More rants of a dead man

English is read from left to right. This works well for right handed people who write with their right hand and don’t end up getting pen ink all over their hands like lefties do because you move your hand over the words you just wrote. Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, we read from left to right. When you get to the end of a line, you look back to the left side of the page or column and go down a line and start reading again.

Wouldn’t it be way quicker to alternate reading direction for each line?

If you can read two languages and one was written left to right and one right to left you could write every other line of text in the alternate-reading-direction language and then read by scanning right, then going down a line and scanning left and so on.

Wouldn’t that be neat? I can’t read two languages so I don’t know how hard it would be to switch language contexts, but it is pretty clear that having a language that could be written in both directions and convey the same meaning regardless of which direction you were reading in would be way more efficient.

Given the zillions of languages that have existed throughout humanity, I wonder why (or maybe if) a language was never/ever created that could do this.

Some languages I know are written vertically, but I don’t think they read down and up, just down.

I guess languages with one-character-per-concept glyphs would make this easier to do, but apparently humans have worked out that multiple-letters-per-concept/word works better.

All interesting ideas…

Photography exists. Cameras are cheap, you can get a nice one in a kid’s toy form and take zillions of high quality photos and store them on super cheap sd cards. And you can print them on a cheap color printer.

Life certainly has moved on from the days of painting portraits. And yet people still paint as a hobby.

The AIs might make programming simple and medium stuff easy and automatic, but there will still be people who write software the good old fashioned way, with punch cards, because, like painting, it is fun.

Okay so maybe not punch cards. They’ll still use a heavy handed IDE, but they’ll write the code themselves rather than have the AI do it.

I hope, or nobody will be able to fix bugs in the AI slop.

So I had this thought the other day.
Food establishments have some fixed costs and some variable costs, I’m sure lots of businesses fall into this category. But food providers like restaurants are in an interesting position, they provide food.

I know little about the restaurant business so maybe my numbers are way off, but I figure you have to for pay rent, and electricity, and gas, and staff. And for food, as in ingredients.

But once you have an employee working x number of hours, they’re getting paid whether they make food or not.
Once you turn on the lights, they stay lit whether there’s 5 people in the room or 20.
Once you pay rent, you have the place for the entire month.

Food ingredients are definitely a variable cost, but I’m wondering what percentage of the cost of doing business make up the variable bits?

My point is this: if you run a restaurant and patrons come in and pay for a meal and some drinks and they tip the wait staff, they are providing your income. They do that based on them coming in. Not how long it takes them to eat, or how much of the fixed costs of the restaurant (like the lights and the heat) they also consume.

So how about this. What if every idle moment by restaurant employees instead of spent waiting for the next thing to do, meal to cook, patron to wait on… what if you had a queue of idle-time work to do, like… making more food.

And what if at the end of the day you had all of this food, that nobody ordered, but cost you little more (extra) than the ingredients and you gave it away.

I figure you wouldn’t want to give it away to the locals, because then why would they bother coming in to your restaurant for a meal? So you’d have to bring it far enough away to a place where nobody is likely to otherwise have come to your restaurant without a reason.

And this is that reason, it’s like advertising.

But instead of flyers and magazine ads, it’s food. People from not-that-close (as in, not in your town, but maybe the next town or two over) would actually get to try your food for free, and if they like it, maybe next week they’ll travel to your restaurant and be a paying customer.

This isn’t perfect, there are lots of variable costs, and maybe they end up costing a lot more than the ROI on a flyer or magazine ad.

But, it’s an interesting idea.

I mean it’s basically what they do at farmer’s markets, why not restaurants.

Apparently I wrote this in 2019 and never hit publish.

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or at least it is unnecessary

it makes all the numbers artificially go up so you feel better about big numbers

it allows you to pay off your 30 year mortgage with cheaper money than today’s money. but you’ll notice the interest is paid up front in more expensive money, and the principal (which is not the banks money but saver’s money) is paid back in cheaper money.

these same people say, when the market is going up “look the value of your portfolio is increasing”

But when the market goes down they say “now you can buy equities more cheaply.”

They’re specifically not saying that when the market goes down, the value of your portfolio has gone down as well, or that, when the market goes up you have to pay more for the same equities.

it also means if you don’t get raises matching inflation you’re taking a pay cut every year

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But while I’m on the topic… Apparently the standard inflation target rate of 2% that everybody seems to think is normal and good was first offered by the bank of new zealand. Go figure that one out.

I don’t get it. I mean I kind of do, it’s why people play the lottery.

If prices keep going up, then I need to make more money, so I switch jobs or do something on the side to make more money, because I feel like I’m making progress because I’m getting more.

No, you’re really walking or running to stand still.

But as above, hey, loan repayments are cheaper yada yada yada.

How about this. One unit of work yields X money. And with X money I can buy a gallon of milk. And next year if I want to buy a gallon of milk how about I pay the same X money, and I do the same unit of work to earn that.

What’s so wrong with that? It increases consumer confidence because now people can predict at least something about the future.

How about that. 0% inflation. What a crazy idea.