The Affable Curmudgeon - Observations
More rants from that old guy sitting next to you at the bus stop
Back in my very long ago childhood, we used to watch shows like “The Lone Ranger”. In these “Westerns”, as they were called, a Native American scout who would put his ear to the ground and then announce how many riders were coming. I don’t put my ear to the ground, because it is too hard to get back up. Instead I put my eyes on the screen and try to sort out the truth from the lies. Here are some of my observations. You may consider this to be doomscrolling fodder, but that’s not my intent. I’ve sometimes fallen into the doom and gloom rut myself. Pessimists are never disappointed, but ignoring reality can be catastrophic. So here are some thoughts offered for your consideration.
Inflation, the Silent Thief
Unless you live in a cave, growing or catching your own food, you know this one well. The media usually use gas prices as the primary measure of inflation. I’m old enough to remember when gasoline cost 25 cents per gallon. Now I’m joyful when I can find it for ten times that. But for most of us, that’s an annoyance that doesn’t cause a lot of lost sleep. Far worse is housing cost, either as rent or mortgage payments. That’s largely a supply and demand situation, made worse by large corporations, such as Airbnb, buying up large amounts of real estate as investments. Rising prices and interest rates are also trapping some people who would like to sell their home, but fear they would not be able to buy a new one.
More insidious is what’s happening in the grocery store. Last week a dozen eggs were $4, this week it’s $5, and in a couple of years it might be $50 or $100. But, again, that’s a supply-demand inequity. The sneaky theft occurs when you try to use those eggs in a recipe that calls for one LARGE egg, and you discover that it takes one and a half or two eggs to make it turn out right. I don’t know much about chickens, so I can’t explain this, unless they are now using pigeons for eggs.
In the recent holiday season, we made some of the family favorite dishes that have been traditional for generations. The old recipes called for ingredients like a 16 ounce can of something, but when shopping we discover that the can is now 13 ounces. This creates many challenges in trying to figure out what to buy without wasting anything. Fiddling with a time-tested recipe usually creates disappointing results. This product shrinkage is affecting all packaged products, not just food. I’m told that even nail polish doesn’t last as long as it used to.
The forces behind the curtain of this trickery are large corporations. Each is led by a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) whose primary mission is to keep the stockholders happy. That means making sure that profits keep the stock price high, ensuring the executive a nice bonus at year end. Inflation creates cover for increasing prices, even when costs are the same. This increases profits. Coupled with shrinkage in package content, and the company profits go up. Since the health of the economy is usually tied to the stock market, the economy appears to be booming. This does nothing to help the average family, which is stuck trying to stay above water.
The pandemic disrupted things, with supply chain issues that impacted the availability of components. By offshoring most manufacturing, and optimizing shipping to deliver things within hours of needing them, a very fragile system was created. It’s broken and we’re having to deal with that every day. The terrorists in the Middle East attacking cargo ships have caused the cost of shipping a container full of goods to quadruple. This cost will be passed on to us in the form of ever higher prices. It may also lead to shortages.
We have no control over prices, and many of us are struggling to make ends meet because wage increases have not kept up with inflation. One strategy that we are personally using is to convert much of our money into goods. For example, a couple of years ago we purchased a small freezer that we put in our garage. When we run across a food bargain, we buy extra and freeze it. As long as prices move only upward, this allows us to prepare for shortages and unaffordable prices, at least for a time. As prices go up, our “bank” of frozen edibles becomes ever more valuable.
Trouble Brewing
For a few months now I’ve noticed more and more announcements of layoffs. As most of our manufacturing has been outsourced to countries with cheap labor, the job cuts are coming from the few industries remaining: technology, media/entertainment, and retail. Some, like Google’s elimination of 30,000 jobs worldwide, are due to Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing people. Many large corporations are looking at AI as an easy way to cut costs, thereby increasing profits.
If you’ve ever thought to yourself “I’ll bet a monkey could do this job!”, be afraid. That monkey may soon be delivered to the loading dock in the form of an AI system that can do your job. If you depend on the health of a corporation for your job, you are at risk of losing it. Having marketable skills is critical now. Many people need more than one job to make ends meet.
Climate Change
If you have watched any of the excellent Netflix documentaries narrated by Morgan Freeman, you know that the climate of the earth has changed continually, long before we were able to pollute it with carbon dioxide from our various conveniences. Our impact on the earth is probably a fraction of what is being suggested by those with a cause to support. As so often happens, our feeble attempts to arrest it have caused unforeseen problems.
Consider the idea that we should all drive electric cars. It sounds like a great idea on the surface. No more expensive gas, no more toxic exhaust, and they are so quiet! This sounds great until you check the prices of the cars. If you are a wealthy tech luminary, that’s no problem. But for those of us with a family and a house payment, it’s nearly impossible. And for many reasons just mentioned in the inflation rant, even gas-powered cars are getting close to unaffordable. So maybe we’ll have to keep the old polluter for a few more years.
There are other issues plaguing electric cars beyond price. There is the battery issue, which requires rare minerals from remote and poor countries. In many cases, children are used to mine the ore in horrific conditions. These minerals were the result of events that happened millions of years ago. When they are gone, there will be nothing to take their place. Recycling of exhausted batteries is very difficult and expensive, so building new ones is cheaper.
Then there’s the cold problem. As many electric car owners discovered, below a certain temperature the time required to recharge the batteries goes from 20-30 minutes to several hours. This forced many owners in Chicago to abandon their electric cars recently when extreme cold set in.
Akio Toyoda, chairman of Toyota, the world’s largest car manufacturer, has said that electric cars will never dominate the market. Toyota will not make all-electric cars. They do make some that run on hydrogen fuel cells, but most of their production will be gas or hybrid cars.
While the term “renewable energy” is often tossed around, it’s really replaceable energy. A transition to wind power has been underway for some time now, and some states have managed to get to the point that as much as 40% of their electricity comes from wind. Solar power is also popular in places where there is a lot of sun daily. Both of these methods have a built-in problem. Sometimes the wind doesn’t blow enough to make the required power. The sun goes down at the end of every day, just as everyone is turning on lights that require more electricity. And, as Texas discovered a few years ago, a wind turbine without ice protection stops turning when frozen. Countering all these problems requires a backup in the form of batteries! Didn’t we just speak about those?
Strident zealots, such as Getta Thunderbird, predict our imminent demise if we don’t stop using fossil fuels immediately. They conveniently ignore the problems, and they also ignore the fact that much of our world requires heavy equipment that runs on diesel. The 18-wheelers that cross the country continuously are essential. Converting them to battery operation is not feasible with existing technology. Without them, the average supermarket would be out of food in 2-3 days.
Our best strategy is to use as little fossil fuel as possible, to give us time to come up with workable alternatives. Minimize the trips you make, share rides when possible, and take public transportation if it’s available.
Subscription Traps
It’s likely that the cable television industry is one of the most hated in the world. Their history has been one of frequent price hikes, hidden fees, and terrible customer service. The advent of streaming video allowed anyone with a decent Internet connection to “cut the cord” and cancel the cable. More streams were available than even the most comprehensive cable package could offer, without a hard-to-escape contract. Most have a free trial, and it has become possible to choose only the shows you want, without paying for a lot of stuff you never watch. “Binge watching” became a thing, meaning you could watch an entire season of episodes one after the other. It was the ideal: get only the content you want, and pay much less for it.
The cable providers were taken by surprise, but only briefly. Most of them also offer Internet service, and in many areas like mine, it’s the only option. The large ones, like Comcast and Charter, simply raised prices for Internet-only. Most of them dropped television entirely, offering instead a streaming box for a monthly fee. The streaming services discovered that allowing binge watching meant that people would sign up for a popular show, watch all the seasons, and then cancel the service. In some cases this could be accomplished while still in the free trial period. So the streamers began offering new shows at one or two episodes per week. The cost of acquiring shows was high, and they started raising prices. The result is that streaming, when the cost of Internet is added, now costs more than cable television did.
Most companies making software for computers and phones have also changed their business model. Traditionally we could buy a program and use it forever. Some would offer a free trial, with an option to pay and unlock the program. Now most new software is sold as free to download, requiring a subscription to use it after a trial period. In the long run you pay much more than you would have in the old model. The argument supporting this is that a steady stream of income gives the developer incentive to maintain and enhance the software. A prime example of this is Microsoft, which has taken the business staples of Word, Outlook, and Excel and bundled them into Office 365, which requires a subscription. They do continue to add features, which require you to learn how to use each new version. As expected, the price keeps slowly increasing.
I do make a small income from selling apps for iPhone and iPad. They are made for a very small market that I know well. My customers are not amenable to a subscription model, and neither am I. My apps are sold on a paid up front, use forever model, and I will continue that for as long as I keep cranking them out.
A few decades ago the music industry was disrupted by software that allowed music to be converted to digital data. This put a huge dent in CD sales, which had previously taken a huge chunk of money away from vinyl record sales. Steve Jobs was able to calm the waters by making deals with the recording companies and artists, selling music through iTunes. That model has been replaced by services like Apple Music and Spotify, both of which require a monthly subscription. Your music “collection” is lurking somewhere in the cloud, subject to vanish if you stop paying your monthly fee.
Even car manufacturers have hopped on the subscription train, with features such as heated seats being offer by subscription. This allows them to keep collecting money even after the car is paid for, right up until it’s headed to the crusher.
The irony of grumbling about subscriptions, on a platform that is subscription-based, is not lost on me. The cost of the various Substacks I subscribe to is many times what I used to pay for a daily newspaper, back when such things were common. Here I can rant and rave, whether anyone listens or not. I’m not a professional writer, or even a decent amateur, so I keep it free.
Well it looks like your bus is here. Thanks for listening to me. Have a good day, and maybe we’ll speak again soon.