Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

The Last Bus

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Now that I’m back from my travels, I wanted to share an anecdote which I think bears a message about the future.

As almost all of you know, when you fly out of an airport, you’ve got at least a couple of parking options for your car: you can pay a high price for short-term parking, which is close and convenient, or pay a cheaper price for long-term parking, which involves some travel, since it’s well away from the airport. The prices for parking, and the distance of the long-term lot, depend on how big the airport is.

At the San Francisco airport, a day in the long-term parking lot costs $24, while the short-term lot is twice that much. So if you leave for 10 days, you probably don’t want to spend $480 to park your car, so off to the long-term lot you go.

For decades, the way to get back and forth between the long-term lot and the terminal was via a bunch of blue buses like the one pictured below. There were a whole series of these things, each driven by a bus driver, and I always felt pretty sorry for that. After all, driving the same one mile route hour after hour, day after day, week after week, and month after month isn’t exactly nourishing for the soul. But they did it, and that was their livelihood.

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The World Goes Fun-Size

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I remember trick-or-treating as a kid, most people were too cheap to hand out normal candy bars, so they bought these big bags off pee-wee ones that were cynically called “Fun Size“. Well, in order to hide inflation, candy bar makers have been simply shrinking the size of their products while keeping the price the same. They call this ‘shrink-flation” and it is everywhere……….

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