The mulch economy

Elf had a load of mulch delivered down the front of the house on Friday. Her masterplan to get it up to the backyard was to pay 25¢ per bucketload to the boys and any other kids we could press-gang on the weekend. On Sunday morning Marcus, Cameron and Lana got into the task eagerly, in fact so eagerly that Elf soon decreed a $10 cap on what she would pay any one urchin. I acted as foreman/tally clerk. I was also preventing Winston running out the open gate, and reading news off the internet, cumbersomely copied from the net-connected computer downstairs onto this offline laptop.

I think all three kids got up to $10 in the end. Michael participated occasionally, but kept swapping his bucket for smaller and odder containers, culminating with a medium-size jam jar.

I am also paying Marcus 10¢ a time to blow his nose at the moment. Before I "monetized" the situation, every time I would ask him to blow rather than snort disgustingly (he was usually reading or playing games on his i-pod at the time) he would complain that blowing his nose hurt. Apparently it hurts a lot less when it gets you 1/30th of the way to a pack of football cards.

Unprecedented since Terminator 2

A couple of weeks ago at work, I was feeling pretty fed up. I had the flu, I was stuck on a boring repetitive task, and I started thinking about all the bills we had piling up. For the last six months or so I've been pretty bored at work. I used to not fuss too much about my salary, as I found my work largely its own reward. But now I was moved to do a little research on comparative salaries. As I suspected, my salary bumps along near the bottom of the band of pay for similar jobs. Everyone knows pay in Tasmania is always lower than the national average, but maybe it would be nice to be at the bottom of the middle rather than in the middle of the bottom.

We live a reasonably spartan life. Of course we are much better off than many, many people. We can afford to eat, and feed a cat and dog. We get takeaways perhaps once a week these days. We have a reliable car, a lovely house, we don't miss our mortgage payments. But we don't buy books or CDs or magazines, we buy clothes for the kids but not ourselves, we scoff at iPads and bluRay bluetooth-enabled telephone wireless dishwashers.

So anyway, before I had a chance to have second thoughts, I emailed my boss and said hey - can we talk about a payrise? I have worked for the same dynamic film producer/director couple since 1991, with a couple of breaks when their business (and me with it) have been bought out and they have gone off to start something new. I haven't ever asked them for a pay rise. That's Nineteen Ninety One, people! Nirvana! Bob Hawke! Terminator 2! Mobile phones the size of a car battery!

So asking for a pay rise was a big deal. I had a meeting with my 3 bosses today - I didn't get a raise, but we had a good long chat about the prognosis for one down the track. Roar Film is very dependent on our export product going to the UK, and things have tightened up there lately. Ours is not a workplace where the staff are constantly told 'business is bad - work harder and don't complain!" - we cruise along blissfully ignorant of the big picture mostly. I appreciated them taking me seriously enough to all make time to go through the big picture with me, and I elicited a bit of appreciation for the work I have been doing. We stopped short of a group hug, but I think we all left happy.

In the last 6 months I have keyed out the green screen background on hours of interview footage, sometimes the same footage over and over when it's edited into different packages. And it's been driving me loopy. The good news is that a couple of more interesting jobs have plopped out of the chute this week, and I am enjoying a break from the dreaded green screen. My current gig is all about the Sunshine Harvester - the fact that I'm finding it deeply interesting reflects pretty poorly on what I've been doing lately.

What can you buy with US$1 trillion?

A podcast I love called Common Sense with Dan Carlin just referred me to this blog article. It's a bit of an eye-opener. If you are easily frightened by large numbers, look away now. This article refers to the US Federal government bailout plan. All costings in US$.

By Barry Ritholtz - November 25th, 2008, 7:19AM

Whenever I discussed the current bailout situation with people, I find they have a hard time comprehending the actual numbers involved. That became a problem while doing the research for the Bailout Nation book. I needed some way to put this into proper historical perspective.

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

______________________________________________________________________

data courtesy of Bianco Research

That is $686 billion less than the cost of the credit crisis thus far.

The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II: Original Cost: $288 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion

The $4.6165 trillion dollars committed so far is about a trillion dollars ($979 billion dollars) greater than the entire cost of World War II borne by the United States: $3.6 trillion, adjusted for inflation (original cost was $288 billion).

Go figure: WWII was a relative bargain.

I estimate that by the time we get through 2010, the final bill may scale up to as much as $10 trillion dollars…