... or why Agatha Christie could afford to hire two servants, but not buy a car.

It boils down to an economic principle first elucidated by William Baumol. Although not all jobs enjoy the same increases in productivity from automation, the wages of the jobs that aren't so affected are pulled up by the increase in productivity of the jobs that are ( Read more... )

A number of stores are going to digital price tags on their store shelves. This would relieve them of the expense of having an employee go around the store and replace the printed price tags each time they need to change a price ( Read more... )

The past month has been a very difficult one for us. Long story short, the van we use for our retail business was making intermittent noises, and it pointed to the transmission. We took it to the transmission shop, and we're going to be looking at a mid-four-figure fix (unsurprising, given that a transmission rebuild for our old van was $2000 back ( Read more... )

When I launched my Kickstarter for Shards of Broken Light, I set a very modest goal, knowing it's my first Kickstarter ever, and with a very small following, I'd be doing well to fund ( Read more... )

It's a good thing I decided to take the evening and slog through the process of balancing and catching up our checkbook, although I wanted to work on the writing. With three disappointing conventions, and some hefty expenses coming due this month, I can't afford to be flying blind, on a wing and a prayer ( Read more... )

Back in 2008 the housing bubble burst and sent shockwaves through the economy that echoed for years. Some people would argue we've never truly recovered.

Now it looks like office space may be the next big financial crisis. There's too much of it for a workforce that discovers working from home, without the distraction of office politics, can ( Read more... )

Back in 2016, when we were struggling with the tub drain problems, I wrote an article on how small things like our lack of funds to pay a plumber to unclog the drain could become a self-reinforcing downward spiral ( Read more... )

It was good to see a number of old friends I don't see anywhere else, since they don't go to anime or comic cons -- and to see a couple of friends I know only online, going back to the old SFF.net days ( Read more... )

I've let a number of things slide over the past few months, since show season started up again. For a while I let some basic bookkeeping slide, which is dangerous when we're operating on relatively slender margins and a couple of conventions are sitting on checks. I got that caught up, although it took a major push to force my way through it -- not ( Read more... )

All told, we've actually been doing pretty well since shows started happening after the COVID-19 shutdowns. We've had a few that were weak, but none where we outright lost money ( Read more... )