Some of you will recall my highly-localized tradition of anonymous Butterfinger bars. Last night, I went to the local CVS pharmacy and bought an eight-pack of Butterfinger Mini bars, took it home and gift-wrapped it, and then snuck it under the miniature Christmas tree on my neighbors' table.

While at CVS pharmacy, I encountered Chris, who was despairing over an immediate lack of consumer choice. He had an urgent need to replace a mislaid umbrella. He had checked at the local Rite Aid and found none. At CVS pharmacy, his choices were amongst just two children's umbrellas, one with a race-car theme, the other a pink princess thing. Recognizing that the ironic charm of the latter would be quickly exhausted, he chose the former.

My very best seasonal wishes to my friends who are reading this. As to the rest of you, I eye you with suspicion. Don't try nothin' funny!

I had a brief but very pleasant conversation this morning with Fred Belinsky, owner of the Village Hat Shop.

One of Mr Belinsky's 'blog entries had been about common-sense responsiveness to customers, and I felt that if I spoke to him about a sort of hat that I'd like to buy from him, then my request would be weighed into the decisions about what their in-house manufacturer, Jaxon Hats, would make.

Mr Belinksy was perfectly reasonable. He suggested some items from their present wares; he respected and even sympathized with my discomfort with fur felts. (In fact, his remarks made me more inclined to think that someone might make a go of a business that made fur felts without the animals having been killed or injured to collect the fur.[1]) Further, he thanked me for expressing my desires, and asserted that, indeed, such requests were factored into the decisions as to what to make. When he learned that I had quite liked a now officially discountinued hat, he made a check in the back room to see if he could find one for me. (Tragically, he found one in each of the other two colors, but not the grey that would go with my suits.)

Before I spoke with Mr Belinsky, I'd found a hat that I wanted to get for my mother. Mr Belinsky was kind enough to give me a Jaxon baseball cap as a lagniappe with that purchase.

And, as I was checking-out, Mr Belinsky amusèdly brought-over another customer, who had just asked for a hat of very similar description to that which I'd requested.

[1] No, I wouldn't want to call it the Shaved Beaver Felt Firm.

I'm not sure whether das Erwerbslosen Forum Deutschland believes that it is better to pay affluent people than poor people, or believes that die Ratten should be left unmolested. I am, however, sure that, if a €1 bounty is placed on rats, then people will raise rats for the bounty.

I haven't followed everything that has been said about the proposed bail-out of the major American automobile manufacturers, and I don't know whether the principal point that I'm going to make below has been much noticed.

It is quite natural for people to hold that, if the manufacturers are given a major infusion of financial capital, then they should surrender some control to the creditors; that if the manufacturers are given a bail-out by Congress, then Congress ought to be able to impose some changes in practices and in policies, to ensure that tax-payers are in some way repaid.

But ownership is no more or less than a right of control, and to the extent that control is transferred, ownership is surrendered. What we are then discussing, however we might put it, is nationalization, albeït perhaps only partial nationalization, whether it is called this or not.

Once the automobile industry is nationalized, management of that industry becomes another government programme, with a large bloc of voters fairly directly dependent upon that programme for their incomes. A sizeable portion of this bloc will insist upon indefinite guarantees concering employment and income. The industry would likely become another third rail of the political system, virtually untouchable unless it is to expand the benefits received by the beneficiaries. Further, conceptualizing what amounts to a transfer programme (welfare) as a manufacturing programme will consume additional resources, which really ought to go into other projects. It would literally be more efficient to pay some or all of the automobile workers to stay home than to pay them to make some or all of the vehicles that they would make; but, by golly, the illusion of productivity will trump the reälity of waste.

Because the political significance of a transfer programme is positively correlated with its direct economic benefits to recipients, the stronger are the initial guarantees of employment and of income, the more powerful will be the abiding political effect of the programme. The Republican insistance that a bail-out provide for swift wage cuts probably speaks to some awareness that the bloc of voters in-question would more naturally align with the Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the White House discussion of doing an end-run to provide a bail-out from other funds may be an attempt to head-off later action by Congress when the Democrats assume the more sizeable majorities from the last elections. Giving money to the manufacturers with fewer strings attached puts less of a programme in place.

Much of my time of late has been going into my paper on operationalizing a model of preference in which strict preference and indifference don't provide a total ordering.

Quite a while ago, I reälized very precisely what sort of system the assumptions would have to imply; I mistakenly presumed that I would relatively quickly identify sufficient assumptions (beyond those already recognized). But, at this point, I have a sufficient assemblage, each member of which is, taken by itself, at least passably acceptable. Jointly, however, there's an issue of factoring.

The paper derives its results from three sets of propositions. The first and second sets seem perfectly fine to me, and I don't expect them to provoke much dispute. The third set are more ad hoc. For the purposes of the paper they function as axiomata, but some or all of them would more ideally be derived from deeper principles (the pursuit of which, however, would be mostly a distraction from my goals).

It's amongst this last set of propositions that the factoring problem exists. One of them used to play an important rôle; right now it's doing nothing but occupying space. I'd remove it, except that I suspect that, in conjunction with the very principle that seemed to make it superfluous, it renders redundant another principle which feels even more ad hoc.

At the same time, I am now wrestling with what sort of discussion to provide after presenting the theoremata. I just don't seem to be in much of a frame-of-mind to ruminate.

As previously mentioned, one of my Corsair Voyager 8GB USB flash drives has failed.

Christophe Grenier's TestDisk was unable to locate a partition table. But his PhotoRec is racing through the drive recovering various sorts of files. I am quite pleased and impressed.

Unfortunately, the program has no way of identifying the file names! So the files are all being given new, opaque names.

Addendum (2008:12/17): A recent entry by oddharmonic reminded me to note here that PhotoRec reässembled video files like Frankenstein Flub-a-Dubs. Mind you that there was really no practical way for the program to know what bits belonged together, and the resultant files could be fixed by using a decent video editor to re·splice them.

A couple of things to note about this story:

First, we yet again have the BBC confusing a rate of change with the thing changing, The last time that I took note of such confusion from them, they were confusing the growth rate of GDP (ΔY/Δt) with the change in that growth rate (Δ²Y/Δt²). This time, they've turned around to confuse the growth rate of GDP (ΔY/Δt) with GDP (Y) itself. (If they maintain the earlier confusion, then by transitivity they confuse Y with Δ²Y/Δt².)

The Eurozone economy isn't growing 0.2% more slowly than before; its production is shrinking at a rate of 0.2%. (GDP is not itself a growth rate of under-lying wealth, because the vast majority of what is produced is consumed, rather than saved.)

A second thing to note is that the BBC is referring to the Eurozone as on the verge of a recession, while America may already be in recession. The brute fact is essentially the same across these two economies — one quarter in which production declined — but the Eurozone is made to seem on the cusp while America is presented as perhaps already well-in.

As European politicians and pundits tut-tut over the ostensible relative deficiencies of American economic policy, pay attention to what is happening to exchange rates.

By itself, the absolute level of exchange rates isn't particularly meaningful — that's really just a matter of scaling. but movements of exchange rates are significant. When the value of one currency is dropping relative to that of another, it means that people are trying to shift holdings in the former to holdings in the latter.

These days, the dollar is generally strengthening with respect to the pound and with respect to the euro, which means that people are trying to increase their share of currency that buys stuff in America relative to their share of currency that buys stuff in Europe.

That doesn't mean that economic conditions in America aren't bad, but it strongly argues that conditions in Europe are worse.

When they notice that I have shut-down my computer and am packing to leave, people intending to be helpful sometimes unplug my computer. Unfortunately, they often or always do so by pulling on the cord itself, rather than the plug. Largely as a result, I have had yet another cord begin to fail recently. I have some replacements on-order, but I also plan to repair the three failing cords that I have at-hand.

A failure is almost invariably where the plug joins the cord, such that replacing the plug will restore the unit. Further, I could get a plug with some sort of sleeve, so that people would be grabbing that, rather than the cord.

To-day I have looked for replacement plugs at CVS, at Fry's Electrionics, at Radio Shack, and at Target, unsuccessfully at each place. (I could have bought a whole power cord at Fry's Electronics, but I need a cord with a special sort of plug at its other end, to join it to a power adapter.) I was fairly certain that I could find some at Ace Hardware (to which I would have gone to-day had they been open while I was running errands); but my search of their website yielded surprised disappointment.

It used to be that replacement plugs were readily found at the sorts of places to which I went. There world has changed in a small-but-telling way. People are far less inclined to repair electrical devices than once they were; they more often simply discard them. A large part of that shift is almost surely economically efficient — repairs can consume more resources than replacements — but it's also part of a larger trend of people becoming ever less able to do things for themselves, and that saddens me.

Up-Date (2008:10/27): ForensicEye (by way of the Woman of Interest) informs me that he gets replacement plugs at Home Depot

Up-Date (2008:10/30): I noticed that the website for Home Depot did not list any replacement plugs, in spite of the assurance from ForensicEye that plugs can be found in their stores. So I called to check whether a similar situation obtains with respect to Ace Hardware, and was told that they carry them in their stores despite the lack of listing on their website. So the plugs are more difficult to find than once they were, but we're not reached the point where Ace Hardware doesn't have them.

Although the rodent that I most want is a fat-tailed gerbil (Pachyuromys duprasi), they are illegal in California. In that context, I have been thinking increasingly of getting a mouse (Mus musculus) for myself.

I have some experience with keeping mice as pets; I had four when I was a teenager — first Aristotle, then Jacques (who was disliked by Aristotle and returned that dislike with hate), then Bob and Ray (brothers who loved each other). The Woman of Interest also had mice when she was a child, and she's offered some helpful advice, from her own experience.

In fact, I've started assembling things so that I will be prepared again to keep a mouse. I got a couple of carriers — one suitable for very short trips, the other large enough to serve as a home for a few days (or longer if the mouse doesn't spend all of its time in it) — a couple of water bottles for the larger carrier, a Silent Spinner wheel, and a clear ball in which the mouse can be placed and allowed to exercise out of the cage.

I still need to settle on whatever I will use as the regular home for the mouse. I like mouse-scaled Habitrails, but I notice that Super Pet (who produced the carriers and ball) makes available many sorts of replacement parts for their habitats, which can be connected to Habitrails.

I also want to have a first-aid kit at hand, though I obviously hope never to need it. And I think that I may get some rodent harnesses, such as those used for laboratory mice, to facilitate airplane travel.