Cheerful Curmudgeon

I have a proposal to reduce the cost of groceries very significantly, something which I think will be welcomed in this goofy economy. We will form grocery buying cooperatives, essentially grocery insurance programs, which will amortize the costs of groceries across all buyers, lowering the costs for all and protecting people from the “oh shit!” moments when they might need to buy extra-ordinary amounts of food, like for a wedding or bar mitzvah.

If you are a member of a grocery insurance program, you will show your membership card at the cash register and will pay a fixed amount of money for your week’s groceries, regardless of how much you need that particular week. Based on some research that I have been doing, I believe that through careful negotiation and the buying power amassed by a large membership, the grocery insurance programs ought to be able to obtain groceries from local supermarkets for as little as 35-45% of “list prices.” These savings will be passed on to members through lower membership fees and lower weekly at-the-cash-register fixed payments.

Membership in the grocery insurance programs will be a neat perk which businesses can offer to their employees. I know that, as a business owner, I am always looking for ways to compensate my employees which do not impose additional income tax burdens on them. The grocery insurance program membership fees would be deductible expenses for the business and, I hope, would be “carved out” by the IRS and not considered taxable income to the employees.

All in all, I think that this will be a tremdously adventageous program which will help Americans.

I can only think of a couple of small problems but I’m sure that we will quickly get them straightened out.

1. About 46 milliion Americans, about 18% of us, will not be able to join a grocery insurance program, primarily for one of three reasons: 1) they are unemployed, 2) they have jobs but their employers do not choose to offer this perk to them, or 3) they have reputations for eating too much food and are ineligible.
2. Grocery list prices, the prices marked on the shelves and actually paid by the 46 million people who are not grocery insurance program members, will be 2-3x higher than today’s prices.
3. Individuals who want to join a program on their own (not through an employer) will need to pay significantly higher membership fees and won’t receive the tax benefits.

Let me reiterate that these are tiny problems. About 82% of us will be unaffected by them and will actually see our grocery bills go down so, in the balance, this is all for the good.

Does this sound ridiculous? Why? We Americans buy health care exactly as described here.

Here is a short, informative video which explains the credit crisis in terms which ordinary mortals (i.e., I) can understand.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

My Sony PRS-505 ebook reader continues to delight me. I have chewed my way through a couple of books and several short stories, all without the bother of braving the mall to reach Borders or the traffic to reach the library. As I have finished these books, I simply let them evaporate into the ether, smug in the knowledge that I have neither filled the recycle bin with nascent packing materials nor killed trees and burned petrol to just to sooth my addiction to reading. There is still a problem: sometimes, I come across a book that I would like to keep and I still have not figured out a satisfying way to keep ebooks.

The underlying problem is that I like being surrounded by bookshelves filled with dead trees. I like the colors and the patterns. Even more, I like the warm memories that surface whenever I look at the books. I have books which have followed me around since childhood; I don’t read them any more but my soul remembers reading them the first time and delights in the presence of these old friends. Someday, my children will wonder what the heck these old things are doing here and, with luck, they will guess the answer to the riddle.

I try to imagine a way to surround myself with ebooks with the same satisfaction and I fail miserably. I imagine my house with every bookshelf gone, replaced by a shared folder on a computer in the basement. Anyone in the house can easily open \\Library\ebooks\fiction (or, for the Linux users amongst us, ssh://Library/ebooks/fiction), browse by genre or author, pick a book, and read it. The ebooks are accessible by everyone at once, so there is no need to wait your turn for the new releases. Since the ebooks can be freely copied, the worry about losing a book is gone forever.

Those are all wonderful advantages but they do not make up for the fact that my life would be poorer without bookshelves. Many books simply cannot be satisfactorily read on a 6″ diagonal screen in black and white. Some need large paper and color. Some need indexes. Some need to be savored by three of us at a time.

Ebooks can serve another purpose, however, as a trial license for the paper book. Several authors and publishers are experimenting with releasing a free ebook in conjunction with a traditional, for-fee physical book and are finding that the ebook certainly does not hurt, and may even boost, sales. James Boyle discussed this in more depth in Text is free, we make our money on volume(s) at the Financial Times’ web site. This makes a lot of sense to me: I can download the ebook and browse it to my heart’s content in the comfort of my easy chair. If I like it, I then buy the paper, thoroughly enjoy everything it has to offer, and finally add it to my wonderfully crammed bookshelf.

Perhaps I have been trying to make ebooks into more than they will ever be, at least for me. I think that, along side the ebooks, there will always be a place for real books in my life.

You might have noticed a bit of “uncertainty” in the economy these days. I was fascinated to see these two articles show up within 24 hours of each other:

We do not know who is right, of course, but I am an optimist and strongly biased toward Updegrove’s view.

I believe that we live in a plentiful universe, that there is more than enough of everything to go around and our challenges are in distribution and not in production. We have, for instance, more than enough food to feed everybody; we just need to get the food from where it sits to the mouths of the hungry people. I believe that we are bright enough to solve this problem.

I also believe in the basic generosity of human beings. Innumerable projects have been accomplished through the donated time of unemployed and under-employed people. People with full-time jobs and plenty of money also donate their time, of course, but history proves that unemployment does not transform normally generous people into the selfish animals which Keen predicts.

Open source software is good for everyone. The programmers get to do stuff which they enjoy, learn new technologies, and bask in the warm fuzzies of seeing the works of their hands thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated. The companies which use open source software see lower costs and (hopefully) higher profits. And last but certainly not least, the people who use open source software get to enjoy a much wider choice of solutions to their problems than would exist if only commercial software were available. With all of this goodness in a naturally abundant universe, we are certainly going to see new bounties in the open source software cornucopia.

With all the hoopla these days, it is very difficult to determine why our economy is tanking. Almost every news article, and certainly every political candidate, points the blame and tries to oversimplify the situation.

FactCheck.org, a wonderful web site which debunks the spin in presidential candidate statements and advertisements, has a great summary in its article, Who Caused the Economic Crisis? Just skim down to the section near the end titled, “The Real Deal.”