h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Oh my, that is incredibly expensive. I had no idea. I hope you get a really really good job.

I have been putting a bit more effort into changing my job. No luck yet but I'm hopeful that I'll be given an opportunity to interview at least. The one that I believe I would do well at is in Idaho. That is quite a distance from home but if I were to get the position it would be a really good career move.

That is my dilemma. Should I be satisfied where I'm at because it pays well and is relatively comfy? Or should I try to keep pushing for a better position? I think complacency looks a lot like moving backward.

So England doesn't really do coffee like Australia or the US? I guess I thought that, even though the English drink tea in movies, they would have decent coffee as well. How did Australia end up a coffee drinking country (seeing as it was colonialized by England)? Come to think of it, my Canadian friends are tea drinkers as well. Hmmm. Maybe you'll have to switch from Arabica to Earl Grey.

In Madison we have several micro-roasters that ship. It might be worth the cost to get good beans in tea country.

Fortunately London contract rates are high enough to cover the extortionate rents that they charge there. However, it is not a place you could live in for long if you were unemployed.

As for changing jobs - I have never had one that lasted for more than two years. Even the permanent ones have been short term! I am probably not in a good position to give advice. However, lack of knowning anything about the subject has never stopped me giving advice in the past!

If you enjoy the job and being the only female vice-president in the company's history is your thing, then stay. Career advancement is useful to pay for holidays, mortages and cat-food but once these things are under control what will a career bring you? If the answer is happiness and knowledge that you won't have to do any work on your new extended holidays, then it is time for a change. Otherwise, accept the shorter drive to work. Complacency never looks like moving backwards - moving backwards looks like moving backwards. Anyway from what you are saying, you are not complacent - merely not getting a new job.

For what it is worth, I have heard that commercially made coffee in the US can be cheap but can be pretty awful (how about that for a generalisation about a country of 200 million people - half of whom speak fluent spanish, the native tongue of coffee drinking). The best place for coffee in Oz is Melbourne. Adelaide ranges from abysmal to really good (price is no indicator unfortunately). I suspect coffee beans are good in London: it is what the commercial coffee shops do with them that destroys them. Mind you, what they say about the British and their attitude to food is true: they really do not care (there are exceptions but, for the English in general, care of what goes down the gullet is not a national preoccupation). Have you read Asterix in Britain? If not you really (really, really) should.

I do drink a lot of tea but getting nicely made tea at work is difficult (tea bags being pretty bad on the whole). I could ask you, how did the US (seeing as it was colonized by England) become a coffee drinking country too? Maybe it was one to many tea parties in Boston habour?

I think we must have rejected most things British as part of our revolution. Also, maybe we had trouble getting tea in the Midwest and West. I know, for a long while in our history, neither tea nor coffee were available and we made a hot beverage with a root called chicory. In the south, some people still flavor their coffee with chicory root. I had been told that chicory more closely resembles coffee than tea. I tried something that was, allegedly, chicory and I thought it was just plain nasty -- not like coffee or tea.

I have the impression that tea is more common in the Eastern US. Anyway, here in the Midwest we have tea here but it is almost always served in bags. Even restaurants that have decent coffee will serve tea in bags. (But coffee shops typically serve loose tea in stainless steepers.)

Yes, it is possible to get a pound of coffee for under $5 but you would probably not enjoy drinking it. The vast majority of coffee available on grocery store shelves is mediocre at best. MacDonalds recently upgraded their coffee to just this side of unbearable so the trend is to at least try to serve something reasonably palatable (as opposed to weak brown water with a funny after-taste). I think what most people find palatable still offends my feline sensibilities.

I guess I'm a coffee snob. I sold coffee beans along with other fine import food products for a while so I tend to buy nice whole bean stuff from small local roasters. The fact that a veriety of nice whole bean stuff is available from several small local roasters is one of the nice things about living near Madison. I can still get a pound of excellent coffee for under $12. Is that a good price?

Okay the job change idea has to do with two things. Firstly, I sometimes want more challenging work and well, I think I would enjoy running an association. At least I'd like the opportunity to try. Secondly, there is some weird interpersonal junk here that is really frustrating. It doesn't usually affect me directly, but the faction fighting tends to bleed over and I just get tired of having to keep track of who is fighting and who is receptive to new ideas.

So the English aren't typically foodies... I didn't realize that. What is Asterix in Britain? (No I haven't read it.)

Chickory, like grits, has the romance of the American West where people wore beaver skin hats, spoke pure frontier gibberish and ate passenger pidgeons by the barrel (and never washed). I have never had any desire to drink it: it falls into the same category as eating haggis in Scotland, that is, something one does for a laugh (at one's expense) when one visits the locals. Mind you, it works both ways, eating French bistrot food and drinking French wine in Paris with the locals is quite nice and something I would recommend.

The coffee we buy is costs about $30/kg. Given a pound is .452 of a kg and the $AU is about $US0.85 (+/-) my calculator says we pay about $US11.47/pound. Which is close enough to $12/pound. At home we also are coffee and tea snobs (and wine). Some people probably like us not for the quality of our characters but for the colour of our beverages.

As for moving out of a weird personality driven organisation - I say move. I find (as do most Australians) the idea of a cross-state drive to work wierd but then Adelaide and Melbourne (our nearest city) are about 800km apart. We don't think about taking jobs in other cities without also thinking about moving/week-long accomodation. On the other hand it appears to just be a long country drive for you.

You should be able to find a copy of Asterix in Britain in any good bookshop. The ISBN is 0752866184. Once you finish that you should read Asterix and Cleopatra (if you are in the middle of a building project) and Asterix in Corsica (given you appear to have a fondness for Gormet foods such as Cheese - and there are some excelent cheese jokes in here). Once you have collected those, you will then be able to fill in the set for any kittens your brother or sister cats leave at your house when they drop past.

If I were to work somewhere other than Madison we would literally move -- as in sell our house load the van and locate elsewhere. Idaho is about 2500 miles from here so it definitely isn't a commuting option even a week at a time. I am hoping to stay in Madison, if possible, but high-end association exec jobs are not plentiful. They're thick as thieves out in DC but who wants to live there? Not this lil ole barn cat.

The office interpersonal stuff comes and goes. We had an office affair between a mananger and staff person that was really ugly. It brought out the fangs in pretty much everyone. That was when I was actively scouring the job options and would have taken a cut to get out. That problem seems to have settled down but the general wrangling is pretty constant. On the flip side, I've recently been getting more (good) responsibility and challenges from our exec so I'm enjoying my work even more. In the end I imagine it will come down to what I can get.

I will have to get the Asterix books. My family just acquired its first great-grandchild (not mine -- obviously) so it is a perfect opportunity to buy and read children's books.

What is frontier gibberish? I've always found the south much harder to understand than the west. Want a few fun terms for confouonding your friends and neighbors?

"Gillikins" (pronounced jill' ick ins) meaning the middle of nowhere or a very remote place

"Woods colt" meaning daddy unknown

and last but not least:
"That dog won't hunt" meaning an idea is wrong or useless

And speaking of dogs that won't hunt... frontier people washed as much as anyone else did at that time. American Indians tended to be particularly fastidious and even requied it of their slaves (those that kept them).

What is haggis? I heard a joke on the radio about it but have never heard precisely what it is.

I replied to this last week - but my reply has been lost!

I will have to try again in a few days (the costs of short term contract work).

I've been waiting with bated breath for your description of haggis. -- really.

I went to New Orleans in early October and tried chicory coffee again. It isn't awful but, like many strongly flavored things, it must be an acquired taste. Fortuntely it is very inexpensive so I was able to bring some home for everyone to grimace at.

I'll write more about New Orleans later. I'm out of time now but wanted to leave a posting just in case it inspired you to rewrite your missive.

Living in DC would be a bit like moving to Canberra. The centralisation of power in this country is happening so fast that most people won't be allowed to get out of bed in the morning without a Canberra bureaucrat authorising the act specifically. It is scary. The idea that freedom trumped Stalinism is not so obvious. We are in an ecconomy where there are only two major retailers that take 90% of all day to day retail transactions in the country and whose computer systems are intimately connected with the government's computers (which are gradually becoming more intimately connected within themselves) and who are constantly reducing the number of product lines because 3 choices is always enough. Stalin couldn't have got a better control on things if he had tried (and he did try and he couldn't).

I am reading the High Court (read US Supreme Court) judgement that gave the Federal Government complete power to pass any laws regarding 'incorporated bodies' that the Federal Government wants to. Essentially it is the end of the State governments because everything interesting is now an incorporated body. Until now, the court had ruled that there were limits on the Federal Government's powers over trading bodies (i.e. the power was limited to ensuring the freedom to trade between states). However, it felt that that reading was too restrictive and the power should be read to allow the Parliament to pass laws over how, what and when they can trade and how they organise themselves, employ people and engage in contracts and sue.

I am reading the judgement (which is long and tedious and it is the first one I have read). It is interesting but it will take a few weeks to get through as it is not something I am being paid to take an interest in!

Office affairs are often messy. Sometimes it is how nice people get to meet each other, get married and have children. Other times not so.

Anyway, the answers that you have been waiting for!

Asterix in Britain: ISBN 0752866184. It is a good introduction to the series (especially if you like the British but have the same cultural sceptisms that an Gaulish Anglophile might have). It might be a bit old for a six month old, but you will enjoy it for the eight to ten years required for your gand-neice/nephew to mature enough to read it.

Frontier gibberish is a language spoken in Blazing Sadles by the frontiersman in the community discussion to save the township (and request a new sherrif). It is the best of Mel Brook's films (I think): it is very uneven but the highs are brilliantly funny and the lows are infrequent and merely tedious.

Haggis is a fascinating food brought to us by people who were so poor they had to eat offal wrapped up in more offal without enough money to add anything to it to make it taste like anything other than offal, slow cooked to preserve that special offally flavour. Hmmmmm.

Haggis sounds very, very nasty.

I can't believe you're reading a U.S. Supreme Court decision. I've read a few (more like skimmed) and they are exceedingly painful. I can't imagine reading one for a country to which I didn't have to pay taxes.

Centralized government vs states rights is a big issue here -- at least to the people who care about those things. States want their own identity and they want to develop environments that attract businesses. There are states where it is more advantageous to incorporate and states where it is less so. While I dislike federalism I do understand why it makes sense (at least to some) to take some of the authority out of the states' hands.

When the US government was formed one of its key tasks was to regulate interstate commerce. That may have nothing to do with the US Supreme Court decision but, in my brain, it makes corporations and the feds related -- at least as far as interstate commerce is concerned.

There is some justification for taking action. For example, the company I work for is considering forming a wholly owned subsidiary to act as a broker for insurance products. We are located in Wisconsin. We would form the subsidiary and incorporate it in, I think, Conneticut because their insurance laws are more favorable to the insurer than Wisconsin. We still would have to comply with Wisconsin's consumer laws when selling products here but would be able to set the nexus in CT for business to business type issues -- like when one insurance company sues another -- and that is advantageous to us.

The State of Wisconsin doesn't like that activity but it can't stop it and it doesn't want to change its laws to provide the same type of enviroment here. The State of Conneticut likes it because it makes tax income off an entity that only exists there on paper. In light of that conflict, I can see someone claiming foul and asking for some method of making incorporation activity consistent.

In a more direct application to my work, vehicle titles are regulated by states. Some states define damage as one thing and others as something else. After a disaster like Katrina an insurance company might route a vehicle through two states that define damage differently and get the damage notation completely removed from the title. A notation may or may not show up some time in the future but in the meantime someone has purchased the vehicle believing it was undamaged. This activity hurts pretty much everyone. It would be nice if we had national (or even international with Canada and Mexico) standards of what is a new/used vehicle, what constitutes damage that needs to be on the title, what other critical, decision-making information should be tracked and accessible immediately and electronically from anywhere in the covered area. But states balk at this level of federal control. Plus any sort of activity that makes information consistent would be hugely costly for someone and nobody has the money for that right now.

So that is a conundrum. Thanks for turning my mind onto something different. I haven't considered states-rights issues for months and it is definitely something that concerns me.

Also, great news on the work-front. We cut positions here and, coincidentally, the people that were giving me the most headaches were the positions that were cut. It means a lot more work for me but I'm fine with that. Now I'm not wasting time avoiding traps and games. Life is much better for me. I feel a bit sorry for the folks who lost their jobs but not so sorry that I would wish them back.

Finally, sorry I've been such a posting deadbeat. I really enjoy the ideas you write about and want to converse. Sometimes I just don't have the time. Anyway, I hope you and Adrien (is that right?) had great holidays and wish you a prosperous and blessed New Year.

The state's rights issue here is interesting. The costitution was written by the states (which existed in a formal sense) to give the commonwealth government some of their powers. This means the constitution doesn't reserve any powers to the states (or the people) because they are the entities giving power away. The recent High Court decision said that the states have no rights in the constitution because the document doesn't give them any.

The reason, I have decided, why I like states' rights is because it gives regulatory competition. It means that local communities (the size of medium sized countries geographically but smaller in terms of their populations) can regulate their economies to balance work/life but in competition with each other. People and businesses will move, and this prevents the states becoming complacent or unballanced. A single regulatory system means that one of the major reasons for change is gone and we move totally into the world of the lobbyist.

We hope you had a properous and blessed Christmas. We still live in a country where we have Christmas and not a 'holiday season'. We also are allowed lots of holidays - I believe that you Yanks have to work all the time (none of that 13 public holidays/4 weeks leave a year + accruable sick leave rubbish).



PS: I agree that corporate responsibility laundering between states stinks.

My company offers 7 paid holidays, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year's Day and 1 day float. Government typically has a few more such as Veteran's Day and President's Day but private business doesn't. I have a friend that manages an association in Massachusetts and they have to obtain waivers to work on state-recognized holidays but my impression is that they aren't hard to obtain in most instances.

I've been ruminating about what I saw and learned while in New Orleans last fall. One of the things you mentioned shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit was how appalled you were at the response. (I was too but I didn't really understand the magnitude of the issue.)

When I was there I had two of my friends take me around the city. One is an upper-crust kind of person -- old New Orleans high society. The other one is self-described white-trash. I wouldn't call her that but I think she takes pride in not being New Orleans royalty. Anyway I got a really interesting perspective on the city and the response.

The upper-crusty (UC) person and the white trash (WT) concurred on one thing. Both had been raised believing that the levy system might be over-flowed but that it would *never* be breached. To have the levies breach in multiple places was taken as a personal violation -- and I can't stress that enough. Neither of my friends' homes were badly flooded but that did not matter. In their psyche the levy breaches were as unthinkable and wrong as rape. It could not happen. It should never have happened.

Add to that mindset of complete disbelief and horror the very real problem that, even in unflooded areas, there was no way to communicate with anyone. So even if someone was safe inside their home, there was no way to know. Fear is still a part of their lives.

They both told me stories of not knowing. UC's husband was able to get a single message out in the first few days and it was only partially understandable. All she could hear was "trapped in the house... hurt". It turned out that he said "unhurt" but she spend almost two weeks without knowing. WT lost her aunt in the aftermath of the flooding and one of her parents (can't remember which) needed hospitalization but was unable to leave the city. He/she ended up living but not without a great deal of fear for WT who was caring for them.

One year later that was where both women were at. The other thing they have in common is an intense love for their city -- far more than I associate with my home town. So they both grieve the devastation and want to see it rebuilt.

Beyond the personal stuff I was amazed at the size of the city. There were huge areas that were only minimally damaged and would be able to be functional if only there were people available to staff and buy, etc. I guess I didn't realize that a lot was intact after the hurricane.

The devastation came from the levy breaches and where there was breach-flooding the vast majority of houses were still vacant. It was blocks upon blocks of weed-covered partially mangled houses and garbage interspersed occasionally with a lot that had been razed or a lot with a FEMA trailer and people working on their home. All of the homes had notations spray-painted on them like 1 9/12--124. The first number is the number of dead found in the home, second is the date tha military entered the house and lastly, their unit number. There were also notes like 1 dog DOA bathroom. (DOA=dead on arrival) Would you want to come back to that? Or live with it day after day? And I was seeing this more than a year after the hurricane and it was still that bad.

UC said that they should come back and rebuild because the people were needed. WT said that it would be so difficult for people to come back and face the devastation -- but that she hoped they would. There were so few people in the badly devastated areas that if something went wrong you wouldn't be heard if you yelled for help. I think it will be years before New Orleans recovers -- if ever. But having been there and met some of the survivors I hope it does. I'll probably write more about it later but this is the beginning of where I'm at with processing what I learned.

I read on the other post that you are getting ready for a big move. I hope all goes well for you in the move. Fortunately the h2g2 is everywhere so, when and if you have time, you'll be about to continue educating the world (or at least the h2g2 denizens) about heresies. I was glad to see that you worked on it again. I thought they were really interesting.