Category Archives: Pants on Fire

I Hate Lines

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I hate liars more.

!@#$%& KMart had peanuts on sale and I needed a clothes line. The peanut aisle was, of course, empty of peanuts and had no “sale” stickers on the shelves so I went to the front counter to grab a flier, just to make sure I was right.

I was.

A slight aside: This event occurred at the Marathon, Florida, KMart. This store, perhaps the least liked of all KMart locations, has long been said to be the most profitable per square foot of all that chain’s retail locations. Local customers dislike the store because they regularly run out of sale merchandise. Local customers dislike the store because many of the staff are surly or missing. Local customers dislike the store because the one or two open checkout lines are always backed up and slow. A typical Yelp review of this location was “now I know why KMart is struggling and closing stores.” It does have a decent fishing section. There were no peanuts there, either.

Since I was at the customer service counter and there was no line, I asked for a rain check.

“What’s a rain check?” the customer service employee asked.

After I dope slapped myself to make sure I heard correctly, I explained.

“This term comes from baseball, where in the 1880s it became the practice to offer paying spectators a rain check entitling them to future admission for a game that was postponed or ended early owing to bad weather. By the early 1900s the term was transferred to tickets for other kinds of entertainment, and later to a coupon entitling a customer to buy, at a later date and at the same price, a sale item temporarily out of stock.”

“Oh, we don’t give those.”

“Of course you do. Every KMart in the country does.”

“No we never have.”

We never have?

Welcome to the MyKmart Community!
Rain checks are normally offered as a final solution after all other options have been completed in locating your item. Rain checks do not apply to special purchases, clearance and closeout sales where quantities are advertised as being limited.
Normally once a rain check is filled out, you will be called once the merchandise comes in and have a specific amount of days to come in and pick up your items, otherwise they will be placed back on the shelf.

Another employee was there. He said they did and to call Mr. So-and-So.

“No, we don’t do that.” The other fellow faded. I guess he saw the look on my face. I hate to be lied to.

A third rocket scientist came up.

“Oh, we have never given rain checks,” she said.

That’s when I returned my cart to her.

Rain checks are a good news/bad news solution for a retail store. Every business wants to minimize inventory and maximize inventory turns. If you hold too much inventory, whether on the shelf or in the warehouse, you risk getting stuck with stuff you can’t sell. If you hold too little inventory, then you risk running out and losing customer good will. Either problem costs you money.

KMart apparently worries not about losing customer good will.

Were I a KMart employee, particularly one charged with maintaining inventory, I might not want to give a customer a rain check either. See, their 1940s policy to bring in the oversold/sold out merchandise, store it in the layaway center, and then stand around in the layaway center back there in the far dungeon of the store waiting for the customer, I’m sure I’d find something better to do with my time.

Still, were I a KMart employee, I wouldn’t lie about it to the customer.

!@#$%& Kmart. I never did get my clothesline.

 

How Much Will the Government Give You?

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How Much Will the Government Give YouBlue Cross blew an advertising flier into the Herald yesterday to remind us that the open enrollment deadline is just 28 days away.

Want to know why Obamacare can’t flourish over the long run? Click through to see the slightly crumpled flier. I’ll wait.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury…”

This quote probably originated in Elmer T. Peterson’s 1951 op-ed piece in The Daily Oklahoman. Mr. Peterson had probably read Democracy in America.

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

Alexis-Charles-Henri Clerel de Tocqueville was a French political historian best known for the two-volume Democracy in America and for The Old Regime and the Revolution.

In 2000, the health policy journal Health Affairs found that the United States spends “substantially more on health care” than any other country. The use of health care services in the U.S. is below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development median by most measures. The study also concluded that the 19 next most wealthy countries by GDP each pay less than half what the U.S. does for health care.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that in 2012 U.S. health care spending increased 3.7% to $2.8 trillion, or $8,915 per person. 3.7% is “slowest growth rate on record.” That sounds like welcome news until you look at the real numbers:
1. The official Cost of Living increase is less than half that.
2. Total annual health care spending at this “slow growth rate” will double in less than 20 years, to $17,830 per person.

HOW MUCH $ WILL THE GOVERNMENT
PAY FOR YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE?

And where does “the government” get the money?

The Congressional Budget office estimates that Federal spending on major health care programs will rise from $2.8 trillion in 2012 to $23.8 trillion in 2038. “A trillion here a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

And where does “the government” get the money?

We can’t blame Blue Cross for this; in fact, we ought to thank them for the reminder.

And where does “the government” get the money?

See, the final vote tally for the Obamacare “reform legislation” was 60 Senators plus 219 Representatives. 34 Demorats in the House joined all Regublicans in both houses in opposition. Want to see who would bribe the public with the public’s money? Here’s the blacklist.

Mr. Peterson concluded:

“After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.“

Horse thievery used to was a hanging offense.

Steven Brill wrote in Time Magazine, “Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay.”

Preventive Testing

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Blue Cross sent me my new Obamacare card and “Outline of Coverage” on Saturday, more than a month after I finally got signed up and 18 days after the new policy period started. I’m glad I didn’t get sick.

The accompanying letter advised, “Please carefully review the enclosed outline of coverage…”

I did. After the shock of seeing my deductible, I went online to view the more detailed explanation. That’s where I found this:

Women have unique health care needs that change over the course of their lifetime. The Affordable Care Act has expanded women’s preventive services to be covered with no member cost share for plans with ACA-defined preventive benefits beginning August 1, 2012 and upon renewal.

I understand why ACA would mandate free Rh(D) Incompatibility and other Screenings for Pregnant Females.

I understand why ACA would mandate free Cervical Cancer Screening for females only just as I understand why ACA would mandate free Prostate Cancer Screening for males only.

I simply do not understand why ACA would limit breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, glucose screening, Hepatitis B virus infection screening, HPV DNA testing, to females only.

It’s not as if the government doesn’t know men develop breast cancer. NIH reports that, although breast cancer is much more common in women, men can get it too. It happens most often to men between the ages of 60 and 70. But there is no preventive male Breast Cancer Screening in the ACA list.

NIH reports that Chlamydial urethritis affects men. But there is no preventive male Chlamydia Screening in the ACA list.

An NIH report recommends the glucose challenge test screening for prediabetes and undiagnosed diabetes because diabetes prevention and care are limited by lack of screening. But there is no preventive male Glucose Screening in the ACA list.

CDC reports that gay and bisexual men are at increased risk for Hepatitis A, B and C. But there is no preventive male Hepatitis B virus infection screening in the ACA list.

CDC reports that most men who get HPV (of any type) never develop any symptoms or health problems but they can still transmit it to their partners. But there is no preventive male HPV DNA testing in the ACA list.

“If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance.”

I did like my health insurance. It did offer free breast cancer screening, chlamydia screening, glucose screening, Hepatitis B virus infection screening, and HPV testing. To everyone covered. It covered my cataract surgery with no waiting period for the cataracts to “mature.” And so on.

Now I have sticker shock: The new policies cover less and cost more.

I'm from the Government

Once upon a time, that wasn’t a joke.

 

Figures Don’t Lie

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Right? Right?

Except Carroll Wright’s entire quote is “Figures do not lie but liars figure.” Carroll D. Wright was United States Commissioner of Labor, addressing Congress at the time; he probably drew on earlier but unattributed versions of the saying.

In the story, Stagnant Wages Imperil Financial Security, the PBS Newshour and Bloomberg News collaborate to paint a deliberate picture of pernicious inflation eating away at our income (true) and that we need to increase the minimum wage to combat it (not true). See, there may be plenty of reasons to increase wages as well as plenty of reasons not to. This story doesn’t tell any of them.

“I would go to neither outlet for facts,” Rufus said when he sent me the original link, “but this is all the way over the top propaganda (or monumentally stupid.)”

PBS Graphic of CPI v. Adjusted WagesAt the core of the story is this animated graphic that they say shows wages aren’t keeping up with prices.

Figures don’t lie but liars do figure.

I had trusted Bloomberg News. Co-founded by former-NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Matthew Winkler, it delivers what we thought was accurate financial news to subscribers. Mr. Winkler was a writer for the Wall Street Journal. Pretty good creds for a finance reporter. They wanted to undercut the competing Dow Jones News Services.

That’s why it disturbs me that Bloomberg’s Roben Farzad would use data he has to know he manipulated to illustrate the PBS story. See, the problem with Mr. Farzad’s chart is that he adjusted the wages data for inflation and then compared the result to inflation. Apples versus oranges. Lies versus truth.

PBS corrected itself. Sort of. “A few of you who visited the NewsHour website last night commented on a graphic we created for yesterday’s show. It was meant to explain the relationship between stagnating wages and inflation. What we should have said is that one reason wages adjusted for inflation have been so flat for so long is that rising consumer prices are eating up a good deal of the gains.” They even offered a chance to view a “selection” of those responses and a corrected graphic but there was no link to the corrected graphic and the main body of the story still uses the wrong one.

Figures don’t lie but liars do figure.

Here’s the chart they should have used:

Published Figures of Minimum Wage Income v. Federal Poverty Level

Huh. Here we can see that published figures of minimum wage income for one person and the annual federal poverty levels for a family or household of one tell the opposite story. Minimum wage income has grown slightly above the alleged market prices in the Federal Poverty Level. The unadjusted data from each year doesn’t lie.

Unfortunately, the real data doesn’t tell the story PBS and Mr. Farzad wanted to tell, does it?

We’re left with two conclusions. Either (a) PBS and Mr. Farzad are too stupid or too uneducated to do simple arithmetic or (b) PBS and Mr. Farzad lied to us to push an agenda. This is very, very bad. The first indicts our schools since every editor and reporter has been graduated from somewhere. The latter indicts the media.

Bottom line? Rufus was right.