Megan McArdle writes:

The economy is at best heading into a soft patch; at worst it is going into the second dip of a double-dip recession.

This is not the worst possibility, rather the middle one of three. McArdle’s dichotomy should be a trichthotomy, split three ways (not a ‘trichotomy’: that would be the act of splitting hairs). As some of her commenters point out, we may be well on our way into a full-scale depression. I have seen no sign of bottoming out, much less recovery, either temporary (in a double dip) or permanent. To put it another way, she and others have wondered whether this recession will be V-shaped (short and sharp, which is good), U-shaped (protracted, and not-so-good), or W-shaped (double-dip, even worse). There are other letters in the alphabet, and other characters in the HTML character set. Rather than one of these:

V - U - W

I wonder whether we might be looking at a drop to a permanently lower level, with no recovery:

L

or perhaps a continuous downhill slide:

\

or perhaps a steep drop with no visible bottom:

⌉

As with ice cream, a double dip is a pleasant prospect, compared to many of the alternatives.

In Reason, Peter Suderman (þ InstaPundit) writes that the Federal budget is “in terrible shape”, and none of the 212 comments (so far) notes that that’s like saying the Passenger Pigeon is “endangered”. There is no federal budget, because Congress hasn’t bothered to pass one, and has no plans to pass one. Shouldn’t newspapers and other media have running clocks labeled “It is XXX days past the deadline, and Congress still hasn’t passed a budget”?

I read somewhere a few weeks ago that New York state legislators hadn’t been paid since April (I think it was), since they hadn’t passed a state budget, but that they will be paid in full once they do. It seems to me that we need a similar law for federal legislators, but without the retroactive part. Why should we pay them if they can’t, or won’t, do their job?

I also wonder if it would be possible to adjust their pay for the size of the deficit. If they pass a budget (or don’t pass it) in which federal income is only covering 60% (or whatever) of federal outlays, why should Congressmen get more than 60% of their salaries? Of course, the problem is to avoid giving them incentives to destroy the economy with (e.g.) massive tax increases in order to safeguard their salaries. Perhaps their salaries should be inversely related to total outlays. Of course, the even larger problem would be convincing them to pass laws that would punish them for not doing their jobs. For that, an amendment to the Constitution might be needed. How humiliating would that be, to Congress and the nation as a whole?

A Volokh Conspiracy post puts me in mind of Suetonius. Jonathan H. Adler reports that the White Castle hamburger chain says that “a single provision” of the recently-passed health insurance reform bill “will eat up roughly 55 percent of its yearly net income after 2014″. In the comments many people sneer at the claim, insisting that White Castle is run by greedy plutocrats who could easily afford the new expenses and are simply lying about the costs of the bill.

That reminded me of a favorite saying of the emperor Domitian. As Suetonius put is (Life of Domitian 21):

He used to say that the lot of princes was most unhappy, since when they discovered a conspiracy, no one believed them unless they had been killed.

Let’s hope we don’t find out how bad the health reform bill is only after it has killed off White Castle and other useful corporations, large and small.

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living.

(Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings of Chamfort, tr. W. S. Merwin, San Francisco, 1969, p. 185)

I would feel a lot better about Megan McArdle’s latest post if it were titled “Looking Ahead to Health Care Reform” instead of “Looking Forward to Health Care Reform”. No one I know is looking forward to it.

If you’re looking for a snow shovel three days into a blizzard: Home Depot. Martin’s (our local high-end grocery chain) sold out on Friday, when the blizzard was just getting started. By Monday, Walmart had been out of snow shovels for quite some time. They suggested I try Home Depot, which had large quantities of four different models, all very reasonably priced: the cheapest was $12.95, the most expensive $22.95. I bought the $19.95 model, since it had a metal blade and the other three were all plastic. I probably should have thought about buying a snow shovel earlier, but I rent, so clearing the sidewalk is the landlord’s problem. Of course, getting my car out from under two feet of snow was my problem. I did most of that myself, with just a window scraper, but paid a couple of guys $10 to finish the job. I would show you a picture of the snow shovel I bought, but searching for ’snow shovel’ on the Home Depot site brings up only snow blowers and snow blower accessories.

The only really inexpensive cheese at Whole Foods last time I was there was Höfdingi, which I would describe as a very smooth Brie, only elliptical instead of round. It was well worth the price I paid: $2.99 for 150g. I was not surprised that an Icelandic cheese was so reasonably priced, given what has been happening to the Icelandic economy lately. It’s too bad that economic meltdown rarely has a silver lining for the people directly affected.

Eugene Volokh quotes M. I. Finley’s warning about the unreliability of numbers in ancient authors:

Even the rare figure to which an ancient author treats us is suspect a priori …. [W]hen Thucydides (7.27.5) tells us that more than 20,000 slaves escaped from Attica in the final decade of the Peloponnesian War, just what do we in fact know? Did Thucydides have a network or agents stationed along the border between Attica and Boeotia for ten years counting the fugitives as they sneaked across? This is not a frivolous question, given the solemnity with which his statement is repeated in modern books and then used as the basis for calculations and conclusions.

In the comments, Stephen C. Carlson asks “Yikes, how does one know that the figures survived the manuscript transmission by manual copying intact?”. How, indeed? Here’s is just a bit of what H. W. Smyth’s Greek Grammar (revised edition, 1956) has to say about Greek numerical symbols:

Sorry if the top part is illegible: the book is too fat to scan comfortably, so the part from the left-hand page came out very pale and blurry. The problem should be clear, even if the text is not. By the way, I’d never noticed before, but this quotation is from pages 104 and 104A. The rest of the book is numbered normally from i to xviii and then from 1 to 784, but there are extra pages 4A, 4B, 104A, and 104B. (Not that I’ve checked every page, of course: there may be other interruptions to the numerical sequence.) Apparently the 1956 revisions involved inserting some extra pages without resetting the entire work.

Here is something on Roman numerical symbols, from Gildersleeve and Lodge’s Latin Grammar (3rd edition, 1895, p. 52):

It’s amazing that ancient politicians and businessmen could do their books at all.

I’m not sure why my comments aren’t working, and why I can’t even use FTP. Until I can fix that, readers may contact me by e-mail at the following address, after carefully reversing it: gro.liveewrd@liveewrd.

Two entries in Flaubert’s catalogue of inane clichés, the Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues (Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, tr. Jacques Barzun) are depressingly familiar:

Importation: Ver rongeur du commerce.

Imports. Canker at the heart of Trade.

Libre-Échange: Cause des souffrances du commerce.

Free Trade: Cause of all business troubles.

InstaPundit quotes an AP story claiming that the cost of a package of hot dogs is up almost 7% in the last year to $4.29. I paid 99¢ each for my last two packs, on sale at Food Lion. Hot dogs keep for months in the refrigerator and years in the freezer, so there’s no reason ever to pay full price. What brand did I buy, and what kind of animal(s) were they made from? Who cares? Anyone who worries about the precise ingredients of his food shouldn’t be eating hot dogs in the first place. Even the priciest dog is, as Mencken put it, “a cartridge filled with the sweepings of the abattoir”. And even the cheapest dog tastes OK when broiled until semi-crispy.

As for buns, I put my hot dogs on semi-toasted folded white bread, with plenty of ketchup, mustard, and minced fresh onion. Even the traditional short stubby hot dogs stick out of the pseudo-bun on both ends as they ought to, and the bread holds the condiments at least as well as a bun, whose hinges tend to break under the strain of a well-slathered dog. Of course, bread is also generally cheaper than dedicated hot dog buns, and works well for hamburgers, too, especially if they’re square.

Joanne Jacobs links to a sad story about five South Korean autoworkers who were fired by Hyundai for not being high-school graduates: they were actually college graduates. My comment there seems worth posting here as well, with a bit of editing:

I’ve been fired from a job for having a college degree, and I hadn’t even applied for it. I was actually just a thesis away from my M.A. at the time. I was between regular jobs in a recession — the Carter administration was one long recession, as far as I could see –, and working intermittently for Manpower. Some of their temp jobs were quite pleasant: working as a flagman for the phone company out in the country when it’s 68 degrees and breezy is very nice, except for the lack of bathrooms.

One week they sent me to Pepsi to help deliver sodas all around the county — including to two prisons (men’s and women’s) and a home for the criminally insane, which was interesting.* On Wednesday of that week, I was told I was fired (by Pepsi, not Manpower). Apparently they were using Manpower to try out possible permanent employees and just assumed I would be interested in signing on full-time. (I’m a Coke drinker myself, and wouldn’t have felt comfortable in a career delivering a product I dislike. Then again, I had the impression the pay was pretty good, so I might have considered it.) They apparently had an unwritten no-college-graduates rule. I certainly didn’t go around telling blue-collar workers I’d been to college and even grad school, and was annoyed that the Pepsi driver wormed the information out of me and then blabbed about it to his boss. He had begged me not to tell his boss about his back troubles so he wouldn’t be fired, and I kept that promise, even after being fired myself, though I was sorely tempted to get a little payback.

*The driver told me to be especially careful delivering sodas to the juvenile wing in the last place. He had had to chase a kid 100 yards down the hall to retrieve three cases of sodas the previous week. What was particularly impressive was that the kid was wearing handcuffs at the time.

This is number 104 in the Philogelos, an ancient Greek joke-book:

A greedy man writing his will made himself his own heir.

Philárguros diathékas gráphwn heautòn kleronómon étaxen.

Not very funny? It’s actually better than average for the collection.

From today’s (I mean the 9th) entry in The Oxford Companion to the Year: An exploration of calendar customs and time-reckoning, by Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens:

On this day in 1799 an income tax of two shillings in the pound was first introduced in Great Britain to finance the war against Napoleon; modern readers may better understand the rate as 10 per cent. The tax was a wartime expedient, and became permanent only in the later nineteenth century; at that date one still spoke of ‘the income tax’, in contrast to the modern ‘income tax’, constructed without the article as if were a force of nature.

While we’re on the subject of wieners, I’ve always been irritated by people (not always French) who think that eating fast food is a sure sign of barbarism, particularly when Americans do it. Food is not the highest thing in life, even when accompanied by choice wines. I once spent nearly $80 on food and entertainment during an evening in New York City: $75 for a ticket to Götterdämmerung at the Met plus two dollars and change for a couple of hot dogs and a papaya juice at Grey’s Papaya (72nd and Broadway) beforehand. I would gladly have spent more on dinner, but $80 was all I had. Should I really feel less civilized and sophisticated than someone who spent $80 on dinner?

Spam comments on my two sites are up from 100-200 per week to over 100 just since I deleted a bunch this morning. Have the spammers stopped to think about the side-effects of their Stakhanovite productivity? No doubt they don’t mind being loathed and despised as long as they’re making money, but how much longer can they make money? If someone had asked me just two or three years ago whether I might want to play Texas Hold’em, the answer would have been yes, as long as the stakes were small and the other players congenial and not too competent. Now the very words “Texas Hold’em” make me want to either vomit, or punch someone, or perhaps punch someone and then vomit on him, as long as he’s a spammer. These urges are relatively mild so far, but they get stronger every day. Is that really the effect the gaming sites are aiming at? Obviously not, so let me rephrase: is that a side-effect that gaming sites can survive in the long run? Making “Texas Hold’em” as unattractive a phrase as “IRS audit” or “prostate exam” or “jury duty” or “root canal” or “restraining order” can’t be good for their long-term profitability.

I need to come up with a nice Graecolatinate term for ‘spamophobia’. Unfortunately, Woodhouse’s English-Greek Dictionary has no entry for the noun ‘hash’, which I suppose is the closest ancient equivalent to Spam™.

Pinch-hitting for Michelle Malkin, Betsy Newmark writes about the idiocy of comparable worth legislation. She hands over the technical argument to her husband, an economist. All this dredged up memories from a quarter-century ago.

I was living in San Francisco when I first heard of comparable worth in 1979 or 1980. One of the first studies was done by the city of San José, and I was interested enough – and dubious enough – to spend $5 and send away for my own copy. It may be in the bottom of one of the boxes I haven’t unpacked yet, but I may have discarded it: I certainly haven’t seen it in years. If it turns up, I’ll see how accurate my memories are after so many years and update this post.

The argument made a huge impression on me, and I still have vivid (though perhaps inaccurate) memories of some of the details. As I recall, thirty different city jobs were arranged in a grid or table of two columns and fifteen rows. Jobs dominated by women were in one column (the left, I think), those dominated by men in the other. The two most difficult jobs, one all-female, the other mostly male, were in the top row, two slightly less difficult jobs in the next row, and so on down to the two easiest jobs. Average salaries were given for each. The reader was supposed to be impressed by the fact that the jobs in the mostly-male column all paid quite a bit more than the ‘comparable’ jobs in the other column – 25% to 40%, as I recall. I was impressed by the fact that the study equated jobs that were clearly not equal. The two bottom jobs were Copy Machine Operator (no maintenance or repair involved) for women and Junior (or perhaps Apprentice) Painter for men. These may be equally easy in most ways, though it would be hard to prove, but the latter is far more likely to lead to premature death, what with all the time spent leaning from tall stepladders. I would expect it to pay more. The two top jobs were Senior Librarian and Senior Chemist, and I don’t suppose I have to say which was mostly male and which was all female. As with all the other jobs, the criteria for equating these two were not stated, but I imagine it was something like ‘both require a Master’s degree in the subject and 10 years full-time experience’. The fact that Chemistry is a far more difficult subject than Library Science, and that chemists often spend their days dealing with toxic, carcinogenic, and explosive substances instead of harmless books and magazines, must have been omitted from the criteria used to equate the two jobs. The other thirteen pairs of supposedly equal jobs were just as blatantly unequal, though I’ve forgotten the details. In short, the study was hogwash, baloney, nonsense – I’m trying to be polite here – an attempt to argue for equal pay for unequal work.

The other thing that struck me about the study was that the lowest paid of all thirty jobs, Copy Machine Operator, paid only $200 (less than 2%) per year less than I was making as Senior Programmer for a small company measuring air pollution, supervising one other Programmer and four Data Processors. The grossest inequality in the study was the one between the city of San José and private industry.

I’ve passed at least half a dozen trailer parks in my move from Baltimore to Raleigh, and have yet to see a car or truck parked in one of them that looked to be worth less than my badly-dented-on-both-sides ’95 Tercel. In fact, the average value of the cars and trucks I’ve seen in trailer parks must be at least three times the value of mine. Of course, if I moved into a trailer park, I would be able to afford a nicer car myself.

Ann Althouse has an interesting post about raising the retirement age for Social Security. The last paragraph is an update:

In the Comments: Responses that show why politicians don’t dare to suggest the obvious, obvious solution! Make this proposal and the practically next words you hear will be “dog food.”

I have known for many years that ‘old folks forced by poverty to eat dog food’ is almost certainly an urban legend. Way back in the late Carter or early Reagan years, one of the regular columnists in The American Spectator (perhaps Tom Bethell or Ben Stein) went to the trouble of testing the basic plausibility of this already-widespread belief. He checked the price of a 2-pound can of Alpo at his local supermarket, and reported that for the same amount of money he could buy a pound of chicken and a pound of potatoes, with two cents left over. In other words, dog food ain’t cheap, and old folks who eat it, if they exist at all, need to be examined for (other) symptoms of senility, insanity, or plain old-fashioned stupidity.

I was about to hit ‘publish’ on the paragraph above when I realized that I ought to get off my butt and see whether this is still true. Perhaps dog food is a better deal than it was twenty-something years ago. I spent a few minutes this morning checking prices at my local Giant, which happens to be next door to the largest old folks’ home in Baltimore County: at 52, I was the 2nd-youngest customer in the store. In what follows, all prices are per pound, not per container or serving. I didn’t worry about the size of the packages at all, but recorded the price per pound displayed on the shelf, and assumed that the impoverished elderly could and would buy whatever portion size (up to 6 or 7 pounds) would save money. Here is what I found in the dog food aisle:

Canned Alpo or Pedigree: 83.2¢.
Giant’s house brand ‘Companion’ (cute name!): 57.5¢ to $1.43, depending on size.
Purina Moist & Meaty burgers: $1.09.
Cesar Select dinners: $3.15.
Beggin’ Strips: $6.38 to $9.04. (Why not just to buy the dog some bacon?)

What about the more standard alternatives? I’ll start with the chicken and then list some of the fruits and vegetables I found that were even cheaper, in order from most to least expensive:

Chicken: 99¢ (Purdue chicken leg quarters on sale) or $1.29 (18 piece fryer pack).
Yellow onions: 83.3¢ ($2.49 for a 3-lb bag).
Turnips: 79¢.
Green (aka ‘spring’) onions: 79¢.
Eggs: around 70¢ ($1.19 per dozen for XL, package marked “1 lb 11 oz”).
Carrots: 69.8¢ ($3.49 for a 5-lb bag).
Green beans: 63.2¢ (Del Monte, in the 6 lb 5 oz can).
Cabbage: 59¢.
Bananas: 49¢.
White potatoes: 44.6¢ ($1.88 for a 5 lb bag).

At some times of the year, apples and tomatoes would probably also drop below 99¢ per pound. Of course, Alpo is 100% edible, whereas all of the alternatives except the canned green beans have bones, shells, skins, or stems to discard, but they’re all at least mostly (80+%) edible, unlike (e.g.) artichokes or pistachio nuts, and I suspect Alpo contains more than its share of unnutricious gristle. Whether baked or boiled, potatoes with skins on are better for you anyway. So far, it looks like dog food could be slightly cheaper, if you stick to the house brand, since a diet of cabbages, bananas, and potatoes would be hard to keep up for long.

I didn’t think to check the prices of bread, rice, or hot dogs, all of which would have included some very inexpensive options, and Giant seems to be all out of 50-packs of tortillas, which I have often bought there for around $3.00, if I’m not mistaken. Nor did I look for day-old baked goods or marked-down damaged canned goods. However, I did take a look at some of the dried foods. These are much harder to evaluate accurately, since a pound of noodles or dried beans will likely turn into roughly two pounds of food when boiled into edibility, and is therefore equivalent to something like two pounds of canned dog food, where the water is already included in the purchase weight. (No, I will not get a scale and weigh a package of noodles or beans before and after boiling. It’s not like I’m getting paid to write this stuff.) Here is what I found:

Ramen noodles: 88¢ (suprisingly high, but unusually dry — perhaps they triple or quadruple in weight when boiled?).
Macaroni: 75¢ to 99¢ (a dozen varieties, some on sale).
Dried beans (half a dozen kinds: black, white, yellow, lima — like a Benetton ad!): 69¢-79¢.
Dried lentils: 55¢.

Cut those prices in half to adjust for the wet-dry comparison, and they’re even cheaper than house brand dog food. If anyone objects that some dog foods are also sold dry, I will point out that they also generally sell for $1.00 per pound or more.

Conclusion: I wouldn’t care to live on a diet including only the (human) foods mentioned, but I could certainly get used to it very quickly if the only alternative were dog food. Many healthy and (relatively) tasty human foods are in fact cheaper than dog food, and eating dog food will not save you money unless you’re too stupid to choose the cheapest non-canine foods.

Update: (half an hour later)

I don’t doubt that people have eaten dog food now and then for non-budgetary reasons, and posted on the topic a few weeks ago in Eating One’s Own Dog Food, I.