There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. – Henry David Thoreau The previous piece called for an examination of what have unfortunately become called “root causes.” Our social, economic, and political maladies didn’t spring from the brow of Zeus; they grew slowly …
Category: business
Jul 24 2024
A Small Victory — Numbers of Warriors Matter
How would you like your purchasing rights restricted by unseen forces putting pressure on your financial institutions? Well, I didn’t. And for now I’ve put a stop to one of mine. It’s a dead certainty I could not be the only customer who complained. I have no idea who or how many, but I am …
Jul 23 2024
Things I Can’t Figure Out Dept.
There are plenty of things I can’t figure out. Many pertain to differences in tastes; others to people’s varying perceptions of risk and reward. And I’m sure that they make sense, for some values of that word, to those intimately concerned with them. But that doesn’t keep them from baffling me. Take breakfast …
Feb 22 2024
Something We’ve All Done
Have you noticed how often other people are wrong? It’s amazing! Where did they come up with so many misconceptions and delusions? How can they live with such murk in their heads? How do they cope with the challenges of life? The italicized word in the above is a kind of shorthand. A …
Feb 10 2024
Trends In Employment
I snagged this story a couple of days back: Since June 2023, Americans have been increasingly employed in part-time positions, with a subsequent decline in full-time work, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The number of Americans working part-time in January grew by 96,000 compared to the previous …
Feb 09 2024
A Leap In Understanding
There are “24 / 7” jobs. Mostly, the requirement that the worker be available at all times is stated before he takes such a job, so that afterward he can’t claim that he didn’t know what sort of position he’d accepted. But most jobs are not of that sort. Time was, employers and managers …
Jul 12 2023
Common Sense, Commercial Edition
When I was new to the working world, there was a plague upon the land. No, it wasn’t microbial. Neither was it amoebic…though in truth American commerce would have been better served by a good dose of “the trots.” It consisted of the emergence of a new breed of predator: organizations that would feed …
Dec 08 2022
A Word I Hate To Use…
…is slowly but inexorably forcing its way into my vocabulary. And no, it’s not should. Let’s spend a few moments on the incentive structure of retailing. For simplicity, let’s focus on a merchant who buys all his stock-in-trade from others, and attempts to sell it at a profit sufficient to be worth his …
Jan 13 2022
A Brief, Bitter Tale
Forgive me, Gentle Readers. I have a great need to vent about a semi-personal matter, and this is my only outlet for it. As you probably know, I sell my fiction through Amazon. Like it or not, Amazon commands approximately 85% of the eBook market, so a writer who seeks to move his …