26. February 2012 by admin.

The other day, my pajamas wore out.  Time for a new set.

Once upon a time, actually not that long ago, I went to Macy’s and bought a set of pajamas, a top and a bottom, in a cellophane bag.  I think the last set I bought that way, admittedly made in China, cost about $20.

But more recently, most of the stores have stopped selling pajamas as sets: you buy the top and the bottom separately.  So my wife and I looked around:

At Macy’s, they had a selection of designer pajamas, with the pants costing $19 to $38, made in China or El Salvador.  (At least El Salvador is on this side of the planet.)  The colors were blah: blue, yellow (charming, but not $38 worth), pink (for the man who’s really sure of his masculinity), and grey (looking rather like a pinstriped suit fabric: I tend to think of pajamas and pinstriped suits as mutually exclusive).

At jcp (the department store formerly known as J. C. Penney), they had Chinese pajama bottoms for $12.  I found a blue/green plaid pair: done.

But what if I wanted pajamas not from China or El Salvador, but the dear old United States?  At Macy’s and jcp, I’d be out of luck.

There’s American Apparel, with little stores in my part of Brooklyn.  I’ve actually never visited one: from the outside it looks like mostly women’s items.  But their Web site has pajama bottoms for… wait for it… $38, the same as the designer brands at Macy’s.

There’s Red Flannel Factory in Michigan, that offers pajamas in red flannel (you were expecting lime-green Kevlar?) for $43.  I’d probably feel better if I could see the goods first.

Some further searching uncovered the Vermont Flannel Company, ‘dedicated to world comfort.’  A few clicks yielded pictures of a beautiful array of pajama sets in a selection of colors.  But a set costs $83.60… if they had any in stock.

And then there’s BedHead Pajamas, based in Los Angeles (but with a shop in NYC).  Pajama bottoms are $78 with most sets around $140.

Trying to support American manufacturing is all well and good, but I can’t bring myself to pay triple the price.

Posted in Made in USA (or not), Life Goes On | 1 Comment »

11. February 2012 by admin.

Walking down the street near my office the other day, I found myself contemplating New York City taxicabs.  A few years ago, the cab scene was a monoculture of Ford Crown Victorias; there are plenty of them still around, but there are Toyotas and Ford Explorer SUVs and Transit Connect vans, which are wheelchair-accessible.  (Nothing by General Motors, though.  Weird.)

New York City is under a court order to make all its taxis wheelchair-accessible.  On a practical level, it seems absurd: the proportion of taxi passengers who use a wheelchair is so small that the cost difference for a wheelchair-accessible taxis works out to over $100,000 per wheelchair-using passenger.  Drivers don’t like the boxy vans that are commonly used: besides the issue of maneuverability in city traffic, they’re less conducive to conversation with passengers, which leads to smaller tips.

But we have the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates wheelchair-accessible taxis and buses and countless other things.  OK: it’s the law, so we have to accept it.

For a moment, I contemplated the New York City I grew up in: the seat of commerce and finance of the most productive and powerful nation on Earth.  We had big Checker cabs that were almost wheelchair-accessible.  It wouldn’t have taken much redesign to make it happen, back then.

If the world had gone forward as we imagined it would in the 1960s, we’d probably have wheelchair-accessible taxis, buses, subways, and everything else by now.   We’d consider it a statement of our power and prosperity that we could make these simple amenities accessible to everyone, and we wouldn’t begrudge the cost.  And if the world had gone forward as we imagined it in the 1960s, I’d be planning my next vacation on the Moon.

But it didn’t happen that way.  After the novelty of visiting the Moon wore off, we stopped doing it.  We stopped being productive, because it’s cheaper to do productive things elsewhere.  The prosperity that would have made such things as wheelchair-accessible taxis effortless faded away.  In its place we have the enforced stinginess of the bean counters.

If we were truly a rich country, we’d have wheelchair-accessible taxis as a matter of the corporate pride of the taxi operators.

But we’re not really as rich as we imagine, so we have wheelchair-accessible taxis by government fiat.

Or, we’ll get them, eventually.

Posted in New York City, Dysfunctional Government | No Comments »

5. February 2012 by admin.

One of the Web sites I follow regularly is the Barbara Ehrenreich forum from her book, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.  The book describes her unsuccessful efforts to secure a ‘middle-class’ job in corporate America, and the people she meets along the way.  The book came out before the financial crisis of 2008, and it was already clear that the corporate job that we once took as a mainstay of American life was going the way of the dodo.  When it came out, I had recently started my own business, and it was comforting to find out that I was not the only one who had been stomped on by my last employer.

There are about a half-dozen people on the forum who post regularly about the sorry state of employment in the US, and up until a month ago, that was OK.  But for the last few weeks, the forum has been taken over by ‘HicyacixGar,’ who generates useless posts about 50 times a day.  We’re down to one thread, as everything else is flooded by Hicaycix.

But I’m compelled to wonder: who or what is HicyacixGar?

OK, a spammer, but to what end?  The posts appear to be illicit ads for prescription drugs, but the Bait and Switch forum seems a thoroughly pointless target for a marketing effort.

Looking at the other fora on the Barbara Ehrenreich Web site, there is some spamming going on, but nowhere near as bad.  The Bait and Switch forum had been the most active, with the most interesting discussions.

So I wonder: is Hicyacix just a spammer, or does it represent a person or agency bent on suppressing discussion about the crappy state of the economy and employment?

Posted in Computers, Networking (computer) | 5 Comments »