the corn painting standard

I think you had told me about the diapers before but I had forgotten,  Paper mill sounds so much better than diaper factory.  When I think of paper mills I think of huge rolls loaded into the holds of lake steamships steaming down Lake Michigan to Chicago and turned into The Sun-Times and the Tribune which go thunk against my door every morning about five.  I suppose diapers are another end (my pun) for paper, but not as oh, cerebral.  Where exactly was the plant, and has it been turned into a shopping mall or an old folks residence, or maybe some hip place with trendy bars and boutiques and all sorts of artisanal crap.  Is there any gentrification going on in Cheboygan?

I don't think anything too bad happened when we went off the gold standard.  Remember when Bryant made his famous speech about crucifying mankind on a cross of gold?  I think he was pumping for a silver standard then.  I don't think that went anywhere,  I believe way back some civilizations where silver was rarer than gold prized silver more.

Gold has some properties that make it useful in industry but mostly it is just bling, mostly it is valuable because other people think it is valuable, so a gold standard is pretty much a house of cards just like what we have now.  Probably the standard should be something like cans of stringbeans or corn then in the case of economic collapse we would have something to eat for a awhile.  But cans of corn are so bulky, what if the standard was paintings of corn which can easily be stacked in warehouses much as mine are stacked on the plastic shelving that lines my bedroom.

What I am thinking is that most of the crap the really rich buy is just so they can keep up with, or lord it over the other richies.  Instead of some fancy dancy car which is built by machine they could own a fancy dancy totem pole all scrimshawed with the work of hundreds of artisans who would be well paid and use that money to buy whatever the richie guy is making,


What happens in the cashless society to bums who hang out on the corner shaking an almost empty cup from a fast food joint?  Are they going to have smart phones with some kind of app and when you plinky plonk the phones together four bits goes into the bum's cyber account and can be redeemed at Al's liquor store?  What about pitching pennies (we called it lagging, I don't know why)? I suppose you could use some kind of slug, but it seems like some of the glamour would be gone. Whatever happened to slugs?  Seems like they were around a lot when I was a kid, not so much anymore.

I can't make much out of that graph.  I think the consumer price index is supposed to be some kind of measure of inflation, but that chart doesn't seem to show much inflation between the days of wigs and quills and WW II (the big 'un) which doesn't sound right to me.  And haven't we been in a long period of non-inflation?  It's not clear how far that chart goes in time.  And what do those numbers on the y axis represent?  It seems to be trying to say something about the Federal Reserve which has lately become the demon of the foil hat crowd, but I don't know what that is.

The guy that owned the Chinese restaurant where I worked many years was  a fearless hard-drinking guy but the health inspector always made his knees shake.  Why don't you bribe him we asked, and he replied I've tried and I've tried.  What incorruptible guys.  Maybe we should set them to investigating stuff. I hope the national spotlight shines brightly on this incident.