This used to ne mine.

Our regular sitter also cuts hair, so I got a haircut at home, and this is what came off. My daughter says I look great, so I guess all the ugly went into that pile.

Couch of cuteness

It wasn't long before the dog moved.

In the city today.

The last time I was here I was stopped on the street and asked for change—to feed an SUV's parking meter. A professional woman said, "I don't have a cup, but do you have a quarter?" Then the guy with her offered me $1 if I had four quarters.

Is this thing on?

This is only a test.

A modest proposal

I know that the authority in such matters says that it falls on June 31, but I propose that this election day be known as Weasel Stomping Day. It was all I could do to keep from humming this cheery tune as I filled in the bubbles at my local polling place. I've had it in my head for days.

Caring capitalism

The Economics of Caring vs. Uncaring:

Which entities produce greater consumer satisfaction: for-profit enterprises such as supermarkets, computer makers and clothing stores, or nonprofit entities such as public schools, post offices and motor vehicle departments?

First, nonprofit entities do not necessarily aim to satisfy consumers, so this question is nonsense on its face. It's like asking which entities produce greater child satisfaction: clowns, or parents? Put another way, it's not meaningful to apply the same measure of success to organizations that have different goals.

Second, good results are not directly proportional to satisfaction. Again, clowning or parenting?

I agree that there has been great good that has come from the good old profit motive. The example of a potato farmer is perfect, indeed. Money can motivate people to do otherwise unrewarding tasks.

That said, I think the greatest goods in the world have not been motivated by profits. Profits facilitate goodness far more than actually motivate people. People looking for a cure for cancer are being paid, and they may even get rich, but I doubt that's why they do it.

He uses household electrification as an example of something great that happened in the 20th century. I find that amusing because that change was not motivated by profits; it came out of government intervention.

Private utility companies, who supplied electric power to most of the nation's consumers, argued that it was too expensive to string electric lines to isolated rural farmsteads. Anyway, they said, most farmers, were too poor to be able to afford electricity.

Ultimately, I think this is a Coke or Pepsi question. If you think the best thing that happened to humanity is the iPod, there's no question that capitalism is the driving force behind the best in life. If, on the other hand, you think humanity's best are things money can't buy, capitalism is kind of cold and calculating.

White board for the road

The white board has on it today (my last day of work):

AND HIS FATE IS
STILL UNLEARNED

This is a line from the song M. T. A. which is actually a bit before my time. In my case, it's literally true, but what I had in mind was actually what comes before that in the song.

Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd

Too subtle? Probably not for the coworker who reads and leaves anonymous comments.

Won't someone think of the children?

A recent post over at Obsidian Wings reminds me of a story from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the series of books, not the movie).

In the story, a race was facing an energy crisis (which we are facing also, but that's beside the point). Their solution to the problem was a fantastic piece of technology that would steal energy from themselves in the past, where, as they recalled, there was always tons of energy floating around unused. This seemed like a great idea, but it also seemed that no matter how they tried, they could never get all the energy they wanted. Finally they discovered those bastards in the future were doing the same thing to them.

When our government spends more than we pay in taxes, we are essentially passing that bill on to be paid later. It's the story above in reverse. We steal money from the future. We're sticking our children with a much larger problem than they'd otherwise face, and we really ought to know better because we are those children. That's how long this has been happening.

Will we give to our children the same problems our parents gave to us?

Bedtime story.

Whenever something inexplicable happened around the house, my daughter would say that a raccoon did it. Mommy's keys are missing? A raccoon took them. A pile of clothes are mysteriously cast from the couch to the carpet? A raccoon did it. She got this from a kid at school who had brought it from home and infected the whole class with it. Before learning that, my only explanation was that a raccoon had put the idea in her head.

Lately, the raccoon has been replaced with a leprechaun, but the leprechaun is far more sinister than the raccoon. My daughter wants to fight the leprechaun. Before bed tonight, she told me, when the leprechaun comes in her room, she will get out of bed and hit it. She'll kick it. She said she'd shoot it and put fire on it.

Daddy's wise reply: "no shooting in the house, sweetie."

A little organization.

I see that folks searching for something like "my mom died" frequently find my post titled, "My mom died." I don't know why they're searching for that, but I figured they might want more than the brief rundown of the week's events in that post, so I've updated it with a link to my Mom retrospective, which has links to many other posts that I've written since Mom's death.

Just keeping things tidy (a task that makes me wonder if my blog would be better as a wiki). Otherwise, nothing new to see here.