Tree Man

By -
Have any of your ever tried getting a contractor to actually show up and do work at your house? Here's the lament I just composed based on the futile effort to do so:

Tree Man (To the Tune of Greensleeves)

Alas tree man you do me wrong
To blow me off discourteously
For I would pay you well and long
If you'd cut down my tree

Tree man I need your saw
Tree man please take my call
Tree man o schedule me
Oh who but my missing tree man

Your dates you've broken like my will
Oh why did you say you'd be by
Now I remain in a world of shade
And my roof remains all moldy

Tree man...

Comments

  1. Tim Swanson4:27 PM

    Sounds like a market failure.

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah11:41 PM

    I think this is, in fact, a great topic for an enterprising Austrian to do some empirical work on. Why is the home contractor market so weird that it can take many months just to get someone to show up to look at the job you need done? This problem is so widely reported that I suspect there must be some systematic explanation for it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous7:49 PM

    As the air comes out of the credit bubble it seems the contractors are getting hungry.

    Here on the Gulf Coast of Florida contractors are much more eager, and actually making reasonable estimates for work. The business climate is much different than it was last year.

    Longer term, one must also consider that consumer preferences have changed. Consumer crap, like Big TVs and Wendy's kids' meals with "free" toy, keeps getting cheaper. Disposable Clown Bucks more freely flow to the home. Contractors have been making a good living these past few years, but perhaps these fat profits won't last as many of the college educated morons figure out that "white collar" ain't part of their future, despite the fact that the Gov'mint has been in the business of pushing edutainment. Everyone should be a contractor.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more