Steve and Judy's Travels!

The hummingbird infestation persists.

Egg cartons.  Soft puffy cardboard.  Maybe add in a paper towel cardboard core.  Shred by hand and place in bowl.  Add hot water from the tap and let stand.

Some hours later, smush it a bit with your hands, stir with your fingers, and call it good.

The result?  Compostable cardboard mush.  Take it outside and dump it in the compost tumblers with the shredded yard clippings.

Roadside flowers.

We have real air conditioning again!

When we got home from our July trip, the air didn’t work at all.  A repair guy got it running by that evening, but we realized after a couple days it wasn’t running at full output.  As the outside temperature went up from the 90s to the 100s, the inside temperature went up from the 70s to the 80s.  First World problem, right?  It didn’t seem that bad, so we rode it out for a while, waiting for the heat wave to pass.  Well now we’ve had over 80 days this summer of triple digit temperatures with no end in sight.  (The old record was 62 days.)   Once we decided to get the AC fixed, it took some time to get it diagnosed properly and another 10 days for the critical part to arrive.

Today.  Full air conditioning.  We set the indoor temperature.  It stays there.  Most excellent!

Let’s say excellence should be rewarded.  How do we know how much it should be rewarded?  We have a process for that.  It’s the free-market capitalist system.  Put it out there and see how much people are willing to pay for that excellence.  The price will be what the market will bear.  Makes perfect sense, right?  Until it doesn’t.

Should there be a limit?  A professional athlete gets a 100-million-dollar contract.  That’s what the market will bear.  This person is good, but are they really a thousand times, or ten thousand times better at doing what they do than everybody else on the planet is at doing what they do?

Okay, I’ll reel it back a little.  How about corporate executives.  In 1965, on average, CEOs made 20 times what the workers at their companies made.  (Source: Economic Policy Institute.)  That seems like a big gap, but there is probably logic to justify it.  CEOs do important things.  But in 2021, the ratio of CEO to employee compensation increased to 399 to 1.  (Source: Economic Policy Institute.)  Any chance that’s excessive?  Were CEOs 20 times more important than each worker in 2021, and now they’re 399 times more important?

So, here’s my thought.  Maybe there should be salary caps for corporations.  There could be a rule that CEOs are only 20 times more important than the average worker and that should be their salary cap.  If they want to make more money, then the workers should get more money too.  I don’t care about the exact multiple.  Let it be 10, or 50, or 100.  Whatever’s fair.  Just because our free-market system produces sensible results in some cases doesn’t mean we should unquestioningly accept every result it produces.