The Cost of Goods Sold

I'm fascinated by boxes and packaging. Some of it can be quite elaborate and I suspect some engineering team is paid quite a sum of money to devise the packaging so that a piece of cardboard or plastic can be constructed in such a way to facilitate a rather complex arrangement of products inside them. It's mind-boggling to me sometimes. And the only purpose is to get a product -- usually an electronic gadget of some sort -- delivered to us efficiently. We unpack and toss the box. It served its purpose. Trust me, I have a lot of experience with boxes and packaging.

This morning I went to the garage to break down some boxes that were stacking up in our utility room. They were beer boxes used to bring home six packs that we have purchased the last few months. Nothing too elaborate or complex there: four flaps on the top and four flaps on the bottom.

I often think about the beers we like being so expensive. Yes, they are high-end beers brewed with loving care by people who love the craft. And frankly, after breaking down a few boxes and contemplating this, I'm amazed they, and everything else we consume, aren't more expensive. I wonder how much of the $9 for some six packs is actually to pay for the 72 ounces of beer?

The bottles can't be cheap. There are full color labels on each one, and bottle caps as well. Sometimes clever stuff is printed on the underside of the caps. Six beers go into a carrying container which is covered with full color graphics promoting the brew. Four of these carrying containers go into a box. Each of the boxes are covered in ink promoting the product, and the bottoms and tops of them are glued shut for shipment.

Some graphics designer had to be paid to come up with the artwork, and marketing concepts take time to develop. All that cardboard had to be shipped from somewhere, as did the bottles, caps, and labels, and the glue used to seal them. Workers are paid to make the brew, and box it up for shipment. Equipment used to bottle the beers can't be cheap and surely requires frequent maintenance. These facilities require cleaning, and their utility bills must be enormous.

Large 18-wheelers come and load up hundreds of cases of these beers and prepare to haul them thousands of miles across the land. Truck drivers need to be paid, trucks require maintenance, insurance, and lots and lots of expensive fuel.

Upon delivery, some store clerk is paid to unpack the boxes and place the six packs attractively on the store shelves, and many of them sit in refrigerated compartments. Those of us craving a nice hop-filled brew will go to the store, select our brew of choice, and pay a clerk who is earning several bucks an hour to take our money. They place the beers back into a shipping box and off we go to drink it. We throw away our bottle caps, and toss the bottles into a recycling bin so another large truck can come every Wednesday and pick them up.

After a few weeks of this, I start breaking down boxes again, and thinking about all that ink.

Good Riddance, Hummer

I shall not mourn the Hummer crash.

General Motors said on Wednesday that it would shut down Hummer, the brand of big sport utility vehicles that became synonymous with the term gas guzzler, after a deal to sell it to a Chinese manufacturer fell apart.

Up to 3,000 jobs could be lost if GM follows through with the shutdown. But honestly, we could, and should, be creating better jobs out there, manufacturing products which don't contribute to our downfall.

Intoxicated by Texting

Can we please do something to stop this insane practice of texting while driving? The time is way overdue to examine this phenomenon and get serious about reducing the occurrences. And even cellphone use should be mandated by law to be hands-free while driving a vehicle, at the very least.

Mr. Hill, a diligent student with a reputation for helping neighbors, also took pride in his clean driving record. “Not a speeding ticket, not a fender bender, nothing,” he said.

Until last Sept. 3. Mr. Hill, then 20, left the parking lot of a Goodwill store where he had spotted a dresser he thought might interest a neighbor. He dialed her to pass along news of the find.

Mr. Hill was so engrossed in the call that he ran a red light and didn’t notice Linda Doyle’s small sport utility vehicle until the last second. He hit her going 45 miles per hour. She was pronounced dead shortly after.

Later, a policeman asked Mr. Hill what color the light had been. “I never saw it,” he answered.

If these people who crash their cars while using a device simply smash into a tree or a concrete barrier, I probably would not be as outraged. People who do stupid things and take risks will pay the price when something goes wrong. I don't think we need a law against cellphone use or texting while jumping from a plane with a parachute, for instance. The only person likely to die in this situation is the person jumping, and it would probably have nothing to do with cellphone use. And wind noise might be a problem, but I digress.

A driver distracted by texting or other cellphone use could be as much a threat to the rest of us as an intoxicated driver. [Emphasis mine.]

Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe.

A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.

Yet Americans have largely ignored that research. Instead, they increasingly use phones, navigation devices and even laptops to turn their cars into mobile offices, chat rooms and entertainment centers, making roads more dangerous.

So, during the time since the 9/11 attacks, we've lost possibly 20,000 or more innocent lives, and possibly 2 million+ injuries, and we've done almost nothing to prevent the carnage. By contrast, we lost a fraction of that number in the 9/11 attacks and allowed a cowboy president and Congress to basically run roughshod over the US Constitution.

Police in almost half of all states make no attempt to gather data on the problem. They are not required to ask drivers who cause accidents whether they were distracted by a phone or other device. Even when officers do ask, some drivers are not forthcoming.

The federal government warns against talking on a cellphone while driving, but no state legislature has banned it. This year, state legislators introduced about 170 bills to address distracted driving, but passed fewer than 10.

Where the hell are our priorities?

Make note of the research mentioned above regarding hands-free devices. I suspect it depends on the person, the nature of the call, and traffic conditions. But without a doubt, there are plenty of situations where that is equally unsafe.

I think about my own phone conversations while I'm sitting at my desk in my home, or on the sofa. I notice two patterns develop: either I'm observing something going on around me and the person speaking has uttered an incomprehensible sentence or two, or I'm paying close attention to the speaker and engaging in conversation myself, and the world beyond the tip of my nose becomes a blur.

Even when I'm in the car with txrad, I occasionally find conversation to be overly-distracting when I'm in heavy traffic. I often need my complete attention focused on the cars around me, being aware of the person tail-gating me, or the idiot who is about to dart across three lanes of traffic directly in front of me to make the exit.

Here's my suggestion. Before sending a text message or having a conversation while driving a vehicle, ask yourself: is this text message or call really worth the possibility of a hospital emergency room visit? Is it worth possibly killing someone or being killed? Is it even worth the possibility of a fender-bender with the resulting hassles of auto repairs and insurance issues? Are you really that hooked on it?

Scientists are grappling, too, with perhaps the broadest question hanging over the phenomenon of distracted driving: Why do people, knowing the risk, continue to talk while driving? The answer, they say, is partly the intense social pressures to stay in touch and always be available to friends and colleagues. And there also is the neurological response of multitaskers. They show signs of addiction — to their gadgets.

John Ratey, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and a specialist on the science of attention, explained that when people use digital devices, they get a quick burst of adrenaline, “a dopamine squirt.” Without it, people grow bored with simpler activities like driving. Mr. Ratey said the modern brain is being rewired to crave stimulation, a condition he calls acquired attention deficit disorder.

“We need that constant pizzazz, the reward, the intensity,” he said. He largely dismisses the argument that people need the time in the car to be productive. “The justification for doing work is just that — a justification to be engaged,” he said.

Auto accidents will continue to happen and innocent people will continue to die. But we need to move beyond categorizing as an accident the blatantly careless selfish obsession with new freedoms to "stay connected" at all times and in all situations.

In a world where one or two seconds can mean the difference between life and death, there are important questions. The person who rammed into this vehicle should have asked them. The mother who was driving this car would still be alive.

Take a look at the Patchwork of Policies compiled by the New York Times. There are only 14 states with a total ban on texting while driving!

If you feel you simply must text while being in motion, then I suggest you take a walk. At least the damage you may cause will only be to yourself.

My "What the Fuck" Morning

As relieved as I am that George W. Bush has been discharged from the White House, I'm starting to realize how there is always plenty of room for improvement. I suspect in the next few weeks we'll start too see Obama's approval ratings drop sharply if he follows through with this.

The Obama administration is signaling to Congress that the president could support taxing some employee health benefits, as several influential lawmakers and many economists favor, to help pay for overhauling the health care system.

The proposal is politically problematic for President Obama, however, since it is similar to one he denounced in the presidential campaign as “the largest middle-class tax increase in history.” Most Americans with insurance get it from their employers, and taxing workers for the benefit is opposed by union leaders and some businesses.

What the fuck? Why not tax things which don't actually improve one's health, things which people can still choose to purchase? We already do that with cigarettes. For some reason lawmakers can't seem to take it another step, like taxing soft drinks. Raise taxes on distilled spirits. Slap a federal tax on fast food. Although it's not unhealthy, maybe we should tax bottled water. Tax any beverage sold in a plastic bottle. Tax plastic grocery bags. But leave our health benefits alone! Those of us lucky enough to have them don't need the government giving us an excuse to decline them.

Maybe we should stop bailing out corporations and use that money to overhaul the health care industry, instead of having it squandered. Seriously, this is making me livid!

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

What the fuck???

I was already not on board with the idea that any corporation is just too big or too important to allow it to fail. And this AIG situation is just driving me to not give a crap whether they live or die.

This reminds me of a game of solitaire in which I keep replaying in order to succeed and I keep getting the same frustrating result. Eventually it makes more sense to simply shut it down and deal a new hand.

A Williams-Sonoma Observation

I'm going to try and be nice here. If I ever bad-mouth a national chain I get the police trolls trying to rectify the situation. I like Williams-Sonoma. I really do. I spent close to an hour in there today examining just about everything. And this is the second time I've gone there with gift card in hand trying to find something to buy.

The first time I walked away empty-handed from that store as well as Pottery Barn where the card is also valid. Today I still didn't really see anything at Pottery Barn and decided to swing through Williams-Sonoma again, determined to buy something.

And I found two things, both recommended by txrad. This silicone mat for rolling dough or baking may come in handy since I have become rather fond of rolling out pie dough, and txrad may bake some cookies occasionally.

He also wanted this garlic press which, although apparently designed in Germany, is made in China and therefore should have cost about $8 max.

Question of the Day: Take a wild guess what we spent on these two items? Make a note of your guess in comments and then take a look at the sales receipt here.

Honestly, I don't understand how people can afford to shop at these stores. Not that there aren't some wonderful things in there which might be well worth the money spent. I saw a few chef's knives I would love but I already have a great knife set. There's just nothing I really need at the moment but these two items will get some usage.

I have a theory that Williams-Sonoma exists primarily as a wedding registry for people who want other people to buy them nice gifts. I would love to know what percentage of the clientele go there and buy stuff for themselves.

Yes, it's nice stuff. But there's no reason why a mom & pop hardware store couldn't sell the same stuff without the same price tag. And then I wouldn't be subsidizing mall rent in the Nordstrom wing.

Wall Street Excess

I'm tired of staring at a post about Adolf Hitler so I'm taking time off work to put up something else, although I can't guarantee this won't be disturbing on a completely different level.

I simply cannot fathom such a bonus being handed out in some of these examples.

For Dow Kim, 2006 was a very good year. While his salary at Merrill Lynch was $350,000, his total compensation was 100 times that — $35 million.

[...]

Mr. Kim’s colleagues, not only at his level, but far down the ranks, also pocketed large paychecks. In all, Merrill handed out $5 billion to $6 billion in bonuses that year. A 20-something analyst with a base salary of $130,000 collected a bonus of $250,000. And a 30-something trader with a $180,000 salary got $5 million.

But Merrill’s record earnings in 2006 — $7.5 billion — turned out to be a mirage. The company has since lost three times that amount, largely because the mortgage investments that supposedly had powered some of those profits plunged in value.

Unlike the earnings, however, the bonuses have not been reversed.

Just thinking about this coupled with the word bailout makes me cringe.

Need I Say More?

Why yes, thanks for asking. Every American taxpayer needs to stare at this chart for a minimum of 30 seconds. It should cause outrage, even in the absence of an economic meltdown.

You would think chief executives would be willing to bite the same bullet the rest of us underlings do. But how could they survive and be happy with a $350,000 a year salary, or even an $800,000 a year salary. How could they even be motivated to get up and go to work for such a paltry salary?

But Wall Street, its lobbyists and trade groups are waging a feverish lobbying campaign to try to fight compensation curbs. Pay restrictions, they say, would sap incentives to hard work and innovation, and hurt the financial sector and the American economy.

“We support the bill, but we are opposed to provisions on executive pay,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade group. “It is not appropriate for government to be setting the salaries of executives.”

But it's appropriate for taxpayers, most of whom are pinching pennies, to bail them out so they can continue drawing outrageous salaries? The only word which comes to mind is bullshit.

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the committee, said the “authors of this calamity” should not walk away enriched.

So true. But to help keep this in perspective, let's not forget that most of us consider Dodd one of the good less corrupt guys in Congress, and his hands are far from clean.

“This was no act of God,” Mr. Dodd said. “This was not like Hurricane Hike — Ike, rather. It was created by a combustible combination of private greed and public regulatory neglect, and now we must confront the present crisis.”

[...]

Mr. Dodd, who has received more contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s political action committees and employees ($133,900 since 1989) than any other senator, didn’t mention lapses in Congressional oversight.

Between the corruption in Congress, and the greed driving the lobbyists, how in the hell can we trust anyone there to work out a bailout plan that will actually work the way it should?

It sounds like the $700 billion could become another bridge to nowhere. Or a bridge directly into the corporate boardrooms.

This is Austin; Let's Have a Drink...or Twelve

Forbes.com has a piece titled America's Hard-Drinking Cities and Austin is on the list. In fact, Austin may be The One.

Austin ranks high for its drinking habits across the board. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) 2007 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey, 61.5% of adult residents say they have had at least one drink of alcohol within the past 30 days, and a staggering 20.6% of respondents confess to binge drinking, or having five or more drinks on one occasion.

But if five or more drinks on one occasion constitutes binge drinking, or if that's considered "staggering" then hell, I binge drink every night. Define occasion. Is that like one evening? Or is an occasion a shorter span of time, like when Rachel Maddow makes an appearance on MSNBC, and you do five drinks during the time she's speaking?

When txrad and I open a bottle of wine, that's about 3 glasses each so I'm already 60% staggered. I always have a beer after my wine. It rinses away the sulfites from my mouth. That gets me 80% staggered. So if I top that off with 3 or 4 shots (my shots are probably less than half of an official bar shot) so let's just say two shots, then I'm 120% staggered.

And when Bush is doing an address to the nation, that's when I'm likely to increase my intake. Who wouldn't.

Collegiate excess has repercussions far beyond hangovers and missed classes, and should be of concern to members of the surrounding community.

What a crock of shit. The surrounding community isn't concerned because... THEY'RE ALL DRUNK! Or high. Or both.

"Binge drinking hurts not only the drinker but also others near him," says Henry Wechsler, Ph.D., a lecturer at the Harvard school of Public Health, where he was also the director of the College Alcohol Study, and author of Dying to Drink: Confronting Binge Drinking on College Campuses.

"The binge drinker disturbs the peace, through noise, vandalism and sometimes violence.

I've got one out of three covered. I will be making some noise tonight. But no vandalism or violence. I'll leave that to my neighbor, the meth addict.

A scene from the Wagon Wheel in Austin. Yeeee haawww! Drunk cowboys!

I Wear Many Hats

Seriously. Are there many people out there who need this product?

Holds up to 32 caps if you stack one on top the other. I'm a firm believer in getting the most bang for my buck.

I wonder if they have a shot glass rack on sale?

My guess is there's over 100 shot glasses in this cabinet. And I've given away about two dozen recently. Would Goodwill want those? I need to de-clutter. Hell, I've got some pretty decent wine & champagne glasses in there which I can't even access due to the shot glasses.

Those were a promotional gimmick for about a year with our favorite tequila. Buy a bottle and get two or three shot glasses. It was fun the first couple of times but then I was ready for that gimmick to run its course. Near the end I was even having the woman at the liquor store tear off the packaging which contained the glasses.

But how many people do you know who could have a crowd of maybe 110 over at their house and everyone simultaneously do a shot? That must count for something.

Stupid People: They're Everywhere

Money can't buy common sense. That's for damn sure.

This house is for sale.

By the time Stan and Dorothea Cheslock moved into their 26,000-square-foot dream house on 30 acres here, they were already dreaming of getting out.

“We kind of knew even before the house was finished that it was too much house for us,” Mr. Cheslock, who made (and lost some of) a fortune in finance, explained the other evening as he showed a visitor around.

Hey, the next time you aren't sure about something of this magnitude, give me a call and I'll advise you for about $150,000 and save you the hassle of realizing you made a multi-million dollar mistake.

The Cheslocks, who sold their previous home in Greenwich for $12 million, bought the property for $7 million in 2000, spent nearly $14 million and four years building the house, and put it on the market in 2006 for $31 million. No takers.

Here comes another konagod boo-hoo moment. Damn, where did I leave my compassion? It was here yesterday!

These people are emtpy-nesters -- the kids are grown. It's just them! The house has a terrace that's bigger than my entire house, and sometimes I think our house is a bit too big for two people. And their annual maintenance cost is more than we paid for our house.

And if you're thinking they learned a valuable lesson from this experience, think again.

They have not decided where to move next — just that it should be smaller.

“I would be happy with 3,500 square feet,” Mrs. Cheslock said.

“I would need 7,000 square feet,” said her husband.

He would NEED 7,000 square feet???

Stupid people are everywhere.

Tired of Being Hijacked

Honestly, I don't know what to do about this but it is driving me completely batshit insane. I'm sure there's a technical term for what is being done to my konagod dot com email account. I just call it hijacking by some asshole for sending out thousands of spam emails. Most of them kick back into my in-box as blocked and undeliverable.

I just deleted over a thousand of these nasty buggers from overnight.

I think I need to pay a visit to the host of my domain and check out some settings.

Yea! Free Money!

All this hoopla over the bipartisan stimulus package is almost comical were it not so sad.

President Bush hailed "the kind of cooperation that some predicted was not possible here in Washington." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) used the words "bipartisan" and "bipartisanship" 10 times in a brief appearance. "Many Americans believe that Washington is broken," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). "But I think this agreement, and I hope that this agreement, will show the American people that we can fix it."

Print that $150 billion quickly because I can hardly wait to get my hands on my $600. Certainly, this will help millions of people temporarily who have been struggling to make ends meet day in and day out for years. For those in or near poverty, and others living paycheck to paycheck, this money is guaranteed to be spent, and hopefully spent wisely. Because it is a one shot deal.

And while the politicians are all gloating and patting each other on the back for their bipartisan success, I sincerely hope they are planning ahead for the day when the honeymoon is over. Once the money is spent, and the lucky retailers on the receiving end of this windfall have tallied up their profits, I have a fear we'll quickly return to face the music of a dismal economy.

Few economists thought the stimulus plan alone would be adequate to keep the economy clear of a recession. Yet many portrayed the package as a significant psychological boost for anxious markets around the world, a sign that the Washington overseers of the American economy are seriously engaged in finding a fix.

“It is a much needed and very constructive step,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration who has recently called for specific and temporary tax cuts. “It will provide some confidence. But policy-making will need to be on standby, because more may be needed.”

Indeed, this is nothing more than a "psychological boost" and more is definitely needed. And what is most irksome is how the Democrats caved in to the misguided notions of the Bush Administration yet again, and minority groups are most likely to be battered hardest should the recession intensify.

Democrats had sought the extension of unemployment benefits and an increase in food stamps. Research shows these measures deliver the largest increases in spending, because poor people are prone to buy what they need when given the chance. Wealthy people, by contrast, tend to save more when taxes are cut.

The Bush administration insisted on rebates alone, and House Democrats relented in exchange for adding payments to people who do not pay income taxes.

“They gave up pieces of the package that were more effective,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington, who blamed the Bush administration for blocking the expansion of benefits. “It’s a political choice, and a bad one. It’s an ideology that says, ‘I can get a lot more credit for tax cuts than I can for expanding unemployment insurance.’ ”

Unemployment among blacks and Hispanics has been rising at triple the rate for whites, while the time it takes for people to find new jobs has been lengthening, according to government data. Some experts argue that by failing to expand unemployment benefits, the plan leaves minority groups most vulnerable to a recession.

Paul Krugman's op-ed piece in the New York Times today echoes these concerns.

Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

[...]

That’s why many of the stimulus proposals we were hearing just a few days ago focused in the first place on expanding programs that specifically help people who have fallen on hard times, especially unemployment insurance and food stamps. And these were the stimulus ideas that received the highest grades in a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

There was also some talk among Democrats about providing temporary aid to state and local governments, whose finances are being pummeled by the weakening economy. Like help for the unemployed, this would have done double duty, averting hardship and heading off spending cuts that could worsen the downturn.

But the Bush administration has apparently succeeded in killing all of these ideas, in favor of a plan that mainly gives money to those least likely to spend it.

In any event, let's not get too excited. It appears unlikely these funds will be in the hands of consumers before June due to the IRS being unable to begin processing these payments until the bulk of tax filings for 2007 have been completed -- usually at the end of May.

Speaking only for myself, I'm not sure what I will do with my $600 but the odds are it will not be spent at Wal-Mart, Target or Circuit City, nor is it likely to be spent at my local supermarket unless my current unemployment status is extended into the summer. Although I am jobless, I am still among the lucky ones whose receipt of these funds is unlikely to stimulate the economy. In fact, I think I might simply tack it on to that month's mortgage payment. A step closer to having a mortgage-free life is my own personal definition of security.

Black Friday Absurdity, Part 1

No way in hell would I get up to be at a store for a 4:00am opening just for a $10 off coupon.

No way in hell.

The extreme hours highlight how desperate stores are to win over consumers this holiday season, which is expected to be the weakest in five years because of rising energy prices, falling home values and a tight credit market.

In another sign of retail desperation, more stores are opening on Thanksgiving night, as if one day of mayhem isn't quite enough.

At the CompUSA at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street in Manhattan, store staff handed out individual pumpkin pies, served on red paper plates, to compensate for missed Thanksgiving desserts. As the clock struck 9 p.m., the doors flung open and hundreds of shoppers dashed inside, ransacking displays and overwhelming the staff. Fifteen minutes later, the employees began delivering the bad news: the best deals had sold out.

“No more GPS, sorry,” said one manager. “Those laptops are gone,” yelled another.

Exasperated consumers left the store in anger. “They are toying with the public,” said Syed Sha, 52, who drove to the store two hours before it opened to buy a Sony laptop — regularly $800, on sale for $549 — for his college-age son.

“ I called ahead and they told me they had at least 14 in the store,” he said. “How could they sell out?”

Toying with the public? How could they sell out? Well, perhaps it has something to do with far more than 14 idiots all clamoring for the same crap at the same time.