Random notes from the long dark tea-time overseas

As promised here is a list (possibly quite long) of random stuff that occured to me during the two weeks I spent in England.

• A letter to AdBusters has suggested guerilla tactic of putting "Out of Order" signs on vending machines, especially those selling high sugar drinks. This little piece of social engineering is apparently very successful since no-one no matter how thirsty wants to shovel coins into a machine that will probably eat their money instead of dispensing sugary beverages.
• When departing for England I got to the airport a good two hours ahead of time like they always tell you to. Of course walking into the International Terminal at SFO I encountered a vast an empty wasteland of checkin desks. Unfortunately as I rounded the corner right at the end of the cavenous hall it turned out that Virgin had a huge line (although not as long as this line) I in front of it. The cause was apparently "our computers are not talking to the ticket printing computers" i.e. someone probably screwed up a network router somewhere. Consequently all tickets were being, shock-horror, hand written! And this was the cause of the monumental delay. I waited in line for an hour and probably would not have made it onto the plane if the computer problem hadn't been fixed after about 45 minutes. As it was I then had to wait another thirty minutes in the security line to take off my shoes and belt and watch and jacket and hat but not my pants... and by the time I got to the gate it was already boarding and there was no time for duty free, a snack or anything like that. Oh well, as they say - "expect the unexpected".
• Having got the front of the aforementioned checkin line I was staggered when a Virgin employee came up to me and tried to sell me a bulkhead seat upgrade for $75. And that was just for one way... The tried it coming back to - the total would have been $150 or only slightly less than my entrie ticket cost. I was amazed that they are trying this kind of trick, I really didn't expect it from Virgin. After all on a 747 if you have a bulkhead seat you are likely to end up right next to the loos and face hordes of people (like me) milling around for eight hours trying to ward off deep vein thrombosis.
• While on the plane I read something to the about Visa that just blew my mind. If you're a regular reader you'll know how the US national debt (that's debt, not deficit) is something like $7 trillion, or over $80,000 per family. Well apparently the folks at Visa (credit cards) handled transactions totally a stunning $362.4 trillion last year. But the really incredible thing is they only have a few thousand employees worldwide. So do the math - they cream of 2-3% (or maybe more) from each transaction which makes something like $6 trillion just from shoveling money around each year. They surely must have the highest revenue per employee of any company worldwide??? Next time you're wondering why credit card companies aren't worried by billions of dollars in credit card fraud you shouldn't be surprised, its a drop in the ocean compared to how much money they are making. And note, this figure doesn't include MasterCard, Amex and all those other smaller credit companies.
• Of late I've found myself having more and more convesations with people about why mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and the like are bad for pretty much everyone except the executives running them and perhaps the shareholders who profit from their profits. The latest development seems to be that the UK supermarket chain Asda is now owned by Wal*Mart which lead to my sister-in-law asking me the leading question "So what's so bad about WalMart then?". This gave me an excellent opportunity to give her a run down on the apauling employee relations record of WalMart, their battle against unions, their terrible record on treatment of injured employees, and the very unpleasent anti-competive business practices the engage in with their suppliers. WalMart employs a staggering 900,000 people in the USA and 1.4 million worldwide so statistically most Americans know someone who works at or worked at WalMart. I do. Last year they made a net profit of $8 billion or almost $6000 per employee. Unfortunately most WalMart employees are languishing on minimum wage taking home a whopping $5-6 an hour and almost none of them have the benefit of full-time employment rights because the managers cunningly keeps their hours below the amount where they would qualify as full time employees. So in the end the only good thing about WalMart is the low prices and profit for shareholders (or if you're an executive the millions of dollars in compensation). Unfortunately the cost of communities that embrace WalMarts low prices as a god-send is undoubtedly a net negative when all factors are considered. They are just another example of a huge corporation siphoning billions of dollars out of our communities and redistributing to the top few percent that have no need for food stamps and working two or three jobs just to make ends meet.
• While in Europe I got a much more balanced view of the world. Yes American issues are reported in the news, almost every day on the TV and certainly every day in the papers. However, even when accounting for the bias towards local stories you get a much greater balance between American, European, Asian and news from the rest of the world Indeed given that the European Union now has a larger population than the USA, and both India and China have populations of over one billion its a wonder how long the USA can maintain its empire building streak before collapsing into obscurity like the UK, France, Spain, Russia, and all those other empire wannabes did in previous centuries. The USA has long been lauded as the poster child of efficiency but recent figures are starting to suggest that Europe, with all it advantages of a superior standard of living is getting very close to current US efficiency standard. And there may even be reason to believe that much of Americans economic growth has been bolstered significantly by increases in efficiency at the expense of living standards vs. adopting inherently more efficient systems.
• I read an article on how Vietnamese catfish farmers realized that opening of trade borders meant they could sell their catfish into the USA and vastly undercut local suppliers. As they began to corner the market the USA catfish farmers retaliated and forced the Vietnames fish to be sold under a different name. While both fish were technically "catfish" the Vietnamese were of a different species than those farmed in the USA. This opened the door for the FDA to rule that only US catfish could be sold as "catfish". To add insult to injury the ITC then decided that the USA could levy a stiff tariff to ensure even the relabled product could not undercut the local product. This to me is yet another fine example of how globalization is okay just so long as a US company is in the chain somewhere to milk some cash out of the newly created international trade. Just how long will it be before India and China finally wake and realize that the WTO and GATT treaties with the USA are only useful if an American corporation is in the chain somewhere to suck up a tidy profit from the cross border trade. After all, if some overseas sneaker company started successfully selling its locally produced product in the USA just how long do you think it would be before Nike was calling for trade tariffs against them?
• Finally my hat goes off to Roy Disney who's resignation letter pointed out that Disney is now perceived as a company that

  "is rapacious, soul-less, and always looking for the "quick buck" rather than the long-term value which is leading to a loss of public trust."

  Well tar and feather me and roll me down the Matterhorn but surely truer words could not have been spoken? Couldn't he have been speaking about almost any Fortune 500 company? Of course Roy Disney will now be ostricised and marginalized as some freak of the excutive world who "just didn't get it" but I think he "got it" exactly. For years now that confounded Disney mouse has caused a very negative reaction in me, not disimilar to that exhibited by Cayce Pollard in William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition". It has nothing whatsoever to do with an aversion for mice, but entirely about Disney selling its soul somewhere along the line to become an icon of all that is bland, phoney and exploitative in America. So that said, if I ever meet Roy Disney I'd certainly shake his hand and buy him a drink for saying what was really on his mind..