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Peace is bad for Business.

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January 13, 2008 Rants

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http://borassweden.blogspot.com/ A humble blog

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1. Robert in Bath says that Harvard will set tuition for students at no more than 10-percent of their family income. Just my luck to not have any kids. I could send them all to Cambridge and Harvard would owe me money.

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2. Here is an email from Graham that says, “Joint Pain, try this: Raisins Soaked in Gin”

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http://www.peoplespharmacy.org/archives/home_remedies/gin_soaked_raisins_for_arthritis.php?page=2

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I went into the web site and am pretty sure I recognized the man and woman who run this peoples pharmacy. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them two or three times at public radio program managers conventions. Listen to this testimonial: “I am a 42-year-old athletic female who was diagnosed with Rhuematiod Arthritis 7 months ago. The pain and the swelling were getting unbearable as was the fatigue. After a couple rounds of different medication which really didn't work, my mother told me about the raisins and gin. Thank goodness for this miracle cure. I have been doing it for two weeks now and I have no pain or swelling. Most importantly the fatigue is gone and I feel like myself again.” How about that. You know I’m interested in a lot of things, unless you count sports. It just occurred to me that one medicine might work for one person and not for another. Is this possible? Or do all people react the same? Don’t you suppose there is a cure for everything if we only knew what to eat? Of course the ideal situation is where we know what to stay away from so we don’t get sick in the first place. What I see when I drive across this great country of ours is great big areas of smog and smoke. Ask anyone who lives in those areas how they can stand the smoke and they’ll say, “What smoke?” People who live in it take it for granted. Opens up whole new markets for people who sell pills.

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3. What is the purpose of education? Are some children wasting their time and their teacher’s time by going to school? Let us consider the case of a man who was trapped under a trailer that dropped on him. According to my newspaper, he had been living in a motel with his girlfriend and children after being evicted from an apartment `by their landlord. A judge gave the man a few weeks to make the trailer habitable for his family before serving a prison term for stealing. Had school consolidation and No Child Left Behind been implemented 30 years ago, do you think it would have made a bit of difference?

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4. Gas now costs more than three times what it did only a couple of administrations ago so you might have looked for some on-line articles that tell you how to save fuel. I have one in hand written by Katharine Mieszkowski. Did you know that every five miles per hour over 60 miles per hour that you drive costs you an extra 20 cents a gallon for gas? It would be nice to set the cruise control and drive through Georgia and South Carolina on route 95 at a sensible 60 miles per hour. But in the real world, when you are in two solid lines of traffic that are both moving 80 miles an hour, is it sensible to drive 60? Tell me what happened to you if you ever tried to drive 60 when both lanes were going 80. Luckily, on most roads you can safely drive in a manner that could save you $1 per gallon. You could probably save even more than that if you think about the price of oil the next time you vote in a presidential election.

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5. The email said, “Look rich with Rolex from $199.” It made me laugh when I saw it. Who in their right mind would pay $199 for a watch when you can get a good one for $12 most anywhere? And who wants to look rich? A couple of my friends look rich, and when they went to Cannes to the film festival someone stole their rich kid looking bag with credit cards and money and who knows what else in it. What do you think these Frenchmen hold that film festival for? The bag I carry when I travel looks like something a Steinbeck character would have thrown off a bald-tired truck half way between Oklahoma and California. Nobody would steal my bag. And if they did all they’d get would be a pair of dirty drawers. My wife told me that my bag belonged to her first husband from Amsterdam, so it has been around for a while. Why would anyone want to look rich? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to be rich and look poor?

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6. I get a newsletter for professional speakers. And even if you are not a professional speaker you might want to listen carefully to this tip from Michael Podolinsky that was in that newsletter today. Quote: “This is basic stuff, but after 26 years and having switched from paper files to computer files, I thought I knew it well enough to trust my memory and my computer. After a couple of incidents of poor customer service on my part and *almost* missing my first engagement due to switching e-calendars, we’ve gone back to checklists, back-up paper files and invoicing every client…” end of quote. Doesn’t this also tell us something about electronic voting machines?

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Homework assignment for this week. Mark Twain’s story on the last words of famous men.

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http://www.poormojo.org/cgi-bin/gennie.pl?Rant+315+bi

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7. May I call your attention to a recent Associated Press article on taxing private planes that fly into Maine? The way I understand it, business people buy private planes in states that have no sales tax on airplanes. This, of course, helps that state because they can sell more planes if there is no tax. Some savvy business people even form corporations in Montana so they can register all of their motorcycles, motor homes, trucks and cars in Montana, because in Montana you pay no tax to register your car, truck, motor home and motorcycles. Then they drive their vehicles in Maine, without having to pay the taxes which help support highway maintenance. It’s a free ride but there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing this in Maine. It is one of the things that separate those who are smart enough to get rich from those of us who aren’t. Some even change their legal residences to other states or countries to keep from helping us poorer folks shoulder the tax load. But from what I read in the AP article, the chickens are coming home to roost when it comes to private airplanes. If they paid no tax on these planes when they bought them, for the next year or so when they go into states that do tax the sale of airplanes, they are going to have to pay a state use tax for the --- well, the use of the runway that they land on. The reasoning is thus: why should taxpayers pick up airport maintenance expenses for these people who pay no taxes at home and yet expect to use airport services in Maine for free? The rich are easily excited. Imagine how they’d howl if more than a third of their gross yearly income went to Anthem for health insurance like mine does.

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8. When man started to live in small communities thousands of years ago certain social rules evolved to keep good neighbors from killing each other. Ever since then there has been a general disagreement about what a government is supposed to do. Some people think that the purpose of a government is to provide security, municipal services, education and health care. These people realize that services that make life worth living cost money and that it is their tax money that makes it possible. Today the countries with the highest taxes, like Holland and Sweden, have the highest standard of living. My friends who have worked in countries like Nigeria where taxes are low, told me that the natives in the cities sit on street corners and cook over burning rubber tires. Nigerian streams are open sewers cluttered with plastic. You are escorted to your barricaded office by armed guards. You would not want to live in Nigeria where taxes are low. But in every country there are people who do not like government and taxes. They want all the benefits of good roads and a good education and a good income but wail and rend their garments when asked to help pay for it. These two groups of people naturally form political parties through which they fight to achieve their goals. Interestingly enough, whenever the party that claims that government doesn’t work is in office, they do everything they can to prove that they are right.

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9. We all have Chicken Little friends who occasionally send us an email that tells us that the sky is falling. The most recent one brought to my attention warned me that if my cell phone rang while I was gassing up my car, it could cause an explosion. Before I Googled this to reveal it to be the hoax that it is, I thought to myself, “Yes that might happen.” Please remember that I still think of telephones as having a little clapper that strikes on a bell inside. And --- a Mickey Spillane book I have read a few times in Dutch immediately came to mind. Mike Hammer is down in the cellar of a house and he is tied up with a couple of woman. You realize that since time immemorial, a hero has had to be tied up with a woman so he can save her. Of course, with great effort Mike Hammer frees himself, cuts the women loose, goes over to the telephone --- and here I’m a bit fuzzy because the book is not at hand and I haven’t read it for a couple of years --- he messes with the phone. He put a match or a nail or something on the clapper. He opens a gas jet on the gas furnace and they crawl out a window and make their way to a convenient telephone booth. Mike Hammer dials the number, the phone rings, and the whole house disappears in a fire ball. Kablooey. Mike Hammer steps from the phone booth just as a startled policeman walks by and says, “What was that?” The last line in the book is Mike Hammer’s smirking, “Wrong number.”

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10. I got a hoax email that said that cell phones could touch off an explosion if it were to ring while you were gassing up your car. I’m not in the socio economic group of people who can afford cell phones, but it is my understanding that millions of people have cell phones and millions of people buy gas. So, if cell phones could cause an explosion, wouldn’t we be seeing pictures of it every day on the evening news? What would be interesting is a study indicating how many automobile accidents are caused by people talking on cell phones. It is a common thing nowadays to be passed by a car, only to see the same car creeping along 3 miles down the road. And the first thing you say to yourself is, “cell phone.” And, sure enough, when you pass them, that person has a phone pressed to an ear. I suppose that this is inevitable in our changing times. Twenty years ago when you’d see a car wrapped around a telephone pole in broad daylight, you’d say to yourself, “… cat got under the driver’s feet or dog jumped on the driver and barked at something.” Nowadays the function once served by loose animals in cars has been taken over by cell phones.

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11. While Googling cell phone fires at gas stations, I read that many gas station fires are caused by static electricity. People start the pump, leave the pump running, and slide into the car generating a spark of static electricity and, blooey. But this is not the point of this rant. At the top of the screen that told me about gas station fires, was an ad from Orbitz that said, “Find Flights to Guatemala City.” Yes. Someone out there in Internet land knew that yesterday I was looking at Flights to Guatemala City. And you might well ask, “Por que es eso?” Why were you looking at flights to Guatemala? Forty years ago 'Blanca Margarita Toledo de Ramazzini was a high school exchange student who lived in downtown Vernon, Connecticut for six months with my wife Marsha. Blanca Margarita Toledo de Ramazzini recently invited Marsha to visit, and, because my farm has a large credit line mortgage that the kids will have to pay off when Marsha and I are both dead, I said, “Why not. We will increase the mortgage on our farm so you can go to Guatemala and visit your old friend Blanca Margarita Toledo de Ramazzini and give her a hug for me.” But --- is it not a creepy thing to realize that no matter what you do on your computer, someone out there in Internet land knows about it and is keeping a record of it? Doesn’t this give a whole new world of meaning to that old song, “He knows if you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.”

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12. Here’s an idea I have for a new game show. Emails are sent out to thousands of very intelligent people. In the email they read that they have won a million dollars in a European lottery. The money is in a bank account in Switzerland. All they have to do is email their contact information, along with a photo copy of their driver’s license and their bank account number to a contact in Nigeria. The first person to do so has the million dollars wired to his bank account and gets to appear on the game show with photographs of all the things he plans to buy or the places he plans to visit with the money. Don’t you think that this program would generate quite a following? If I were to produce a television show, I’d look for a sponsor so I could do it. I’m humble@humblefarmer.com What would you do with the million if you won it?

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13. We all have things that we can do. And there are other things that we cannot do. Perhaps an adult might be defined as: “a person who knows what he can do and what he can’t do --- and isn’t afraid to admit it.” The email I recently received said, “humble, Don't you remember what I thought of as Plan A?” Of course I don’t remember anything about Plan A. Because I’d like you to learn a little more about me, you might listen closely to the reply I sent to this person: “Please realize that I don’t remember much of anything. My talent is not in remembering, but in synthesizing that which I have recently heard and presenting it to friends as original material.”

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