The Smalrus Web Site

The Key to Wedded Bliss? Money Matters, by Tara Siegel Bernard, NYTIMES, 9/10/2008

This article is totally true. All of it.

In my senior year of high school, I wrote my thesis on how the basis of humanity boils to two P’s: Procreation and Provision (I wish I was able to recover it from my first laptop). Everything we do in life boils down to its impact on either of these two subjects. And they’re cyclical. Because we work on ourselves to impress a mate (the social construct of the mating game) once we have children, we use the tools of a social construct to enable ourselves to provide for our children.

Unlike any other of the millions of animal species that revolves around Procreation and Provision, this social construct we employ is significantly more sophisticated, particularly when you throw irrationality and emotions into the mix. In addition, it is the socio-religious imposition of monogamy that makes the singular Procreation and Provision model reliant on the backing of an artificial financial system.

As a result, the complexity of the social construct imposed on Procreation and Provision means that “financial soul mates” are key to the upkeep of the cycle. The ability to be financially synchronous with one’s mate is what inhibits–and potentially prevents–the disintegration of marriage. It is the old adage that “money doesn’t by happiness,” which makes financial synchronicity an important element to maintaining one’s happiness.

Is it true that people can “fall out of love?” Perhaps, but as our society has increased its base of wealth and even increased its middle class, it becomes more obvious that financial pragmatism is will keep money from dividing couples and dividing families.

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For those of you who haven’t noticed in the past couple of days, I’ve moved the location of my web page.  No, I haven’t moved from the actual smalrus.com domain name itself… But I have moved my hosting/domain name provider.  After seven years with my old host, they decided to raise their prices to what I was paying when I first started.

Given the fact that the cost of computing is actually supposed to be coming down, I was less than impressed that as a legacy customer (I was a customer for 7 out of my host’s 9 years in existence) I was given a package that was almost twice as costly as that of a new member.  In addition, I found the site to be overall sluggish in response time.  Thus, I took the opportunity to change my provider.

With this change, I was able to simultaneously and seamlessly upgrade to the newest version of WordPress on the back-end.  The end result was a mass migration of the old site’s entire contents (how I managed to amass 897MB of data on the old site, I don’t know).  My new site has a few more features for me, as well as a dedicated FTP directory that I can just shove any files in as necessary.  The bandwidth and site sizes are also larger, and the response time on the web site is faster.  All in all, this should be a smoother ride than before.

Now… I just need to get back to updating my site with a little more frequency.  Hey, I’m not in school anymore,  I should have no excuse.

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NYT: Supermarket Chains Narrow Their Sights

I find this article to be humourous. It’s as if they are portraying supermarkets as altruistic to the local produce farmers.

In my opinion, the fact of the matter is that their research toward consumer attitudes hasn’t changed perceptions toward local and/or produce. The Hannaford Brothers’s research isn’t really demonstrating anything different from what anybody’s been saying for years about local produce and why farmer’s markets are always a mainstay.

Stores like Trader Joes and Whole Foods have done well, but they really haven’t been disruptive to the produce markets, as many consumers are still acting price consciously (particularly given the current economic climate).

The key to local produce lies in three key words in the article: “soaring transportation costs.”

Many of those chain stores have had to reverse the trends of globalization in the face of rising oil costs and transportation by localizing supply chains. (For example, see what Procter & Gamble has had to face with rising fuel costs:)

This means it’s all good for supermarkets, possibly iffy for the Farmers’ markets. But then, who cares? Farmers’ markets are places for local produce to be sold and if they’re getting sold in the mainstream, they don’t care. This is a by-product of the years of ridiculous farm subsidies contributing to the collapse of the Doha round.

The winners: farmers. The loser: globalization.

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“It is worth remembering where the blame for this neutering of fiscal policy lies: squarely with the Bush administration. At the start of this decade, the budget stood in surplus to the tune of 2.4 per cent of GDP. On unchanged policy, this was expected to grow to a surplus of 4.5 per cent of GDP by 2008. This year’s actual deficit of 3 per cent of GDP therefore represents a worsening of more than 7 per cent of GDP, or roughly $1,000bn. Almost all of this deterioration is due to policy: to tax cuts, spending increases, and their associated debt-service costs.

That projected surplus was a priceless gift to the White House. It offered the Bush administration ample scope for outlays on homeland security and other unforeseen priorities, and moderate tax cuts as well, all within a budget balanced over the course of the business cycle. Instead, the administration knowingly opted for outrageous fiscal excess – adding insult to injury with its phoney tax-cut sunset provisions, designed for no other purpose than to disguise the long-term fiscal implications. Eight years on, this startling record of fiscal irresponsibility has all but taken fiscal policy off the table as an available response to the slowdown.

The US economy had better have luck on its side. Luck is about all it has left.”

~Clive Crook, Financial Times, August 4, 2008.

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When was the last time I used twitter? I mean, I know it was the new big thing, but I don’t feel like it’s really taken off…

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