Today, I was Stumbling around when I came across the New York Times article titled “Average is Over”. It does make an interesting point about how, when your labor pool is global, any given labor resource needs to have something that makes them a more desirable source of labor than any other given worker.

I think what the author fails to factor in with this race to the bottom for labor is, “who are you producing for if most people have no worthwhile jobs, and therefore no money, to be able to afford those low labor-cost products?” I mean, it’s great that you’ve got nearly a billion Chinese to produce low-priced goods for consumers throughout the globe, but who’s gonna employ that cheap labor when the people elsewhere in the world can no longer afford those goods? Eventually, while chasing the cheapest labor, you reach a point where no labor is cheap enough. Then you have lots of idle people out there who can’t afford, not only those cheaply-produced goods, but things like entertainment, healthcare and food. It’s not a “sustainable” model.

And those idle people that can’t afford anything - how do you think they’re eventually going to react? What do people with nothing to lose - jobs, ready ability to purchase food and healthcare, etc. - do with all the free time you’ve given them? If they don’t end up dying from their lack of access to food, healthcare, etc., they end up pissed off with a feeling of having nothing to lose. Shortly afterwards, even if your economies haven’t failed due to there being no one capable of buying things, your societies fall apart from all of the crime and violence caused by the people with nothing to lose and everything to gain by forcing a change in the new status quo.

Interesting times ahead, folks. It’s either gonna get extremely ugly or there’s gonna be a sea-change in how the global economy works. Then again, outside factors (such a a global pandemic) might remove this excess and under-utilized global population. 

Clock’s ticking. Hopefully, the bell goes off after I’m not around to care about it.

Tonight, my wife and I went for a sush-dinner at Hana Tokyo (in Alexandria). We’ve been going to this place for years now. For the most part, it’s always been a really good experience. Prior to tonight, the only thing approaching a bad experience was getting there on a busy night and not being able to get seated quickly.

Tonight, we were able to get seated quickly. While the place was slammed like it usually is on a Friday - their hibachis are very popular, apparently - we’d called ahead to make sure we could get a table. I dropped Donna off at the door and went to find parking. By the time I got there, they were just about ready to seat us at the sushi bar.

We like going here because they frequently have interesting specials (though, with as frequently as they have otoro, they should just have it on the regular menu). We split a Dragon Roll order. I got my usual salmon roe nigiri with uzura and a Philadelphia hand roll. I also ordered the otoro, eel, cobia, Japanese snapper and mackerel. Donna ordered her stuff, and then we proceeded to wait.

After our food was presented, we started to eat. Donna had “textural-issues” with one of her items and asked if I found it similarly “not quite right”. Taste wise, it was fine, but the fish, tonight, just wasn’t a firm an crispy as it usually is. The otoro wasn’t quite as buttery as it normally is. Even my salmon roe wasn’t quite as perky as normal for our meals there.

At the end of the meal, the chef asked how our dinner was. I asked if they’d had to buy from a different source, today, noting that the texture had been not up to their usual standards. He had the manager come over and ask us more about the meal. When I pointed out that, in the (probably five or so, at this point) years we’d been coming there, we’d always been very pleased with the meal - which was why we’d been repeat customers for such a long time. He asked if the texture on the fish was wrong, to which I’d answered that, while the flavor had been as expected, yes, the fish didn’t have the pleasing mouth-feel that it usually does. So, supposedly, he’ll be talking to his suppliers at their next order.

That’s the funny thing about fish - particularly uncooked fish: it’s very fragile. Even if it starts out as high-quality stock, if there’s too much variance in temperature between catch and delivery, it causes the cell structure to start to break down. Delicately crispy fleshes, such as that of cobia, become mushy. Buttery cuts, such as the otoro, lose that butteriness. Roes lose their perkiness.

If you eat your fish cooked, much of the textural subtleties tend to be lost, any way. Variances in the delivered meat is much less important because the cooking breaks the meats down, any way.

I don’t consider myself to be a sushi snob, but, sometimes, it’s just not quite right. And, that was what tonight was: not quite right. I’ve had sushi at places where it was decidedly not right. I’ve even had it where it was utterly indifferent. When you have a place that performs as consistently well as Hana Tokyo does, it’s kind of jarring when they have a miss.

Oh well, we’ll be back again. They’ve had several years of good performance. So, hopefully, tonight was just an off night that was beyond their control.

I gotta say, if there was a possible way to fuck up the marketing of the NHL Winter Classic, the various outlets found a way to do so.

I should not have seen empty seats in the stands. But, when you’re setting extortionate purchase-terms for season ticket holders (you had to buy tickets to all three WC events if you wanted to be allowed to buy the “main event” tickets), you pretty much guarantee that a significant chunk of the tickets will go to scalpers ticket purchasing services and package promoters. And when those outlets are charging as much for a pair of seats as an entire season ticket plan, you’re gonna have a hard time filling all the seats.

Back in November, when the NHL Shop started the Winter Classic marketing blitz, I’d ordered a pair of “authentic” Winter Classic jerseys. I’d figured “since I can’t reasonably afford to go to the event, I can splurge on jerseys for my wife and me”. So, I put in the order for the customized jerseys - a Hartnell/19 for Donna and a Timonen/44 jersey for myself. The order sheet said to expect fulfillment around Decemer 15th. At the time, that was a nearly three-week wait, but, “whatever”.

Christmas came and went and still no jerseys. So, I called up the NHL Shop to find out where the hell they were. I was told, “they haven’t arrived at the warehouse, yet, but we’re expecting them in soon enough to have them to you in time for the game.” This was not at all reassuring, but, “what can you do?”

The week of the Winter Classic, still no box with jerseys were to be found at my door. So, I called them again. “They still haven’t arrived at the warehouse”. I was a touch incredulous at this and pointed out that there wasn’t much time for them to get them and get them to us. I was told how sorry they were for the delay but that there was nothing to be done.

The Winter Classic came and went. Jerseys never arrived and no indication of what the fuck had happened to them showed up in my email. Yesterday, I called to find out “whut the fuck.” The person I got hold of gave me the same story of “they still haven’t arrived at the warehouse.” This time, however, they told me I could call back the following week to open an investigation or I could cancel the order. Having been waiting nearly two months for this disappointment, I told the CSR that I wanted to just cancel the order since they were well late and they were able to give me no indication of when or if I might ever see them. She canceled the order and gave me a cancellation number and told me to expect cancellation confirmation to show up in my Inbox (no such confirmation ever came). She then asked if there was anything else she could do for me. I took this opportunity to point out that she and the NHL had, to date, done nothing for me, so how could she do “more”. I also pointed out that their order fulfillment was abysmal and that I’d never bother to try to use their service again (and, to anyone reading this, I’d advise a similar path). She gave another useless apology before we concluded the call.

Today, I spoke to someone that sells NHL merchandise for a living. I was informed that he’d only been able to get a very limited quantity of them and had sold out several days ago. Additionally, the manufacturer, who clearly had a hot commodity on their hands, wasn’t going to make any more (and, looking at shop.nhl.com, today, even they aren’t advertising them any more).

I am, to say the least, a touch incredulous at how stupid this is. I mean, they were selling these jerseys for $350 per unit. Rather than cranking out more to sell, they opted to discontinue them and sell only the much cheaper “replica” and “Premier” jerseys. I’m sure, at some point, we’ll hear how problematic mechandise forgeries and the like are to these companies (I’ve already seen the “don’t settle for cheap immitations from Asia” on some sites selling the Indonesian made “Premier” jerseys). Yet, when they have the opportunity to sell things that people want and are demonstrably willing to pay for, they choose not to. That leaves people with the choice: of be price-gouged by third parties that bought big, early so they could price-gouge later; settle for lesser goods from “legitimate sources” or, since you can’t get the thing you really wanted in the first place, buy fakes. If the recording and movie industries have shown us anything, it’s that people will either do without, or will resort to piracy to get the things they want.

Stupid.

All I can say is, “fuck you, NHL” and “fuck you, Reebok”. I hope the lot of them die in a goddamned fire.

As I wait for it to get closer to time to get ready for New Year’s festivities, I’m sitting here watching TV. As I scanned through the online “what’s on” guide, I saw that National Geographic TV was running one of their Aftermath shows.

The series, as a whole, is based on some fairly far-fetched premises. However, those premises were, previously, ones that conceivably have the capability of having a “life goes on” outcome. The episode that’s on,now, Population Explosion, doesn’t really fit that mold. It has as its premise that (somehow) the earth’s population has somehow managed to double overnight.

Yeah, I get that this is supposed to be a cautionary tale for our future that collapses the time-frame of whats to come as the Earth’s population doubles on a more natural time-scale. However, doubling over a course of decades versus over the course of a day (or even months) results in a completely different set of stressors and outcomes. Population is an inherently self-limiting problem. Explosive population growth is even more self-limiting. I’m not seeing on this episode that people have somehow become immortal, so a lot of the problems they’re positing seem unlikely. Long before we’d have to worry about creating new housing, beefing up infrastructure and finding more farmlands, energy and other resources, people would have already started to die, on a massive scale, from lack of food and environmental exposure. Let’s face it: if you doubled the human population, overnight, and even had double the farmland (and seed-stock) available to plant new crops on, those crops aren’t going to come online for a month or more - billions will have starved before then. Along with them starving (and running out of water), your doubled need for housing is going to disappear.

Oh well.. I guess National Geographic had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for this one. Seriously, this one borders on the mind-bendingly stupid. Would that doubled population still exist three (or more) years from the doubling-event? Don’t think so. I have my doubts that, post doubling, we’d even have our current levels of populations surviving over the course of even half a year, let alone ofter three. The damage and deprivation caused by that doubling would be severe. Not only would all of the new population not survive, but a significant chunk of the incumbent population would die along with them.

Sorry, National Geographic, but gonna have to give you a big, fat “F” for this bit of shoddy programming. This is even worse than the A&E’s Ancient Aliens shows.

Last night, a buddy of mine and I went to go see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. It wasn’t a horrible movie but it was hardly “art”. Two tickets for the non-3D version ran $24. Add in two 1qt bottles of water for $9 bucks (that’s $18/gal. for water - even at its peak, gasoline wasn’t that expensive) and you’re at more than $30 for two hours of mid-grade entertainment.

Today, while at work, a box arrived from Amazon. In that box was the full, 8-movie BluRay set of Harry Potter movies. Sixteen or so hours of quality entertainment. Total price? $60. And that’s $60 for unlimited viewings by me and any number of other people that might come over during our ownership of the discs (and, lets not forget loans/swaps with neighbors and friends).

So, tell me, again, why Hollywood thinks that piracy is why annual ticket sales are down by a half-billion seats?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind spending money if I’m getting good value. But when every trip to the theatre becomes a $20-$40 gamble whose odds are worse than rolling a hard-8 in Vegas and it should be fairly self-evident why everyone’s staying home.

A week or so ago, I disabled my FaceBook account. I’m almost tempted to reactivate it to see what my Timeline looks like. Unfortunately, it seems that FaceBook only is granting you seven days from activation to edit your Timeline contents.

Given how much data I generated since opening my FaceBook account, I don’t think seven days is going to be enough time to do the requisite edits of my Timeline page. So, it kind of removes the desire to re-activate.

Oh well: I’m sure that FaceBook will eventually make activation of Timeline not an option, which will pretty much completely remove any desire to reactivate my account.