Signals

“That’s terrible,” my wife gasped when I showed her the photo.

I said, “So do you still want to shop at Walmart?”

Her gaze remained on the TV when she replied, “Well, you see if you can afford not to.”

And this is the essential problem, isn’t it? Like any rational actor, we respond to price signals. And like most people, this is all my wife—who is certainly not without mercy—is doing. The grim image of two people crushed to death, their bodies turned ash grey with cement dust in the ruins of a collapsed Bangladesh garment factory, has only a transitory effect.

PotD – Wish

Outsourcing jobs is good and necessary in a global economy. It encourages innovation and keeps the cost of services affordable for Canadians. Banks are not charities or community service organizations. They must make money (i.e., profiits) [sic] to provide the services they offer to customers, especially the expensive individual account services they give people with small amounts of money. The only way our financial institutions can continue to provide these services at affordable prices is to cut their costs as much as possible and wherever possible. Sending “back office” jobs overseas is the smartest way to do this.

—”CanCrit,” April 14, 2013 in “Former outsourcer describes how job destruction works: Walkom,” Toronto Star reader comment

PotD – March

Most of the 100+ comments on this news story are anti-Administration. How ironic is it that those liberals who are by and large Obama supporters are so bent on selling him out on this key issue of national security?

As one who voted against him twice, and consistently opposes his domestic agenda, I am strongly with him on his very wise anti-terrorism stance.

—”Tim,” Feb. 27, 2013 in “Justices Turn Back Challenge to Broader U.S. Eavesdropping,” New York Times reader comment

—Attica Blue

Zero zero zero

Jeremy Grantham is a capitalist. Of the rentier kind, even. His credentials in this regard are impeccable. He runs a global investment management firm that as of December 2012 had US$106 billion under management. He’s been around for a long time and in 1977 co-founded the company that partially bears his name. Before that he was an economist for Royal Dutch Shell. Well—how about we hear how he puts it: “I am a capitalist and have co-founded two firms that today employ about 600 people in total. Like most capitalists (and most humans) I prefer to please myself than to be told what to do. I am willing, though, to part with some of that personal freedom to advance an important or even a vital public good.”

What’s vital about Grantham—hair long gone white, company photo hiding the lines that must have crawled all over the place by now—is that this multi-millionaire capitalist, of all people, says we are at the end of growth.

Owned

Nancy Lanza loved guns, and often took her sons to one of the shooting ranges here in the suburbs northeast of New York City, where there is an active community of gun enthusiasts, her friends said.

It was one of her guns that was apparently used to take her life on Friday.

—”A Mother, a Gun Enthusiast and the First Victim,” New York Times, Dec. 15, 2012

—Attica Blue