08:57 – Barbara labeled a bunch of bottles for biology kits yesterday, and will label a bunch more today. I’ll be filling those over the next few days, along with everything else I have to do. We’re in pretty good shape on finished-goods inventory, with enough of all kits to carry us through end of this month, or nearly so. By then, we’ll have more in stock.
09:55 – I don’t know why, but I’m still surprised every time I buy components. So much for government inflation figures. The sodium bicarbonate tablets cost 50% more than they did when I ordered them a year ago. The purple Sharpies were up more than 20% in less than six months. The 9V batteries were up more than 8% since I ordered them a year ago. My guess is that the real inflation figure, like the real unemployment figure, is at least three times higher than the government admits to.
Of course, inflation is actually a hidden tax on monetary assets. It penalizes the prudent and the creditors, and rewards the imprudent and the debtors. And it eventually makes the prudent and the creditors decide to transfer their assets to tangible property instead of fiat currency. Which is why I’m happy that I have, for example, almost a thousand test tube racks in stock. The real value of the money I used to buy those has been decreasing every week, while the real value of those test tube racks remains the same. So, a year from now, that $4 test tube rack will sell for $5 or whatever.
Once the autumn rush has tapered off, I’m seriously thinking about bringing up a shopping cart system. I actually installed Zen Cart a couple of years ago, but I’ve never had time to enable it. Until now, about 99% of our sales have been packaged kits, but we’re starting to get more requests from people who want to order just specific components.
09:06 – ESR long ago predicted that Android would kick Apple’s iPhone ass. I saw some recent figures yesterday that illustrate just how right Eric was. Apple’s worldwide market share of smart phones is about one unit of every seven sold. Android pretty much gets the other six. Blackberry is rapidly becoming an asterisk, and is now trying to sell the company. For what it’s worth, which isn’t much.
I got a couple dozen chemistry kits built yesterday, which gives me a bit of a breather. Today I need to cut purchase orders for stuff we’ve run short/out of. I actually did the first one last night. We’re completely out of the 650 mg sodium bicarbonate tablets that are included in both chemistry kits. The last time I ordered those, a year ago, I paid about $12 for a bottle of 1,000. The place I bought them from last year no longer carries the 650 mg tablets, only 325 mg tablets in bottles of 100 rather than 1,000. So I checked around and found that the price had gone up significantly and there were few sources offering the 650 mg bottles of 1,000. Amazon stocks them at about $18/bottle, a 50% increase in one year. They had only four bottles in stock, so I ordered all of them. A bottle is about 40 kits worth, so we’re covered for another 150+ kits once those arrive. A quick look at my inventory sheet tells me that the only other chemistry kit components we’re critically short of are purple Sharpies and 9V batteries, so I’ll get a gross of each of those on order as well.
This weekend, Barbara will continue labeling bottles for a new batch of 60 biology kits, and get started on labeling bottles for a new batch of 60 chemistry kits. I’m also expecting an order from a state distance-learning virtual school for 40 custom AP chemistry kits. That may or may not happen, but I suspect it will. If it does, I’ve told them we can ship within 30 days after receipt of order/payment, so things are likely to get even busier around here.
09:11 – Wow. I just checked Amazon, which now says it has nine bottles of the sodium bicarbonate tablets in stock at $19.99/bottle, versus the $17.79/bottle I paid less than 12 hours ago. Geez.
08:56 – I’m building chemistry kits today. As of this morning, our inventory of the CK01A kits is minus one. We’re also down to only six of the CK01B kits. We’re currently shipping a dozen or more CK01A kits a week and only three or four of the CK01B kits, so the priority today is to get some CK01A kits built. We’re also down to a couple dozen of the BK01 biology kits in stock, so Barbara’s priority this weekend will be working on those. Then I need to get back to building subassemblies for another batch of 60 of the CK01A kits.
09:39 – Towards a radical new theory of Anglo-American slavery, and vindication of free markets
There’s actually nothing radical or new about it, it’s not a theory, and most of my readers are probably already familiar with the essential points, but it’s still worth reading. The left has always tried to make classical liberals (nowadays called libertarians) the bad guys, just as they try to make the American Civil War about slavery. If you read Locke or Jefferson or any of the other 17th and 18th century libertarians, you’ll find that they universally abhorred slavery. If you’d asked a hundred Union soldiers what they were fighting for, at least 99 of them would have said “to preserve the Union”. If you’d asked if they weren’t really fighting to free the slaves, they’d have looked at you funny. Same thing on the other side. At least 99% of Confederate troops would have told you that they were fighting to protect States’ Rights. If you’d asked if they weren’t really fighting to keep their slaves, they’d have looked at you funny, because almost none of them owned even one slave.
15:36 – It seems that a week seldom goes by without some sort of problem at Dreamhost. Maybe I was spoiled by Greg & Brian’s Excellent Hosting Service, but Dreamhost is the pits by comparison. Until an hour or so ago, web, mail, and webmail were all been running very slowly if not completely inaccessible for several hours. I checked the Dreamhost system status page, which had no problems reported. So I started a trouble ticket, only to get a message that this was a known problem and had been reported by other users. I think the real problem is that Dreamhost has some downtime almost every day, which they (correctly) think makes them look bad. So unless the problem is on such a large scale that they can’t hide it, they simply don’t admit publicly that there are any problems. A dishonest system status page is worse than not having one at all.
I originally tried to make a post at around 0800. I tried literally half a dozen times between then and now, and each time the system dropped me. At one point, I thought I might be blaming Dreamhost unfairly because I started having troubles getting to other sites. Of course, the other usual suspect is Time-Warner Cable, which has frequent problems with its DNS servers. So, just to cover all bases, I power reset my cable modem and router. Things are still slow, but not as slow as they had been.
I’m taking my first break of the day from working on science kits. Despite the problems with our websites, we sold four chemistry kits today, which took our remaining inventory to zero. So, after spending this morning finishing up new batches of the two forensic supplement kits, I started on final assembly of a new batch of chemistry kits. I’m doing a quick batch of a dozen first. That should be enough to hold me for at least a couple of days while I get another three dozen built. And at some point I simply have to take some time to generate purchase orders or we’re going to start running out of components.
We watched the first series of Hell on Wheels. It was pretty decent, not as good as, say, Deadwood, but not bad at all. I gave it three stars on Netflix. Series two is another story. I call it Hell on Wheels Coming Off. It’s grossly inferior to series one. The actors are still very good, as are the production values. It’s the writing that has gone downhill fast. I understand there’s a series three in the works, but I don’t think we’ll bother watching it.
I remember reading an article back in the mid-60’s in Popular Photography or Modern Photography. They were talking about a group of young, aspiring documentary photographers at a workshop in New York. The workshop was led by a well-known Eastern European photographer. The students were showing the portfolios to the group. One student was no doubt encouraged when the instructor took a long time looking at one of her images. She was probably crushed at his comment, rendered in his deep Eastern European accent: “Is perhaps a rough sketch of no idea.”
That’s the problem with a lot of TV series that start well. Quite often, the series creator writes all or most of the early episodes, and is very hands-on even with those episodes credited to another writer. But if the show takes off, the production company starts throwing more resources at it, including (unfortunately) more writers. I suspect their thinking is that a group of writers will put out better storylines. The truth, of course, is that with rare exceptions writing collaborations just don’t work. It’s much better to have one writer doing it all.
08:02 – As expected for this time of year, we’re running just-in-time on kits. We get a batch of one type built just as we’re running out of another type. At times, including today, we’ll ship kits that we just finished building that day or the previous day. Our current run rate is two or three kits a day–60 to 90 kits a month–and increasing, which is reasonably good for early August. Now I need to go build more kits.
13:17 – Call me sexist. I don’t care. It’s bad enough when one of our young men is killed in action in the Middle East. When it’s one of our young women KIA, it’s an entirely different level of bad. And when that young woman is the mother of two small children, it’s simply indescribably bad. Caryn E. Nouv, age 29. What kind of society puts its young mothers on the sharp end?
09:56 – I’ve seen several articles about the US private sector creating 200,000 new jobs in July. The problem is, most of those shouldn’t be counted as real jobs. Depending on who you listen to, since Lehman kicked off the crisis the US has created about two new jobs for every three that were lost as a result of the crisis. The problem is, most of those three jobs were real jobs and most of those two jobs are garbage. I mean, if a job lost paid $40,000/year with full benefits and a job gained pays $8/hour part time or temporary with no benefits, how can anyone claim with a straight face that the new job makes up for the loss of the old one?
The government collects all the data needed to provide honest employment figures, but they never do. I mean, removing people from the unemployed category when they’ve given up looking for jobs because there aren’t any available is simply dishonest. We need to dump the whole idea of unemployment rates and substitute employment rates. What percentage of adults aged 18 to 70 are employed, and at what level? Temporary and part-time jobs should be separate categories, as should jobs that pay less than, say, $20,000/year, as should government “jobs”. The reason these figures are not easily available is that people would be stunned to find just how small a percentage of adults have real private-sector jobs. You know, ones that involve actually making something or providing a service that people are willing to pay for voluntarily, as opposed to ones that involve extracting money from taxpayers and transferring it to the pockets of the otherwise unemployable.
14:20 – LinkedIn Creates Furor When It Bars Photos Of Pretty Female Engineers
I guess LinkedIn thinks this young woman is too pretty to be an engineer. Morons.
09:43 – Barbara is cleaning house this morning. This afternoon, we’ll continue work on labeling and filling containers for science kits. We’re in pretty good shape on biology kits and forensics kits. Enough to carry us through the end of this month, anyway. We’re down to a dozen or so finished chemistry kits, but we have enough subassemblies to put four dozen more together, on-the-fly if necessary. Again, that may carry us through the end of this month. Next month is another story. September won’t be as busy as August, but it may be nearly so. The real crunch is from mid-August through mid-September. During that 30-day period, we may ship 25% of the entire year’s sales.
08:29 – Time-Warner Cable is in a big fight with CBS over retransmission rights. I keep hoping that one of these times the cable TV company being extorted will tell the network doing the extorting to get stuffed and just stop carrying their signals. The whole idea of requiring cable TV companies to pay for retransmission rights is stupid anyway. The networks broadcast their programming as free OTA signals. All the cable TV systems do is pick up that signal and provide it to their subscribers, who could have gotten it OTA for free. The cable TV systems aren’t charging for the content; they’re charging for providing the equivalent of the antenna. These retransmission fees already total several billion dollars a year, all of which comes out of cable TV subscribers’ pockets. The networks are being paid twice, first by their advertisers and then by cable TV subscribers.
It’s long past time that we put a stop to this. In fact, it’s long past time that we put a stop to OTA TV and cable TV and put television networks out of business. That RF spectrum is wasted on broadcast TV. It would be much better used for wireless data. And the cable TV companies should become pure broadband data providers. If people want to watch TV programming, they should be doing it via IP packets. There’s absolutely no need for broadcast television networks, local TV stations, cable TV, or any of the rest of the obsolete infrastructure that grew out of the way things were done 60 years ago.
08:02 – Barbara and I have been watching One Tree Hill on Netflix streaming. We’re through the first 22-episode series and have started on the second. There are 187 episodes total. I suppose most would classify it as a teen drama, but like most similar series the adult cast plays a very important role. In that respect, it’s reminiscent of Everwood.
The high school girls spend a lot of time agonizing over their physical appearance, all of which is unnecessary. I’ve been telling girls and women a deep, dark guy secret since I was in high school myself, but it bears frequent repeating: young women are attractive and smell good to guys, literally, for the same reason that flowers are attractive and smell good to bees. It’s all about pollination. Nature makes young women attractive so that they can attract young men. But young men almost without exception do not judge young women by how attractive they are. Attractive is attractive. If a young woman is attractive enough to draw young men to her–and the vast majority of young women are unless they intentionally try to be unattractive to young men–that’s sufficient. Once her looks draw a young man close enough to her to strike up a conversation, their job is done. What matters then is the rest of the elements that make a young woman attractive to a guy, which is everything from her personality to her voice to her scent. It’s all about biology, and people are as biologically programmed as dogs or bees or warthogs.
Nearly all young women believe, wrongly, that the size of their boobs is important. It’s not. Boobs are a checklist item for guys. Boobs comma two? Check. It must be a gurl. Boobs are just part of the whole package, physical and otherwise. A guy doesn’t not hit on a girl he otherwise finds attractive merely because her boobs aren’t big enough. Sure, guys will stare at a woman with huge boobs, but it’s not because they want them for themselves. It’s more like staring in amazement at the Grand Canyon. And, as we all know, guys never take the Grand Canyon home to meet their parents.
Speaking of attractive young women, I thought Amber Marshall from Heartland had gotten married some months ago. I was mistaken. She got married on 27 July. She rode in on a horse, literally.
