Jeff Miller’s been in town. He played the SPARK on Tuesday, played the Lair with us on Wednesday, played the New Deal Café last night and now he’s off to a house concert in Pennsylvania, leading a circuitous path that will eventually lead him back home to Nashville. He stayed with us while he was in Maryland and we had a lot of good conversations… I told him the tale of Pee Boy, Heather’s Lesbians, The Girl Who Was Naked, “Catch me, I am STILL a MAN”, and the tales of Asparagus – BOTH pronunciations. He told me stories of the road, stories of college, stories of scraping out ahead with perseverance, luck and planning.
We’re a good foil to one another, and he makes me think.
Jeff optimizes his Life. He seeks to take minimalist approaches to some things, maximizing others, for best results given a particular system. What works for RPGs actually DOES often work for real Life and he gets a genuine joy out of gaming systems like rewards cards and high-yield checking accounts, knowing the rules and making them WORK for him. Personally – making a lot of those rules work for the everyday human is a bit TOO much work for me, but to each their own.
It’s like… it’s like mic stands. I put my mic stands through Hell. Venues and open mic hosts and rock-folk musicians see what happens to our mic stands and we have to do a calculation: do we buy the expensive ones with long warranties and keep them well-maintained and hope no-one swipes them or breaks them faster than we expect or voids the warranties? Or do we buy cheap and just replace them more often? Cables… strings… it’s all a similar calculation. I’m amazed at what Jeff will cheap out on (strings) that I would NEVER, and what he WILL spend money on that I tend to just sort of wave away, knowing it’s Life time is limited by nature and use. He’s done the math and come up with his solutions. I’m a little more gut instinct, but I DO Love my napkin math, and feel like I’ve got a pretty good grasp of one informing the other, and more importantly, having a gut instinct for when math looks WRONG.
Which is an instinct that I think a LOT of people do NOT have… especially after the first zero or so.
Jeff Loves Taco Bell. Or at least… he Loves getting the cheapest thing on the menu because it has the most caloric-value of any easily and broadly-available food, and he buys the Taco Pass and won free tacos one month and generally thinks it tastes pretty good too. And so we went to Taco Bell. I’ve got no lament on that, but we got to thinking… even BEFORE you start talking about discount programs and what not, how the HELL does a Taco Bell franchise stay functioning with such cheap food? The answer is of course that most people don’t buy just the cheapest thing, and there are frighteningly complicated corporate algorithms that go FAR beyond googling “how much does it cost to run a Taco Bell” (“A standalone Taco Bell franchise location is estimated to cost between $1.2 million and $2.6 million, exclusive of land and lease costs.”) and dividing by the cost of the Potato Taco ($1.19) and showing that at an average cost of 1.85 million dollars annually, a Taco Bell would have to sell roughly 3 Potato Tacos every minute to cover costs ‘exclusive of land and lease costs’.
But yeah – napkin math is fun. It becomes quickly obvious that though Taco Bell has cheap-ass food, it wouldn’t be able to survive if everyone just bought the cheapest food all the time.
You see a LOT of memes go by about finances, corporate greed, where the money goes, etc – and they’re fine as far as they go, but people don’t think about them. I think I bitched about one in particular that seemed to really demonize Starbucks, which made me really want to know where the damned meme had originated and with what purpose. It was misleading in any number of ways, but even if you took it at face value (for example, the graphic states that Exxon Mobil had $9.1 billion in profits in 2023) people don’t think about the numbers.
That’s legit. We can’t IMAGINE these numbers.
Exxon states they sold (https://www.statista.com/statistics/264126/petroleum-product-sales-of-exxon-mobils-downstream-division/) 5,461,000 barrels of “petroleum products” in 2023.
Per day.
You and I? We can’t IMAGINE how much oil is produced.
So, with 5,461,000 barrels x 365 days we get that 9.1 billion dollars profit came from about 2 billion barrels of oil. So – they COULD’VE just decreased the price of each barrel by $4.50 or so and taken that entirely from the 45% of the barrel that’s refined to gasoline (rather than jet fuel, etc). Since “19 or 20 gallons” of gasoline is made per barrel, if they’d eliminated their profits it would’ve gleaned us less than 22c per gallon. Yes, that adds up for each of us, but not the way I think most people believe – and if a company’s not making a profit, why would they exist? It doesn’t lead me to believe in something un-towards in the way of overwhelming conspiratorial corporate greed. It leads me to believe there’s a problem with capitalism. That’s a 22 cent “invest in US because we’re profitable” tax and was probably arrived at by another of those “frighteningly complicated corporate algorithms”.
Another friend, local musician Ty Ford, puts a lot of things on his Facebook page, and I’ve come to recognize that he’s doing some of it to start conversations, and is absolutely open to the idea that he doesn’t know the answers. This makes him a rarity!
THIS one came up a week or so ago and a bunch of people spoke up, wondering what EXACT policies Biden had put in place to cause this inflation – as above about complicated math but gut-checking the idea that corporate greed alone caused Cheerios to go up in price by 40% over the past four years… well, gasoline alone went up by 50% in 2021 so I’d expect that anything that Safeway didn’t … like… grow in the aisles had to absorb a major uptick in transport costs. It’s so easy to blame Biden, or corporate greed, and people Love to share these memes, but it really gets us pointing fingers and getting angry as opposed to unpicking the tangled web of cause and effect.
It’s why I still think the most important thing on the docket is education. People need to be able to work through these things on their own. This sort of dis- and mis- information is probably the biggest thing standing in the way of decent public policy.
That sort of conversation continues as we discuss the destruction of the Key Bridge. Ty says “More Monday Morning Quarterbacking about Key Bridge – Apparently not using tugs to take the ships past Key Bridge has been SOP for some time; fewer tugs, fewer people on tugs – less expensive. That’s what you get. Catastrophically bad planning if you ask me. What were the cost differences (and who pays for the cost) of more tugs and more people to guide the ships past the bridge? All of this could have been avoided.” A big point of order – all of this HAS been avoided for 50 years!
After a couple of bandied back-and-forth points I talk about how : “There’s sort of a HUGE picture here that reminds me of your “Bidenomics” post / overall inflation. We’ve (I’m not sure who “we” is here, America? The world?) been slowly optimising our entire supply line – whether it’s widgets from China, or labour in Korea, or call centres in India – to make everything as cheap as possible – and I think we’ve slowly been seeing the consequences of absolutely eliminating any margin for error. Whether it’s shoddy maintenance on the engine of a gigantic freakin’ cargo boat, or failing power infrastructure in Texas, or simply the bridges flying off of shitty mandolins bought on Amazon – add that to legitimate interruptions from war, weather and the pandemic and of COURSE prices are going up. Perhaps to where they should’ve been all along? But more likely with a surcharge for going back and doing some things RIGHT.
The disconnect between the public’s DISGUST that corporations have been doing everything on the cheap vs the public’s DISGUST with paying more for what they want / need is a HUGE problem. If we want to have “market forces” solve our problems, we have to be able to have honest, transparent conversations about actual market forces sans conspiracy theory and politics.
Unfortunately, we never seem to have the conversation that “running things more expensively will, in the long run be cheaper and safer than panic spending. It’s lower than the tax-price and loss of Life that we’re seeing now” – instead we say the “cash grabbing Democrats want to put expensive regulations in place” and “Republicans don’t want to make things safer for immigrant workers”.
Okay – I’ve spent far too long on this. Another point I made in this conversation is that, yep, it IS Monday Morning Quarterbacking, and my understanding of this sports term is that it’s implicitly non-experts saying what experts SHOULD’VE done, sans complete knowledge, sans having been there, and WITH hindsight.
Bah. I appreciate you listening to my robrant. You’re my sounding board, even if no-one’s listening.
