- Georgie James is breaking up, and breaking my heart in the process.
- Local school board is planning to put security cameras in selected cafeterias to prevent theft. The economy must be dire indeed if people are reduced to stealing school cafeteria food.
- Shell has started a weekly gasoline lottery--buy gas from them, and become eligible to win free gas.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
What is the meaning of the last sentence?
Silly Megan.
Nobody is going to be nostalgic for the aughts.
If people can be nostalgic for WW2, the Great Depression, and Disco, they will be nostalgic about anything.
Who's Georgie James?
Please Megan, we both know you're smarter than this. The cost of the CCTV system would be greater than the cost of the stolen food even if they could eliminate all theft (which the system won't, but it will mitigate it greatly).
So why is this happening? Lawsuit prevention. Not sure what kind of lawsuit they're hoping to prevent, but that's pretty much the only cost that could justify the expense.
Any guesses?
Things that make your readers feel old:
According to this article (click on my name for the link):
I’m not sure how much it would cost to install surveillance cameras in six school cafeteria but losing $1.2 million in theft makes it worth at least considering.
Considering you can buy simple systems at Costco for a hundred bucks, I figure for $1.2 million you could put in sharks with frick'n HDTV cameras on their heads.
Well color me shocked! I was assuming a hundred grand or so at the most. In this case, perhaps it does become cost effective.
I used to work on these systems. To cover the critical areas of the cafeteria (3-5 cameras) and have recording capability (system is useless without it) we're looking at the 20-50K per installation for a mid-range to good system, including the multiplexers, monitors, and recorders.
That's the peanuts, however. The real cost comes in monitoring the system.. active monitoring will be required for this system (theft deterrent/catching).
Totally not worth it for the 100K or so I was assuming... and to be honest, I'm not even so sure about the real amount (only 200K per school). But if they're getting a "tryout" they're likely getting a good deal from some vendor.
Of course, if they just want theft deterrence, make some press releases and put up fake cameras all over the place... practically zero cost and about the same effectiveness... perhaps that's what is going on ;)
ahh crap. those little details that you miss sometimes:
Most of the hardware is already there. Now we're talking 2-10K per location (depending on expansion available and quality of cameras). That definitely falls into the "worth it" category.
Even if they had to put in the whole thing from scratch, a CCTV system isn't a one-use item like a road flare; it's a capital investment. It doesn't deter just one year's worth of theft and then vanish (unless perhaps you know somthing relevant and disturbing about the build quality on commercial-grade CCTV systems).
Nostalgia is so 1990s.
I'm with "the puzzled one", I'm having trouble parsing that last sentence. Maybe our hostess could shed some light?
"Of course, the radio will undoubtedly be itself an anachronism that was only introduced in 2010 models."
It seems to be suggesting that in this nostalgia film 25 years hence we will hear some of these "oldies" on the radio to indicate, nostalgically, the time period (aka now), but that having a radio will be an anachronism as it won't be introduced until the 2010 models.
So, I suppose it's sort of like having a radio playing tunes of the era in a movie set in the 1900's, which would be an anachronism.
But I'm trying to figure out why radio would be "introduced" on the 2010 models? What kind of "models" are we talking about? I think of that as referring to cars but surely in 25 years people will still remember that we had radio in cars already, yes? Or is this some new-fangled kind of radio?
Or perhaps we're talking about new models of something else? But what? There seems to be no hint given...
My alma mater is one of the schools trying out the new surveillance system. It makes sense since Mount Vernon is the county's smallest school by population, and that population is by-and-large pretty poor (Route 1 corridor) by Northern Virginia standards.
It's interesting that the article notes that the theft happens in rich and poor schools alike, which doesn't really surprise me. The kids I knew who had the stickiest fingers were rich. They just did it for the thrill.
If it's playing on the radio, it will be a streaming webcast on the family laptop - probably of NPR. If it's in the car, well, it will be Stern on Sirius: that's the voice of the aughts.
Me, I miss Paul Harvey.
The anachronism line was incomprehensible. But "The economy must be dire indeed if people are reduced to stealing school cafeteria food." is probably the best line of the month, any blog.
What she means is that the model of radio on which these things are heard in the hypothetical future film will be one that did not exist in 2008, and was only introduced on 2010 cars, or whatever. Like seeing a car with an iPod dock in a movie set in 1995.
Yes, cwp is right. Megan means that when the "Forrest Gump" of the year 2033 is made, romantically traveling through the years 1990 to 2008, some idiot in production design will show a car radio that didn't actually exist before the year 2010.
I mention Forrest Gump because it's a good example of this phenomenon: it shows Forrest going to Vietnam in 1967 over a music background of "Fortunate Son," a song from 1970. Movies do this all the time, not just with songs but with physical items that are chronologically out of place.
Within a few years we'll be seeing, in whatever media is dominating, some kind of "That 90's Show," and you'll see it happen in every episode.
"Shell has started a weekly gasoline lottery--buy gas from them, and become eligible to win free gas."
Now where are our Congress people (I mean babysitters) to outlaw this form of gambling. We need to be protected from harming ourselves.
One elementary school had 2000 gallons of heating oil stolen. And fast-food places are starting to fall victim to frying oil thefts. So I have no problem believing the food thefts from elementary schools.
I'm sure the kids would be ecstatic to have sharks with or without hd cameras on their heads. Maybe sharks armed with lasers, like laser tag.
If CWP has her meaning right, a more felicitous phrasing might be:
"Of course, the radio model itself will undoubtedly be an anachronism that was only introduced in 2010."
As written, it simply didn't parse (it sounded like the ANACHRONISM was introduced in 2010 models).
Bah, on reading it again, mine's not much better.
Can't really improve on CWP's phrasing anyway.
"Nstalgia is so 1990s."
Ryan W., I am stealing that line.
The car could be a 2010 model. The radio model... what innovation is possible in radio models? We've progressed from "radio buttons" to basically "any interface will do", so circa 2008 we have radio buttons, dials, touch-screens, voice recognition, etc.
Humorlessness aside, yes, nostalgia movies do include anachronisms, but in this postmodern era you can suspect that even the anachronisms serve some purpose, maybe as an inner joke or (most likely) as a clue to some people to identify it and feel "superior" for a fleeting moment (after said moment, they will feel just older than 51% of the audience).
I was playing a 1994 CD yesterday in the car, and one of the songs was the first one I taught my elder kid. She sang along. Sometime during the song playing I realized that said kid was born after the song was released, and some very strange endorphine transactions took place inside of me.
(Artist: Tippex - Disc: Your life in a lafa - released 1994)
Georgie James is breaking up?? Nooooo, they were together too short to break up already, and their first album was so great! :(
Some years ago, a new-hire administrator at Kohala Hospital deduced that the food service manager was stealing food, so he fired the foor service manager. The food service manager's union (HGEA, an AFSCME subsidiary) protested, and called for an audit. Health Department auditors found nothing amiss, so the new-hire administrator's job was on the line. He hired an outside auditor. Food had disappeared. A court ultimately found the food service manager, Clarence Rengulbai, guilty of theft ($200,000+), and ordered him to repay the hospital at a rate of $250 per pay period. No jail. Why did the Health Department auditors miss the theft? Why the lenient sentence? Rengulbai had been transferring the goods to a caterer who supplied Democratic Party fundraisers. The Judge was a Democratic appointee. The Health Department auditors belong to the same union as Mr. Rengulbai. The HGEA endorses Democrats.
Food purchases in Hawaii's State schools exhibit a two-year cycle, higher in even-numbered (i.e., election) years. Hawaii is an agency-shop state. State law mandates Statewide collective bargaining for DOE employees. Custodians and cooks are UPW/AFSCME. Administrators aaand clerks are HGEA/AFSCME. Teachers are HSTA, an NEA subsidiary.