This morning I stopped on the way to work for some Halloween supplies. I went to a "halloween superstore", a seasonal business that sets up in an otherwise empty "Expo" center. It's Halloween morning, and there are dozens are cars in the parking lot. Inside there are four cash registers, but only one employee. The line of customers is about forty long, and did not move the whole time I was there because the employee was on the phone trying to fix a credit card-related problem. I'm guessing that the employee is warming up for the highlight of his year, working at the voting booth. I left without buying anything, and I assume others did as well.

And you want to know why it's an international crisis? I just tried to buy a commercial product from a Taiwanese company. A press release mentions the price, and links to a description of the product. The description has no mention of the price and no clue how to purchase one. I ran around the website for a while and could not find a phone number or email address. There is a contact form with six or eight fields, name, phone, etc, but no matter what I did, it always insisted a required field was missing. In fact, looking more closely, it's not even a working web form. It's just a mockup of a web form. That's an interesting business plan: create a detailed website site promoting your product, but don't actually sell it or make it possible for anyone to contact you.

Can we please just let the global economic system collapse, and take us all with it? I'm sure the cockroaches will do a better job.