Shaky Danny

Roller Derby was the most popular show on television. Then advertisers realized the demographic had no money. Hill Street Blues had lousy ratings but the demographic was management. Now they can target ads to individuals rather than shows. But the current marketing is pathetic. Given all the individual demographic that advertisers have I should be soft putty in their hands. Instead, they parrot my own history back at me. Why tell me about a site I have already visited or a product I have just purchased? Tell me something I don’t know. Amazon tries. “If you like this, you might consider that”. If I were an advertiser, I would want to screen out the people who know about me. When Harold Washington, mayoral candidate, was passing in front of the CO-OP grocery store, the bagger yelled to him: -Harold, go somewhere they don’t know you. Washington was smart enough to listen. When I see poorly targeted ads, I suspect the company is bad at everything else. There is a fine line between re...

  One of the first instructions you get in school is to read to yourself. This makes sense in a classroom. But it is a mistake. If you want to remember your lines in a script always read your portion aloud. If you want to remember your lines, never read them to yourself, always read them aloud. If you are having difficulty with a text, read it aloud. If you are working a difficult problem, read it aloud. I don’t know why it is, but we process differently when we voice the words. You will be more successful reading aloud.

  Inflation wins. We have already had severe capital inflation. Eventually, when rich people spend money, it impacts wage earners. Trickle down becomes a torrent of prices. The pressure for wage inflation was held in check by undocumented immigrant labor, destruction of unions, imports and, until recently, interest rates. Then DJT and Steven Miller terrorized the undocumented immigrants. Terror works, particularly institutional terror. Mexicans love their kids and they quit coming. Fruit rots on the ground. Stores are closed on Monday. We still get immigrants, but they are refugees, and they have status. Undocumented immigrants set the marginal wage rate low. A documented immigrant is less likely to endanger their status by driving the truck or recycling shipping containers. Without our slaves we have to be more rational and that is expensive. There have been multiple economic shocks and we are no longer as cushioned. There is also demographic. A lot of us are retired and index...

  Right after I saw The Banshees movie, I blocked someone boring on Facebook. I doubt you will find any of this new, does it need saying? I like that there are four gospels. Four gospels refute literal truth. Christ is a descriptive name. There were no Cross kids running around Nazareth. Is Jesus also descriptive? In some gospels the name Jesus is a big deal: -Name him Jesus. If Jesus were just a name, would they have said: -Name him Ralph. Jew Zeus comes to mind. A later interpretation says that Jesus is a Greek mistranslation of Joshua. Joshua made it through translation just fine in Torah. Mathew affixes the name to another character; thus, arguing that it was a name of the time. Ancient people were aware that the name was descriptive. They didn’t care about literal truth. The story spoke to them as they spoke it to each other. Every holiday but Hanukah was trashed, every commandment broken. Ruled by the future Italians, monotheists were confronted with evil. The stor...

Many people in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, are installing sewer valves for their homes. Some years back we had an impressive deluge and this is a reaction. Your stack or stand pipe may drain directly out to the street sewer. Putting a check valve or flapper in the way means that when the system hits load those houses refuse service and the overall pressure on the system will increase precisely at the time it is stressed. If you don’t have a flap then super tough on you, the effluent has to go somewhere. A product that creates its market. Once everyone has flaps there should be popped flaps or broken pipes. Flaps are necessary on flood plains. As flood plain construction is common it is difficult for other municipalities, such as Oak Park, to deny their use. Chicago used to require a basement floor drain. You were expected to share your suffering with your neighbors. Most people have their stack drain into their own sewer that then drains into the street sewer. This is a nice fea...

One proof of the market is that economics is obscure. Because of patronage there is no advantage stating the simple obvious.   As I am not getting a grant, I can be direct. Inflation is manifest differently in each of its many components. My parents bought their house for almost $12,000 in 1959. That was about twice my father’s yearly salary. Today the house is almost half a million in Zillow which would be about ten times the salary of a comparable position, give or take. There are some equivalents. Maybe there is a correspondence between a year’s college tuition and a new car. The social security cutoff seems to be about what it takes to comfortably support an upper middle-class family of four. Inflation has two classes: wage inflation and capital inflation. There is no government control of capital inflation. Wage inflation is controlled by four government agencies. The Department of Labor supervises unions. Immigration is restricted. Commerce allows imports. The Federal Res...

Samuelson’s Economics has an entire chapter worrying over wage rates and the efficient allocation of labor. Why do people change jobs? Samuelson would like to tie it to capital allocation, work duration…he doesn’t mention the insult factor. I know a guy who loved his job. He was proud of the job and the work he did. When he learned that someone else made more than him, it was too much. He quit even without another job to go to. Nothing else had changed. It was simply that he felt insulted. Managers fail to understand the insult factor. Headhunters understand it. Unions understand it. Customers understand it. Why go through the folderol of a manufacturer’s rebate? If you are getting points, then someone else is getting ripped off. When the price at the aisle doesn’t match the register, you feel insulted. Bombing me with ads texts and emails after I have bought the product is discouraging. When a headhunter offers a better deal, it feels like your own company doesn’t value you. Co...

The Supreme Court functions as a safety valve. When the court fails, it is a big mess, we have had a civil war. In 1974 people were voting with their feet. Illegal abortion was so prevalent that the court had to act. The prisoner’s dilemma underlies our concept of justice. Say a juror is fixed. How does the juror know that they will be paid? If they are paid ahead of time, how does the fixer know the juror will stick? At this time, it has been announced that there are five judges who will rule against abortion. The early decision is a blatant loud fart. As Biden explained, it ignores the ninth amendment. The ninth amendment is intended to prevent this argument. As Pogo said: -I got rights I ain’t even used yet! If privacy or women’s equality are rights, then abortion should be legal. Buttigieg explained why abortion, whatever the term, should be a private family, not an arbitrary government decision.  It is a difficult medical and personal decision made in hard circumstance...

  Next time you see some little darling tormented with multiplication tables, have them make up a grid and fill it in themselves. It is easier to remember with context and seeing the relations between numbers. Be sure to point out the square’s diagonal. They can also build grids for the other operations, just for fun.

  One of the questions of mathematics is are we uncovering the ideal structure of reality or creating language. Yes. [i] I think of mathematics as a collection of tools or techniques. Socrates argued that all knowledge is innate. He took a young slave boy and interrogated him as to a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. Since the boy kept agreeing with Socrates, he must have known of this proof already. Socrates described a right triangle, then showed a square constructed from 4 of these identical triangles, then set the area of the square to the areas of the 4 triangles and the square contained in them. Then he solved for the Pythagorean theorem. Socrates was in the impossible position of arguing for ethics and logic in a polytheistic world, surrounded by the arbitrary gods. By proving that a slave had the same innate knowledge as the rest of us he was calling into question slavery. Euclid hated this proof of the Pythagorean theorem. The proof requires that you already know w...