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Of course, with me, two days are more like to snow flakes than anything else... very different. But the facts as described are real enough to pass muster. Weighing in this morning, somehow I gained seven pounds overnight. Thems must have been some serious dream meals! No, fluids do that. Lose so many pounds and the body must think it's dying and fights to retain again. Something weird like that. It has always been the case. Though a jump of seven pounds is pretty nasty.
Today will be, pretty much, the first day out without an appointment driving me out. At high noon at the O.K. Corral? Not quite. But sort of. Guns and ornery men, bravado, and a bit of rebelliousness is involved. The targets don't shoot back though. I have checked my finances, it seems I can afford to send that package to my lady friend, do some shopping, eat a meal, and still be within budget.
The last two months have simply dinged my finances a bit heavily. Not so much my mother being here. I just had odd bill after odd crisis. I think I have changed my bills so that they are all paid directly, not through problematic debit cards. When a debit card is cancelled, all such bills stop being paid and I don't necessarily check my bills very often when they are on auto pay. I suppose I should but it is an easy thing to not do when I have to start cutting back on my activities. Well, it does add some excitement to an otherwise rather drab life.
Waking at a little after 1:30, I tried to force sleep again. No dice. Up and at it was the only option. It looks like 3G is back on my phone but the batteries are near dead. Ah well. Weight and morning meds have been dealt with. I put on a pot of coffee. In an hour or two, after some coffee and wake time, I will get my shower in early and be dressed and ready to go well in advance of the time to go. I might even hit the laundry and dishes or sort through this or that.
Oh, I had a most interesting dream. Some woman was here, from the Church. And she was going on about this or that and I put the screws to her (having nothing to do with anything physical). I hammered her liberalism. She went away, sore it seems. So a priest arrived and asked what I thought I was doing. I told him. He went away. Then a group of men arrived from the Church, forms of clergy and specially trained laymen. They asked me questions. I answered rightly, save one. They asked me what would happen if a Church family was unrightly being threatened by a biker club (say, they had witnessed a murder by chance or some such, so innocent of the threat to them). I suggested prayer. They suggested the Church has other means of dealing with this, but I don't remember the answer. Drats! I am curious, even if it is just a dream.
Oh, a problem with the Amazon shopping effect. While internet shopping does lower costs it also makes it so that stores don't carry as many items. Further, items get boosts from initial sales while not getting good solid longer term reviews. For example, I have been looking for the perfect rice cooker for my mother. She enjoys her stir fry, and with her guy. But rice is a rather odious thing to prepare, more so the brown varietals, then time and keep warm. I have been looking at what is available. The top tier of rice cookers get rave reviews, and lots of them. But after some serious digging, after looking at the negs, I found that the various top tier cookers fail after anywhere from a year to three years, and it is a design flaw (or indiscreet planned obsolescence). The battery that runs the logic chips is impossible to change by a non-tech, without special tools, and dies in three years and other items are not built very well. Step it down to medium tier and you find construction or cleaning problems. Below that, you get crappy rice. But little of this would you know by reading the reviews (from new buyers and in a wasteful society). But nowhere can I find the rice cookers to look at them in person, look at the instruction manuals (often complicated and translated poorly from Japanese or Chinese into pig-English). The way of the future, I suppose.
Well, on with my day. Good day.
I don't know that there are fewer choices now with Amazon, but that we never knew what we were missing in the way of choices until online shopping took off.
ReplyDeleteI do know that WalMart cut the variety in what it carried in a big way about a year or so ago. I can't imagine Amazon is capable of so affecting a colossus such as WalMart in a significant way. My guess is retrenchment due to the ongoing sea change in our economy.
Definitely right about choice. But, and often, we find that our choice is between higher priced junk and lower priced junk. Not on all things, but on many things. And with price being one of the objective qualifiers of quality (wrongly or not, heretofore), it can be confusing.
ReplyDeleteI think with Walmart, among other things, they got rid of a liberal who was running things according to the liberal religion. He was limiting choice then. They got rid of him several years ago, and dumped his junk/liberal high-priced limited inventory, but because of him, I think, they lost their market influence. Before him, they had more dictatorial control on manufacturers. They even told companies to change ingredients and it was done.
As they recover from liberal lunacy, and begin picking up the pieces, until/unless they get their feet back under them and control back, they will never have that kind of variety of offerings again. Well, and qc has dropped in manufacturing due to the economic collapse, making getting control back much more difficult. Walmart can't quite square the circle that China is. It is like demanding Ph. D. work from high school dropouts.
QC, or who it is doing the manufacturing in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI was shopping Amazon yesterday for an inexpensive compass to put in another BOB. There was a fairly fancy looking compass for a very reasonable price. Turns out from the comments, this is a Chinese knockoff of a $150 German compass.
After pointing out many of the differences between the original and the knockoff, one reviewer made the relevant comment: "People who do not know sh!t about how to use compasses have no business trying to manufacture compasses."
Yet the Chinese persist. Their economic model is to take quality Western-made products and try to figure out how to make them cheaper. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Our struggle is to sift out the sh!t from the gems.
With manufacturing qc, even good companies get swindled in China. I would guess it is difficult to keep qc in order there. Bringing foreign supervisors and qc specialists in must be difficult and expensive.
ReplyDeleteCaveat emptor like never before. Oh, and if there are only a few ratings on a product, I like to check and see if the posters have posted for that item only. It's no guarantee, but often the manufacturer will have it's employees go out and boost their product while dumping on competitors. One product rating people (or groups of items in the same vein) are highly suspect.