04 December 2001
Today I want to have a free discussion on a variety of topics.
Bud Lite, as baseball fans refer to Bud Selig, the faux commissioner of baseball, is talking about contraction of baseball teams. Two of them. Most people pick on the Expos and the Marlins. Some people want to see the Devil Rays go. Bud is talking about buying out the Twinkies (that's the Minnesota Twins for those of you who don't follow the game). Bud Lite is the worst thing to happen to baseball, ever. Worse than the Black Sox. Worse than Pete Rose. The current crop of MLB owners will ruin a perfectly good pair of leagues, and lose money in a legal monopoly.
The plans being bandied about by the airheads like Peter Gammons indicate that the owners plan to buy out two teams for $200 million each, that it's about $15 million per owner and that they've got the money in the bank. Some of the stories involve Disney selling the Angels, and several owners playing fruit basket turnover.
How can I accuse Bud Lite of being bad? The Twins, Bud? The team closest to the team that you used to own and now your daughter runs for you? Close them down because they have a bad stadium lease? And because their owner wants out? I'm accusing Bud of trying to line his own pocket at the expense of the people of Milwaukee and the people of Minneapolis / St Paul. What a travesty for him to call himself a commissioner, after Fay Vincent, Bart Giammatti, Bowie Kuhn, and Judge Landis had the job. He's a used car salesman, and a bad person for suggesting that the Twins are a problem.
If the other owners can buy out Carl Pohlad for $200 million, why can't they spend $100 million and get the Twins a new stadium deal? They Twins are subletting from the Vikings at the Humpdome, and they have the worst lease in baseball. Their team wins, the franchise is 100 years old (they were the old Washington Senators until about 1962), and its only mistake was being weak and in Bud's back yard. The ghost of Walter Johnson is going to throw more than a dollar across the Potomac.
If there were any cities for the teams to move to, they would be doing that fraudulicious taxpayer stickup. Give us a $200 million stadium or we'll leave for another city that will. How can they get more cities to move to? Close down a couple of teams. And wait, why do you need another city? Just threaten to buy them out when they don't yield to extortion.
This contraction idea might be a great idea, but the guys who are cooking it up are scamming for money, not husbanding a great game. A pox on both their houses. I hope that no city or state will ever again donate a nickel to MLB.
Don't get me wrong. I like foreign aid. What I don't like is saying that we're having foreign aid when we're really taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich.
For example, we give military aid to Egypt. That aid is used to buy American fighter planes, tanks, and missiles.
For example, we give humanitarian aid to countries by giving them money but stipulating that they have to buy American grain, or other finished goods with it.
Think about that for a second. The givernment collects taxes from the public, gives the money to, say, Egypt, and then Egypt turns around and gives it to Boeing or Lockheed. We could cut out the middle man but just giving the subsidies straight to Lockheed, and sending the Egyptians brooms. They have a lot of sand to sweep up. We could send them dustpans and trash bags, too.
Okay, maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe the Egyptians would want American planes. Maybe they feel safer knowing that their air force is buying the F16, just like the ones that we are selling to the Israelis. Part of the Camp David deal was that we give Israel $3 billion a year, and Egypt $2 billion a year. And have been for over 20 years.
Good fences make good neighbors. But good defenses, geez, a good line of tanks and fighter jets, does that make good neighbors?
What if we not only cut out the middle man in the middle east? What if we not only didn't launder the money thru foriegn aid before we gave it to Lockheed? What if we just kept it? What if the people of this country just paid $5 billion less in taxes, and Lockheed and GM and Chrysler and the rest of the defense contractors got $5 billion less in foreign sales, and the Israelis and the Egyptians had to kill each other with last year's tanks? They should have plenty of missiles saved up by now.
Are we really doing the best thing we can think of?
Not long ago, I was amazed at how low RAM prices had gotten. I was nuts. RAM prices weren't low. They're low now, though. At crucial.com, I can find RAM for my Toshiba. 128 MB for $21. For laptop ram.
I can get 512MB DIMMS for $80. You can get a 1 GB DIMMS for under $200.
And crucial.com will ship it Fedex 2nd day for no charge.
Whoever thought that 128MB of RAM would be a stocking stuffer?
I read last week that the three largest components of international trade are oil, arms, and drugs. Wow.
Not food. Not cars. I guess that people like their own food and cars. But people will buy and sell power, power, and escape from power.
I hear it in the way that people talk on the phone. Are they playing it safe or trying a risky improvisation? Now I'm starting to hear it in my PDA and my laptop. It's the electron dance. Of course, there's about 30 times as much memory in my Palm Vx as there was in the IBM 360, but it's still amazing that so much information goes in there and takes the shape of words and ideas, but they're really just electrical charges, rushing and swirling and shining around.
I was working on a client project recently that required some data conversion from the old system's files to the new system's files. We zipped up the files at the client, emailed them to me, I converted the data on the laptop, and emailed the converted data back. In the end, they still had a lot of 1's and 0's on their network, but the 1's and 0's had moved. The music changed and the dancers were doing something different.
Life, and information, and computation, are just completely amazing. Move your 1's and 0's. Change keys suddenly.
Isn't this just another word for running on empty? For no reserves. For constant hunger?
When I hear "Lean Organization" I think that if one guy goes on vacation that there's a drop in service level.
If one kid has a school event and a parent leaves for a day to see it, service level drops.
If one person gets sick, no one knows how to do their work, and there's a drop in service level.
Whatever happened to having reserves, planning for the inevitable, and having strength? Why are we flirting with that twitchy line between a marathoner's physique and a POW's?
I don't think that everyone would refuse to buy a product from a company that takes better care of itself.