Norfolk

Josh started a class at Old Dominion University, which means he's driving into Norfolk four mornings a week. "Norfolk is a hell designed especially for drivers. The roads are bad, drivers are terrible, their stoplights are weird, they don't have any highway access in the majority of the city, the pattern of doing roadwork is bad, and did I mention the roads are ridiculously bad, like driving on cobblestones?." He sat at a single stoplight for ten minutes. "Parts of Norfolk look like the Dominican Republic--not downtown Norfolk itself, but the area around it, old shabby houses that aren't being taken care of", and also "I saw three people walking through the central business district in Norfolk; in the cities in Australia it was hundreds of people walking in all directions all the time."

Why the Political Class Needs a Greek Bailout

An interesting discussion at Armed and Dangerous. Snippets:

[R]aising taxes won’t help. The amount of private wealth available to be taxed is insufficient, even if taxation could be raised to 100% without suppressing all economic activity. In practice, raising taxes leads to increases in spending which more than consume the increased revenue (by a ratio of 1.17:1 in the U.S. since the 1940s).

Cutting military or any other form of discretionary spending won’t work either. If you zero all that stuff out, public pensions and other entitlement commitments still require revenues larger than the taxable private economy can generate.

and

Our political class, like the aristocrats of the French ancien regime, believes in nothing so firmly as its own indispensability.Après moi le déluge; but when the bond-investor flight happens – and it is now a matter of when, not if – the teetering Ponzi scheme that funds their self-importance will collapse.

Asking enough questions

Sometimes what the customer wants, isn't what the customer wants. You have to ask more questions and then make the decision that he would have made if he knew what he was doing.

Back when I was selling plastics, someone called me to see if we had six pieces of 3/8" Teflon sheet in stock. We had it and Teflon was relatively expensive; I could have taken his order right then and it would have been a respectable sale, and I'd have gotten a decent commission from it. What I did instead was ask the Magic Question: "John, what are you doing with this?"

He told me, and his application didn't really need Teflon; he could have been using UHMW, which was much cheaper. So I told him "I know you usually get this from someone else, and the only reason you're calling me right now is because he's out of stock. So I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm only going to sell you one piece of Teflon, not six--and the only reason I'm selling you that one is so you'll be comfortable, you won't ever actually need to use it. And I'm going to send you six pieces of UHMW for the same price as one piece of Teflon.

"Now, let me ask you for a favor. Once you try it, I want you to make a phone call. If it turns out that I've steered you wrong, I want you to call my boss and tell him all about it. And if you try it and it works--which it will--then I want you to call your current supplier and ask him why he's never bothered to find out what you're doing with this, and why he's been selling you something that costs you six times what it should. Is that fair?"

Needless to say, we had a new customer from then on.

Cuchulainn's Lament

Now listening to Caoineadh cu Chulainn. Cuchulainn was Irish, the castle Eilean Donan is Scottish, but the poetry fits well despite that.

Miscommunication

When Josh first met Gwen, he asked what she was reading, and they got to talking about science fiction books. She said her favorite was a classic, Jyoon.
And Josh thought, but didn't say: "Jyoon? Not ringing any kind of bell. Jewen? Juen? June? Nothing. What the hell is Jyoon? I am a Big Time Science Fiction Nerd. If it was a classic, I'd have heard of it. And I've never heard of a book called Jyoon. She must think I'm a poser who's just chatting her up. Is this some obscure Australian author? Is this...oh."

The Lost World

Watched the 1992 version of The Lost World, based on the Conan Doyle novel. Definitely not a high budget film, but fun. It's a classic pulp story, including romance between the Native Princess and the Intrepid Hero, and John-Rhys Davies does a good job as Professor Challenger.

Kayak and Jellyfish

Went out for an hour near sunset, and the jellies have started to arrive. These are not fish made of strawberry jelly. These are translucent white, three to six inches across, the big ones streaming tentacles that reach eighteen inches long or more. They're hard to take photos of--the camera wants to focus at the light reflecting from the water's surface, so the jellyfish shows up as a ghostly blob.  Right now there are relatively few of them, but soon it'll be about three jellyfish per cubic foot of water.
Also saw an osprey, some gulls, and some little birds, white and black with sharp wings, who pulled up into a hover and then dropped straight down into the water. And a heron who was rather annoyed when I slipped in view around some marsh grass only ten yards away from him; he hopped into the air and flew off, croaking.