Organizations don't work well when their budget can change dramatically from one year to the next. There's no ability to take on long-term plans when another, popular department takes 50% of your budget, or someone in your PR department makes a gaffe. Long-term employees get laid off and won't return in a few years when your budget goes back up.
Off on a bit of a tangent, I 100% agree with you, and that was probably the best feature of California's Prop 13 from 1978. After it passed, the projected income to Sacramento was rock-solid for decades. California doesn't have an income problem; it has a spending problem.
Still, I would welcome the opportunity to let Sacramento know that, in my opinion, they spend too much on education and welfare and not enough on infrastructure.
It also doesn't help that for school backpacks, the buyer and the user are different people. There is less incentive to take care of stuff, and when it breaks, parents are more likely to blame a bad backpack than to blame their children.
One silver lining is that backpack industry doesn't have a huge moat. New companies can get started relatively easily as the older ones sell out and decay.
The bags I bought 15 years ago were made locally in San Francisco - Timbuk2 and Chrome - and had a reputation for quality. Now both brands are mainly produced overseas, but have been replaced by two other local brands with ties to the originals - Rickshaw and Mission Workshop.
Just checked how much a movie costs near me, apparently it's $30 for a single ticket during the day where no one with a day job can go to anyway. Plus they insult your time with 30 minutes of pre-movie ads and overpriced snacks.
I'll just wait six months or more until the movie comes out to streaming. At least I can pause it while I go to the bathroom. Little wonder that people would rather talk about TV series that provide slower, more refined plot development and character arcs over a few months instead of a highly compressed two hour movie.
I read all the chapters on the hiking and falling deaths before I hiked rim-to-rim. So many of them are "Family hikes down to the canyon, young child complains of heat. Sits down and dies." Or "Someone takes a shortcut, walks down an un-climbable hill. Dies of exposure."
There were a lot of completely unprepared tourists on the way up to the South Rim. They had walked down a little bit and couldn't walk back up. We weren't in great condition ourselves but we had been hiking for the past 12 hours.
If you're a US employee being paid market wages, the cost of the Macbook is rather trivial compared to how much you cost the company, and how much it costs them for you to be not working. But some lower-level managers and employees don't seem to understand this.
reply