Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

For Sale, Cheap

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We all know about using Craigslist to find adult–some might say illicit–activities.

Fort Pierce, Florida, police arrested 35 people as part of a prostitution ring that used Craigslist to set up “dates” last September. Now, 40 states including Vermont have joined in an agreement with Craigslist to crack down on prostitution after Alexis Serrano, 23, of Shelburne, was charged with prostitution. Court papers show she was one of dozens of Vermont women who offered erotic services via Craigslist. Florida will not sign the new agreement.

Advertisers will need to provide valid telephone and credit card information to post erotic services ads. The website will provide that information to authorities if subpoenaed. Started in 1995, Craigslist has websites in more than 50 countries.

There could be other illicit activities associated with Craigslist.

I listed my Keyscar on the popular website last fall. It was a great ad with top notch copy and great pictures. I did not have to provide a credit card but I did include my phone number.

I didn’t expect to get half a dozen offers with certified checks for more than the asking price. The moral of this story is that many, many crooks will offer you a bogus certified check for more than the purchase price and ask you to pay the “overage” to their “shipping agent.”

Don’t do it. They will walk away with your goods and your money. You will walk away with a very small piece of art suitable for framing.

ramsey wrote:

Hello,

I was opportuned to see your advertised Car .So I picked interest in it, moreso with the full description that was attached to with the advert, kindly get back to me with your selling price. Also I will like to know if you will accept a banker draft or a certified personal cheque for the payment . Since I have not seen the pictures clearlly, I will like to know it’s present condition, Also tell me if the Car has ever been involve in any form of accident ? If yes, Don’t essitate to tell me the affected part.

Your fast responce will highly be appreciated .

Regards.

Donald Duke wrote:

Hello…

Thanks for your response to my mail and I want you to consider that its sold, pls do withdraw the advert from craigslist to avoid disturbance.I want you to know that I will be paying with a bank certified check and to also notify you that shipping funds will be included with the payment that is coming to you. so therefore.I will need you to provide me the following information listed below, so that I can ask my secretary to issue out the payment to you.

Full name to write on the check…………
Full Physical address to post the check…….
city………………….
state………………
zipcode………………..
Home & Cell Phone to contact you

*** Note that the payment will be shiped to your address via COURIER NEXT DAY SERVICE and I will like you to know that you will not be responsible for shipping I will have my mover coming over to your location for pick up after the receipt of the payment
Thanks

I am pleased to report that I did get a couple of legitimate nibbles on the car and did, in fact, sell it to a nice couple in Key West.

I am also pleased to report that I just bought a refrigerator via Craigslist.

Nothing ever goes quite as planned. A couple of years ago the 18 cu. ft. or so fridge my folks had used for umpty-ump years started making really loud graunching noises. Its doors sagged so the cold air kept running down the street. And it was a bit undersized for my liking. I watched the bulletin board at the Post Office and found a perfectly good used side-by-side for very little so I grabbed it and moved my folks smaller box outside to be the “bait fridge.”

It still makes a lot of noise so we don’t run it very often.

The perfectly good used side-by-side stopped making cold last week so I looked on cragislist for a replacement. See, I can’t suspend my disbelief enough to shell out more than the cost of a brand new Chevrolet 5.3 liter crate motor for a pretty white box that makes cold.

Sears had plenty of choices but nothing I could buy. A LG side-by-side, $1,300, a GE side-by-side, $1,600, a Kenmore 3-door “trio,” $2,000, another Kenmore 4-door, $2,700, and an 18 cu. ft. Kenmore top freezer bare bones box for $425.

As my friend “Bob” said, $1,200 is too much. $3,000 is mindless.”

I agree wholeheartedly.

With the economy crunched, I’m surprised there aren’t many newish used fridges on the market. After all, there are certainly thousands of newish used homes. I did see a one-or-two year old glory model LG refrigerator advertised in Key West for $1,500. That’s too much for a new one, let alone used.

Craigslist had a 3 year old Admiral listed for significantly less. The new-to-me fridge is in place. It is clean, well made, and in excellent shape.

The fridge was in the Stanley Switlik estate. That beautiful home sits on a some lovely Marathon acreage with water on three sides. D’Asign Source is designing and building a private home for the new owner.

I paid cash for the fridge.

Entitled?

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“There are only two English words that begin with ‘su‘ that have the ‘sh‘ sound,” a fellow commuter on the West Chester local told my grandfather a few decades ago. “Sumac and sugar.”

My grandfather, known as Grandpa to my cousins and Boppa to me, was amused. See, Boppa was a scientist as well as a Presbyterian elder. He knew his fellow commuter believed that vocabularic limit. He also knew the difference between fact and faith.

In what seems like a non sequitur, we might recall that the Miami-Dade school district plans to sue the state of Florida to recoup approximately $25 million in “lost revenue” because the state changed its funding formula to reflect the drop in income.

Meanwhile the structural issue in the Vermont budget is a $200 million shortfall this year and next. That seems small in the overall economy but it looms large in this state of 600,000 peeps. Governor Jim Douglas, R-Vermont, says the state will have to cut programs including $34 million from Human Services and charge higher premiums for people on state health care.

“Our message to the governor is this: Stop,” said Carlen Finn who spoke first for all the advocates for seniors, kids, the differently abled, and others who lashed out at the gov.

BROKEN NEWS


Fiscal desparation is why Gov. Douglas was in Washington today. He lobbied fellow Republicans to pass the stimulus bill and was the first governor invited to the White House by President Obama.

Vermont entitlement groups have offered a different solution to the problem of diminishing handouts: no lawsuits, just new taxes. They expect the state to raise the cigarette tax by a buck a pack and double the income taxes on the 2 percent of Vermonters who earn over half a million dollars annually. Oddly not one group thinks docking the salaries of non-profit executives by 5% is a good idea.

The entitlement group proposals would generate about $20 million. The rest, they say, should come from the federal stimulus package.

Wow. Maybe I can get that new laptop I need and the camera I really really need.

“There’s no question we should give as much money to the states as we can,” Congressman Charles Rangel, D-NY, said “But with so many of our infrastructure problems … we’re going to have to … remove the [governors’] discretion.”

One of my correspondents notes that, “on an economic scale of 1 to 50 Vermont prolly rates below Mississippi.” He doesn’t worry about the Vermont legislature mucking up an economic recovery. “I mean,” he says, “how much damage can they do?”

Hey. A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we’re talking real money.

I hate to agree, even briefly, with anyone in the Barney Rubble gang in Congress but if Vermont is any indication, state legislatures can do a lot of damage.

Unfortunately, if the bank bailout is any indication, Congress can sink us all.

For the record, business is slow for us consultants this year and Anne’s hours have been cut as well. Our income is down a few grand compared to last year so WE HAVE TO SPEND LESS MONEY. That few grand seems small in the overall economy but it looms large in this family of two. See, faith in Congress notwithstanding, the simple fact is that I can’t buy the laptop or the camera if I don’t have enough cash for the cable bill.

“Somebody needs to explain to [Governor Douglas] that the word tax is not a four letter word,” said Christopher Curtis of Legal Aid.

“Are you sure?” Boppa asked the commuter all those years ago.

“We must have strong minds,
ready to accept facts as they are.”
–Harry S Truman
President Truman was a Democrat.

Change

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Haven’t we been here before? I’ll bet you thought I was going to write about the new administration didn’t you. After all, never in the history of politics (where the more things “change” the more they stay the same) has “change” been more heralded.

Nope.

Today we are going to talk about Pepsi™.

Three of my two favorite beverages, Diet Pepsi™, Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi™, and Tropicana™ Pure Premium Orange Juice, have significantly changed their appearance on the grocery store shelf.

I didn’t like it.

I thought I didn’t like it only because it was difficult for both Anne and me to find the bottle on the shelf. Forest : trees, innit. That’s the old-fogey response except I have to think that, if it is more difficult for me to find the product, it is more difficult for every other buyer to find the product on the shelf.

That seems counter productive.

The Hawthorne effect describes how you change your behavior in response to a change in your environment. The name comes from a series of experiments with telephone relay assemblers at the Hawthorne Works, a manufacturer near Chicago, that began in the 1920s.

The Hawthorne experiments had many facets, most of which counted the number of relays each worker finished and dropped in a chute. Over the years the researchers changed pretty much everything that could impact the workers from payroll frequency to break time to the lighting in the test room.

I particularly remember the lighting.

See, the researchers changed the assembly room lighting and productivity went up. After a while, they changed the lighting back and productivity went up. Again.

That experiment told us for the first time that making a change–any change–can alter peoples’ behavior.

Tropicana™ dropped the long-famous orange-with-a-straw logo in favor of a stemware glass and a squared-off, formal typeface. The carton looks more … generic now.

I doubt that was the intent.

Pepsi-Cola™ has unveiled a new face several times in the past couple of decades, starting with a logo change that the company thought was “younger looking” than Coke’s antiquated script. The company has since changed the swoops and the design on the bottles a few times leading up to the most recent major color change. Diet Pepsi™, which I drink before five in the afternoon, was once in a primarily blue bottle. It is now in a silver bottle that looks brownish in soft light. Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi™, which I drink after five that I might sleep at night, was once in a mostly tan bottle. It is now in a white bottle that looks vaguely blueish in soft light.

Those new bottles look so different, they force a rote buyer to search all the product in the soda aisle to find them. That means the rote buyer no longer makes his or her choice automatically but considers all the other products Pepsi™ sells. I looked for the first time in quite a while at the Max™, the Wild Cherries™, the Jazz™, and even the Caramel™. Caramel?

Huh.

I guess the change worked. The new bottle design means I really did look at every one of the Pepsi™ bottles on the shelf. Unfortunately, I had also looked at every one of the Canada Dry™ products, the Schweppes™ products, and even the Coke™ products thinking perhaps someone had pulled an unconscionable switch.

Overall, perhaps the change is good. I did relearn about all the different flavors (Caramel?) and it did not drive me to sample the offerings from the competitors. It might just attract the eye of new buyers who very well might try the taste. That is the game: keep your current customers happy with the taste and find new markets with the advertising. And the packaging.

After all that bottle lugging I’m suddenly thirsty.

It is worth noting in the small print that, although both Tropicana™ and all the Pepsi™ beverages mentioned are Pepsico units and that I do own Pepsico stock, there was no product placement payment for this column.

Singing Pigs

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Robert A. Heinlein wrote, “Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig.”

The Congressional Budget Office is the de facto standard by both tradition and enforcement to provide all Congressional economic data. It was created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.

It is interesting to note that CBO’s budget projection rules require their economists to assume that federal laws and policies governing both spending and taxation will not change.

Acting Director Robert A. Sunshine delivered a stunning forecast to Congress on January 8:

  • A slow recovery in 2010, with real GDP growing by only 1.5 percent.
  • An unemployment rate that will exceed 9 percent early in 2010.
  • A continued decline in inflation, both because energy prices have been falling and because inflation excluding energy and food prices—the core rate—tends to ease during and immediately after a recession; for 2009, CBO anticipates that inflation, as measured by the consumer price index for all urban consumers (CPI-U), will be only 0.1 percent.
  • A decrease of more than 1 percent in real consumption in 2009, followed by moderate growth in 2010; the rise in unemployment, the loss of wealth, and tight consumer credit will continue to restrain consumption—although lower commodity prices will ease those effects somewhat.

Most important, “CBO anticipates that the current recession, which started in December 2007, will last until the second half of 2009, making it the longest recession since World War II.”

That means the recession, on paper, will be over by Christmas if Congress DOES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL.

I have come to realize that Barney Rubble knows this. After all, Congressman Frank himself acknowledges that he is the smartest man in Congress.

The reason to get the stimulus passed in a hurry is the same as the reason to push through the $700 billion TART overnight: if they held it up to the cold light of day, people would realize it was a scam.

Mr. Heinlein also wrote that the best government is the government that doesn’t try to govern.

Acting Director Robert A. Sunshine lost his job on January 22.

What a surprise.

Barack Obama said, “There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”

The Cato Institute, an inside-the-beltway think tank with strong libertarian leanings, disagreed. In fact, they found a few hundred economists to sign a full page newspaper ad the day after Mr. Sunshine testified.

Too bad no one reads newspapers any more.