Here we go again

[altivo]

The rain is back. At least this time it comes with entertaining lightning and distant thunder. My dog rarely gets up on the bed, but last night he did because thunder worries him a lot (even though he's 13 years old now and growing hard of hearing.) This afternoon we had severe thunderstorm warnings, though nothing materialized. First they said it would pass north of us. Half an hour later they changed and said it was headed right for us. It actually went south of us.

So the news says that General Motors has been dropped from the Dow Industrial "Average". This is apparently a normal practice. When a stock no longer performs well enough, it is dropped and something else put in its place. They replaced GM with Cisco. That's hardly a direct substitution. Seems to me a hardware manufacturer of consumer products should be replaced by another company that does the same. But this just goes to prove that the DJIA is antiquated and does not deserve the psychological "weight" that is assigned to it. The economy is very poor now, so we should believe that it suddenly got better because a healthy stock is substituted for a very unhealthy one in the measuring scale? In order for the average to be a meaningful value, the decline in GM's stock price should show there, should it not? But that's bad for business if you're a broker or mutual fund "pusher" so they redo the supposed measuring mechanism to make it look better.

This is like when, instead of raising prices, the seller changes the size of the container. "Now, less sodium than ever." Well yeah, because now there's less tuna in the can than ever. It only weighs 5 ounces instead of the 6 it weighed last year or the 7 it weighed when I was a teenager.

Your waistline is embarrassingly large? No problem, let's just use this magical tape measure that has extra big inches. Look, now you're only a 32 instead of a 48.

Governments have been doing this for a long time, so I suppose it's no surprise that the stock market pundits should be doing the same thing. "Hey look, unemployment has gone down!" (Because we stopped counting people as unemployed if their unemployment compensation ran out...) "See, there's no warming trend!" (Or at least you'll have trouble figuring it out because we just switched from Fahrenheit to Celsius readings. A 20° temperature sounds MUCH cooler than 68°, right?

Bah, humbug.

Comments

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Gad more rain for you, it's been raining here a fair bit everything is wet and miserable, and the carpets are starting to smell rather musty.

I kind of like them making food sizes smaller rather than increasing the price as then I eat less :)

I hope this bankrupty and restructuring helps GM change their attitude when it comes to producing cars.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Smaller food packages are OK. It's the dishonesty with which they advertise that really offends me. Like when the ice cream makers started reducing their half gallon package down to 28 ounces or whatever it is, they put on the box "Now, more convenient size." More convenient for whom?

I'm afraid GM is hopeless. They just don't get it. They've had plenty of opportunity to look farther into the future than six months, and have failed again and again. This was inevitable. Chrysler has the same problem. Ford is doing just slightly better and may actually survive because at least part of their design and management had already been pushing for more efficient cars and production methods.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Food packages saying "fun size" have always been my bugbear since I was a wee kitten. At least most now say, snack or treat size.