Sales

Little One came home from school to find me in bed today. After giving her usual sorry for getting me sick and some small chit chat she goes

"Daddy, can you become a car salesman?"

Me : !!!! Why?

LO : So I can have a room to myself, we can have a second floor in our house and have grand birthday parties in our house and a pony in our backyard and pretty much anything we want!

Me : 1. Why do you need all that? and 2. Who told you that car salesman have all that?

LO : Muffy's dad is a car salesman and Muffy has all that. No other kids in hehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifr class have all that! Only Muffy. Her dad's http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifname is Ed Crosswire and he is a car salesman!

Me : Do I know him? Have I seen him in your school?

LO : No.. No.. he is not real. He comes in "Arthur"!

Me : !!!!!!!!!!! Starting tomorrow you two are not going to watch anymore Arthur. We are done with this living in Arthur world and watching the same episodes of Arthur on the ipad day after day.

LO: Fine. But can you be a car salesman?

Me : What ?! That is a TV program. Real life car salesman are not that rich and living in mansions and you don't need any of that stuff. You should be happy with what you got!

LO : I am happy. Just wanted to check that is all..


Sometimes it is very difficult to answer these kids and set them straight. Even a supposedly educational program like Arthur on PBS kids can have devastating effects.. Who knew?!


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Recycling

With an injured foot and no doctor appointment in sight, was working from home this morning.

The kids who do not have school the whole of this week were overjoyed that I was in the house, but saddened by the fact that daddy was locked inside a room and was in phone meetings for the entire morning.

At noon, Jr. and the little one were already fed and ready to go for their naptime.

LO : Daddy please stay at home. Don't go to office. If you are home I will huggie you more!
Me : Thanks da kuttyma, but I have to go to office. Only then I will get money.
Jr.: What if we give you money?
LO : Yeah. We will give you money. Then you can stay at home.
Me : Where do you guys have money?
Jr.: We have been saving the money and coins that mommy and grandma gave us!

They were so sweet. They gave up all the money they had in two ziploc bags, all 2 dollars and 43 cents of it!

Didn't have the heart to tell them "No, I don't want your money" or "it takes a lot more money for me to stay home with you guys".. and while all this was going through my mind Jr. chips in with

"Appa, if we keep giving you the money you give to us, then you don't have to go to work!"

Now, that sentence sent me reeling. According to Madras paati, aka my mom, some astrologer did predict that Jr. will become an accountant when she grows up. Chances are she is going to become one, and she will play an important part in the 2034 recession, which will be the biggest recession in recorded history!

With this concept of giving the same money back and forth multiple times, so many daddy's are already home permanently. So decided to go into a lecture on economics, job, money, time, daddy, kids, love etc. etc. and the kids gave me one glassy eyed look and ran away to grandma saying

"Paati, please come nap with us!"

Daddy escaped!


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We are like that only !

This phrase is more popular in India.

Do not know if some famous Indian head honcho said this and it became some kind of classic quote, so readers please provide a link to the origin of "We are like that only!", if you have it.

Now, this is used usually in a defensive state, as in "dont tell us how we are doing, dont complain about how we run things, etc. etc." and it ends with "we are like that only!".

It is high time Americans adopted the phrase.

Why?

The US economy is going through its worst time
Taxpayers are going to be taxed more with all bailouts
Money is literally being pumped in to the same channels which got the US in this mess and

While all this goes on two news items today catch my ears:

1. Citibank gives bonuses to employees in the form of cards with $1,000 to $3,000 loaded in them!

2. American express decides to offer 300 bucks to a bunch of American express card holders, if they would close their credit card account and pay their bills.

Here is the funny part according to what I heard on the radio.

Let us say, you have $ 500 left in your amex Card. Now you transfer the balance to another credit card, thereby essentially paying off the Amex card, you get $ 300 from Amex!

You just made 300 bucks courtesy of some bailout money for which guys like me are busting everything they got working 18 hours a day, 6 days a week! It is however sad that you are still in debt by 200 bucks.

If you happened to transfer your balance to Citibank, the guy who gave you that credit card offer will get another bonus for his brilliant ability to get "more business" and they will give him another $3,000 gift card, courtesy of more of taxpayer money. I will probably have to work 18 hours a day all seven days a week!

If the person whose account Amex is trying to close is as fiscally responsible like I expect him to be (I am literally rolling on the floor laughing at my own sarcasm with happy and sad tears), he/she will figure out a way to transfer the balance do some juggling and get a perpetual payout machinery.

Before you know it, a couple of more billion dollars will be syphoned out of the system.

At that point I will be working 27 hours a day nine days a week!

Hi, if you think that cannot happen, think again. There is no bottoming out of this crisis. The next bailout to bailout the previous bailout will be approximately 10 Trillion dollars and it will involve bailing out rotten banks, loan brokers, real estate agents, mortgage lenders, wall street firms, insurance agents, credit card companies, etc. etc.


What to do?

We are like that only!


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Pound wise, is the penny foolish?

It has been a tough week!

Jr. came home from school with an assignment where the teacher had a simple comment, "barely meets standard". The assignment was on counting coins!

Considering that she can do upto adding 8+ a number less than 10, it would be surprising if she could count money. The thing that annoyed me was that in spite of spending an hour with her, it was not easy to teach because there are some fundamental problems with counting money, as seen in the eyes of a kindergardener!

There are also some fundamental problems with seeing money the way it is, in the eyes of a metallurgist!

Here is part primer, part facts, part frustration on what I call "Monetary economics"!

First a quick photo tour of the coins in one shot and some related facts the kids are supposed to remember! (this is on top of the counting).



Pictured in front and back are the most common penny, nickel, dime and quarter. The pictures are those of :
Lincoln / Lincoln Memorial
Jefferson / Monticello
Roosevelt / Wreath
Washington / The Bald Eagle

That said, the coins in the USA are not exactly easy to grasp. Why?

We don't call them 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents and 25 cents. We have to call them penny, nickel, dime and quarter respectively. That is one additional layer of memorization that has to be registered. Mentally they have to convert dime to ten before doing a transation. Any guy worth his computational salt will tell you that it is inefficiency built into the counting process.

Next, the coins do not go from smallest to biggest in size (or biggest to smallest like in other countries where the higher denomiations are made of more precious metal and end up smaller coins)! The Nickel sticks out like a, well sore nickel!

Third, the color and lustre of the coins does not show any gradual change from copper to silvery metal. The nickel is dull. The quarter is equally dull considering its composition is the same as the nickel but somehow the finishing leaves it slightly more shiny! The penny is in a world of its own.

As a kid, it would be difficult if the monetary value did not follow the sequence in nomenclature, size, weight, color or texture!

That left me puzzled. That did not make any sense. One would assume(if you have an undergraduate degree in Metallurgy), that the monetary value of a coin is in some way related to the metal content! That said, daddy faded into the background earlier this afternoon and Metallurgist took over. After going through the web for various facts and fact checking, I present to you the table below:



Have not found any table as a quick reference guide yet on my web surfing, so who knows this compilation might actually find some use!

Now for some facts. The US Mint kept changing metallic compositions of the various coins because as metal prices fluctuated, the cost of making certain coins was significantly more than the value of a coin!

If you look at the old compositions of coins at todays metal prices it looks like the quarter will be worth $2.9 and a dime worth $1.15 and the penny would be worth 2 cents! Understandably zinc got subsituted for copper and the silver is all gone from today's currency. Still by todays standard, the metal value of these coins is not a 1:5:10:25 but a 1:11:4:10. Again, it is the nickel that sticks out and it is the root cause of all counting mistakes made by Jr.!

The penny makes sense today having a metal value of 0.6 cents (sure there is manufacturing cost, which would be hard to keep at 0.4 cents in the future, unless the manufacturing eventually moves to China. A thought which has been considered by economists!).

Pound wise, it is the Nickel that does not make sense!

Hopefully, will be able to teach Jr. to count money...


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