I have not read the presidential policy platforms for the upcoming election, but I’d throw my support behind the first candidate that agrees to standardize the red, yellow, green button for credit. Every store is different, yellow for credit, green for credit, red for credit and I seem to always be wrong and some kid behind the counter looks at me like I’m an ogre from a prior century. I push green and they say something like, “yellow for credit,” as they reach over and cancel my transaction in disgust and say, “you gotta start over.”
In some parts of the country, thieves are treated better in stores than the “wrong button for credit” crowd, of which I am a member. Walk in and steal all the ephedrine, no problem. Screw up the credit card transaction and they want to ban you for life. We live in crazy times.
I know that we are not good at standardizing things in this country. We kind of fumbled the metric system and let’s all agree that standardizing education testing has not gone well. But I think with the right leadership we can get this done.
I don’t mean to bemoan a point, but I’d really like that fourth grade year back when we started to convert to metric. Seems like that was stolen time from my generation. We could have learned how credit card machines worked or something more useful than millimeters and centimeters.
You know what else needs fixed? Gas can pour things. Yeah, those things are so safe now, I can’t even get the gas out of them. Need an engineering degree to fill up the mower.
I want one of those straight tubes with no safety that my grandpa had on his gas can. Straight up pour, no air gap locks, no special releases, just a damn tube that pours gas out. These are things that we could get excited about. You guys can fight about abortion and guns, I’m all about gas can pour things and “green for credit” candidates.
Platte County Prosecutor Eric Zahnd got us all up to date on river law last week. Zahnd’s not only a lawyer, he’s a judge’s son and he can’t help himself from speaking legalese, but he basically said don’t be doing crime on his side of the river and they know which part of the river is theirs. Something like that.
Foley texted me in the middle of the night on Monday (it was near 10 p.m.) and gave me the deets on the new jail. Platte County is gearing up to be the Capitol of County Jails in the region. A skyscraper of prisoners stacked on prisoners. Get ready for the cooperative agreement talk with area jurisdictions, which is jail talk for taking on prisoners from other counties. I’m also a big fan of jail economics. Almost every jurisdiction that has ever built a jail remembers every single part about operational costs and revenues except the pesky depreciation cost.
The” filling beds” talk begins to outpace the obvious fact that more prisoners bring greater costs to the daily operation and more importantly the long-term impact on the facilities. While they’re bragging about outside contract revenues, the jail you built them will begin crumbling from the moment the first prisoner enters the place and those costs will be all but ignored; count on that.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or discussing jail economics with his friends)
