When I first moved to Long Beach in early '76, the Carter recession was well under way and jobs were scarce. After several simultaneous part-time gigs, I finally went full time as a minimum wage security guard for Fox Security. It was not a bad job, if you didn't consider the pay, anyway. I like to read and my stack of to-be-read books was large then, altho nowhere near where it is now, and most of the Fox locations only required a fraction of an hour for rounds, after which I could kick b...

A recent story in the Orange County Register indicated that for around $5,000, you can convert a gas car to total electric. The article mentioned a local woman who plugs her total electric in every night and drives a fair distance commute every day and the electric bill is only $2 per day. Of course, even with gas prices what they are and are likely to be next year and the next year and the next year, $5,000 buys a lot of gas, and batteries will only take you so far on a charge, and they do...

Some years back, Ralphs got busted big-time for systematic overcharges of its grocery customers.  As a legal consequence they had to offer all kinds of bonuses - free groceries, for example - for every overcharge that a customer caught on their receipt.  I had been checking my receipts for years by then and about half the time there would be an error of a few dollars.  I collected big-time when the penalty policies were implemented.  Now Ralphs, Food-4-Less and t...

  Update 11/08/08 No problems today.  A new class of customer has moved in bigtime, however.  Whenever the economy tanks, we get an influx of "Okies" in the OC, which was apparent both in the sudden appearance of several decripit motorhomes in the back alleys and a dozen or more raw-boned, farm-bred looking customers at Carl's this morning. Last weekend, however, history repeated itself in the appearance of a gang-banger shooting up againg in the men's room.  I ...

If you accept the Bush administration paradigm for "Homeland Security," then I suppose that my experience makes some sense, in which case you probably shouldn't read this, as you will only be even more confused.  Many more people die from preventable auto accidents, equally preventable diseases, and general crime than from terrorists, but we are apparently happy to keep pouring what at last estimate looks to be $3 trillion down a hole that doesn't really seem all that connected to stopping ...

So, what exactly does it mean that Warren Buffet has decided to give $10 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation? What does charity actually accomplish, if anything? First, note that the world of goods and services exists as a kind of continuous auction. There is a limited supply of just about anything and everything at any point in time. We either produce, trade or steal to get pieces of that limited supply. When we produce, we add to the supply. When we trade, we effectively ...

I just submitted this to the state of California at insurance.ca.gov/0250-insurers/IndHlthRateFilings, in response to an article about Anthem Blue Cross's application to raise rates by about 20% next year.  Note that previously they had insisted that they needed to raise rates by about 40%, due to increasing costs.  However, the parent company, WellPoint*, was audited and somehow, via such standard accounting practices as double-billing, as they admitted, they had lost track o...