While I was visiting the Woman of Interest during the second week of May, I had a hold placed on my mail. During that time, a CD arrived dall'Italia. Unfortunately, some time between then and when the carrier attempted to deliver it, it went missing within the local postal facility. Finally, on Friday or on Saturday, I found a note in my mailbox declaring that they'd made a final attempt at delivery — the package requiring my signature (rather than that of the apartment complex manager) for some reason — and would hold the thing until 22 June. I wasn't thrilled, but I had two other reasons to go to the post office to-day anyway. I had a package to send to the Woman of Interest (which package holds two devilish rubber ducks and a fair quantity of jelly beans), and needed a small money order to pay for a purchase made by way of eBay.

Also in my box on Friday or on Saturday was a note that the complex office had a package for me, which package contained A Drawing Manual by Thomas Eakins, a volume of lectures by Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises that had been absent from my collection, and a DVD of In the Heat of the Night (1967).

At Bronx Pizza this evening, someone spotted a dollar left on the floor; I knew who had probably dropped it, and gave it to her. Not exactly the scenario of one of my polls, but quite close.

Later, at David's Coffee Place, I noticed a group of four people whom I've seen there on prior occasion, again discussing a business venture built around a social networking site. I won't name their site here, because I really don't wish them ill, but to me, they seemed foredoomed to failure. First, centralized social networking already has some heavy hitters, and if this new site has useful innovations then they are going to have a hard time avoiding imitation by those established players. Second, the group of four only have one actual programmer, and the others don't seem to have a prior background in the business side of any similar venture; further, the programmer doesn't seem to have the personal connections to the other three that they have to each other. Third, I over-heard mention of a failed attempt to secure funding, which would have stuck them with a 35% APR — such debt doubles in less than 2 years and four months.

During the first weeks of May, my hummingbird feeder didn't get much use. In the last few days though, the sugar water has been depleted rapidly.

The hummingbirds that I now see at it appear to be a different variety from those that I saw at it previously through the last year. These are much smaller and more plainly colored. They also seem more willing to accept the possibility that I have no aggressive intentions.

Yester-day, one arrived at the feeder as I was stepping out of my apartment. I paused and said hello (which is actually a way of trying to distinguish my behavior from that of a predator hoping to be unnoticed before it strikes). It decided to drink. It hovered for a while as it did so, but eventually sat to drink, with its back to me. It was too small to reach the hole if sitting on the circular rest at the bottom of the feeder, and so it sat on the rim of the floret around the hole.

After it finished, we went on our respective ways.

My latest review of Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) has been deleted from Kudzu and when I tried to repost it now, instead of absurd messages about failed searches I got this message:

We're sorry

Your previous review of this business location has been deleted by the Kudzu.com team.
You won't be able to write another review for this location.

For more on our rules regarding reviews, please see our Visitor Agreement and Guidelines for Writing Reviews.

So, plainly, Kudzu is an advertising site masquerading as a review site. No big deal. The more significant result of the exercise was earlier catching Geek Available lying about not using parts got from eBay; I'll be using that later.

I have posted another poll in the series.

Here are the previous two:

It is, sadly, a well-known result that much recycling doesn't really pay for itself. Recycling takes resources beyond the recycled material itself, and often the value of these exceeds the total cost of producing without recycling. Therefore, States promote some sorts of recycling by subsidies. But, in the final analysis, that actually means that taxpayers fund waste, even as proponents generally think that waste is being reduced.

But that leaves a question to which I don't know the answer: Which sorts of recycling involve marginal waste?

Let's take it that I cannot keep the government from promoting the wasteful recycling of X. Well, given that, some of the costs of recycling are going to be paid whether I recycle X or not — plants will be built; power, labor, and expertise will be diverted. So then the question is of whether my throwing my X into the recycle bin will cause more resources to be consumed than my sending it to the land-fill.

As an economist, I have a thing for efficiency, coupled a more clear-headed notion of what is-and-is-not relevantly efficient than most people have. I'd really like to know what to do with my plastic and paper.

On 27 May, after Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) moved their page on Kudzu, I posted a new review:

Beware!

Instead of buying repair parts through reputable channels, Rodrigo Pereira (owner of GeekAvailable) uses eBay account "rodrafael" (which, as you can check, used to be named "geekavailable"), to buy questionable parts from unreliable dealers, without telling his customers that he is doing so. When things go wrong, Rod doesn't take responsibility; he lies and stalls and misses appointments. My computer was supposed to be repaired in about 72 hours; thanks to Rod Pereira I lost two weeks.

To-day, Rod Pereira posted a new response with a new version of events:

Dear Daniel McKiərnan, this kind of part can be found with the same 6 months warranty for $30 on ebay or way more through Dell (not even counting on the waiting time). We didn't lie when we told you that we would be on shop on Saturday, but as you can see on our business hours, we don't open on saturdays and unfortunately you got to our shop too late without any calls in advance. We could never realize you would still come and couldn't wait for the whole day as we were only organizing the shop. We told you to come as we wanted you to have your laptop back ASAP. And actually, you didn't lose 2 weeks. You dropped your computer on May 15th and instead of having the parts here on 72business hours (on May/20th) it got here on May/23rd,^[1] the same day you called yelling at the lady that you wouldn't wait anymore. Following my instructions, she just told you that would return the computer back to you as you demanded since you were extremely rude and unpolite. Regards, Rod

So I've tacked-on an addendum to my review:

Geek available lied to me about when the part was ordered; at one time (and this can be documented) they lied about not using eBay; at another time (and this too can be documented) they lied about having been open until 2:30 on that Saturday. I was there at 2:10 because I was told that they'd be open until 3:00 that day. (Had they instead said that they'd not be open, then I'd have gone on later Friday afternoon.) They lie now when they claimed that I yelled. And on the 23, the day that they claim that the part arrived, I called after mail delivery, was told that the part was not there. So either they were lying then (which would have been weird even for a dishonest business) or they're lying now.

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^[1]Mind you that Rafael Schneider Pereira told me on Tuesday (27 May) that he thought that the part had come-in on 24 May. (I rather doubt that it was even mailed by originalpartsglobal before 27 May, as he'd promised them tracking, but on 23 May they said that he'd not provided a tracking number.)

If you want a sense of the dynamic behind Wikipedia administration, then read

(If you're only going to read one of these pages, then I would suggest that it be the evidence page.) FWIW, I recognize some of the disputants as villains, and some of the others as either villains or rather great fools; I don't know, one way or the other, about the rest. It's quite possible that some are fine people, or that all are jerks.

Last night at about 20:00 PDT, on my way to David's Coffee Place, I glanced into the Brass Rail, a San Diego night club. On a Friday night, there were no customers. That had changed by the time that I headed homeward, but it still wasn't particularly busy. Nor was it yester-day. David's Coffee Place has also been slow the last few days. Carlos, one of i baristi, suggested that this is largely an artefact of the increased price of gasoline. I think that he's correct. I also think, as I told him, that current petroleum prices are a bubble; but I don't know when the bubble will collapse, nor what will trigger the collapse.

Locally, there are various store-front locations in Hillcrest that have been vacant for months. It's an inescapable that there is some price at which someone would be willing to rent any given one of these sites; but landlords are evidently unwilling to drop rents to such levels. This refusal might seem simply unreasonable, and perhaps in some cases it truly is, but all landlords (reasonable or unreasonable, renting or refusing) are unavoidably gambling. Any who enter into an arrangement at the market-clearing price of to-day is gambling that those prices won't rise to-morrow enough to off-set revenue forgone by waiting. At the same time, those who are refusing to lower their prices are hanging tough on a theory that prices will rise in such manner, or that they'll connect with someone who'll pay their price in spite of generally prevailing prices.

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I don't know what the national economy is doing right now.

Apparently, growth figures for the first quarter were revised upward; I read mention of a 0.9% annualized rate (rather than 0.6%) yester-day. This is still low — one normally expects growth of about 3%. Some respected economists are predicting that the annualized rate of growth in the second quarter will be about 0.4%, followed by 2.2% in the third quarter. Since that would suggest that we would avoid a recession altogether, I can safely predict that present efforts by pundits to redefine recession will intensify.

There has been some yammering about consumer confidence, which has dropped to levels not seen since the economic down-turn during the Presidential administration of GHW Bush. The consumer confidence measure seems to be a garbage statistic to many economists, including me. Further, it hit that previous minimum at the end of a down-turn, rather than leading a worsening of conditions. (And the down-turn in question didn't even qualify as a recession proper, as it did not last for two quarters.) If the statistic means much of anything, it doesn't mean what journalists seem to think that it means, nor what they want their readers to think that it means.

Conventional wisdom seems to be that the worst of the credit-crunch has passed. That means, however, that the Federal Reserve System will counter-act the pressure on prices creäted by the measures that it took to loosen credit; those counteractives are, unsurprisingly, things that will re-tighten credit — the hope being that a credit crunch doesn't resume. I don't think that they'll get to have their cake and eat it too; prices will rise, or the economy will go into recession, or both.

On top of everything else, Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) had misdiagnosed what was wrong with my computer display. But the computer should be back in working order some time on Monday.

And to-day's additional Geek Available (AKA GeekAvailable) datum is that the fellow who goes by the name of Rafael Schneider is in fact Rafael Schneider Pereira.

(A datum for yester-day would be that the Better Business Bureau informed me that they had forwarded my complaint to Geek Available, and would again contact me in two weeks, or sooner if Geek Available replied within that time.)