The New and the Old; An Expose' of the Aged

Our young friend is not a migrant worker. I’m not sure how the local farmers can get by with having children as young as 10 detassle but it’s quite popular around here. Brad’s in his third year of detassling now. Pioneer Seed employs hundreds of young children as detasslers and busses them all over northern Illinois.

Oooo…Mary’s and my very first computer. We played Radar Rat Race and Pong on it. In the mid '80’s, we graduated to a $1500 Zenith desktop computer with two 5 1/4" floppy drives. I was told that I could get a hard drive cheaper by mail order, so I bought a 20 Mb hard drive from Seagate. We were told to stay away from the 30 Mb drives because they were still trying to work out the operational bugs.

that’s ridiculous.

Seagate still makes good drives today…

No, this is ridiculous.

Life’s rough on sesame street.

I am wondering if this won’t change as oil prices rise and the cost of shipping becomes a major issue. We may start to look for closer supplier of products. I am starting to buy locally whenever I can which is pretty rare because there is not much manufacturing up here.

Interesting! It never occurred to me that I might have to care. It also never occurred to me that maybe I should care.

But we don’t necessarily know the implementation details. We don’t know the location of the warehouse from which the product will be shipped. You may order from a place many states away, but the item may ship from your home state. Maybe the other way around. Or… doesn’t FedEx ship everything to a central processing facility? If so, you would want to order from a place near that facility (to be the most green).

Sidebar: On occasion, I’ve needed a computer part right away, so I would find a place on the west coast that would ship today via overnight. Since west coast stores are open “later” than east coast stores, this time difference has allowed me to get something by the next morning – while ordering it at 5 PM. That’s an example of picking a store that is as far away as possible.

Does that mean that everything shipped by Fed Ex goes through one facility regardless of where it is going and where it is from?

Most things that we buy have already made a huge trip already from where it was made. I think that a lot of resources are shipped from Canada to Asia were it is used for manufacturing and then shipped back as a product. I wonder if it works like this;
Some steel is shipped from Vancouver to China where it is made into a unicycle. It is then shipped to Vancouver where it goes by truck to the central warehouse of the retailer in Ontario. The unicycle is then ordered by someone in Vancouver. :smiley:

That’s what I heard long ago. I’m trying to verify that. Here is a page that seems to validate that idea (the animation on the page is no longer available, but the text indicates a central hub). I’m still looking for a better source.

It’s mostly the case, but not 100%. If I ship something from Atlanta to a location here in the city, it gets pulled and redirected here, and not through Memphis. Most everything else does though.

The hub and spoke idea makes sense for an oil rich economy. We have all been used to this and have taken fuel costs for granted. I wonder if it will change as fuel gets more scarce or will it just get more expensive?

I recently played a gig up in Dawson City Yukon and I payed the most I have ever payed for gas $1.79/litre or 6.78/US gallon. We are paying $1.44 /litre ($5.45/US gallon) here right now. I remember paying $0.49/litre when I first started driving and it was probably even cheaper in the US. I find that we plan our route now to be more efficient when we need to go get something and often wait until we have a few different errands to run before we go just to save money.
I think that the younger generations coming up will probably have to look at things travel and fuel related differently.

Hi Bugman!!!

Where have you been?!

How the heck are you? I hope well.

Billy

Everything is great! Thanks for asking. Picked up part time work at Walmart to deal with the rising price of gas. Then I realized it was costing more to get there than I was making. So I just quit making my house payment and am waiting for my check to pay off the mortgage. :wink: Seriously, just busting my hump to get ahead, and spending time with the family. I just completed a 24 hour fundraiser called 24 Hours of Booty in Charlotte, NC and that was the most uni riding I had done in months. I jammed my knee pretty good about three months back and have been a little nervous free mounting the Coker. After 45 miles of riding this weekend, I had no issues with that knee. I hope it stays that way.

Bah… Reminds me of the people who have never used DOS :wink: Actually reminds me of a reversed “Old Folks” story… My mother complained that the Linux LiveCD I gave her wasn’t really Unix because it booted into a GUI. She needed to brush up on her Unix command-line skills before a job interview, and couldn’t find the Terminal program… She can’t take care of her Windows XP computer, but she knows her way around Unix :wink:

On the other hand, my dad still remembers picking up the phone, talking to “Central” and asking to be connected to “7”. Yes, he had a friend with a single-digit phone number.