card. They were actually upfront that they couldn’t do this and framed it more as a request. Even though money was tight, I complied.

Ultimately, what would be really nice is market pressure to simplify the process. I’m not entirely sure how to get there from here, though. The barriers-to-entry are so tough that those at the top can stick together without formal agreements that would violate anti-trust law and nobody is going to come along with vanilla-only cards and none of them are going to simplify things for the sake of a consumer that is likely to remain oblivious to the deals that are going on behind the curtains. You could try to regulate simplicity by forcing interchange caps and the like, but I’m not there yet for supporting that.

When our current byzantine system of home loans was created, nobody really expected this:

Representatives of Deutsche Bank told The Daily Caller via email that the bank’s involvement in the Jeffs case [wherein a guy named Jeffs was denied the opportunity to show up at a foreclosure trial -ed] was merely nominal, as it had to be named as the plaintiff in the case because it ultimately held the right to foreclose, not Chase, which originally made the loan and which was accepting Jeffs’ payments and forwarding them to the proper recipients. But Chase had tried to work out a loan modification with Jeffs, and he was current on his payments when Chase abruptly informed him that his modification was denied without explanation. Several days later, Jeffs found out that he supposedly no longer owned his home. He stopped making payments, and he hasn’t made them since. But no bank has been able to successfully repossess and sell the property. To the banking system, the asset backed by the house—the mortgage—has simply vanished into thin air.

Does that mean that Jeffs is finally in the clear? Not exactly. “Quite often, what happens in these cases is the bank creates new documents to fix the old documents,” said Goldman. “One of the most common things we see is a paper with a notary stamp that gives the bank the legal authority to foreclose. Well, anyone can buy those stamps. I can buy those stamps. A lot of what’s going on is law firms desperate to win a case are hired by banks who don’t know what those law firms are up to. Then the bank thinks it can foreclose, even though other banks also think they have that right, and those banks might not figure out what happened for a long time because the system is absolutely overloaded with foreclosures. And even if they do figure it out, suing to repossess a property that another bank already sold is a long and arduous process. So you wind up with a scenario in which the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.”

It’s easy to look at this situation and say “Oh, that’s all just a bunch of buck-passing. Of course they expected it and this is their way out of it!” or something to that effect. The problem is that the system they created is disadvantaging them more than anyone else. They have enough legitimate foreclosures that they don’t need to toss legitimate homeowners out of their house. And it’s not like once the homeowners are gone they’re going to make a killing in the re-selling. As the saying goes, never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence (well, incompetence and reckless disregard). This isn’t to let the banks off the hook. Right now I am not sure how much they care about “false positive” evictions except insofar as it is an inconvenience to them. As such, of course, we need to make it as inconvenient to them as possible. Congress and the White House have been trying to meddle in the housing meltdown since the start (well, before the start, many will point out) with forcing re-negotiations and the like. It strikes me as a flypaper sort of thing where the more they try to do the more they mess things up.

However, if they wanted to set up a system wherein someone erroneously foreclosed on is guaranteed a reward, I wouldn’t object. You would have to be kind of careful, though, because it’s easy to find a goof-up in the paperwork of even legitimate foreclosures due to the system’s inadequacies. You might want to limit it so that the only ones who get compensation are those that are actually up to date on their mortgage or owe none. This is one of those cases where it’s really tempting to stick it to the banks, but I’m not sure it’s in our interest. It is in our interest, though, for a lot of the pending foreclosures to actually go through. We can’t recover until we know where we are. If the foreclosures are delayed and smattered over the next decade, it’s going to prevent any rebound or growth in the market. Of course, growth in the market helped start this whole mess, but that was in part because the growth was a bubble. Suggesting that we don’t want a robust housing economy because of the housing bubble is like suggesting that we want Dow Jones to stay as low as possible because of what happened in the early naughts.

Clancy and I were talking about our plans for our future living arrangements (now that we’ve signed a longer-term contract, do we want to consider buying?). I know that for my part, buying is the last thing I am interested in until we know what the actual value of a house is within a reasonable margin of error. We can’t know that until we know how many vacancies we have.

The Well has an interesting piece by a doctor regarding the difference in managing health care for people versus those of our pets:

My own patients have a far harder struggle in every respect. My foray into the insurance world as a patient exhausted me and pointed out everything that was wrong with our health care system. How is that the simplest routine medical matters have been made so complicated by our insurance companies? Why does every encounter require a veritable girding up for battle? And how many patients do not get the care they need simply because they are defeated by the bureaucracy?

There’s a lot we can learn from animals in many facets of life — Lord knows, a nice massage behind the ears could do a lot of us some good — but I am consistently impressed by how much smoother veterinary medicine runs. Of course it’s too simplistic to make a direct comparison, but I hope that in this ongoing health care reform we consider ways to make things easier for patients.

As Dr. Ofri points out, insurance companies don’t exactly have incentives to make collections easy. I agree with her that it’s not an accident that they make it as complicated as they do. I don’t think it’s a huge conspiracy, but they have no incentive to make it simple and the specificity that comes with making it difficult benefits them even apart from discouraging people from making claims.

Conservatives will be quick to point out that one of the chief differences between animal health care and human health care is that the former is purely market-driven while the latter is a combination of public, private, and private but driven by public policy (namely health care tax exemptions for employers). This is quite true. Veterinarians have every incentive to make pricing as transparent as possible and without the intrusion of insurance companies they don’t have to negotiate different rates with different entities that leads not only to opacity, but disparate pricing.

This is one of my main frustrations with our health care system, though it could be addressed either with a market system or a purely socialized system. Namely, when I go visit the doctor I have no idea how much I am going to pay. I don’t know what the insurance company is going to quickly agree to and what they’re not. And then, if they don’t agree, then suddenly I am on the hook for more than I would have paid if I’d simply paid up-front. There’s no way of knowing, up front, what the cheapest method of paying is. Since I am healthy I saved money when I was on catastrophic health insurance, but what I remember most fondly about it was the fact that since I knew I was paying for all non-catastrophic care out-of-pocket, I didn’t have to worry about any of this stuff. Even under the current system, when you tell them that you’re paying up-front, the pricing becomes a lot more transparent and you can even save money in the process as they will often charge you less than the listed price in return for not having to submit claims to insurance companies.

However, there is another significant difference between human and animal care, which is that we as a society are willing to let animals die for non-payment and we’re simply not willing to let humans do so. This changes a lot and makes a purely free-market health care system very problematic. Since we force emergency rooms to treat anybody and everybody that comes in, people that are uninsured can simply go there if they’re worried about it, racking up substantial bills that they will never be able to pay but who cares because they need the help now. This ratchets up the price on those that can pay who have to pick up the tabs for the former. (Yes, I am aware that illegal immigrants play a role in all of this, but if they all disappeared tomorrow we would still have a problem in this general area. And this is not a post about immigration.) And apart from emergency rooms, when you force insurance companies to pick up the tab on people with pre-existing conditions and people know that they can get insurance at any point and coverage will be assured, they can wait until they get sick before they get coverage. We are simply far more reluctant to deny care to people than animals and this has wide-ranging repercussions.

Anyhow, back to the health insurance companies. It’s easy to attribute the Charlie Belcher Theory of Economics to the insurance companies that they are only denying care and making payments difficult because they want more money. Insurance companies are an easy target and I dislike them myself as a matter of course. On the other hand, I have been covered by for-profit and non-profit insurance companies and I can’t say that I ever really noticed a difference in terms of paperwork and thriftiness. They all have incentives to hold down costs and even the for-profits tend to have small profit margins (which they make up for in volume). The only really good insurance company I’ve ever felt really comfortable with is our current one. It could be related to the fact that they’re not-for-profit, but I also wonder if they treat us differently because they know my wife is a doctor or she works at a hospital.

The biggest problem with insurance, as I see it, is not so much the profit motive as it is the incentives. They have no incentive to make it easy on us because we’re not the ones that chose them. In some ways, our current system is the worst of both worlds where we have profit-seeking by many of the players but not the consumer choice that guides these institutions to serve the consumer’s needs. Not just on price, but on simplicity and transparency. They have to be cheap in order for our employers to sign with them, and if they don’t cover anything the employers won’t sign with them, either, but they can thread the needle by being opaque enough and, from their perspective, it’s easy to justify the opacity as caused by the cloud of the inherently complicated nature of health care generally.

I had lunch with Tom Baker, an acquaintance through Clancy’s work. He is a businessman with a track record of success who, like me, moved here for his wife’s job. He’s looking to start a software business and was wondering what my level of interest would be (and how I might be able to contribute). Along the way, he commented that he had hoped to make this new business an Arapaho institution to provide local jobs and bring money into the local economy, but he discovered that the IT-sector in Arapaho is virtually non-existent. Worse yet, the state university system is mostly uninterested in having strong computer science programs. And, of course, Callie is a small town and the nearest “city”, Redstone, is a rusty sort of town that educated people are typically interested in leaving. As such, if this business takes off and expands, he will most likely have to contract out the software development to a region that has IT people or, if he’s going to contract out anyway, to India. Now, some of this is merely a product of our specific location within the state, but even before this conversation I found it interested the comparative disinterest in technology compared to Delosa and even Deseret.

On the other hand, to some extent I suppose it makes sense. If there’s not an industry to support the jobs, the result is that you end up educating people who end up leaving and contributing to the economies of other states. Delosa and Colosse have been great beneficiaries of this. Delosa has a number of really good computer science programs and engineering programs, but a lot of talent is imported from neighboring states without the jobs to support their graduates. Muscogea State University, in the state north of Delosa, is a particularly good example of this. They have excellent computer science and engineering programs and upon graduation most of them seem to immediately move to Colosse. The Musco State Wildcats have almost as big a following in Colosse as the Delosa Panthers. At some point, the legislators in Muscogea have to be asking what the point is of spending all of this money educating people when they’re just going to move away. On the other hand, if they don’t supply graduates, if virtually assures that aspiring IT companies are going to pop up in Delosa rather than Muscogea.

Deseret has similar issues with an excess of talent. Its three largest universities have computer science programs with master’s degrees (though one of them is limited in scope) and at least one of the schools has a quite good program. Deseret also tends to turn out high school graduates that are actually reasonably education. But outside its capital city, the jobs aren’t really there and even inside the capital city they’re not easy to come by. They manage to hold on to the talent in a way that would be difficult for Arapaho because its Mormon population really doesn’t want to leave the state and will take low-paying jobs to stay in the Promised Land and near all of the family that also hasn’t moved. So Deseret has a stickiness that Arapaho and Muscogea lack.

If the business takes off (these things are always an uphill climb, but Tom has a pretty strong track record), it is not inconceivable that it could open up an office in Mocum, where I worked in Deseret and where I know there are a lot of tech-savvy people that are underemployed, and be only a two or three hour drive from operations. I suspect that India would make more sense. Or the West Coast.

Outside the world of IT, there is actually a similar operation. A national breadmaking operation has its corporate headquarters in Callie but neither makes nor (directly) sells bread here. Unlike with a software company, I don’t now entirely why that is as the process of breadmaking does not seem to require particularly specialized labor. I suppose they don’t make it here because of the lack of wheat fields (though I’m not sure why the land can’t be used for wheat. There’s a similar climate in Deseret and a cereal company had a major wheat-harvesting operation there. Not that this has anything to do with the main post, but I found it interesting regardless.

Over at Half Sigma, a discussion on two different types of poverty.

Apparently, if you live in Europe or the US/Canada, being poor makes you fat and malnourished.
But if you live in India, or Africa, or South America, or so on, being poor makes you thin and malnourished.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that in the “developed” countries of the world, much of the problem is simply with the fact that individual people no longer – to the large extent – know how to cook and, further, have the desire to do so. I’ll admit I am as guilty of this as the next guy; I tend to eat prepackaged meals (canned soup, canned noodle dishes, frozen pizzas) more times during the week than I make my own meals. Making my own meals is reserved for occasions when I have a female guest (they seem to love finding out that yes, guys can cook and cook well) or during the weekends when I’m not reaching home tired and wanting to relax.

The reality is, of course, that some of the prepackaged foods I eat are clearly not as good for me as if I made something vaguely equivalent from scratch. Just about everything is likely to be higher in sodium than it needs to be, though being a borderline supertaster, I tend to want more salt to counteract the bitterness in certain foods that other people miss, unless I’m in a mood for something bitter.

At the same time, however, the “western” diet has changed over the past few decades. At one time, “pure meat” – that is to say, a chicken leg, or steak, or burger – was something people had 2-3 times per week. Lunch counter food looking back 4 decades or more was much fresher and less unhealthy as well. To what degree HFCS causes troubles, or the overabundance of Gluten as cheap filler, I can’t say, except that HFCS was barely noticed back then, and didn’t even get to “GRAS” (“generally recognized as safe”) status by the US FDA until 1976.

At the same time, poor neighborhoods tend to lack healthy options. Comparing “poor” and “middle class” neighborhood grocer’s produce aisle, for instance, will give one a remarkable perspective: there are two versions of one particular chain that I tend to go by on a regular basis. The first, in the midst of the “poor zone” surrounding one side of Southern Tech, devotes less than 1/20 of the store’s floor space to produce, and what they do have tends to be wilted or otherwise unappetizing. On the other hand, the “flagship” version, a few miles south of my house, devotes approximately 1/8 of their floor space to produce and tends to have very fresh, clean and appetizing produce for purchase. Given that produce is listed for the same price at each store, I find myself wondering how much of the difference is because the poor around Southern Tech don’t buy it (and so it sits around and wilts), and how much of it came off the truck half-wilted as the “last pick” from the delivery truck.

It’s also true that the number of fast-food restaurants and crappy little corner stores increases with poor neighborhoods. So by the same token, the neighborhood grocery’s produce is unappealing, the Popeye’s Chicken just outside the tenement door smells really good, and why walk the four blocks to the neighborhood grocery when you can buy (for a suitable markup) the same can of Chef Boyardee Overstuffed Ravioli at the corner store on your own block?

As well as that, neighbor-on-neighbor crime is up in those neighborhoods. Why try to go somewhere, even a local little park or a walk along the canal, when you’re likely to have someone try to mug you just for being outdoors?

The impact of mostly-sedentary jobs (when the poor are actually working) isn’t to be underestimated, either. In western nations, the poor are likely to be working “minimum wage” jobs. For a little exercise, perhaps stocking shelves, but they may equally be working in the neighborhood fast-food restaurants, or sitting the counter at the corner store/gas station, or any number of “sit in your butt and watch this” type of jobs. By contrast, the poor in developed nations are walking more to get where they go, and tending to do more physical types of jobs.

Circling back around – when I was in school, there was a requirement that students “choose” between either “home economics”, or a couple other optional courses. Because the other optional courses didn’t interest me, I wound up as one of the 4 boys taking home ec that semester (they wouldn’t let us do wood shop until 8th grade, which I did take when I could). Even looking at the course back then, it was rather a joke; there were 4 weeks of sewing that wound up creating one plush football, 4 weeks of “this is how you make a budget” (which most of the kids failed at), and four weeks of “meal planning” out of which 80% of the class wrote up exactly the same weekly plan based on the very few things they’d been taught to make. Since the home ec room had stoves but we weren’t allowed to turn the gas on to use them, “cooking” was rather pointless, and the most appetizing thing the class ever created were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. As I was given to understand, by the time my brother and sister went through that school, home ec was shut down entirely.

By comparison, looking back a few decades, it was expected that most households – and most individuals – knew how to cook, at least enough to survive. The basics of making a soup, making a sandwich, grilling, baking, broiling… as far as the middle and poor classes were concerned, at least, they were necessary life skills. In an age when one can stock up the freezer with “hungry man” dinners (or even “lean cuisine”, which are anything but), why would one bother to learn to really cook? The phenomenon of the stay-at-home wife also offers at least some option for a leaner, healthier diet inasmuch as having someone who (a) has the time to be at home preparing a meal and (b) handles food preparation and meal planning regularly, definitely was going to do wonders for keeping some of the nastier stuff out of a waistline.

ED Kain reports that we have Jimmy Carter to thank for America’s booming beer industry:

To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening back up to craft brewers.

I am personally positively bland in my beer tastes. My “favorite” beer is a Delosa-based outfit (“Wurzbock”) that’s something of a state institution. I put favorite in quotes because I’m not sure if I actually prefer it to Budweiser. Back when I was going to a lot of bars (for music shows) I made the switch to Budweiser simply because it was cheaper. Having moved away from Delosa, I now drink Wurzbock whenever I get back into town simply because it’s less available outside of the state. I say “less available” because according to Wikipedia it’s actually available in over 40 states. I would periodically see Wurzbock trucks when I was in Cascadia. I was tempted to follow one just to see what bar it was headed to. There was another local beer I sometimes drink instead that costs the same as Budweiser, isn’t as good, but is named after my home state. Home field advantage, I guess.

Most of the time, I am fine with Budweiser (or Miller or Coors)g. I’ll drink any non-lite beer. I have some friends that are beer snobs and try to push this really malty stuff on it. I would periodically order Guinness only because I hate it and therefore one glass would last me all night long. For the most part, I am the opposite of a beer snob. Mostly because I don’t really like beer all that much. I had to force myself to like it in the first place (that I would do so astonished many Delosians Deseretians). I did so by basically taking hot days and instead of drinking a coke like I wanted I would just drink a beer. Eventually my mind began associating beer with refreshment. But the effects have sort of worn off as in Arapaho and Cascadia there were never many really hot days. I used the same tactic with diet coke, though that always wears off almost instantly as soon as I drink a couple cans of the real thing.

So unfortunately President Carter’s contribution is more or less lost on me.

Spirit Airlines has officially started its policy of charging for carry-on luggage.

Honestly, I don’t really have a problem with it. I mean, I prefer fewer charges to more charges, but if you’re going to charge for checked luggage, it only makes sense to charge for carry-ons. Failing to do so creates inefficient incentives. I was behind a woman at the Alexandria airport that had three carry-ons/personal-items. Now, we’re only allowed to take two on the plane, but that’s not really security’s business. She just checks her third bag at the gate. That is a courtesy that the airlines provide for those that have something they can’t really check, such as a stroller, or accidentally bring on luggage that they can see won’t fit. It’s not meant to sidestep checked-luggage fees. It ads time to security screening, which is always a process of indeterminable length. It ads time to the boarding process as lines get held up by people trying to cram their bags in overhead bins. It ads time to the security line.

Generally speaking, I think things that discourage people from packing more are on the whole a good thing. I say this as someone that typically packs heavy. When I flew down to Delosa, I actually used the fact that I had two checked bags for free on the flight back because off the kind of ticket I ordered to buy some stuff in Delosa and take it back with me on the plane. Taking advantage of a courtesy, just as the lady with the three bags did.

Along those lines, I think that people that limit themselves to a personal item (purse, laptop) ought to get priority through security. That’s another thing they could do do discourage people like me from taking everything under the sun.

Phi points to an article about how the outsourcing-to-China business is on a downturn:

Where once low-tech factories and scant wages were welcomed in a China eager to escape isolation and poverty, workers are now demanding a bigger share of the profits. The government, meanwhile, is pushing foreign companies to make investments in areas it believes will create greater wealth for China, like high technology.

Many companies are striving to stay profitable by shifting factories to cheaper areas farther inland or to other developing countries, and a few are even resuming production in the West. {…}

“I have 15 major clients. My job is to give the best advice I can give. I tell it like it is. I tell them, put your helmet on, it’s going to get ugly,” said {outsourcing advisor Rick} Goodwin, who says dissatisfied workers and hard-to-predict exchange rates are his top worries.

A while back I wrote a post that I cannot find (maybe it was on another blog) regarding the outsourcing of IT work. The perception among many is that with manufacturing gone (it isn’t, though granted it’s certainly not what it used to be) the next logical step is for us to lose the IT jobs because, after all, the Indians and Chinese are willing to do it for cheaper! I wouldn’t say that the threat is not there, but one of there were and are some flaws in the assumptions that underly it. One of the assumptions is that they will get to do anything that they can do cheaper there than we can do here. Another assumption is that this is something that will continue in perpetuity (or until something is done).

The problem with the first assumption is that they don’t just have to be cheaper. They have to be a lot cheaper. Every experience I have had that has involved outsourced talent in India, China, or Russia has reinforced this notion. It’s a heck of a lot easier to build stuff here. For a lot of jobs, it can require multiple people to do the same job that one person can do over here. And because of cultural and language differences, they’re less likely to get it right. Now, oftentimes despite all of these things it can still be cheaper and better (from the company’s point of view) to do things over there than over here. And the margin does not need to be as much when it comes to low-skill jobs like manufacturing (though shipping can be an issue, depending on what is being built and shipped). It’s important to keep in mind, however, that if they can build it here for $5 and there for $4, we’ve got a really good chance.

The problems with the second assumption applies particularly to high-skill workers but also to low-skill ones and definitely to the governments of those countries. They don’t want to be our errand boys forever. They don’t want to work for pennies on the dollar forever. Right now they are willing to do these things because they have to. However, as these countries get more wealthy, they’re going to start to be less willing to. As their citizenry gets more educated, they’re going to want to design their own stuff. They’re going to want to build the stuff that they design. And they’re going to want to own the company that makes the profits from the stuff they design and build. And as they start more and more of their own companies, their labor and manufacturing capacity diminishes and they have to start charging more. This is particularly true in the high-skill realm where it costs a lot of money to educated a relatively small portion of the population with the intelligence required to do the work and do it well. But even with manufacturing, they have to get the infrastructure in place and build the plants and round up the people.

Granted, China has a lot of excess capacity and it may take a long time before they officially start running short on people. But the factories don’t magically appear and as they have difficulty keeping up the prices they will be able to command will also go up and the difference between how much it costs American companies to build something over here and over there will become less startling. That’s if they don’t start leaving China for other countries, which will then often undergo the same pressures and transformations. I’m not suggesting the jobs are going to start marching right back to the States. Most of those that are gone will stay gone. But over time, I expect less of the new jobs to leave.

That’s not to say that it won’t be a rough transition or that everything is just going to be hunky-dory. Nor is it meant as an argument against trade restrictions that would make it more difficult to buy things in China. I lean against them, but there are arguments in favor of them not really discussed in this post. That’s my way of saying that I don’t want to make this about whether free trade is, in the aggregate, a good or bad thing. All of the above can be entirely true and it may still be a bad idea.

The main point I am making is that a lot of people seem to be of the mind that of the mind that China will be able to have its cake and eat it, too. They’ll be able to be this new hyperpower that runs our errands while paying its workers pennies on the dollar. Success in a country breeds expectations among its people. It’s what happened in Europe; it’s what happened in Japan; it’s what happened in the United States. They’ll demand better pay or better services from their government in order to bring their lifestyles – and hence their wages – more in line with the first world’s.

A lot of folks have been rolling their eyes at the recent proposal in San Francisco to ban pet sales in city limits. Just another example of the nanny state and big government trampling on our liberties. As far as libertarian thought goes, this response makes a great deal of sense. But ED Kain links to (and expands upon) a pretty good counterargument:

No one need suggest that a kitten’s life is morally equivalent to a human’s to observe that something is terribly wrong when we casually dispose of one much as we would the butane in a Bic lighter: that is the mark of a callow society, a cruel society. It does not speak well for us that we kill millions of sentient, sensitive animals every year through grotesque, painful methods such as gassing and heart-sticking. Pet stores are one of the main reasons we do this.

The author, Claire Berlinsky, goes a step further than I would in supporting the ban of pet shops everywhere. I’ll get into why I am not on board with that idea later.

If one does not accept government intervention for the welfare of animals under any circumstances because animals are no more than property, there isn’t much that can be said to convince you. But for the rest of us, pet shops represent a real problem for the welfare of animals even if we don’t find the sale of living creatures distasteful (which I don’t) or oppose the captivity of creatures to the whims of measly humans (ditto).

Pet shops, by virtue of their trade, make it their business to sell pets. That means convincing people that they want pets. The problem is that while someone can change their mind after buying an iPhone and be left with nothing left than a hunk of plastic that they don’t want to use, someone that changes their mind after buying a pet has a living, breathing creature to care for. This is inherently more problematic. Even if they return it (if they can), if they got a puppy they have put the animal in a position where it is less likely to be adopted in the future (“So someone else didn’t want this animal, so why should I take it?” and “Oh, well I was hoping for a puppy under 12 weeks for training purposes”).

Further, unlike with other things that we prohibit the sale of, such as narcotics, we are not denying most people that genuinely want the product the ability to get it. You want a dog? You can still get one! You just have to go to the pound! They’re being put to death because not enough people want them and not just dogs that have something wrong with them. So the usual fears about a deathly black market don’t really apply so much. The number of people so dead-set on a purebread puppy that they would be willing to break the law and enter into a black market is relatively small. It’s mostly just a preference. And an availability. And that the most obvious answer to the question of where you get a pet is a pet store.

One of the counterarguments I am hearing is that a society that eats meat cannot care about animal welfare. Usually tossed in are the profound insights that we tend to treat different animals differently. Some suggest that our choice of dogs and cats to be family friends is a random accident or at least a subjective choice with no particular value.

To me, though, there is no inconsistency inherent with treating different animals differently. People, in the aggregate, have basically made different arrangements with different animals. And with arrangements come relationships. Dogs and cats were not chosen as housepets by random or cause they’re just cuter than the rest. Our relationship evolved from the fact that dogs and cats have something specific to offer us. Dogs and cats are smart enough to be useful (herding sheep, catching rodants) but dumb enough to, in the aggregate, be controlled. For that matter, horses proved themselves useful for riding. And so we put them to work and became fond of them. This is pretty natural and it takes something external, like a religious prohibition or a lack of available animals, for this kind of relationship not to develop. And besides all that, to the extent that we use them solely for companionship, they’re particularly useful for that, too! They’re the right size and have the right temperament.

Other animals, though, are primarily useful only insofar as we eat them. So while we can form a relationship with a dog or cat based on what they do for us around the house (they make excellent vacuum cleaners) and the convenient companionship they provide, we form relationships with cows based on how tasty they are (or how tasty their milk is). Because they have no other use to us, it’s hard to look at them any other way. They’re too dumb to be useful in another capacity. They’re too big to be kept in the house. I don’t know how smart chickens are, but they’re not entirely convenient to have in the house the way a dog or cat is. From what I understand, pigs are smart and are domesticatable, but their size and the habits they form make them inferior pets to dogs, so they’re applying for a job that has been filled by the most qualified applicant.

So we have a relationship with dogs and cats that is particular. We will hold them hostage, but we will also feed them. We will feed them food they disfavor compared to the food we eat, but we will give them shelter. We will treat them in a lot of ways that they do not understand, but we’ve worked it out that so long as we rub their tummy, they’re happy. Not having owned any cats nor desiring to, I don’t have as many insights to our precise relationship with them, but I assume that there is something similarly worthwhile about them.

It seems to me that adding (in the aggregate) to that arrangement that we will take minimal efforts to see that fewer of them are needlessly killed is not particularly unreasonable.

Above I said that I would not go as far as Ms. Berlinsky. Here’s why: sometimes people really do need to buy a pet. Some people really have their heart set on a particular breed and getting a mutt from the pound is not an acceptable substitute. I would prefer the government not prevent that from ever happening. I think as long as we make sure that’s what they want, we can push the fence-sitters to the pound. But even if we don’t want to accommodate those, there are some that need need purebreds or dogs with traceable lineage. If the dog is being trained for a very specific task, some breeds are better than others. If a police department is going to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars training a drug-sniffing dog, they are going to want that dog to be of the right breed (or make sure that it doesn’t have particular other breeds in him or her) before they do so and that is not unreasonable. There are also people, like the President of the United States, that need hypoallergenic pets.

I am hoping that Clancy and I will be getting a new dog in the next month or two. I have a natural preference for mutts over purebreds and so I would probably go to the pound in any event, but things that would push me in that direction and away from breeders are good steps. Making purchasing a bred dog less convenient, for instance, or more costly. As it stands, I may well get a for-sale dog if the local pound doesn’t have what I want. I am not above such selfishness simply because I want a dog of a certain size and a certain age. Probably not because of my preference for mutts as well as having the point hammered into my head by my ex-girlfriend the former dog trainer (Julianne), but in a better world it wouldn’t even be a close call or something that I would consider.

So what to do? My preference would be to tax the hell out of purebreds (and use the money to take care of the mutts at the pound). At least try it and see how it goes. I have no illusions that there won’t be a fair number of unreported sales, but they’ll have a harder time setting up shop at the mall or widely advertising their services. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. But I think it’s worth a shot.