God turneth neither to the Left nor to the Right

Talking with the missionaries about economics. One of them reminded me about the economic power of differences.

It's something we all know. The scriptures even talk about this, if you know where to look.

It is our commonalities that enable economic exchange. Thus the Left. Socialism. Communism, even.

It is our differences that make us profitable to each other. Thus the right. Capitalism. Corporatism. Maybe even Nationalism.

If we don't have enough in common, we have no way for economic exchange to occur.

If we don't have enough differences, we have nothing to exchange.

If we get stuck either direction, the economy falls over and dies.

[JMR202007132051:

It occurs to me that I need to provide the scripture reference for the title of this post. It's a bit of a misquote, but here it is:

Doctrine and Covenants 3: 2

Also, see Joshua 1: 7.

]

yummy job -- oishii shigoto

There's an expression in Japanese business vernacular, 「おいしい仕事」 ("oishii shigoto").

It transliterates to "yummy job", except that "yummy" sounds childish.

So it transliterates to "delicious job/work" except that delicious is too literal, and sounds like working in a pizza shop or bakery or confectionery.

Compare it to the epithet, "This job is cake." Or to the complaint, "He skims the cream for himself, leaves all the strippings for the rest of us." as applied to a businessman who grabs all the easiest and most profitable contracts he can and and leaves the harder and less profitable assignments to his co-workers.

Okay, not everyone uses "oishii shigoto" as an epithet. Some people understand that hard work is like vegetables and that work that produces too much money is like refined sugar.

Some people understand that sweet is not the only delicious flavor.

Tobacco addiction cheap for society?

Some really strange things get said on /. sometimes.

As I was originally starting to type this, there was an article (which I failed to record a link to and now can't be sure which it was) on Bitcoin being used in the black market for illicit drugs. Lots of people in that part of the conversation seem to want to make drugs generally legal in the US, and they cite the supposed failure of Prohibition.

(I thought I had blogged about the supposed failure of prohibition. Apparently not.

It did not fail, but we failed to do it wisely.

We should have specifically authorized the states and communities to prohibit and/or regulate intrastate commerce in alcohol and other substances with strong habit-forming properties and/or negative health consequences, and restricted the states from attempting to prohibit personal and private production and use of the same, except in cases where the production and/or use at private level presented legal issues in other areas. (Production facilities blowing up and/or threatening neighbor's property, health, etc. Also, allowing states and communities to attempt to deal with individuals who, when consuming or using such substances, would lose control and present a clear danger to others.)

And we should have authorized laws to be made regulating and/or prohibiting interstate commerce and transportation of such substances, particularly into states where such was regulated and/or prohibited.

This would have been in keeping with the spirit and letter of the Constitution.

Having failed to do that, we undid the prohibition amendment in a way that left us open to the FDA. That was a bigger failure than the way we originally did prohibition.)

Well, somebody brought up a concept that is apparently making the rounds in parts of Europe -- that tobacco is actually cheaper than euthanasia. Talk about false dilemma and strawman and, well, the whole basic gamut of false logic.

Dealing with the "problem" of an aging society by killing the old folks off with either explicit euthanasia or the implicit use of vice is just plain wrong on all levels.

Old people are valuable. For their experience, if nothing else. But for all sorts of other things, too.

If our economy does not allow us to recognize their value appropriately, then the economy is wrong. Fix the economy, don't fix the non-problem of a rising average age.