Hubby’s Shoe Adventure

Hubby had the quasi-ignorant opinion that I could find the perfect shoe if I knew where to look.

Let me outlay the criteria for you:

Comfortable.
Flat heel.
Decent tread.
Hard-wearing.
Leather sole. 
Size 9-10.
Sandal. 

Yeah, I have big feet. And no, I can’t go to drag shops for shoes because (a) I don’t know where any are and (b) I suspect they’d be full of 9-inch heel FMB’s. I can not wear heels. If I try, one of my ankles decides it’s Fuck the InterNutter Day and goes sideways at the most inconvenient moment when I’m moving at the fastest plausible speed.

I gave up on heels after the third time I damn near broke something personally painful.

Now, in the intervening years since the last time I visited Shoe-Shopping Purgatory, some nitwit in the advertising and marketing arena has decided that everything can be a sandal.

Let me set this out for you:

A shoe with anchor points on either side of the toes only is a Mule. Mules are for people who don’t lift their feet when they move, because if you try to lift your feet whilst moving and wearing Mules, you will soon be barefoot and your footwear will soon be airborne.

A shoe with three anchor points, one between the big toe and the other toes, and two on either side of the foot is a Thong, or a Flip-Flop if you’re hopelessly American. Thongs are for people who walk like chickens and automatically grip with their toes when they lift their feet. If you forget to do that, you quickly become barefoot, etc. etc.

A shoe with straps across the foot and the back of the heel is a Sandal. Sandals are for people who like air on their feet, but dislike the risk of flying footwear when they have to move fast. Sandals are made to not come off without some conscious effort on behalf of the wearer.

A shoe with no holes all the way around (except the hole for the foot to go in and maybe one for the toes to peek out) is an actual SHOE. It is not a Sandal because it has solid fucking sides, you moron.

…you can tell I got a bit tetchy in the accumulated sandal departments, can’t you?

In my continued journeys from shop to shop to shop… I learned something interesting.

Apparently, you need to swap shoes every day to both extend the life of your shoes and improve the health of your feet.

What. The. FUCK.

It’s bad enough I have to drop nearly $200 on a pair of goddamn sandals - my entire week’s food budget, mind - but TWICE?

Gyah.

Hubby was determined to make sure I could never bitch about my feet again, but we still went looking for cheaper alternatives.

Solid heels are the go. Or at least, solid insert-material-here heels. If they’re attached to a different substance, the risks of painful substructure rise astronomically.

And in an effort to be complete, he lead me into a Crocs shop. It literally stank.

My God, you could smell the carcinogens. It was thick in the air, an almost visible miasma of slow death in the making. I tried to breathe as little of it as possible whilst also attempting to encourage hubby to hurry the hell out of there.

I can’t for the life of me imagine why people linger in there. Augh.

Besides, plastic is also evil because it’s made from petrochemicals, an increasingly rare resource that is also polluting our environment. I could not, would not, endorse Crocs.

We eventually found cheaper salvation and some rather pretty proper sandals at a chemist’s, and then Athlete’s Foot. Yes, I’m wearing rubber soles, but they’re solid rubber. The likelihood of them picking up sharp things and embuggering my feet is small.

Besides, rubber can be made naturally and is therefore renewable. Not saying it is now, I have no idea how synthetic rubber is made… but it can be again when they run out of oil.

And cost - damn near $300 all up. And that was the CHEAP option.

Hubby said my perfect sandal would be solid rubber sole on cork padding. I said it’d be better with something impenetrable between said rubber and padding.

They don’t make it, alas.

And even if they did, they’d never sell it here.

I fucking hate the industry.

I Can’t Fix Everything.

I had a massive bout of depression, recently.

No, nothing epic. Just the kind that makes you feel like you’re backed into a corner and also that the gravity has been turned up by at least fifty percent.

I have been reading a lot of OWS and related topics. It’s sad for me that the greatest country in the world is threatening to implode because a few greedy arseholes find it more convenient to ship their investments to another country and thereby hasten their own culture’s downfall.

I can’t do anything about that.

I’m in Australia, and I live two hours’ travel away from a meaningful protest. By the time I got there, I’d have to turn around and come back. Because I have kids in school who need me to look after them.

My youngest is deeper into ASD than my eldest. Neither of them are completely independent, yet. Both need watching, because the instant I don’t, they do things they really shouldn’t.

My washing machine broke, this week. It was in a coma for another week before that and revived by meaningful glares from my darling-dearest. Now, I’m also in Delivery Limbo, where they say they’ll call in 2-5 days and mean they’ll call whenever the shit they want.

And that’s just to arrange for a date and time of delivery/installation.

So…. I’m pretty much chained to my house. Metaphorically speaking.

Plus, if I did trust my beloved to look after the kids, there’s another risk.

See, not everyone has firearms rights like America. Here in Australia, the people legitimately seeking to own a projectile weapon have to dance through an inordinate labyrinth of red tape just to get one. We have to carry a separate photo ID, maintain a membership in a very specific club, etc. etc. And not even think about breaking any laws.

Yeah, we don’t really have free speech over here, either. We pretend we do, but legally… we don’t.

So, by going to a protest that I back, I am technically breaking the law. And worse, because I’m a registered shooter and the owner of a muzzle-loading black powder replica Squirrel Rifle (estimated loading time, two minutes per shot), I am the worst kind of scum-sucking criminal ever born and should be punished appropriately.

Sigh.

We have a very skewed opinion on weapons and the people who own them, over here.

Anyway, I have digressed.

I’m feeling trapped, three times heavier than I should be, and generally in the doldrums. My dilemma for the day - one I can actually deal with - is whether to clean the whole house [a day’s task] or the laundry room that resembles a small apocalypse.

Either way I chose, I was certain, I lose. It’d be the wrong choice.

I tried to articulate this to hubby-dear and he said, “So… instead of making a choice, you’re choosing to do nothing?”

It woke me up.

Even if I made a bad choice, I could still choose to do something. And then I could do something else. Take my problems to pieces in bits I could deal with.

Yes, I occasionally need my butt kicked. Yes, I sometimes need help.

I worry too much about things I can’t control. Worry doesn’t change them. Neither does ignoring them. They’re still there.

So, this afternoon, in-between chasing the kids to do what they should be doing anyway, I shall endeavour to make the laundry room from the apocalypse tidier.

Not completely tidy, because that would kill me. Just tidier. A little better. Improved.

And, this weekend, I am taking my little tardis-car and going on a scavenger hunt. I shall be seeking out foam boxes that chain shops just throw away. I shall also seek out and relocate the door to the compost tumbler I bought earlier.

I shall purchase some seeds and sugarcane mulch and start growing some idiots-can’t-kill-it herbs and vegetables.

I can’t do a lot, but I can do something.

And maybe I’ll get some wood shims, too. For the next time someone sends me a credit card application. Not that I’ve had any for quite some time, but… the prepared mind is favoured by fortune.

And no matter what the results, I shall have something to blog about.

Why Bipartisan Politics Fails

Put succinctly: they spend too much time fighting and not enough getting shit done.

I don’t follow American Politics very closely. I can’t tell the difference at a glance between Republican and Democrat. All I know is one lot (generally) cheats on their spouses and the other lot (generally) embezzles from public funds.

Back in the days before corporations could buy politicians, the folks you elected were supposed to represent their electorate based on what the majority desired. The ones with integrity stood for their electorate no matter what the party they belonged to said about the whole issue.

Party A pretty much backs industrialisation. They’re great for business. I’m not positive, but I think they’re the Republicans. I’ll just stick with Party A.

Party B sticks up for the little guy. They back health care, education and looking after the interests of real people.

Party A screws over the little guy in favour of business growth.

Party B screws over big business so the people can theoretically flourish.

In an ideal system, both parties are supposed to reach compromises so that both parties are at least satisfied and an equilibrium between both situations is established.

The problem is that Party A has achieved an almost religious hatred of Party B. So, as a direct result, they block absolutely everything Party B offers just because it was put forward by Party B. Even if it makes perfect sense to do so.

And there’s an interesting cultural fillip in which Party B and all its proponents are lead to believe that what the real majority wants is the stuff Party A wants, and screw off, you lousy hippie.

Party A are a vocal minority. If you actually talk to real people signed up to vote for Party A, you’ll discover that a lot of them are closet hippies, too. At least according to the heavy-industry Party A.

Party B just hasn’t been willing to shout as loud or be as ignorant and loutish as Party A. It’s like trying to tell an opinionated bigot that (insert minority here) are really nice folks by whispering about it as they rev their ghetto-destroying behemoth-mobile.

Therefore, even when Party B is in power, it has no power. They’re constantly trying to appeal to Party A, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Environmental Rapists Inc.

Then, to add insult to injury, Party A screams blue murder about how Party B isn’t fulfilling any of their electoral promises and threatens impeachment or whatever.

Party A repeatedly misses the point that if they completely win, they will lose.

No health care == sick workers.

Deregulated everything == more pollution, less pay for the workers.

Why should they care about the workers? Well… they’re the ones with the money to buy all the products they make.

People can’t buy it if they can’t afford it, Party A. And they won’t buy it if they’re sick or dying.

You’d think it would be in Party A’s best interests to make sure folks live longer to buy more. Or have jobs so they can afford more.

But no.

That’s bad for business.

Apparently.

The Debt Dollar - or, How the Banks Don’t Have Any Money

Once upon a time, money was made out of gold or other precious metals. It was a finite resource and everyone could agree on how much it was worth.

But precious metals are heavy and hard to carry around all the time. Especially on long journeys.

People started trading coins for promissory notes that they could trade back for coins when they got to where they were going. A fairly honest system started by the Knights Templar.

Other folks quickly got into the idea.

Pretty soon, people were trading with the promissory notes and not the precious metals.

Then a banker got a brilliant idea. Since hardly anybody actually used their coins, any more, he could lend WAY more than he actually had. As long as the growth rate stayed the same, nobody would be any wiser.

Until a disaster occurred and there was a run on the bank.

Some centuries later, another banker got a brilliant idea: Why base money on precious metals at all?

The debt dollar was born.

We all know it as “fiat currency” if we know it at all. Basically, banks base their loans on the capital they possess. But that capital also includes how much debt they are owed. Banks can trade debt. They buy, sell and break up debt into shares and sub-loans until the whole tangle is incomprehensible to an outside observer.

When someone pays off a debt (a feat in and of itself, these days) the money that was fictionalised for it vanishes. The system becomes poorer.

So, in its own best interests, the system scrambles after itself to generate more and more ways for the plebes to get into deeper and deeper debt.

Take the “no-interest” credit card. This is a scam worthy of some kind of award. They hand out fliers with a big, bold 0% on the cover, and incomprehensible, teeny-tiny fine print on the page that nobody looks at.

Poor people, desperate people (the best kind of victim in this scam) sign up for a card and promptly use it to eliminate some of their existing debt. Bad mistake. The fine print that nobody reads boils down to “If you use this card for ANYTHING, we will raise the interest rate”. There’s also nice clauses like, “if you look at buying a high-ticket item, we will raise the interest rate,” and, “if anyone checks your credit, we will raise the interest rate.” Basically, even owning the card is an excuse to raise the interest rates.

Pretty soon, the poor sod who signed up for the card is thousands in debt and there’s a whole bunch of laws preventing the poor from declaring bankruptcy.

Yes. The poor can not declare bankruptcy.

Businesses can. Banks can. The rich can. You can’t.

Why? Because the businesses make money out of your debts. They have comoditised your impoverishment for their benefit.

It is, in essence, legalised slavery. The only thing you can do once you’re in the hole is work until you can’t work any more. And all the time, the industry that has enslaved you is piling interest on top of the interest you already owe.

Another scam is Direct Debit. Companies love you to sign up with direct debit. Why? Because the money is taken from your account automatically. And it’s done by a different company, so that even when you cancel the service/membership/whatever, the debt continues. They can say, “oh, that company hasn’t been notified. We’ll get right to that,” and then turn around and laugh all the way to the bank.

If the money for the transfer isn’t there, you get saddled with overdraw fees from your bank.

I have known them to attempt to take money away from someone who had died. Yes. The corporations were stealing money from a dead person.

They’re stealing from the living, too. All in the name of having the most numbers of pretend money.

The system is rigged, folks. The best thing you can do for yourself is try not to fall for the scams. If they only take direct debit or cash - pay cash. Don’t sign for any credit cards unless you understand ALL the terms and conditions. Save for the big ticket items and make do until you can afford it.

Remember, it’s people who drive the market. Drive it towards good, not evil.

Making Do

Once, when I was a kid, the people running the one electricity company in Queensland at the time had a huge workers’ dispute. So huge that the electricity was shut off for a large amount of time.

Such worker’s action did highlight how necessary the employees were, but it also inconvenienced the people who had no voice: the public.

The politicians and the higher-ups could afford their own generators and weren’t effected by the blackouts. It may be one reason why they lasted for months. But that’s not the point I’m trying to make, here.

The point is, my poor, blue-collar household managed just fine without power. Because my mother was old enough to remember what it had been like in the bad old days.

We boiled water in an improvised copper, made out of a forty-four gallon drum. We did our washing in big buckets with broomsticks and plungers, and got most of the water out with an old mangle we still owned.

In this day and age, the above paragraph needs some translation. A copper is a sort of cauldron [they used to be made of copper, I guess] in which hot water was manufactured by boiling it over a fire. A mangle is a couple of cylinders hooked up to a crank. You carefully insert wet fabric, turn the crank, and it squeezes a majority of the water out. Beats the living crap out of wringing things dry by hand.

We still had kerosine lanterns. The stuff you’re lucky to find in antique shops or kitch decorators. And you’re even luckier if they still function. We had a primus, a camp stove, and candles. We had a battery-run radio so my mother could keep up with her news addiction.

It was sort of fun, in it’s way. Sure, it was hard work, and we got a bit sick of baked beans and other one-pot wonders. And my parents, to their detriment, taught me to be a rotten little capitalist at Monopoly. If I was older, I have no doubt they’d have also taught me to be a card shark as well.

The fun part was listening to the mundanes moan about how tough they had it without power. They couldn’t get their clothes clean. There was no way to stop the kids driving you mad in the dark. Everyone was moaning because there was no ice-cream.

I was possibly the only kid in my school who was a little disappointed when the power went back on. I still looked forward to summer thunderstorms and the inevitable power failures that came with them. I could fleece my parents in Monopoly and we’d swap stories in the light of the kero lamps.

Thirty-so years later, I own a primus camping stove, and make certain I have a stock of candles and a Monopoly set. I have a wind-up radio, so I don’t have to depend on batteries that rot. I want to share the fun of making do in the dark. The slightly unholy glee of knowing a bit more than the other guy.

It’s a pity the skills of the past are the fading hobbies of today. We need to keep them up.

Because sooner or later, the infrastructure we depend on may just fall over.

I tell my kids, jokingly, to be “prepared for the zombie apocalypse”. It’s not all knowing how to shoot them in the head. It’s knowing how to live without infrastructure. These are, not exactly essential skills, but necessary ones.

Even if you don’t want to do it the old-fashioned way, everyone should know how to do so. Just in case.

Dollar Shop Economic Theory

I’ve had this one baking on the back burner for quite some time. And since I have nothing else in my head but brewing brony tales, I figured I’d best get this out of my head to make some room.

The Dollar Shop is a phenomenon out my way, where you can walk into a shop and get an item [or a number of items] for a dollar a piece. Some cost more than a dollar. Many cost up to five. You can get a rare few for more than that, but not normally. Dollar shops sell cheap gimcrackery, gadgets and gewgaws. Some, but definitely not all, are useful. Some only catch dust. Almost every last item in a dollar shop is made to last less than a week. A month if you treat it carefully.

They also sell gadgets and gizmos amazingly like the ones you see on TV for five easy instalments of $99.95… for a hell of a load less than damn near $500.

It is so very, very easy to walk into a dollar shop and blow $100. Even if you go in with the intent to purchase just one item, you are guaranteed to find five more that are both tempting and affordable.

And since the cleverer ones stock food and house maintenance necessities, they make money hand over fist.

That’s not the theory. That’s the exposition.

You know these shops. You probably have one or two in your area. Unless you’re in a super-rich gated community, in which anything that’s not worth at least twenty is not worth handing over Daddy’s credit card for.

The theory is this: You can instantly read the state of a community’s economy by counting the dollar shops in a particular area.

At the depths of our own economic pit, four or five years ago, there were seven in my immediate shopping zone. There’s still four surviving, but they’re comfortably apart. It’s when they *cluster* that you know things have gone far up that famous creek. In a barbed-wire boat. Minus the paddle.

When you have competing dollar shops clustering in a shopping zone, you know the folks who live there are populous poor. Or at the very least, populous impoverished. They barely have enough to make ends meet, so they go to the dollar shops to skimp a few cents here and there. The populous comes from the fact that three or more dollar shops can exist in the same zone without driving one another out of business.

When too many people can’t make ends meet, the dollar shops thrive. People can no longer afford to go to the advertised and branded big box mart, and only go there when they can’t find what they need in the dollar shops.

Worse news for box marts, Dollar shops train shoppers to only look for what they need. Seriously, if you want to save your money in a dollar shop, go in with one objective and a definite allowance: “I will only buy X and if I am tempted, I will only spend Y”. That way, shoppers walk out of there without a shitton of useless crap. Or quasi-useful crap.

Dollar shops train shoppers to avoid the trolley-snagging “hot spots” of crap you just can’t sell, Boxmart. It’s in your personal best interest to make sure your shoppers can afford your overpriced crap and not go to somewhere cheaper.

“How?” I hear you cry. “The economy’s about to crash! We have to hang on to our money!”

Well… you have to spend money to make money. No, not on executive bonuses. No, not on clever marketing campaigns. On jobs. Spend money on wages for people who live in the area. Generous wages. Give them a small employee discount. It will generate loyalty and most of their wages will come straight back to you.

Yes, you lose a little on the deal, but it’s got to be better than the money going straight to Mexico (or wherever) by hiring illegal immigrants for less.

The thing is, people who have more money spend it on more expensive things. People with less, take what little they have and use it for their own “selfish” advantage. Which means that Boxmart winds up with nothing.

And that’s the Dollar Shop Theory. See if you can use it in your area.

Time for a New System

No system is perfect. Communism collapses because people like being in power and refuse to give it up for the finishing steps. Capitalism as we know it is about to collapse because people in power etc. etc., and we are genetically geared to want all the marbles and only share with our personal genes.

We seriously need a new system before it all falls over into barbarism, a new dark age, war, pestilence, dogs and cats living together and all that end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it malarkey.

We need a system that works with our primitive little my-marbles monkey brains, because no system that tries to ignore that is going to last for as long as we’d like it to (eg. “forever”).

Gene Rodenberry, bless his soul, envisioned a future in which, “there is no hunger, there is no greed, and all the children know how to read”. I admit, it’s a sweet dream. In a future where you can gather material things at the push of a button(or a verbal command at a replicator) for free, he reasoned, material wealth becomes worthless.

Um. Not quite. Sorry.

People like to have things. Sure, we could all own a replicated copy of the Mona Lisa (just for example) but the original is still inherently valuable because of the history and work behind it. An artist creates from themselves, taking time and making an effort to make something. Not because it earns them money. Fuck, no. They create - more or less - because they are inwardly compelled to.

I admit, Leonardo DaVinci is a bit of a bad example. Most of his surviving works were created because someone paid him to do it. Though his sketchbooks do kinda speak of a kind of OCD/ADD/ASD aspect, because the man left no blank space unoccupied and no idea undoodled.

Think about it, though. Everyone creates. Even if it’s little doodles on your notepad in that endless office meeting from Hell. Some people are doodlers, some people carve by chipping bits out of styrofoam cups - or styrofoam anything. We, as a species, like to do stuff with our hands.

Me, I’m a doodler and a scribbler. Look at any notebook from my scholastic term and the margins are full to the brim with little sketches. The backs of them are worse. Guaranteed. I got worse in University, where I was never without a palm-sized notebook and every spare minute I could glean, I was writing something.

Just look at all the things we would rather be doing. The things we occupy ourselves with in our spare time. Not the fantasy activities, where we run through varying simulations via a game screen. The things we do by and of ourselves.

Some people cook. Some love to clean (If you live in the area of Burpengary, send me a message, maybe we can make a deal…). Some doodle, some scribble, some do both. Some carve - and yes, I include whittling in the classification of “carving”. If you’re making something new by taking material away, you’re carving. Some “weld” by putting existing objects together in new ways.

Pretty much all of us have been trained to throw those idle creations out. Even if we keep them, if another notices, we’re all, “Aw, that’s nothing, just some junk” or sentiments similar. It’s not worth anything because nobody paid us to do it.

What if that became different?

What if, instead of a system based on debt (another topic for another time), we had a system based on time.

Think about it. Time is precious to us. We can feel our lives slipping away when we’re stuck in any variety of queue. We increase our fury as the time for our appointment grows increasingly into the past.

I, personally, will never set foot in a Telstra shop for the rest of my life because they made me wait twenty minutes to see a guy just to tell me the thing I wanted wasn’t in stock. And the half-dozen co-staffers chatting away in the break room only compounded their felony in my mind.

We talk about it as a commodity. I need some me time. Let’s share some face time. I want my (insert time period) back. It’s precious because it is a limited resource. Once we’ve spent it, we can’t reclaim it. We only have so much before it’s gone forever, and so forth.

What if time is currency? We’re paid for the time we spend on a work, and the work we create is worth that much Time.

Sweatshops would be obliterated, because suddenly, quality is worth more than quantity. Personally speaking, I’d love to spend some Time for a garment or five that suits me, fits, and won’t fall apart the instant I wash it or go to pick up a coin on the ground.

Obviously, the time you spend on study must be worth a bit. That’s an investment, definitely. In my pretend system in the Amalgam Universe [Those three stories I shared to date are all set in it] study time is repaid in Perks. The corporate entity paying you for your time offsets your value by supplying things like: food, shelter, furniture, gadgets, uniforms, etc., depending on your prior investments.

In my imaginary future, you pay a Second for the kick, but ten Minutes for the knowledge of where to kick it.

It’s a universe where people follow their talents and their passions, instead of reserving them for “one day, when I’m rich”. Where art and creativity flourish and learning is sought instead of forced.

And I think it would work. More would be done because people doing the work would want to do it. And they’d be happy in their work and, say, not slagging off to play Farmville whilst pretending to fill in a TPS Report.

Plus, pharmaceutical and medical companies would be interested in extending your life and curing your ills because your time is worth something. Hell, every life would be worth something, because of what the person living it can do.

Artists would be paid in micro-transactions. Time spent appreciating the work. Perhaps also in Time inspiring someone. And they could possibly afford to sponsor companies that make the things they need/like/etc.

And nobody would have to do without.

Sure, it’s a system that automatically prevents acquisition of all the marbles, but isn’t infinite marble acquisition what’s going wrong with the system we have now?