I was recently at a Trader Joe’s store. They were giving away crackers covered with blue cheese. The woman I was with picked up 2 of them. She handed me one. I declined and said: “I don’t like blue cheese.” She said: “Neither do I, but it’s free!”, and she ate both of them. I know a number of people like this. You probably do too.

VIDEO TAPES. The thing that I see most often in ‘free boxes’ on the sidewalks here in Berkeley are video tapes. No matter how many video tapes are in a ‘free box’, they are always gone within a few hours. Why do people take video tapes? Very few people own video tape players, and video tape players are no longer sold in stores. Also, video tapes deteriorate with time. If you have video tapes made in the 1990s, the odds are that some of the footage is already distorted. Most people who take old video tapes take them just because they are free.

URBAN ORE. What should you do with old video tapes? Most charity thrift shops won’t accept video tapes anymore as donations. Urban Ore here in Berkeley does accept video tapes as donations, providing they are in good condition and are in their original boxes. They have hundreds of video tapes for sale at Urban Ore, but who buys them? It turns out that there are people who make a living buying and selling old video tapes. Most video tapes are worthless, but a few of them are worth serious money. A factory-sealed video tape copy of ‘Top Gun’, shown below, recently sold for $8,600. A used copy of ‘Barney and Friends Practice Makes Music’ sold for $10,900. Very few copies of this video tape were made, but nevertheless, I can’t imagine why anybody would pay $10,900 for a Barney video tape. Many used Disney animated movies on video tape sell for $100 to $300 on eBay, even though millions of them were made. You might find a valuable video tape at Urban Ore, but you will need to know which ones are valuable. Urban Ore is a huge and unique store. It is worth a visit.

IRISH & JEWISH CORNED BEEF.
St. Patrick’s Day will soon be here. Come early March, every supermarket will have pictures of corned beef surrounded by shamrocks and leprechauns on the front page of their advertising circulars, and restaurants will be featuring corned beef platters on their menus.

Have you ever wondered why Irish corned beef looks and tastes exactly like the corned beef that you get in Jewish restaurants and delis? Even the spices are the same. Is this just a coincidence? No, it isn’t. In the 19th Century, large numbers of poor Irish immigrants came to the United States. About the same time, large numbers of poor Jews came to the U.S. from eastern Europe. A lot of employers in the U.S. wouldn’t hire Irish immigrants or Jews, and landlords wouldn’t rent apartments to them either. As a result, Irish and Jewish immigrants often wound up living in the same neighborhoods, and as a result of that, Irish immigrants often wound up eating at Jewish restaurants, where corned beef was a staple.

Poor people in Ireland could rarely afford beef in the 19th Century. Jews in eastern Europe did eat beef, but because they were poor, they could usually only afford the toughest and cheapest cuts. Beef brisket, from which corned beef is made, can be very tough, which is why it is cooked for hours. Like a lot of things that Americans think come from Ireland, corned beef is actually Irish-American in origin. In other words, corned beef didn’t come to America from Ireland. It came to Ireland from Irish-Americans, who in turn, got it from European Jews. The first U.S. president to serve corned beef at the White House on or just before St. Patrick’s Day was Abraham Lincoln. Now they all do it – especially in election years.

There are a lot of things that Americans think are Irish, but which are actually Irish-American. It was Irish-Americans who changed St. Patrick’s Day from a religious holiday into a public celebration of Irish culture and identity. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade held anywhere was in New York City in 1762. Throughout the 19th Century, St. Patrick’s Day parades got progressively bigger in the U.S., but the first St. Patrick’s Day parade in Ireland was held in Dublin in 1931. Most people in Ireland are aware of the fact that all of the fun stuff they do on St. Patrick’s Day comes from the U.S., like drinking green beer, singing Irish-American songs, and eating corned beef.

James Cagney. Like many other Catholic Irish-Americans who grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, James Cagney could speak Yiddish. He could also read Yiddish. He speaks in Yiddish in several movies. Here is a clip from the movie ‘Taxi’: James Cagney Speaking Yiddish.

DON’T SAVE MONEY.

You have probably heard that saving money is a virtue. It’s in sermons. It’s in popular literature. Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, and many other famous authors wrote about the virtue of saving money. Saving money used to be a virtue, but not anymore. It took me a long time to figure that out. The reason is inflation. Up until the 20th Century, inflation was not a problem. In 1900, a 1-pound loaf of bread cost 5 cents. That was about the same price that it sold for in 1800. Up until World War 1, most money was gold and silver coins or paper money that was redeemable for gold or silver. Now, our money isn’t tied to anything. The Federal Reserve can increase the money supply with just a keystroke on a computer. In 2020, it cost $7 to buy what $1 bought in 1970. In 1970, a Hershey bar sold for 10 cents. Look at ads below from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1972 for apartments for rent. Rents in Berkeley and Silicon Valley were even less than this.

Warren Buffet. Most people don’t see any connection between the kind of companies Warren Buffet invests in, but they do have something in common – the ability to raise prices along with inflation. For example, Buffet owns a lot of stock in Coca Cola. How much would the price of Coke have to go up before people stopped buying it? It’s the same with nearly all of the companies Buffet invests in.

Cryptocurrency. Warren Buffet is also right about cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is far too volatile to ever be accepted as money. It is not unusual for a cryptocurrency to quadruple in price or lose 3/4 of its value in a year. Also, no major government is going to make cryptocurrency legal tender. Legal tender is something that must be accepted as payment for debts. Cryptocurrency is also not an investment. If it was an investment, how would you determine its value?  Cryptocurrency pays no dividends or interest, it has no utility, and it is certainly not scarce. There are literally thousands of cryptocurrencies, and 2 guys in a garage can create a new one with little or no capital.

GETTING RID OF ANTS WITHOUT POISON.

The reason why you are most likely to see ants in your home when it is cold and wet outside is because ants do not like being cold and wet any more than you do. When people see ants in their homes, it is most often in the kitchen, and when people see ants in their kitchens, they usually spray them with ant poison because they don’t know what else to do. You should be very reluctant to use ant poison in your kitchen, and you shouldn’t use ant poison at all if you have small children or pets in your home. I don’t know which, if any, of the ant sprays that you find in supermarkets are safe to use. Nearly all of them are illegal for use in commercial kitchens.

However, there is a very simple way to get rid of ants in your home and without poison. Get a spray bottle. Put in a cup of regular white vinegar and a cup of water. Follow the ant trail to see where the ants are coming from and spray the trail and the source of the trail. It sometimes helps to do this with a flashlight. Once you spray the ants and their trails, the ants will not immediately die as they would if you used ant poison, but they will very quickly vanish, and they will stay away longer than they would if you used ant poison. Ants hate vinegar. Vinegar not only repels ants, more importantly, it destroys the chemical trails left by other ants. The area you spray may smell like vinegar for a short while, but that odor will fade away as the water evaporates. Vinegar and water is not just a cheapskate’s alternative to ant poison. This mixture really does work as well or better than any product you will find in a supermarket for getting rid of ants.