Author: Kim du Toit

(Not) Truckin’

Business

A couple weeks ago, I gave a ride to a guy in the trucking business — he was the Area VP of Operations of a large firm — and he told me that they can’t find drivers to handle just the local deliveries (stores, restaurants etc), never mind the long haul stuff.  And this in an area where a driver gets a starting salary of $60,000 plus serious benefits, after company-sponsored training and licensing.  As I recall, he said they need about 1,800 drivers, and so far had managed to get… 40 (forty).

That, folks, is a serious labor shortage, and his company isn’t the only one with this problem.

Shipping costs have skyrocketed in the United States in 2018, one of the clearest signs yet of a strong economy that might be starting to overheat. Higher transportation costs are beginning to cause prices of anything that spends time on a truck to rise. Amazon, for example, just implemented a 20 percent hike for its Prime program that delivers goods to customers in two days, and General Mills, the maker of Cheerios and Betty Crocker, said prices of some of its cereals and snacks are going up because of an “unprecedented” rise in freight costs. Tyson Foods, a large meat seller, and John Deere, a farm and construction equipment, also recently announced they will increase prices, blaming higher shipping costs.

And here, in a nutshell, is why the illegal immigrants keep flooding over the border.  Business owners (not just truckers) are facing a series of rock/hard place situations, and foreign-born workers (mostly illegal) are in many cases the only solution.  I don’t agree with what they’re doing in principle, but as a former employer myself, I can understand their actions.  Stuff’s gotta move, and nobody’s interested in the “how”.

Gilding The Lily #268

Food & Drink

I am so sick of people messing with perfectly-good things in order to “improve” them.  Here’s but the latest to arouse my ire:

Gin lovers were sent into a frenzy recently when a popular brand launched Premium Pink Distilled Gin & Tonic cans for £1.80 a tin at four major supermarkets in time for the first May bank holiday weekend.
Gordon’s Pink Gin, which launched last year, is said to taste of raspberries and redcurrants with a touch of juniper.

Two things:

1) if a gin doesn’t taste of juniper berries, it isn’t gin at all.
2) Pink Gin is made with a drop or two of Angostura Bitters added to the gin.  Making a gin pink-colored (with raspberries and redcurrants? ye gods) doesn’t make it a “Pink Gin”.  And don’t even get me started on the topic of booze served in tins.

Lastly — and this doesn’t just apply to the above — I’m getting really sick of manufacturers trying to extend their user base by appealing to younger people, playing on their unsophisticated and undeveloped taste buds by adding Kool-Aid flavors to grownup drinks.  (Chocolate vodka? are you fucking kidding me?)  This is akin to trying to get more women to shoot guns by making gunpowder smell like lilacs.

I am, by the way, fully aware of how innovation works — that most of civilization has occurred because someone, somewhere said: “Y’know, I bet if we just changed…” — but that’s confusing improvement with extension.  Tinned fruity-flavored gin is not an improvement.

I know that raspberry-flavored beer may have caused more people to take to beer drinking, but that’s changed things, and not for the better.  Go into any bar and look at what beers are on tap these days.  Barely a drinkable one available, and worse, they’ve pushed all the decent beers into bottles (or out of stock) while hipsters and chickies are catered to with the latest fad, Strawberry IPA [pause to be sick].

Basically, booze manufacturers are changing their products to appeal to people who don’t like booze.  In the old days of marketing, we used to call that pointless endeavor “catching eels” (try catching an eel in mid-air when someone tosses it in your direction and you’ll see what I’m talking about).  Not only is it pointless, it’s mercurial because what’s popular today won’t be popular tomorrow as your fickle new customers chase after the next “Flavor Of The Month”, and you’ll have gone from catching one eel to catching multiple eels.  That’s something they don’t  teach in the Marketing section of the typical MBA course because MBAs are all about theory (“line extension”, “product enhancement”, etc.).  And don’t tell me I’m talking nonsense because I’ve seen the curricula.

I think I’ll go and mix myself a drink.  A real Pink Gin, or maybe a gin & tonic — Gilbeys. Tanqueray or Bombay Sapphire (because the brand is less important when you add tonic to it) and Schweppes Tonic. (Cucumber  tonic? egads.)

Or I’ll just have a pint of Fuller’s London Pride… and if anyone tells me to squeeze a lime into it, there’ll be murders.

DIY

Gummint

When I resumed blogging, I toyed with the idea of starting each week with a feelgood story, but to be frank, there aren’t that many of them.  Here, however, is a fantastic one about a man who works for the council in his home town, and gives his constituents back more than they give him.  We should all have such a guy in our community.

“I got sick of sitting in useless council meetings where people just drank coffee and did nothing about the complaints that were coming through in waves.  I thought: ‘Right! I’ll just roll my sleeves up and do it myself.’ “

Needless to say, the council are trying to stop him.  And failing, because he has massive community support (and a 75% voting margin every election).  The man should get an award from the Queen.  But he won’t, of course, and I suspect he’d just be embarrassed by it.

Read the whole thing because it will make you feel good about the human race, even if only momentarily.

Bad Planning

Advice

From this article:

Arizona Is Planning For Exodus to State in Event of Major Calif. Quake

Government agencies, businesses and other organizations in Arizona plan to participate in an exercise to practice how the state would respond to a migration of 400,000 people following a catastrophic earthquake in Southern California.
The Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs says participants in the National Mass Care Exercise in the coming week will tackle how to organize operations such as providing food, shelter and medical services.

Ummm I’m just throwing the idea out there, but how about instead a building a high wall along the AZ-CA border, with occasional machine-gun towers?  Too extreme?  Yes?

My question then becomes:  what if the half-million displaced Californians decide to stay?

Brutal

Men & Women

…but sadly true in today’s world, measured in 20 Memes. (Link contains NSFW material, btw.)

The key words are “in today’s world”. Of course, it wasn’t always that way — hell, it was never that way before now. Which takes me back to Cappy’s excellent take on living in a 1950s world:

However, I have a bit of good news for you, and it is one of those rare bits of good news indeed. For while “we” as a country can’t and never will return to the 1950’s, YOU as an individual can. And there’s nobody who can stop you.

It’s an excellent, thought-provoking piece and I urge you to read it and reflect. The critical nugget of wisdom in the whole essay is this sentence:  “YOU as an individual can.”

Albert Jay Nock’s precept comes to mind, that one can never and should never try to change the whole of society. The way to effect massive societal change, Nock suggests, is to present society with one complete individual (that individual being, of course, yourself). In a larger sense, of course, one tries to make not just oneself a better person, but one’s family as well: by example, by education and by rearing. (Just understand that as one moves those efforts from oneself out to others, the results may not be perfect, nor even realized.)

And that’s Cappy’s point. Don’t expect the world to revert to the 1950s ethos. In fact, as he points out, modern society is being taught that the 1950s were a bad time because racism / McCarthyism / Cold War nuclear holocaust / oppressed women etc. What’s being omitted from the indoctrination is its purpose, which is to undermine what made the 1950s great:  patriotism, a sense of honor, hard work, deferred gratification, strong family ties, Judeo-Christian morality, modest living and so on. The purveyors of this indoctrination seek to replace all that with (initially) chaos and nihilism, followed closely by an omnipotent and malevolent State which would control our lives.

But what this indoctrination cannot do is stop you from living according to those values. All you have to do is eschew those aspects of modern society which repel you —   rampant promiscuity, immorality and amorality, hyper-materialism, greed, etc. (you know what they are: they’re the Seven Deadly Sins) — and replace them with the values of the 1950s, both for yourself and for those closest to you. That begins with family, and extends to a close circle of friends (always understanding that at some point, others’ values and your own may come to differ slightly or even quite a lot — and you can reassess the benefits of those relationships as they do).

I’m often teased by my friends (and on occasion by my Readers) for being so unashamedly old-fashioned about life, and the things and people with which we associate ourselves.  To this teasing I am entirely inured, and about my attitude I am utterly unrepentant. I am a conservative man, and that’s because I believe that in our own pasts, and in the history of civilization, there is much worth conserving.  Certainly, that is true of our recent history (the 1950s), as much or more as it is true of earlier decades and even centuries.

The whole purpose of civilization has been the freeing of individuals, whether of their physical being or their minds.  What I’m seeing in the modern world is a massive attempt to reverse that — and while the 1950s were often derided for their societal conformity, that conformity was largely benevolent. The conformity of today, as imposed by the Left, is largely malevolent — it is suppression and oppression, all while the Left is claiming (falsely) that it’s about escaping oppression.

This, in fact, is precisely what the 20 Memes link above is describing:  how women were supposedly “liberated” by the tenets of feminism, but how that liberation has come with outcomes that are both horrible and demeaning — for women.

So while the diagnosis is depressing, the prognosis for you as the individual is not. You just have to make it happen — and I know for a fact that a great number of my Readers already have, and all power to them. (WeetABix’s ears, for one, should be burning about now.) Just because society is the way it is, that doesn’t mean you have to conform to it.

I’ll leave you with this piece of the 1950s, a ’55 Chevy Bel-Air station wagon:

I’m not saying we should all go back to driving one of these magnificent beasts. What I am saying is that if it were equipped with just a few safety features from today (e.g. seat belts), we would not be substantially worse off by driving one.

Now apply that attitude to society in general, and you’ll see what I mean. The best part of what I’m saying, however, is that you get to choose those parts of modernity you want to keep — and then discard the others completely.