The sound of buzzcuts

So I used to get my hair cut at John’s Barber Shop up on Route 6. It was a slightly cramped and slightly antique little place off the parking lot, tucked behind the stores that face the road. John was a small energetic barber with an Italian accent and a small staff of sub-barbers, most of them as far as I remember female, John and the staff and many of the customers at least as old as me, maybe even one generation back.

It was a fun place to go for my once-or-twice-a-year haircut, because they would always tease me about the amount to be removed (most of the other male customers being in for short conservative cuts to their lightly oiled black hair), and because it felt like a piece of reality in a way that the Family Salons in Malls never quite did.

(And the one time I got my hair cut at the Family Salon in the Mall and casually told the guy “oh I don’t know, maybe like yours is!”, it was John’s that I went to to have the resulting rat-tail removed. Not that I have any moral objection to the vaguely Hell’s Angel guy I saw in the mirror afterward, but it was profoundly Not Me.)

Eventually John stopped being there very often, and the sign changed to “John and Frank’s” I think it was. And now the sign is just “Frank’s”, and I like to think that John is retired with good wine and lots of Italian grandchildren running about.

Frank is a young guy, maybe thirty, tall and thin, vaguely Russian, but not the pale Caucasian Russian; something darker and hardier. He’s expanded the place, put in nice wood flooring, a glass-fronted case with plants in pots on top and containing some random Salon supplies that no one ever looks at, a rack of old magazines, a refurbished Ms. Pac-Man game, and some extra chairs.

Today as I’m sitting there watching the little boy have his hair cut (“Just him”, I said as we came in, “mine’s still short”, and everyone laughed because they tease me about my hair here still), there are three of them working: Frank, and a shorter guy, maybe Italian (one of John’s grandchildren?), with a buzzcut and a Yankee’s cap worn backwards, and a big muscular chocolate-brown guy with a shaven head and tattoos on his upper arms. Frank is doing the little boy’s hair. Even though he’s having it cut so short that M will be surprised when we get home, it’s still the longest cut I see them give anyone while we’re there. Everyone else is buzzcuts, or shaven sides with a modern not-Mohawk in the center, or something along those lines. (I don’t remember ever seeing a woman in the place since it stopped being John’s.)

It still feels more real-life than the Mall, and everyone is joshing and “how are ya man”ning each other, and being all “I can’t believe we had snow, I was pissed off!” and “You get caught with a suspended license it’s worse than not having a license at all, that’s crazy shit, bro”. I’m sitting with my iPad reading Charlie Stross and listening to Chicks on Speed and electronica on my bluetooth earphones (when I sit up and stretch Frank says “Wake up! You’re playing with that thing too much, is why”, meaning the iPad), and the TV on the wall in one corner is showing soccer as I think it usually is (more evidence that Frank is some sort of European, or maybe just that it’s the XXIst Century now).

And I put a quarter into the M&Ms-for-charity machine, and it gives me a nice handful of good old-fashioned milk-chocolate M&Ms.

Frank always charges us extra, I think, because the little boy and I never come in until our hair is longer than any other four of his customers ever let theirs get between them. But it’s probably no more than the Mall, and it’s more interesting.

On the way out, I say that I’ll be back once my hair’s long, and they laugh.

More economics shit

So I don’t understand the huge fucking deal about the weakness of the goddamned Euro. I mean, so who the fuck cares if their currency is “weak” compared to some other fucking currency? Sure, it like sounds wimpy an’ shit, like “haha dude you are Weeeeeak!”, but it’s not like really so fucking awful and like waaaaa my currency is weak and oh noooo my poor poooor balance of payments!

Some Euros or some kinda shit like that

So say you’re some Euro dude and you want to buy some foreign shit, and you go to buy it and the fucker is like “you want to buy it with what?” and like “those Euros aren’t worth jack-shit, so if you want to buy my crap you gotta give me like ten billionof ‘em”. And that’s a drag ’cause you can’t buy the foreign shit, but really you can just go to some other Euro fucker who makes the same kinda shit, and buy it from him, and he’s a Euro dude too so he’ll take just a couple Euros for it, and so you didn’t get the foreign shit that you originally wanted, but you got some similar shit, and really shit is shit, y’know?

And if you’re a Euro bastard who wants to like sell stuff to foreigners (or y’know people that Euro dudes think are foreigners, which includes like Americans who aren’t actually foreign, but you know what I mean), you are in Hog Heaven, ’cause you can be all like “my shit is one million Euros!”, and they can just go down to the bank and buy a million Euros for like nine ninety-five, and they’re like “here’s your million Euros, sucker!”, and you’re like “yes!!”, and everybody’s happy.

An’ really once enough fuckers who have real money start buying all that Euro shit ’cause Euros are so cheap, Euro stuff’ll get all like fashionable an’ shit, and everyone’ll want to buy it because it’s cheap and like Lady Fucking Ga-Ga is wearing it or anyway it’s cheap, and so people will want to buy like billions an’ billions o’ Euros to buy it with, and when some assholes want to buy tons o’ some shit the price of the shit always goes up, and so Euros’ll start to be worth more again.

So it’s, like, self-correcting an’ shit. I’n't? I mean, fuck!

Yay, I saved Europe(an bankers)!

Scene: a big fancy room in a big fancy building.

European Banker: You must help us! No one wants to trade in Euros, or borrow them at interest, or anything, because the economies that back them are all messed up!

Capitalist: This is a valuable market signal! The weak demand for, and vanishingly small interest rates on, your currency means that you are doing things wrong. You should reassess how your economies are structured and see if, for instance, they are run primarily for the benefit of politically-connected individuals and institutions who steal billions on a whim, but produce nothing of value.

European Banker: Who let him in here? GUARDS!

Shouts and scuffling, gradually receding into the distance.

European Banker: Apologies, my friends, most embarrassing.

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: No problem, mon ami, these things happen.

European Banker: But back to our problems! If there is no demand for Euros, economic activity will slow, people will have financial difficulties, perhaps even come to think that our economies are run primarily for the benefit of politically-connected individuals and institutions who steal billions on a whim, but produce nothing of value. They could demand change! We might lose power! And we really, really, really like power.

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: I understand completely, mon cher, mon coeur. It is not a problem! We will buy your Euros with our dollars, and we will pay as much for them as if they were actually valuable, and your economies healthy! We will make dollars cheap, cheap, cheap, and give you vast truckloads of them for your pretty colored Euros!

European Banker: Che bello, tesoro! That is wonderful! But what if the Euro does in fact tank? You will have huge piles of worthless colored paper!

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: Όλα θα πάνε καλά, Αγαπούλα μου! Do not worry your head! In that case, the American people will as always make up the shortfall!

European Banker: ¡hala! That is extremely generous of them!

U.S. Federal Reserve Banker: Yes! Or it would be, if they had any choice in the matter! Ha ha ha!

European Bankers: Ha ha ha! xaxa! Ja ja ja ja! mdr mdr mdr!

Exeunt omnes.

Griftopia

So I said the other day that my libertarianness was slipping because of undesirable things that can happen even in a libertarian system with everyone obeying the (comparatively few) laws.

And that may still be true (something for another post), but at the moment I’ve decided that it isn’t relevant to what’s currently going on. I’m reading Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, and he’s convinced me that what’s currently happening is mostly people getting vast sums of money through blatantly illegal actions, and then using a small fraction of those vast sums to avoid any sort of punishment for their crimes.

(And then using the less savvy parts of the Republican voter base, rebranded as the Tea Party, to create a huge noisy distraction around the premise that our problems are caused by giving poor people food stamps.)

There’s also an element of “getting vast sums of money from the government that you in no way deserve”, where a libertarian can say that, well, the government shouldn’t be structured in such a way that it can give anyone that much money, and that’s probably right.

But the general observation that if you steal enough money, quickly enough, you can then use some of it to deploy resources to avoid punishment (and even avoid capture, prosecution, indictment, discovery), probably applies to any society with anything like money in it.

How do we prevent this kind of crap? I think the need to prevent it (or at least minimize it) is one argument against the sort of libertarian minimal state. If the state is that minimal and simple, it’s not going to be able to defend itself against a really well-heeled miscreant, who can employ his stolen resources to baffle and evade the comparatively small and simple state.

Or as Taibbbi says in the book, talking specifically about Ayn Rand’s libertarianism:

Obviously it’s true that a Randian self-made millionaire can spend money on private guards to protect his mansion from B-and-E artists. But exactly where do the rest of us look in the Yellow Pages to hire private protection against insider trading? Against price-fixing in the corn and gasoline markets? Is each individual family supposed to hire Pinkertons to keep the local factory from dumping dioxin in the county reservoir?

We can tell lots of stories here about voluntary associations of private people getting together to hire some really good Pinkertons, but it’s not at all clear, given that even a non-libertarian nation-sized government has a hard time marshaling enough resources to do this sort of thing, that these voluntary associations could actually have enough clout to prevail against, or even sufficiently deter, people with the amount of money that this sort of crime can produce.

In some sense “criminals who make so much money that they can use it to escape detection and identification and prosecution” are an edge-case. But edge-cases can be ignored only if you’re sitting in your armchair opining about how much better a minimal government would be. In the real world, if there’s some edge-case that someone can use to get rich, it’s got to be at the center of our attention, however peripheral it is seen from the armchair.

Anyone else read Griftopia? Any nice comforting debunkings of it you can point us at?