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Sunday, October 28, 2012

RANDOM THOUGHTS #116

Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself:
     

1. The post office is going broke, partly from the usual inefficiency of government and the ridiculous payroll and retirement obligations, and partly because email has all but made hard copy mail obsolete. They could save money by ending Saturday delivery, but the lobbyists for junk mail companies and small rural newspapers fight against it. Seriously, would it hurt if you only got home delivery two or three days a week? Seriously? What do you get by hard copy mail? Bills now come electronically. Letters from relatives too old to use email are hardly time sensitive. Catalogs can wait an extra day. How about we just do not replace retiring letter carriers (or those who leave for whatever reason) until we're down to that level? I would, of course, continue daily delivery to business districts.
      

2. Does deterrence work? Sometimes, but it depends on the overall context. Deterrence certainly kept the USSR from nuking the USA, but will it keep Iran from nuking Israel? Maybe not. Probably not. The USA and USSR had over 200 million people and thousands of nuclear bombs. A savage exchange would have left each superpower with half of their people and maybe a tenth of their industry alive. (The survivors might take a moment away from envying the dead to get enough subsistence agriculture going to stay alive.) It's not like Canada or Mexico would then invade to enslave the survivors. Israel could be pretty much destroyed by less than 10 bombs. (Whatever is left could be easily swept into the sea by the army of any one of her neighbors.) Israel might reduce Iran to subsistence agriculture, but it would still exist as the idea of a nation. Worse, Iran's government is quite comfortable with suicide bombers (something the USSR did not use) and is not beyond the concept that by forever ridding the Muslim world of the Jewish State they would gain eternal glory on Earth and in Heaven. (If nothing else, 90% of the Muslim world would be undamaged and they'd all help what was left of Iran.) One really cannot count on the US to nuke Iran in retaliation for the destruction of Israel. One really cannot count on deterrence to stop Iran's leaders, once they have a dozen nuclear missiles, from waking up one morning and deciding it's time to get it over with.
     

3. I like the TV show Grimm. Steven Petrick said he could not make the numbers work, as there could not be enough Grimms to handle the population of vessen. Well, that depends. We don't know what the population of vessen is. Are there four cities in North American with vessen colonies, or 400? How many Grimms do you need? Now, there could be a lot of Grimms. If you assume that the two original brothers each had four children (starting at age 21), and that each child had four children, and that all children survived, you could easily have a quarter of a million Grimms. That's a maximum and the realistic number could be a tenth of that, but then, maybe the original Brother's Grimm were in fact only two of a few thousand active Grimms in the world at the time (just the only two who let the world know the truth).
     

4. I like the show Rookie Blue but it seems to have degenerated into Desperate Rookies. Gloomy guy suddenly professes his love for hero girl and she runs away to an undercover task force. Chief's daughter gets away with a mistake that got someone killed because it would look bad for her to be de-badged just before she testifies in a big trial. (Like the defense won't use the special favors she got because of her parents against her?) Brooding guy runs away to the task force because chief's daughter won't admit their relationship is a real one. Depressed guy goes back to his wife who has thrown him out five times, leaving the hot blonde badge bunny loose at the bar. It's a wonder any of these oversexed people have time to actually arrest someone, but I still love the show. I'd watch Missy Peregrym read a phone book (in French).
        
 5. I have written a lot of magazine articles on a lot of subjects, most of which my customers never saw and never heard of. One that was never published, however, is the one that my mind keeps coming back to. I had written a couple of minor articles on stamp collecting when I pitched an article about "collecting stamps on your vacation" to a major stamp collecting magazine. They gave me a green light on the outline and I sat to work, even doing some field research. My advice (which covers a lot of collector fields, not just stamps) was partly practical (how to find stamp dealers in an epoch before the internet was invented, setting a total budget, visiting a dealer while the family sees something else) and partly tactical (how to negotiate the best prices). As with any collectibles, there are no fixed prices for stamps. There are only so many of them and catalogs list an official market price, but only the dumbest of collectors pay it. Most stamps are sold for about half of the catalog price, but condition varies (and the seller's opinion of a given stamp may be a higher grade than the buyer's). I recommended that a vacation buyer should take his list of the stamps he wants to add to his collection (every collector maintains a "want list") and do research with mail order lists in stamp newspapers and catalogs to determine what something was really worth. My article recommended making sure the dealer knew you were from out of town, meaning he had one chance to get your money, but that any sale he made to you was good because you were from outside the circle of his usual customers. I also included hard-nosed advise on bargaining, insisting on a better deal than the mail order lists, and perhaps on package deals for several wanted stamps at an even lower price. I frankly thought it was some of my best business writing. The stamp newspaper refused to publish the article because they feared it would upset the retailers who carry the stamp newspaper on their shelves. They wanted the article rewritten to say you should build a relationship with a dealer by paying more than the going price. I pointed out that this was ridiculous in the case of a dealer you would meet only once on a vacation, and frankly wasn't that smart even in the case of your local dealer you buy from all the time. They told me not to submit any more articles.