Musings from Brian J. Noggle – Page 269 – To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."

A Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned; A Federal Dollar Saved Is A Fiscal Disaster For Someone

July 20, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

The Government Services Agency, recently in the news for its expensive and lavish conferences which sometimes mocked the thought of fiscal restraint, has cut a conference from its docket. St. Louis businesses who would have benefited from the largesse this time around are unhappy:

That was the case this week, when a scandal-plagued federal agency, still reeling from revelations about a lavish conference in Sin City, pulled the plug on an upcoming gathering here in the Gateway City.

Now 10 downtown hotels are left with a bunch of empty rooms and wondering if they will ever get paid.

The General Services Agency, which manages nuts-and-bolts federal purchasing, told St. Louis convention officials this week that they are canceling a big energy trade show scheduled for America’s Center next month. It would have filled nearly 2,500 hotel rooms downtown for four nights, generating an estimated $6 million in hotel and convention spending, plus cab rides, meals and more. Now? Nothing.

“It’s impossible to fill almost 2,500 hotel rooms for four or five nights in a month,” said Kathleen “Kitty” Ratcliffe, president of the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission. “Those hotels are going to sit empty. Cab drivers won’t be working. Restaurants won’t be as busy.”

As we have seen in Missouri, we get an article from this template when the legislature performs any sort of spending restraint that caps spending increases, reallocates fiscal resources according to some sense of priorities, or even eliminates some programs. Open your local paper today, and I’ll bet you’ll find a story about people who won’t receive money from the state or nonprofits who will not receive some sort of state funding. I even had a full schtick going during the Blunt governorship pointing out all the people Matt Blunt hated by cutting their funding.

It’s easy to report on the people who lose the federal dollars because that impact is focused, and journalists can find people to quote and photograph. It’s easy to mobilize these people to call their legislators to get that funding restored.

The savings impact, though, is diffused throughout the budget. That $6,000,000, not all of it government funds, will get spent on something else. But, still, savings are savings. Cancel a couple of these conferences, and you can buy an Apache. Which is more important to the country? Ask the GSA or some energy company, and they’ll say the conference. Ask any number of soldiers, if they think about it, and they’ll say air support. That’s optimistic, of course; the six million dollars will remain in the GSA budget for something like a fleet of Chevy Volts or something, but still, that’s at least not quite as ephemeral as a conference.

It’s unfortunate that the city of St. Louis’s publicly funded convention facilities have lost publicly funded conferences to trickle some money into the hands of actual citizens and torrents of amenities into the pockets, maws, and alcohol-fueled sleep of government employees and government hangers on. But it’s a step in the right direction, and further steps, if they’re taken, will lead to news stories much like this one, rending garments and wailing.

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The Two Commercial Interests, Hey?

July 20, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Normally, David Nicklaus is pretty reasonable in his columns for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But in his latest, In heavyweight fight over card fees, consumers are the likely losers, he underemphasizes an important point:

When two big commercial interests start a fight, consumers would be wise to watch their wallets.

So it is with the dispute between banks and retailers over swipe fees, which the store incurs every time you pay with plastic. The fees average about 2 percent of each transaction and have risen over time.

Congress capped the swipe fee on debit card transactions, costing banks an estimated $8 billion a year.

So whose fault is it that you’re going to have to pay a premium, maybe, at certain shops to use a credit card?

Congress. Or, more to the point, the former Democrat-controlled national legislature that gave us Dodd-Frank.

I’ve given a stray thought to the impact of this settlement. Will retail establishments start charging a 5% premium (or giving a 5% discount) to people who pay with cash? Maybe.

If Amazon doesn’t do it, small businesses (or larger businesses) that charge 5% extra will lose business to Amazon and larger businesses that don’t charge the premium. That business decision will cause more smaller businesses to leave the field. Thanks, Congress! Of course, this will get blamed on large banks and credit card companies who need to maintain their product margin and additional costs of compliance with Dodd-Frank and its Frankenagency’s whims (what, doesn’t the Secretary of Health and Human Services get to arbitrarily impose anything with this legislation? How did she get left out of something passed between 2009 and 2011?).

Hey, let’s travel on a tangent: Why, this very week, I ate at a small business that had a sign offering a 5% discount for cash. When I paid for the bill with cash, the discount was not applied. I didn’t quibble with it. That 5% just came out of the tip. But whenever I see all those twee signs, pictures-with-words that pass for insight on Facebook, and whatnot that says “Buy from a small business” as though a small business is inherently more moral than a large business, I can’t help but think of the times when I’ve been rooked, overcharged, or otherwise immorally treated by a small business. Caveat emptor, I know, but still, the sentiment is twee. I buy from whomever is convenient, least expensive, best quality, and whatnot. Sometimes I like to buy from a small business because I like to support small business. But there’s no moral compulsion to do so, and some small business people are only limited in their immorality by the fact that Bank of America or Unilever have not bought them out and brought them into the executive ranks of a large business.

Where was I? Oh, yes. To sum up: Dodd-Frank sucks, and Congressional action has made things more expensive for consumers, but again in a fashion where they can frame capitalism for it.

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Book Report: The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman (1995)

July 19, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book offers a template through which you can view the relationship with your significant other, typically a spouse as this is a lightly Christian-flavored book (although it’s lighter than something like So What’s The Difference, so non-Christians can get something from this book if Christianity does not offend them). Chapman identifies five distinct silos of behavior types to which classify interactions with one’s significant other (or others–more on that later). He uses the metaphor of a “love tank,” a vessel that holds positive feelings towards one’s SO, which is constantly draining but that you can fill up with one or more actions in the template.

The five love languages (sorry, apparently this is a registered trademark, more appropriately The 5 Love Languages®) are:

Words of Affirmation, which is saying something nice.
Quality Time, doing something together.
Receiving Gifts, which relies on physical tokens.
Acts of Service, which is doing something for someone.
Physical Touch, which is pats, hugs, holding hands, and sex.

So finding your partner’s primary love language and showing love for your partner will help to “top off” that love tank and keep the relationship strong and healthy. Okay.

Well, it is a new framework in which to view one’s relationship, and by thinking of the relationship and the trappings/interactions of the relationship qua relationship, I can see where this is helpful. However, the book focuses a lot on primary love language, where I can see how using more than one of them as expressions of love in daily interactions can be more beneficial still than only focusing on one (although one might have primacy over the others, yes, I get that).

Chapman explains or wonders whether the source of the primary love languages stems from youth, what the child lacked at home or how the child saw his parents interact and chose to emulate or reject those patterns of behavior. That can be a little forensic, really, and what matter most is in the present application of the framework.

The book is told as a series of composite sketches, where Chapman talks to people or couples and they have epiphanies every chapter. I guess I can live with that fictionalized dramatic recreations of complete conversations. But after he gets through with his thesis, Chapman tacks on a couple chapters of further examples that were a bit superfluous and includes a chapter of using the framework with your children, which I didn’t find consistent with the premise that the source of the primary love language came from childhood. I can see it being something on the nature side of the ledger, but in the first chapters, the source of the primary love language comes from the nurture side. I dunno. Didn’t work for me.

So it’s an interesting read and might be a new framework, a template for considering your interactions with others, but it’s just a template, ultimately, and if or how you choose to apply it should remain up to you.

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John Brunner Discovers Sarah Steelman, Todd Akin Were Legislators

July 19, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

John Brunner has funded a pair of Web sites, Sarah Steelman Facts and Todd Akin Facts that illustrate that both served in legislators and voted. Thus, the fact that they voted on some things that conservative bloggers don’t like is evidence that they’re RINOs or something.

Unfortunately, Mr. Brunner has no voting record to attack. Unfortunately, he does have a record as a businessman, so he’s made some decisions that were good business decisions that might conflict with conservative principles.

Jeez, Louise, kids. The Claire McCaskill ads that say, “Even members of his/her own party say….” start here. So how about you focus more on what you believe and what you’ll do rather than cast aspersions on your fellow party members?

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Visiting Smallin Civil War Cave near Ozark, Missouri

July 18, 2012June 23, 2016 Brian J. Noggle

The Smallin Civil War Cave is a commercial cave located just north of Branson just off of County Highway NN. It’s sort of accessible from US 60 between Springfield and Branson, but you do have to wind down a county highway and through some other streets to get there. I headed down there one Friday morning to beat the crowds, and I found the little complex easily enough–at every turn, there’s a sign indicating which way to go to the cave (but you’d better remember where you turned, since there are no signs on the way out to guide you back to NN–but it’s not that hard).

The complex has ample parking for cars, buses, and RVs. Most of them weren’t in use at a little after 10am on a Friday morning. I spoke to Mrs. Bright, the owner of the complex, and she said the caves are the most busy on Friday afternoons and Monday mornings, when visitors to and from Branson visit on the way to Branson or on the way home.

The Visitor Center is the staging point for the cave tours. Outside, it offers a free crawl box for children who’ve been cooped up in automobiles for a couple of hours and who will not have the chance to go off-roading during the guided tour of the caves:

The crawl box is relatively new construction and is very sturdy, which doesn’t diminish the excitement for the children but comforts the minds of the parents. My boys went through the box several times and could have probably spent the whole morning there.

A mining sluice also stands outside the Visitor Center; you can buy bags of sand and gems inside to recreate the experience of panning for treasures, although the Smallin Cave itself does not have panning or mining history (except for the native Americans who mined chirt in the cave).

Listen to me talking about Smallin Cave authoritatively based on one guided tour. Why, I’m almost as good as a tour guide already.

The Visitor Center offers a wide variety of geological and Civil War themed items, and as I mentioned, it’s the staging area for the guided tours. The guided tours last about an hour and cost $15.95 for adults and $8.95 for children, so the cost of visiting definitely runs to Tourist on the scale. They also offer a “wild” tour which means you go off the concrete path for two hours, climbing through the cave like a real spelunker. Additionally, they offer other events that involve sitting around a campfire, eating, and hearing Civil War stories. We went with the guided tour.

Just outside, an Indian marker tree points to the cave location:

Native Americans used to bend saplings to make them grow in this fashion to point toward trails or important land features. Like the cave entrance.

The tour actually includes three caves. The first cave, which I believe the guide called Fielding Cave, is a smaller cave on the property:

This cave was the home^* to a couple of large bears throughout the ages as well as serving as a camp site for prehistoric people who might have mined chirt there and cooked dinner there. They probably did not live there as the same time as the bears. The tour guide also pointed out that they are working with Missouri State University to archeologicate some artifacts from the cave.

Fielding Cave is just a quick stop to whet your appetite. An opening act, if you will.

Disappointment Cave is just a quick point-out:

They call it Disappointment Cave because it’s only twelve feet deep and it takes as long to climb to it as it does to explore it.

Smallin Cave has a varied history^*. In the 1960s, the first commercial owner ran it as a tourist destination and installed some of the amenities enjoyed by visitors today, including the concrete walkway that ensures that visitors won’t get their feet wet on the tour. This proprietor apparently liked to play up the tenuous connection to the Civil War by loading the property down with memorabilia. After he passed away, his heirs did not claim the property, and it was sold for taxes. A church organization bought it and used it as a camp site for some youth ministry. Its dedication plaque remains on the wall:

The church eventually stopped using the cave as a campsite, and it remained fallow until the new owners took it over a couple years back. But as we approached the cave and the entrance chamber, I could understand why this served as a gathering place in many centuries. Aside from the fact that the cave was comfortably cool on a hot summer day (startlingly so, I noticed as we emerged), the end of the canyon and cave mouth make a natural amphitheatre.

At any rate, the tour includes a quick stop on a platform designed for a good picture (available at the gift shop after your tour) that frames you against the cave entrance:

As you can see, the concrete path has good railings on it, so you don’t have to fear falling into the nameless depths of some cave pool that’s really only a couple of feet deep.

The tour guide will point out the normal features of caves, including soda straws, stalagmites, stalactites, and other features such as curtains:

If you’re into serious spelunking, of course this isn’t the tour for you. But if you’ve never been in a cave before or if you’re way amateur into visiting caves, it’s a good introduction and very interesting. And safe.

Along the way, you might see some of the animals that live in the cave, including bats:

If you’re lucky, you might spot any number of salamanders, crayfish, frogs, and whatnot that call the cave home. We did.

The main entrance to the cave is large (claimed to be the largest in the world, and it’s certainly the largest in this particular canyon), but there does come a point where the path narrows and curves and you cannot see the outside. This, my friends, is the Claustrophobia Point:

I got over it, though.

The tour ends a couple hundred yards into the cave, past Claustrophobia Point, but the cave goes on beyond that:

A wild tour takes you further. The guide says that the cave system has yet to be completely explored, as the deepest parts yet explored take about five hours to reach^*.

The return trip is much quicker along the walkway, but the guide pointed out a number of fossils in the ceiling of the cave, including the newly discovered shark tooth, and a new stalagmite forming on the walkway (slowly).

When we emerged, as I mentioned, it was a bright and hot day outside.

Because of the drought this year, the cave was dry. Much of the time, the cave has running water and that emerges into the canyon. Water runs over the rimstone dams and from the ceiling in some places, as I judge from pictures on the cave’s Web site. I’m interested in returning when I can see these features, but I’m glad to have gone when the water was down so I could hear the guide better without the roaring of the water.

Overall, I enjoyed the visit and learned a lot. I won’t say it awakened a great love of actual spelunking in me, since I still prefer to have an emergency exit I can elbow and claw my way to in the event of an emergency, but the experience is akin to visiting a museum: it encapsulates a field of study into something I can access and determine what knowledge, if any, to pursue.

That said, I do have to reiterate this is a commercial operation. The owners were recently profiled in the Springfield Business Journal. The existence of this company and others of its ilk rather flies in the modern governmental wisdom that only government entities or nonprofits can steward these natural resources effectively or educate people to their beauty, structure, and history. It’s untrue.

Also, a note if you’re thinking of going: You can find coupons for 10% off the admission on the Web site and in various tourist brochures and information packets. Don’t forget to use one, like I did.

^* Many of the facts related here were originally related by the tour guide, and they might be based on rumor or have been presented for entertainment. Ask a tour guide, and he or she will admit it. Kevin Bright has written a book about caves in the Ozarks, and in a chapter on commercial operations, he explains that this is so and that it’s an entertainment business more than an academic endeavor. So view the tour guide, any tour guide actually, more as a storyteller than as an authoritative and definitive source of anything.

Also note that this whole account is based on my memory of what a tour guide said. That’s a double whammy. It’s what a tour guide said that’s posted on the Internet. That’s a double negative of sorts.

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An Internet Resource You Need

July 16, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

A Web site that tells you how to say, “Oh my God, there’s an axe in my head!” in many different languages.

Frankly, that’s something you probably need in an iPhone app so you have it handy when you’re on the go.

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Book Report: Painting on Glass and Ceramic by Karen Embry (2008)

July 16, 2012July 15, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book is the second of the two books on glass and ceramic painting that I borrowed from the library. It, too, talks about the techniques of painting on glass and includes a section on painting on clay that you’re going to fire in a kiln. Only the first part is relevant to me, if any is at all. The designs, projects, and templates within are a little too cutesy for me, with little frogs and lots of words in script that doesn’t match the kind of things I have in mind. So I guess this is worth a read if you’re into those sorts of things, but I’m not sure if the techniques alone make it worth buying. But if you want to, notice the handy links throughout the post here.

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Jay Nixon Vetoes Bad Legislation Missouri Republicans Passed

July 16, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Last week, Jay Nixon vetoed a law introduced and passed by the Missouri legislature.

The Missouri legislature, dominated by Republicans, passed an inexorable, inexplicable bill that would have transmogrified a business relationship to favor one powerful party in the relationship:

Distributors, including St. Louis-based Major Brands, had pushed for the change in Missouri law that would once again make their relationships fall under franchise protections – limiting producers from dumping distributors for competitors.

The bill would have tied distributors to alcohol producers in much the same way that national conglomerates such as McDonald’s are tied to their local franchise restaurant owners under Missouri law.

It’s unclear to this poor little Tea Party Republican what’s so special about the distributors of liquor as opposed to the middle men who resell other retail goods from producers to consumers. What is clear is that the powerful, monied interests who own the distributorships wanted to use their influence in Jefferson City to get the Missouri Legislature to alter the rules to make it so that producers could not do business with other distributors who offered better terms to the producers.

A free market like that would lead to more efficient delivery methods and lower prices to consumers through competition, but less money in the pockets of the established distributors. Of course, they cannot abide by that.

It’s less clear why Republicans in the legislature wanted to indenture wineries, distilleries, and small brewers to those established distributorships.

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The Headline From 1200 BC Reads: “Society’s Supply of Copper, Tin Limited; No Advanced Civilization Can Function Without Bronze Implements”

July 15, 2012August 29, 2016 Brian J. Noggle

The BBC has an alarming report from where environmentalists gather to eat, live it up, use more resources than they would normally have access to in their native lands, and issue alarming reports, complete with scary infographic about how things are running out. The text sez:

If we fail to correct current consumption trends, then when will our most valuable natural resources run out?

As the world’s population soars, so does its consumption, and as a result we are stretching many of our natural resources to their limits.

. . . .

The hope is that talks at the Rio+20 Earth summit will help to steer the world economy on a more sustainable path.

Oh, spare me the Jeremiads. No, that’s not a meteor shower; it’s a type of sermon. Make no mistake about it, those fellows who want to create a “sustainable path” have in mind some very basic controls that The World will have to do to save the planet from the infestation of humans. As though the planet were some weak sister who needs the help of her acolytes to regulate systems whose complexities and subtleties are not yet understood to any great degree by man. But I’m getting off onto my stock climate change rant here. Let me switch back into my limited resources rant.

Any projection of resource usage based on current consumption relies on the misconceptions that what we use now is all we’ll ever use and what we have now is all we’ll ever have. Let’s take each in turn.

What we use now is all we’ll ever use.

As the headline suggests and history shows, humans and civilizations have relied on different resources at different times. In the Bronze Age, they used bronze. In the Iron Age, guess what? They advanced and discovered iron. Even in more recent history, in spans of less than 100 years much less epochs, resource needs have changed. In the 18th century, whale oil fueled lamps for interior lighting. Then they discovered coal oil, also known as kerosene, and that illuminated homes into the 20th century. Anyone rending garments about the limited supply of whale oil would have proven less-than-prophetic in predicting a dark age around 1880 because the whales were gone.

Similarly, buildings were built with brick and wood, but now we see a lot of construction from steel and other materials. Household furniture used to be wood, but a lot of it is now plastic and particle board (which is wood, but used more efficiently).

Take a look at this timeline of battery technologies and see how fast the resource combinations for energy storage have changed. And this is a survey of commercial products.

Now, tell me how someone is going to prognosticate the future resource needs based on today. Especially when one looks at the resource needs and their evolutions in the future.

What we have now is all we’ll ever have.

Take a look at the recent discoveries of petroleum resources in the Bakken formation. Revel in how the estimated amount of recoverable petroleum keeps going up. Or look at the new discoveries off of the coast of Israel. Does the alarmist image take those into account? I looked at the source document, but it doesn’t give the source for its fossil fuel claims, but other claims are made on data from 2010 or before. So we can probably assume that the alarmist icon does not include the new discoveries.

Additionally, the report probably does not take into account discoveries of rare earth metals after 2010, such as Japan’s find in sea beds which could essentially double the earth-bound amounts estimated by the US Geological Survey.

Why do I say earth-bound? Because there’s that Planetary Resources company that has a business plan of mining asteroids. A company. With a business plan to profitably mine asteroids.

So any alarmist paper or icon coming from a transnational or international concern designed to create “sustainability” really does not recognize human ingenuity or the way the human race has acted in the past when confronted with scarce resources or just more efficient ways to use resources.

Undoubtedly, the path to sustainability requires some sacrifice on our part. Because here in the United States, we have a very high standard of living, and certainly we somehow “should” give something up to make sure that natives in Cameroon get to rise to some level of sustainable living. Not the same easy lifestyle we have, mind you, where large portions of the population have the leisure time to collect on resource-intensive devices and computer networks to lament the unsustainability of the lives they enjoy. Some top-down solution must be imposed, something like a potentially hazardous, expensive form of lighting replacing energy-intensive but inexpensive, pleasing, and technologically proven forms of lighting. Something like that. And maybe an energy-efficient stove for a Ugandan family.

The BBC post I linked to above does throw a sop to human ingenuity:

Of course, the assumption is that human ingenuity and market forces will prevent supplies from running out: we could create better or cheaper extraction methods, recycle materials, find alternatives to non-renewable sources, or reduce consumption.

But that is probably just a sop. Do you think the people at the Rio+20 summit are in favor of the free market to find these solutions? Do you think the journalists covering them believe individuals and corporations should mine asteroids, or do you think they more believe that the asteroids are pristine, people-free environments that should be protected because of their intrinsic value qua rocks floating through interplanetary space much like the earth has some intrinsic metaphysical value qua rock with atmosphere floating through space? Me, too.

In lieu of embracing an environmental hair-shirt and hemp-based computer architecture required for a sustainable world, how about we just go on doing what we as humans have done for millennia and really well since the Enlightenment and innovate our way to greater shared prosperity?

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Book Report: Dixie Convoy by Don Pendleton (1976)

July 15, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

This book is the 27th Mack Bolan book, and you might as well call it Mack Bolan on the CB. Bolan travels to Atlanta to take down the transport hub of mob illicit goods and rescues a pair of sisters from under the thumb or protection of an aging mobster from New York.

Obviously, Pendleton was influenced by the song “Convoy” from 1975 (but not the film based on the song, which would come in 1978), and the book hits the common knights of the road and CB lingo tropes from other pop culture in that era and that vein.

Unfortunately, like some of the other Bolan books (even the early ones), Pendleton seems to hit his word count and wrap it up with a very quick climax that seems tacked on. That’s unfortunate, since Pendleton’s one of the better writers in the silver age of pulp. But a man had to eat, I guess. Worth a read if you’re a fan, but if you’re just looking for good action paperbacks, you can probably skip it.

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It’s Only One Item On My Wish List

July 14, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

McMurtry Sets Auction of 300,000 Books:

Author Larry McMurtry has been gathering books around him for more than five decades. Along the way, he has filled his four-building bookshop with 450,000 titles and turned his hometown of Archer City, Texas, into a destination “book town.” Now, at age 76, he’s finally letting some of his collection go. “I think it’s time they enter back into the great river of books,” he said.

On Aug. 10, the novelist and screenwriter will auction off more than 300,000 books at a two-day event he’s calling “The Last Book Sale.” (Mr. McMurtry’s novel “The Last Picture Show” was made into a movie of the same name.) The books will be auctioned off from the shelves of his bookstore, Booked Up, in groups of about 200, each containing several valuable books.

300,000 books can count as one item on my list for Christmas, can’t it?

Also, just to reiterate, McMurtry is has a book store, which explains how he has more books than even a professor (and, perhaps, one fewer shirt). So 40,000 books is the next level for me to achieve (Professor), with the level beyond that (100,000 – Bookseller) still in range for the rest of my life.

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Depends On What “Bellwether” Means

July 14, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

I hate essays and articles that start with a definition from the dictionary. So, in a fit of self-hatred, here’s the definition of bellwether:

1. a wether or other male sheep that leads the flock, usually bearing a bell.
2. a person or thing that assumes the leadership or forefront, as of a profession or industry: Paris is a bellwether of the fashion industry.
3. a person or thing that shows the existence or direction of a trend; index.
4. a person who leads a mob, mutiny, conspiracy, or the like; ringleader.

Now, square that with an article entitled Missouri slips from political bellwether status this fall:

Missouri has been a bellwether state for more than 100 years, with presidential candidates lavishing attention on Show-Me State voters and spending millions on field operations, glossy campaign mailers, and TV ads. But this election? Not so much.

Roy Blunt’s 13 percentage-point victory in a U.S. Senate race led a strong Republican wave in Missouri in 2010.

This year, Missouri isn’t on the list of top swing states — those vote-rich battlegrounds that political experts and campaign strategists say will determine who wins the White House on Nov. 6. Most political handicappers instead have Missouri in the “leans Republican” column.

Somehow, to this professional commentator, “bellwether” means something like “toss-up,” “swing state,” “independent,” “contested,” “battleground,” or “undecided.” None of these are true.

Either the commentator is ignorant as to the meaning of the word and the implication that Missouri is leaning Republican–as the nation in the aggregate did in 2010, or the commentator wants Missourians to, I dunno, straighten up and fly tight to get more ad dollars (evil, I thought, unless I guess they’re spent in your market, maybe) to fill the airwaves with irritating, offputting, and often marginally mendacious approved-by-the-candidate messages.

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Hipsters Can’t Wait For Huge Chain Store To Put Mom & Pop Small Businesses Out Of Business

July 14, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Sure, it’s a friendly, happy story about how high-income hipsters want an Ikea store to come to St. Louis:

Perhaps no other store has been rumored more often to be coming here soon than that elusive retailer whose very name gives many residents heart palpitations: Ikea.

The absence of the Swedish retailer — whose hulking blue and yellow stores are filled with sleek bookshelves, modern bedroom sets, and eclectic knickknacks— is a sore spot among many St. Louisans. As one of my colleagues put it, it’s one of the last bastions of our retail insecurity.

We now have Trader Joe’s, Crate & Barrel, Nordstrom Rack, American Girl, H&M, Ross Dress for Less, and buybuy Baby (which recently opened a store in Ballwin).

To be sure, there are still some left on our retail wish-list: Zara, American Apparel, Bloomingdale’s, and Room & Board, to name a few.

But there is no bigger Holy Grail than Ikea.

As you can probably guess, I have never been in an Ikea. I’ve done my share of assembling particle board furniture, including a huge honking desk that cost me almost a thousand dollars, more than a dozen Sauder bookcases, many laminated storage cabinets with doors hanging awry, and a couple Sauder printer stands that even today function as major pieces of furniture in my domicile. I’ve bought none of them because of the logo on the box, though, so I can’t understand how prestige and status stem from furniture you have to put together yourself.

But I digress.

So the crowd that we would have called Yuppies thirty years ago want their Ikea in St. Louis. Even though this will put small businesses out of business:

As I wrote last year, there are a handful of businesses that have sprouted up around town that take orders and pick up items from one of the stores in Chicago and then bring them back to St. Louis. One of them is Expedite STL.

Another such company popped up earlier this year called Blue Square Delivery. It was started by brother Dave and Bill Carruthers of Des Peres as a side business. They take a big moving van to Ikea about every three to four weeks.

Sorry, I guess that’s brother-and-brother businesses. But still.

So, how does this differ from Walmart?

Mainly in that hipsters like Ikea, and hipsters do not like Walmart.

Don’t worry, yuppies. Some municipality in St. Louis County will eventually throw enough tax credits, special taxing districts, and other perks to draw Ikea to town.

(Hey, aren’t you a yuppie? No. I’m not that young anymore, and I live in the country.)

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Meanwhile, Elsewhere…

July 13, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Things have been a little light here this week, but check out these posts at Missouri Insight:

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A Perfect Score!

July 13, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Entertainment Weekly presents a list (come on, it’s really a quiz!) called 50 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen (warning: gallery form).

I got a perfect score. That is, I haven’t wasted my time on any of them.

I am no modern cinemataste. I prefer my best movies no one else has seen to be seventy years old and in black and white.

I have to admit, though, that as I got further and further into the gallery, I was a little afraid that it might include something like Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but whoever compiled the list is a real aficionado (that is, he or she likes to flaunt his or her familiarity with the obscure) and really seems to favor British films and documentaries.

Now, let’s discuss my imperfections: I have not seen every Adam Sandler movie, although I have seen Click and Going Overboard, so I’ve knocked off some of the harder titles.

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St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Message: DON’T HIRE CONVICTS!

July 13, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

The St. Louis County Prosecutor has a message: Don’t hire convicts:

St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch on Thursday denounced the county Economic Council’s recent hiring of a convicted felon, and called for the employee’s dismissal.

Last week, the council hired Dean Burns, 60, to serve as its vice president of real estate and community development, with an annual salary of $127,816.

Burns was working in the very same job in 1999 when he acceded to then-County Executive George R. “Buzz” Westfall’s demand that he quit after Burns pleaded guilty of diverting federal funds.

Burns admitted illegally transferring $30,000 in Housing and Urban Development rent deposits to his private company in 1994, about two years before he joined the Economic Council.

Actually, McCulloch has it in for this particular hire, and it’s all about appearances:

McCulloch said Burns’ hiring was akin to the county Health Department hiring a former drug addict to purchase pharmaceuticals.

“Hiring a felon is one thing, but you have to have some common sense about it,” he said. “I don’t know what the people who hired him were thinking, but I have to question their judgment. This makes the county look bad, and county government ought to correct it as soon as possible.”

Leaving aside the question of exactly how much Percocet the county is buying, McCulloch fails to understand the way his argument can look against hiring any felon for any job.

When you’re hiring for a job, you’ve got a lot of legal risks and liability not only for your organization and company, but for you personally within the company. If you’ve got someone with the right skills but a little box is checked on the application with the little handwritten explanation with it, your organization will probably hold you responsible if you bring a former drug addict in to work anywhere dealing with money. Or a former burglar dealing with small electronic devices. Or someone guilty of a sexual assault who deals with the members of any gender, frankly. Not only might the organization be responsible for any recidivism, but the person behind the hire internally will be on the hook for any infraction, whether just by taking a reputational hit or by actually being let go.

The man McCulloch talks about has experience in the position and has a combination of real estate development and sucking up to government skills acquired in the private sector for the position. He was convicted of the crime almost 20 years ago. Perhaps his one night in prison convinced him to be a good boy for the rest of his life.

As some of you know, there are two tracks one takes when arguing for prison and legal justice: one, you can rehabilitate the offender, and two, you can punish the offender. McCulloch seems to indicate his belief that offenders cannot be rehabilitated, they can only be punished. Forever, if possible.

McCulloch does say one thing that’s almost Tea Partier, though, when he says:

He said, “If Burns really is the most qualified guy in the country, I’d say we probably don’t need this position.”

A St. Louis County Economic Council who dishes out hundreds of thousands or millions in salaries every year and is part of the county government? Does St. Louis County really need that? Not the St. Louis County Government, mind you; it needs as much as it gets to continue its existence as a growing organism. But the County itself. By what right is this a function of government?

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People Move To City For Action, Energy; People Then Decry Action, Energy

July 11, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

Some residents of downtown St. Louis are growing older:

The scene picks up pace on weekends, with the streets even busier and the bars even fuller — offering regular proof of how the neighborhood has transformed in the last 15 years.

But the changes have also brought simmering tension that has now come to the forefront. Residents, business owners and police acknowledge that crime is steadily increasing along Washington, and that cruising on the strip has gotten out of hand. They’ve complained about motorcyclists revving engines, cars blaring music, fights, loitering by teenagers, even some shootings.

They’re just not sure what to do about it.

In the last month, police have experimented with closing off the street to vehicle traffic, circling the area with a helicopter and enforcing a curfew for those under 21.

The Partnership for Downtown St. Louis has helped form a task force to come up with a “code of conduct” for the area, hoping to crack down on noise, littering and congestion.

“We all wanted this growth,” said Tammika Hubbard, alderman for the 5th Ward. “We just didn’t know how we were going to handle it.”

At a residents association meeting two weeks ago, the consensus from speakers was that the area had become a victim of its own success.

The residents moved to the lofts from their quiet suburban homes because they wanted that. Now they’re getting older a couple years later and are outgrowing the party-all-night mentality and want to get some sleep, so they want governmental recourse.

It’s akin to the people who claim that The Simpsons isn’t funny any more. The cartoon hasn’t changed. They have.

Prediction: If they succeed in pushing out the bar and clubbing crowd (who preceded the residents and most of the other businesses), the businesses will follow, as they won’t survive without that crowd. Washington Avenue and other parts of downtown St. Louis will not be a shopping destination (see also Union Station and St. Louis Center), and the hundreds or small thousands of people scattered among the lofts will not support them. Eventually, Washington Avenue will become quiet again, and the loft dwellers will move on.

And the cycle will repeat in 2033 or so. Maybe.

(No, I am not a downtown booster, especially when it comes to centrally planning a Renaissance. It hasn’t worked in downtown St. Louis in the thirty or more years that government officials have been applying the paddles. The minute they lay off with the defibrillator of taxpayer cash, the city or neighborhood flatlines again. The government cannot will a self-sustaining reaction and revitalization through its action, but it sure can put the pillow over the face of one when it tries too much to help or to inspire its citizens.)

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Book Report: Painting Glass by Moira Neal and Lynda Howarth (1997)

July 11, 2012July 9, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

I know what you’re thinking: the same thing that I thought. “Gee, Noggle hasn’t decided to try any sort of strange new crafting hobby, one where he reads a book on something after getting a notion and then spends a pile of money on it before shelving it when he can’t make time for it in a reasonable fashion.”

Friends, this book is the one you’ve been waiting for.

It’s an old British book (did he call something from 1997 old? Yes, he did. Remember how much simpler things were then?) that has a number of projects for painting on glass. The designs within are traditional, and it’s a book that you read the basics for the techniques and tools and then flip through for design ideas. What do they call that again? Oh, yes, a craft book.

As I said, traditional designs, the silver on blue projects are a winning combination, but the more I read up and look through the design ideas, the more I sense this isn’t a thing I’ll like to do to express myself.

That said, coming soon to Craigslist, hundreds of dollars in misbeboughten supplies.

Books mentioned in this review:

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DéJà Vu, Government Style

July 10, 2012July 11, 2012 Brian J. Noggle

I just got a check from my insurance company for $261 rebate on my insurance premiums. Apparently, this is part of the PPACA, that I get money back if the insurance company does not pay out 80% of its premiums as benefits.

This check, stamped COURTESY OBAMACARE by statute, no doubt, came just days after I received a letter from my insurer that my premiums are going up $1200 a year, or $300 a quarter. Also COURTESY OBAMACARE, no doubt.

So this month, I will write out that insurance check, and the government’s check to me personally will not actually fully cover the increase in the premiums. Where have I seen this before?

However, as a self-employed small business owner, I am not the target of this gambit. The real target of this largesse is someone whose health insurance costs just disappear from the weekly or bimonthly paycheck, but to whom this check might appear, courtesy the Democrats in the Federal government. Their insurance costs will go up, too, assuming their employers keep them on it, but the gravy has a .gov return address.

I hope they’re not fooled.

UPDATE: The St. Louis Post-Dispatch covers the story, along with this quote from a believer and recipient:

“I imagine there will be a bunch of people who change their minds about Obamacare when they get their checks,” Fox said. “I think it will make them feel better that their insurance companies are being held accountable for gouging.”

He is the target audience. Kudos to the St. Louis newspaper for making sure he got to laud appropriately in paragraphs 3 and 4 and to get a critic of the move, an industry spokesman, to criticize it only in the final paragraph.

The article clarifies that I was mistaken in who gets the refund. Mostly people who buy directly from insurance companies, like me and Fox.

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