Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Well I survived my first day of work.

Yay paperwork.

In today’s news from the Financial Times, and I’ll paraphrase: “blah blah blah. China bad. blah blah blah. Trade deficit. blah blah blah. Blame the yellow people. blah blah blah.”

Clinton, Obama, and bunch of Republicans want to pressure China into ending their “freebies for the world program” (my title) method of currency valuation.

The bipartisan legislation has been spurred by claims that China’s cheap currency makes its exports more attractive and is contributing to the record annual $232.6bn (£115.6bn) US trade deficit with the country.

In other words, the economists are right.

Speaking of economists, here’s one who posted just yesterday about the “irrelevance of bilateral trade balances.”

Additionally, while China may be artificially lowering the price of its exports, the US is equally, if not more, guilty of artificially increasing the price of domestic goods through taxation.

Really the good news here is that our popularly elected political followers (if they do as they polls say, they are followers) really do understand supply and demand. So whenever they wish to argue that raising prices won’t lead to a reduction of quantity demanded, we can kindly remind them of what they know to be true.

Many Charlottesville drivers — although this surely happens everywhere — are simply too nice for the greater good. They go around unnecessarily disrupting traffic patterns so they can feel good about doing someone a favor. Unfortunately, they usually just fuck up everything and everyone ends up worse off.

Day to day I’ll be somewhere waiting for a long line of cars to pass so that I can turn or cross through the intersection and the driver of the very last car decides that it is their time to be nice. They just have to do someone a favor so they can feel all good and warm inside. So they slow down and wait for me to go. Awe. Isn’t that nice?

Yes. Nice and stupid.

Why is it stupid? Because I have no fucking idea what is going on in that driver’s head. I have no way of knowing what their intention is. For all I know they’re distracted and just waiting to mash the accelerator. I do know that if someone goes wrong it will be my fault.

Moreover, even if I could read minds, the entire act is useless. In the time it takes for them to get slowed down, they could have just gone past me. But since mind reading is not one of my talents, I sit there and wait like I’m supposed to. The end result is everyone losing time because some nice idiot decided to stop when he/she/it (have to throw in the “it” because you never know in Charlottesville) had the right-of-way.

So if you are guilty of this offense, STOP IT!

And remember, don’t forget to bring a towel!

If I know that you have a tattoo before I know your name, I’m probably not going to like you.

Addendum: Let me apply this rule more broadly to people who have lip, eyebrow, or nose piercings and the idiots with the stupid black disks wedged into their earlobes.

At this point next week, I’ll be joining the real world. I’ll have a real job, real responsibility, and a real salary. Is it really July already?