Journal: Helping local business

I stopped into our neighborhood Mexican place last night to pick up some chow. It's a beautiful authentic little place that, if you've ever visited Mexico or the Caribbean, looks like you've just stepped a thousand miles south. Very small, a counter but no tables, mostly take-out, but the food is fantastic. I chatted a bit with the owner, asking about some new convenience-store stuff that had appeared. I was concerned that this perhaps signaled a bout of misfortune. He said he'd picked it up from a convenience store that closed a couple doors up the road, but didn't like the fact it was all junk food and his kitchen prepares only healthy stuff. He said that after some nearby layoffs in the wake of September 11th, the lunch crowd is way down and he's in pretty tough shape. I've decided to give an ad for him in my Slashdot sig, because I really don't want him to go out of business. Being it's Slashdot and I don't like spam any more than anybody else, I wanted to make the ad tasteful, so it just gives GPS coordinates (42.3243 N 71.3994 W). Enough to find the place, a momentary amusement for anybody of nerdly inclinations, but not too in-your-face. If you're lazy, just look here.

People have often talked about supporting their own local economy in the context of helping the economy overall. There are even folks who like the idea of creating a local currency. I think these are good ideas.

The recession is like a bunch of dominoes. Each domino has continuous inputs and internal state variables (orientation and momentum), and a discrete output (falling over), so each domino amplifies the pervasive phenomenon of falling over. A company's discrete output is the decision to lay people off. So there's a thing here of amplifying the bad karma and passing it along to others. One preventive measure would be to avoid needing to pass along bad karma: a company with better financials can sustain more troublesome inputs before it is forced to lay people off. In the domain of human relations, some people can take a lot more crap than others before snapping at somebody else. So this amounts to good management.

Maybe supporting the local economy is a form of good management? Maybe a local currency can better represent values that are cherished locally but dissed by the wider economy? Maybe it doesn't matter where the money goes, as long as it keeps moving around? Maybe keeping the money local prevents it getting sucked into some value-sink in Washington or Wall Street?

Supposing I can absorb abuse for a longer time before passing along bad karma, this may reduce the net intensity of bad karma but it lengthens its total lifetime. In a perfect world one could hope to reduce both the intensity and the total lifetime of bad karma. This reminds me of an interesting result from control theory: if there is any frequency for which the system's gain is exactly -1, you end up with instability, or persistent oscillations. This is called the Bode stability criterion. Here's another link.