Anyone but me find the “shop locally” push an overly alarmist campaign?  I’d like to propose that all shopping is local.  I may buy any number of things online from enterprises that may or may not have local store presences, but I suspect that all those goods are delivered by someone with a job who is local.  I suspect that person represents lots of other people local to me and local to others that have jobs. Don’t they count?

How many components or support mechanisms are there local to me that went into some portion of the creation, marketing, support, delivery, etc. of the product I bought from the evil, online enterprise?  I paid with financial services that have a local presence and last time I was in my bank they paid their employees.  Don’t these people count?

I guess I’m supposed to be sorry that the local mom-n-pop bookstore is going by the way-side (seriously, where are these mythical realms?), but am not going to shed any more tears over this than the loss of my local mom-n-pop hobby store or printing store or… name your own thing here.  If you can’t compete, you don’t get to play for long.  This is a rule of life and capitalism mirrors life most closely which is why it works better than other systems.

I love that one enterprising person decided to take on Amazon’s app approach with an app of their own.  Great response if you want to compete, you have to compete, not beg for the pity and charity of your supposed customers.  That may work once or near the holidays, but is not going to keep you in business even mid-term, let alone long term.

Don’t get me wrong, if you have a “local” store that you love and gives you fabulous overall value for your money, sweet.  Keep going and spending your money.  However, don’t be guilted into caving to corporate charity.  You’re not doing the business a favor, merely slowly prolonging the inevitable.  Better the business be confronted with reality sooner than later and make the necessary adjustments which may well include changing businesses.  UPS and FedEx outlets are local too, remember.

I’ve never regretted rebuffing the many offers / attempts to get me to move to the left coast in my life.

via VDHs Private Papers:: Jerry Brown, Modern Sisyphus.

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Victor Davis Hanson as always well worth the time to read.

So either the bank’s supposed “two-factor” solution flat out failed (seriously arguable that an IP address is a legitimate “what you have” factor, IMHO) or they processed it anyway?  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Looks like another case of sacrificing security at a real world cost for ease-of-use roughly tied into my most recent previous post.

Yeah… what he said.

Now, will we get another Reagan to follow-up this generation’s Carter-to-the-factor-of-10?  I sure hope so, cuz there’s a lot more to dig out from under than with Carter.

I couldn’t say it any better than he did.  The realities of the catch-22 we the voters have put ourselves in with regard to our lack of any discipline is why I don’t believe we’ve yet gotten anywhere near the “bottom” of this economic downturn.  There’s a lot of self-delusion at work from the citizenry to the press to the government and until we decide to act like adult citizens and elect adult representatives, we’re in for a long period of pain. 

Of course for some that ”hope for change”, this emasculating of America is exactly the goal.  Remake America in the image of the rest of the banana republic / statist / second-rate nations.   It would be more honest if they just jumped right to the equalization tactics of out-and-out communist regimes of the past and take the doctors out of the hospitals to the fields and the farmers into the hospitals, but then enough true Americanism still runs through enough citizen’s veins that an honest, up front, straight-forward approach wouldn’t be tolerated.

I do have some hope that at least the health care scam has been seen through by enough people that perhaps their vision will be cleared about all else that is being done to “take care of them”.  Remember my comment about adults earlier?  This is what I mean.  Are we adults who care for ourselves and our own or are we mere child wards of the state?