b.cognosco

Can We Please Just Do The Obvious?

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 04:12:41 GMT

For anyone who's managed to miss the news for the past 6 months, the southeast US is in a 100-year drought. As we are wont to do in such cases, we have ignored this for the past several years until now all our lakes and reservoirs are nearly empty. Suddenly, we have a crisis.

Imagine that.

So what do our vaunted civil servants do in this precarious situation? They implement outdoor watering bans. They argue with other states. They complain to the Army Corps of Engineers. They shutdown car washes and landscape companies. They go on TV and tell us how dreadful it is, and how sorry they are that people must lose jobs, and that they just can't help this awful, awful situation.

All the while they completely ignore the blindingly obvious, brain-dead simple, straightforward, and guaranteed 100% foolproof solution to the problem. Any 3rd-grader could suggest this.

Raise the price of water!!!

Oh, I know we can't raise the price. After all, it's completely unfair to the poor.

Bullshit.

The average person can live comfortably on 1,000 gallons/month. They don't even need to be particularly conservative to do that. We could probably survive well on 750, but let's say 1,000 to be compassionate. So for a family of four you need 4,000 gallons.

Let's be really, really compassionate for the poor. Set the price for the first 5,000 gallons at $10. Set the price for the next 1,000 at $10. That's $20 for up to 6,000 gallons - enough to serve a family of 7.

Set the price for the next 1,000 at $20. The next 1,000 at $30 and so on. At 10,000 gallons you're paying $150. By the time you get to 15,000 gallons (a typical amount of water used in one month watering a yard) the cost is now $550. Nobody gets a pass. Everybody pays.

You think people won't stop using excess water once they get a $550 bill? I sure will. If they won't (or don't), raise the incremental price to $20 per thousand. I don't know anyone who would spend $1,100/mo on water. If you have that kind of money more power to you - there aren't going to be enough of you to significantly raise total usage and we can all get on with our lives without these self-serving, jackass politicians grandstanding on TV with all their new emergency regulations.

Car wash owners would have to run out and change their coin-ops from $2 to $10. Or $20. That will hurt business, but people who want to spend $10 or $20 can still wash their car now and then. And maybe the owners will figure out they need to recycle. Ditto for industrial users and the power company. Office building managers will have to figure out how to actually operate their sprinkler systems, or turn them off. And landscapers will have to stop guaranteeing their plants. But we'll get over it.

It's absurd to try and reduce the use of limited resources in every way imaginable except the one way that is best designed for managing limited resources - economics.

But this is the government. I wish I could be surprised.

The Cranio-Rectal Decision-making of Sparta Commercial Services

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 00:22:59 GMT

Recently I purchased a new motorcycle. Today – approximately three weeks and 1,000 miles later – the lender has decided they can’t finance the bike. This doesn’t bother me particularly. I have the bike. But it does have the dealer in a bit of a bind.

The problem isn’t my credit score, my credit history, or my ability to pay. In fact, my credit score is well above the 640 posted on the lender’s home page as the minimum required for their “prime” rate. The problem isn’t the loan amount – it’s a piddly little loan. I paid 50% of the bike’s cost at purchase, and financed the rest over two years. The entire deal is a fully collateralized loan that is less than the amount an itinerant bum could put on an unsecured credit card. The problem is that I’m self-employed. And Sparta Commercial Services thinks that self-employed people are crooks.

The trouble began when Sparta called to verify my employment. All it would have taken was for someone besides me to tell Sparta I had a job. I answer my own phones. Have for years. If I’d put them on hold and had the receptionist across the hall talk to them, or even if I’d just lied to them and pretended to be someone else, they just wanted one person to tell them I had a job. Any kind of job. The employer could be on the brink of bankruptcy. Sparta wouldn’t know. The employer could be a tiny little business (or internet start-up) that isn’t going to make payroll next week. But that doesn’t matter. It’s a job.

Never mind that their credit report says I’m a good risk. Never mind that I have a good history and good references. Never mind that I’ve managed to pay all my bills on time, pay my rent for the past two years, and stay in business. Never mind that I put 50% down on the bike.

No, never mind any of that. It would be better if I worked for a guy who was up to his ass in debt, behind on all his bills, stiffing his creditors, and failing to make payroll. (How many of us work, or have worked, for companies like that) Yes, that’s the kind of reliable situation Sparta thinks makes for a good credit risk. These people are idiots. And they are completely disconnected from modern society.

In today’s world a job is the least secure form of employment you can have. I’ve done the corporate gig. I’ve done the internet start-up gig. I’ve done the small company gig. Never, ever was I less secure than when some other individual could deprive me of my livelihood with two little words – “You’re fired.” And I have never been as secure as I am right now, depending on my own resources for my survival.

Whatever goes wrong, I am responsible. Whatever needs to be fixed, I can fix. No bureaucracy, no politics, no bullshit. If I have a bad customer, I fire them. If I need more work I go looking. But I do not live in fear of losing my paycheck because of someone else’s bad mood, bad policy, or bad management.

Recently Steve Pavlina wrote 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job (hat tip to Euan.) There’s good food for thought in that essay. It’s a bit jaundiced, but also contains a lot of truth. Not everyone should work by themselves or for themselves. Small groups and entrepreneurial teams can usually do far more than an individual. But the point is that you should have some control. You should not be in fear of the words “You’re fired.”

Sparta needs to grow up. Their requirements for lending to entrepreneurs are outmoded, outdated, and counterproductive. What’s more, the “validation” they seek isn’t in any way a reliable indicator of income or ability to pay. The mortgage industry figured this out long ago. If any thinking person at Sparta had reviewed my case this whole situation would have been avoided. But that’s asking a lot, I guess – a thinking person at a bank. In the end I’m glad they won’t be getting any of my money. I hate giving money to morons. It just helps their stupidity survive a little longer.

The Road Ahead

terrywfrazier@gmail.com — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 19:31:49 GMT

A group discussion on what trends will most shape our lives in the future. Participants include the usual suspects - Tim O'Reilly, Esther Dyson, Moby, Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Dery, Clay Shirky, David Brooks - but it's still interesting. Some excepts (out of context):

TIME Magazine - The Road Ahead
We assembled some of the smartest people we know to identify the trends that are most likely to affect our future. What we got was a fascinating discussion about religion, technology and politics and why no one's golf scores seem to be getting any better.

[...] MOBY: I know a guy in Barcelona who has started a company to develop algorithms to determine whether a song is going to be a hit. It analyzes music to figure it out--and they're selling it to the record companies, and it's quite effective. If you expand on that, there's no reason you couldn't have your own personal search engine that understands your taste and can instantly analyze music based on a whole bunch of different, very subjective criteria to determine whether you might like it. [...]

[...] GLADWELL: One of the big trends in American society is the transformation of the evangelical movement and the rise of a more mature, sophisticated, culturally open evangelical church. Ten years from now, I don't think we're going to have the kinds of arguments about religion that we have today. [...]

[...] DERY: The democratization of available avenues of possibility is always phrased in market-friendly terms. It's about purchasing power--the cornucopia of options available to those who can stuff their shopping carts and proceed to checkout. How many options were available to those who were marooned in New Orleans? [...]