Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Sometimes human behavior is negatively reinforcing.

So I wonder, as the stock market tanks, and “change” becomes more inevitable (i.e. the non-Republican will win), are people fleeing the market, pushing it down further, in expectation that the next guy will only make things worse?

As I wrote the first two “paragraphs” (they are pretty weak for paragraphs), I was making implications about Obama. Although, now, a few moments later, I realize that I have no faith that McCain would do any better.

ADDENDUM: This morning the Fark Business section links to a USNews blog wondering the same damn thing as me.

Some of you will remember the podcast with Mike Munger on price gouging. Obviously with hurricanes flying through the country, gouging is in the news a lot. Anyway, Munger comments on some of the various anti-gouging pieces of legislation throughout the country; the descriptions are frequently so vague as to be unintentionally hilarious. The word “unconscionable” is thrown around a lot, but the real gist of the laws is that gouging is hard to define but that the government will know it when it sees it.

Virginia, it turns out, is not immune to this. I ran across the following hilarity last night when I found the VIRGINIA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE AND CONSUMER SERVICES PRICE GOUGING COMPLAINT FORM.

• The Anti-Price Gouging Act prohibits a “supplier” from charging unconscionable prices for “necessary goods and services” within the affected area during the thirty (30) day period following a declared state of emergency.

So there’s the “unconscionable” part. But what does that even mean?

• The basic test for determining if a price is unconscionable is whether the post-disaster price charged by a “supplier” for a “necessary good or service” grossly exceeds the price charged for the same or similar goods or services either by the same supplier, or within the same trade area, during the ten (10) days immediately prior to the disaster.

So “unconscionable” means “gross.” Thanks, Richmond, that really clears things up.

Regarding speculators:

Speculators who don’t take delivery (and we know today’s aren’t because oil inventory numbers are going down and not up) have no more control over oil prices than traders in weather futures have over wind speeds.

Recently, I have been intending to write something similar. Except I was going to compare oil speculators to those who bet on athletics.

And as a funny, yet somewhat scary anecdote, let me recall a conversation I had with an older fellow in Missouri. He said that to lower oil prices we should open the strategic reserves. The beauty of the plan, he argued, was that once prices got lower, we could just buy back all the oil we released at lower prices! I countered that if selling a whole bunch of oil will lower prices, then one should probably assume that buying a while bunch of oil would raise prices. He remained unswayed and emphasized that it was an easy proposition so long as young, smart people tried really hard to make it happen.

So there you have it, the solution to our energy price problems; young people working for the government figuring out how to hide the purchase of tens of millions of barrels of oil. Easy.

Leave it to me to wait until after I both polled you all and cooked all my tomatoes to refer to the cookbook that sits on my shelf. [The phrase "sits on my shelf" is highly sensitive to the location of that "h".] From my America’s Test Kitchen Test Kitchen Favorites - The 2007 Companion Cookbook to the Hit TV Show:

When it comes to cooking, we prefer to go with good canned tomatoes. Juice-drenched seasonal tomatoes, available only a few weeks a year, are reserved for eating raw on mayonnaise-slathered bread or straight off the cutting board.

They tested 10 brands of whole tomatoes and found the the 4 Italian brands were quite horrible.

For decades, Italy has been synonymous with superior tomato quality, so these results were puzzling. First, we checked the tomato variety used for each brand, in case the difference was as simple as plum versus round. All of the Italian samples were plums, while the American samples (our top five brands) were split down the middle between plum and round. but tomato variety proved to have little to do with our preference.

The stale taste of the Italian brands in our lineup, it turns out, has more to do with trade laws than crop differences. In 1989, the United States imposed debilitating punitive tariffs on imported European fruits and vegetable–from 13.6 percent to an exorbitant 100 percent. Unsurprisingly, Italian tomato prices went through the roof, and sales of imported tomatoes dropped off dramatically. To avoid paying the steep duty, Italian tomato canners eventually began packing their tomatoes in tomato puree rather than juice. The loophole? When packed in juice, tomatoes are considered a “vegetable”; when packed in puree, they’re a “sauce,” which carries a much lower customs duty. Sure enough, the Italian brands were all packed in a thick puree (even though two brands inaccurately call it “juice” on the label).

Via the OrangeCoat Blog, I followed a link to ADynammic’s post about Tom’s Shoes and their “amazing” business model.

I think Tom’s is great because they are more than just a shoe company (they aren’t even a pretty shoe company). They are a company who set out to do good, and they’ve done that. Mr. Mycoskie says the shoes sell themselves because almost everyone who buys a pair and hears the story tells someone else the story and it goes on and on. He rarely pays for any traditional advertising because the story sells it’s self. Now people like Ralph Lauren and other big designers are signing on to design special additions because they love the story as well. This is capitalism at it’s best. So check out the embedded video and maybe you’ll want to get a pair as well.

In other words, he collects a premium from gullible, probably guilt-ridden, customers, gives them a shitty pair of shoes in return (that no one even pretends are worth wearing), convinces some of them to work for him as free interns, sends a pair of shoes abroad to some poor kids, and then pockets the tidy profits.

This is not capitalism at its best. A fine case of charlatanism, perhaps. Or maybe charity at its worst.

Not that “best” capitalism is easily defined. But were I to venture a definition, Tom’s would sell shoes that were worth buying and that competed in the marketplace based on their own merits as shoes. He would also put his production plants in these poor countries (he may do so, but the video doesn’t say) so that he could provide jobs instead of handouts. But this is obviously just me being silly.

And then I’m going to stick one on every fucking Prius I see with an Obama sticker.

Ok. Deep breath.

Exhale.

All right. Immediate reactions aside. This can’t be real. Mr. Wordly, Mr. Improve our Image Abroad can’t seriously be behind something this stupid. It has to be part of the vast right wing conspiracy. Has to be. Right?