The poster child for the devaluation of the dollar is Mac and Cheese

The poster child for the devaluation of the American dollar is Mac and Cheese.

I'm not going to be politically correct when I say, "Everyone knows that mac and cheese is poor people food." Now that I've gotten that out, I just want to say I've eaten a lot of it in my life, it's extremely affordable, and offers little nutritional value and mostly fat, fat, and more fat. That's why it tastes good. Does America have an obesity epidemic? Why yes it does. But I'm not here to talk about that, or why Americans buy so much of this stuff...no, I'm going to rant about how mac and cheese is now the staple in fine food restaurants.

It seems that fine food establishments (consider steak houses like Flemings for example) all now have gourmet mac and cheese offerings on their menu. I've ordered quite a few of these. You know what the secret is? Some off-the-collar ingredient that they already have to order "in bulk" to cover their steaks and to stuff other things with. Outback is now offering "Mac and cheese with lobster" which will just be mac and cheese with chopped up lobster bits that they couldn't use on anything else. But you can see this crap everywhere. "Mac and cheese with truffle infusion."

"Oh you just took mac and cheese and chopped up mushrooms in it. How much you charging? $15 bucks a side dish? And you got some bread crumbs to top that with?! Baby sign me the hell UP!"

Another great restaurant here in SLC that I like to visit called Zy has some snooty mac and cheese dish. Again, it has prosciutto (or ham to the layman) or something like that stuffed in it to justify the expense. 

It reminds me a lot of house flippers. You know the kind (I'm getting increasingly frustrated by them, because I'm looking for a good value in a house to own). These house flippers are like vultures, pounding on doors, running teams of people, pressuring owners to sell, and scooping up properties the instant they go to short sale so a Joe like me who has a day job and just wants to own a house...if I'm a second late...the value is gone with five bids on it.

So what do I have a beef about with house flippers...the fact that they think they can throw one ingredient in a pile of crap and increase the price by $100,000. Seriously. This seems to be the case on a house I was interested in. Seized for $140,000...new coat of paint, new carpet, granite countertops and new cabinets and that's it. No landscaping or nothing. And boom back on the market in four weeks for $240,000. WTF?!

All while the houses around it are in the $140,000 range. How does that even work?

Imagine going to a nice brunch with your significant other. The waiter comes out and charges you for bottled water when all they are doing is filling up the same bottle in the back with tap water. Then they present their new $15.00 specialty. "Will you be having the Charms de la Luck?" Sure you say and order it.

They bring out a bowl of Lucky Charms cereal, only instead of the normal marshmallows in it, they've cut up a package of Circus Peanuts.

I would scream!!!

But that seems to be happening all over the United States. It's called ripping people off, and I'm getting sick of it. Where is the value? I don't think it exists anymore (yes, I know this is a pessimistic attitude).

As authors we work (sometimes for up to a year or longer) to produce a story that costs $2.99 to buy. THAT's a frickin' value. America used to be about value. Now it just seems more and more (outside of authors) that everything is about ripping the next guy off, about taking a shortcut, about hiding expenses or charging outrageous amounts for something that should be really cheap to produce.

Cheap ass work. The person who did this on a new house should be
caned like they do to litterbugs in Singapore because cement is the most
expensive ingredient, and they knew it would hold up for two years. By
that time, they are long gone, and you are stuck with a bucket of crap.

I see it in concrete driveways that start to flake after just two years. Do you know why concrete flakes? It's because the person that poured it shorted you on your cement (an ingredient in concrete that costs the most money).

I was in a house recently rewiring a light switch for my job. I took off the cover plate (which was mysteriously cracked-like why would that happen?) and discovered that a three-box was actually a two-box and a one-box wedged together and all bent to force the faceplate to fit (which is why it cracked over time). The contractor knew exactly what he was doing and cheated the homeowner by doing a crap job.

My friend James and I have a meme that we do whenever we hang together. It's called, "Where does a rich guy get his money?" The answer is always the same: "Off the backs of the middle class."

Think about that the next time you go on a date with your loved one and splurge for a nice restaurant, and you see Mac and Cheese on the menu. Ask yourself, where is the risotto? Well that would be too hard to make money on now wouldn't it?

/end rant

Have a great Wednesday. :)

Thinking About the American Dream

Tonight is the State of the Union address and because of that, I've been thinking about the American Dream. The New York Times recently featured an article with the title "How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work". The complete article can be found online here. I read it completely through, and I wanted to talk about what I read because it's a rather bleak commentary on the disappearing middle class.  By way of Apple as an example of the ultimate capitalist paradigm, the author pretty much tells us why prosperity for the middle class (as was realized last century) is never coming back no matter what politicians want you to believe. If you don't have time to read it, here are my highlights:

1) Barack Obama asked Steve Jobs at a dinner, "What would it take to make iPhones in the United States." The late Mr. Jobs replied, "Those jobs aren't coming back."

2) Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products. 

There's so much wrong with this picture and the intentional misspelling
of "America" that I don't even know where to begin.

3) Jared Bernstein, former economic adviser to the White House, said “Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now." 

4) FoxConn in Shenzhen built a factory, stocked it with already cut glass to Apple's specifications, and had workers living in dormitories ready to work 12-hour shifts even before there was a contract to work with Apple. They did this to be more appealing to their potential customer, and it worked. This simply couldn't be done in America.

5) The facility employs 230,000 people working six-days a week making less than $17 a day. 

6) One of the selling points for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days. 

7) "[T]he challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said. 

8) “We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

This is from the Global Competitiveness Report. It measures America's educational
system rank as compared to other countries. The criteria is education expenditure,
quality of math and science education, and quality of primary education.

9) In the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

So my question to you is, do you agree with Apple that the U.S. no longer produces a workforce with enough education to meet the demands of technology companies? If you agree, why? Are people just not motivated to go to school anymore?

In number 2 above, Apple basically calls Americans lazy. Would you agree? Are Americans fat cats sitting around waiting for a lot of money for a little work?

Does the item printed in number 4 at all surprise you? That they would stock and build a factory without any promise of money? Is that what it's going to take to be competitive?

These are workers submitting resumes for jobs at one of the factories at

 Shenzhen. There's such a huge pool of people just begging for a job

 that all the power rests with the employer. Basically, a single worker on his

own is completely disposable. It makes me wonder if the babies brought into

 this world will know a life better than us, or if in fact, we are bringing

them into a world where they will not be able to support themselves and will 

be doomed to live in poverty while the rich remain rich.