Bottle and Sandra talk for a while

We're gonna have to skip the album review tonight. I know, i know, you're all heartbroken, but 1) i'm working on a massive secret chapter about shipping insurance for the 4th book, and 2) my brain has been singing "dead butterflies" for several hours. Send your hate mail to Architects, it's their fault.

S: Bottle, i think you have a serious image problem. You're so angry about everything. 

B: that's the real problem, i'm not angry. You, not you specifically Sandra, i mean the rhetorical you, think i'm angry, you think i hate everything, you think i'm a Communist, you think i'm out to destroy the world, you think i should do this or that. Where in there do i get to say anything? In fact, when have i ever done that to anyone? I say "i can do this, i can't do that, if i do that then this might happen and everyone will be unhappy so here's how i have to prevent that." I'm not sitting here waiting for someone to give me instructions, i just go do whatever the next thing is. I already know what that thing is because i think about it and plan for it. 

S: but how do you know? 

B: i don't. I plan for it to work, i plan for what i'll do if it doesn't work, i plan for how to prevent the next however dominoes from falling if it doesn't work, and so on. I worry about me and how it affects everyone else, not everyone else and how they affects me. You might think one or the other is selfish, but they are equally selfish in inverse proportion to each other. 

I'm actually a bleeding heart liberal in the Capitalism sense of Liberal. I want the good parts of capitalism, i want to own the means of producing all the things people need, i want to work really hard at it and succeed, but i am deeply upset and remorseful about what i have to do to get it. I have to take advantage of good people so i can trick them into feeling like i'm one of the good guys when a real person in the real world actually said to me "you don'thave a mean bone in your body" and i replied "guilty as charged." I have to push somebody out of the way to take their spot. That's a lie on top of a lie. I hate it, it makes me want to puke. So i quit. I hand my money to people who do things that make my world more enjoyable to inhabit. Mrs. Bottle and the kidlets obviously, but musicians, artists, and writers are at the top of the list. I value music and ideas, even if not the particular noises you're making at the moment. I can't like or hate what you make unless you have the ability to make it. Either way, i'm happy you made it. 

Things, machinery, toys, they're only as valuable as what you can do with them. I want to take some rich guy's money and spread it around to my friends so i can enjoy what they do. I don't need money to be happy, i need money to reward you for being awesome. The guys with all the money don't like that because it means they have to actually start spending their money for no return like i do. They want to keep it juggling for as long as possible because they don't like the way it feels to be the bad guy either. You end up forcing me to pretend to be the bad guy. 

So, what i'm trying to show everybody is the actual tug of war. The money has to actually complete the figure 8. People with money have to spend it so someone else can have a turn, then they have to spend it, and on an on until the plane crashes and we have to eat our own soccer team. Best estimate is that that cycle takes about 30 years to crash. That wasn't much of a problem back when life expectancy was only 40 to 50 years, but that has grown to twice as many people living twice as long experiencing twice as many cataclysms. 

Now, you're going to read that and say "that's pseudo-psychological jibber-jabber, Bottle. You're talking nonsense." 

What do you think the "generation name calling is?" Baby boomers, gen x, millenials, gen z. We're rapidly approaching trying to support 5 generations of people on only two-generation's worth of wealth and resources. It's not pleasant to walk down this hallway, but somewhere down at the bottom of the barrell comes this nasty little clique of Auditors whispering "just kill more people, that will solve that." Let 'em starve, make it a game, throw 'em in jail, pick an enemy and eliminate them. I've been down that hallway, i've sat in those offices, then one day i just walked away and built my own fortress of solitude. The only trouble with my design is that it's super easy to stumble in, but next to impossible to get back out. You're pretty much stuck here and i can either shove you in a bottle or let you freely wander the place. 

I try not to bother the minions more than i need to, they have their own lives to live. GREGORY rampaged and ate more than his fair share, so i put a lid on him and that made things a lot nicer. Buuuut, Carl's dog isn't producing anything to shove in the tube, and i as you say have that PR problem: there's no public to relate to anymore. I'm a dying breed, the guy who wants to pay for it, the guy who will pay for it, who was paying for it. Now i have to collect it all back. The mob bosses who didn't tell me they were mob bosses are coming for my kneecaps. I having no real problem giving 'em back like Warcon gave Page back his album if that evens the score and we go our separate ways. I wanted to teach whole new generations of kids to appreciate it, after all. They aren't in the kneecap repossessing or the letting me do that business, though. They're in the die of natural causes so we can collect the insurance business; how many natural causes can we invent today? 

Again, this is all metaphorical. They'd much rather my thing succeeded and i gladly paid them back. Doesn't work that way in practice. The reason it doesn't work is that nobody else is taking care of their own garbage first; they think i'm supposed to do that for them. That's a huge problem because now the titles we have on paper are opposite of how things actually work. Your piece of paper says "Boss," mine says "Minion." You don't have the foggiest idea how i do your job for you as an inconvenient interruption while i'm still doing my actual job, so reality is now the opposite. 

S: ok, ok, i think i see where this is going. We're circling back around the other side. 

B: exactly! Rhetorical You's turn is over, you cash in your chips and go back to paying for it. You can't balk halfway through the process or the car crashes start piling up behind you. You've climbed up the ladder, now you have to slide back down, not tell everyone to take a hike and go build their own playground. 

S: oh, oh! Then you go wait your turn for the swingset, then the monkeybars, then back to the slide. 

B: exactly. Obviously we have to close down the equipment every once in a while for repairs, and we have to be patient when it opens back up, and we have to be ok with some of our friends, or even ourselves, not wanting to wait any longer and running away to a shorter line, but we don't own the playground, and sometimes we have to share it with some other kids whose own playground burned down, and sometimes we just want to go lie down in the grass and not play at all. All that stuff is just normal stuff, and as long as the whole thing doesn't turn into everybody kicking each other in the teeth all the time then we should all just be glad that it's not raining and we get to have recess at all, 'cause some of those jerks on the school board want to tear it all down and build a strip mall or use it as a landfill for all their garbage. Now, how do you feel? 

S: good, actually. i feel like i understand you better. 

B: great! No throw it all in the garbage can because who cares? Or, we could try to use it to understand a real problem. How do you feel about mandatory insurance? 

S: what? That's totally non-sequitur. 

B: no, it's totally sequitur. The question of insuring your package is a microcosm of the entire global socio-economic problem. Planes crash, boats sink, frustrated Newman's chuck packages off cliffs, some jerks knowingly send broken stuff and try to blame other people for it. How do we deal with that? 

S: i... i... don't know. I've never really thought about it. 

B: ok, well let's start at some starting place. Maybe not the question of whether we reserve international shipping for the cheapest cargo and manufacture the most valuable in our own country because stabilizing physical flow is super important, that's like a graduate seminar in its own right. How about a 3 pound box on delivery trucks? That's pretty easy. 

S: ok. 

B: i box up a thing and hand it to a delivery driver, but it gets lost or damaged. We all do the refund/ship a new one thing like nice humans, but we always lose the cost of the replacement item and the cost of the driver's labor. Who pays that cost? I think most people would instinctively want to pinpoint blame and that person pays the additional cost. Most of the time that's actually impossible so we have to ask is it better to arbitrarily blame someone, or is it better to devise some built-in cushion for "accidents"? The answer of course depends on how big a problem it really is. A box with a coffee mug in it isn't much of a problem, but a freighter with millions of dollars worth of coffee mugs sure is. 

Now, obviously, in a perfect world the guy who dropped the box says "oh crap, that was my fault, and he or his company pays the expense." That happens all the time, people are generally honest, all things considered. This leads to what should be our familiar 4-hallway atrium. 1) no plan everything is actually fine, 2) no plan, things are not fine at all, 3) yes plan, but everything is fine so we're wasting money, 4) yes plan, problems are solved by that plan and we're all as happy as possible. Make sense? 

S: sure, that makes sense. 

B: ok, well you can enter those hallways from either direction. There can be no plan and everyone knows that, or there can be no plan but everyone mistakenly thinks there is one. The can be a plan that should work but doesn't, and there can be a plan that nobody knows about, or we could just be jerks and not follow the plan 'cause it's "Grumpy Thursday." What if there is a plan that worked for a long time, but only like 1/10,000 packages gets damaged so we all decide to just not bother and buy another one? 

S: ok, now it's getting out of hand. 

B: welcome to Bottleville, population crazy old me. Let's say accidental loss or damage is frequent enough to need a plan, but nowhere near frequent enough to make buying insurance mandatory. You can choose, so you'll probably insure expensive packages and eat the cost of replacing cheap stuff. 

S: sure, that's realistic. 

B: ok, what happens to the money paid to insure packages that get there perfectly fine and don't have to be replaced? 

S: oh, OH! You mean is that a reward for the delivery company, or should it be returned to the person who paid for the now unneeded insurance? 

B: yes, that's exactly what i mean. That is "surplus value," and we have to distribute it. If i don't need the insurance then i'm wasting money, but if you've intentionally tricked me into thinking i need that insurance then the referee throws the fraud flag. Hello doorway to the room where we argue about "socialism." Oh, i see they've installed a card reader to determine if i'm a consumer buying insurance as financial protection, or a business buying insurance to protect my business from disgruntled customers and/ or employees. Wish real life had those, it would make things a whole lot easier. For now though, we'll just pretend it doesn't matter and describe both sides. 

Do we build this insurance into the cost of our service, or do we offer optional insurance for the consumer to decide. There's a further question about managing the insurance ourselves or outsourcing it to a 3rd party, but we're only interested in the distribution of the surplus value. We could argue back and forth, but the real question is are we using the insurance from one customer to pay for another? Are we using the system in good faith, or are we using it as an impenetrable buffer between our business and the consumer's impression of our business? In other words, are we misappropriating unused package insurance to cover up other unrelated internal problems and artificially boost our overall profits and only paying out of pocket if we absolutely have to? 

S: holy crap, how deep is this rabbit hole? 

B: infinite. We could keep going, but i want to back up and think about the transition from one system to another. What happens when we go from no system at all to a built-in system where we keep the unused insurance as profit? The answer is exactly the same as transitioning from a competitive market to a monopoly. There is a deadweight loss to the total economy and we now have to ask how that affects the comparative value of our company in relation to all the other companies in our economic network. Our profits will go up, but the available money supply will go down and we will lose customers. Those customers may invest in our competitor who can now lower their own price across their total customer base and pull us back below prior profit levels or send us down the bankruptcy hallway. What if that happens and the loss of our entire fleet is larger than the absorption capacity of all of our competitors combined? 

S: well, i mean, you can just calculate that, right? 

B: you're trying to figure out if this obvious good thing is secretly a bad thing. How confident in your own answer should you realistically be at this point? Furthermore, what's the financial impact of paying someone smarter than you to give you their educated guess? You're a moron now, so you end up electing anyone who even hints that it's way better to just have no plan at all in the first place, and we all get a little bit dumber and/or angrier. 

I think you know my answer. My answer is we all learn to accept a little bit of cushion in the up front price, return as much unused surplus value as possible, and stop treating each other like garbage. 

The faster we collectively pay off my student loan debt, the faster i can go back to just handing people money i don't need because they're awesome just the way they are. You're watching me do everything i want to do within the confines of my perfectly reasonable paycheck, my refrigerator always has food in it, my cars go forward and backward, i'm not wasting money on disposable razors that end up in a landfill (i really did use hair clippers that time i shaved last Summer), and everything beyond that is a waste of good brain power. Like i said, rhetorical you needs literal me to trick you into paying me to be awesome when i'm already being as awesome as i possibly can be for free and it ends up leaving your wallet hungry, not mine. Extremely immodest, totally honest because i am perfectly happy if my level of awesome isn't good enough for you. It's more than good enough for me, so who's actually winning?