A leading indicator, as the term is usually used, is a factoid that can be used to predict other factoids down the road. The business TV people love to talk about ‘durable goods orders’, for instance, even though I don’t think this is a very good indicator. People want fewer durable goods, and therefore you can infer from that that the people who work in the durable goods factories might soon be laid off, the suppliers of durable raw materials will soon see their orders shrink, etc., etc. The lack of orders leads the other things.

I don’t think that this makes much sense any more, largely because I think that the old models of the world economy are enough out of whack with current reality; I don’t think the models adequately consider the enormous increase in the velocity of information we’ve seen over the past ten or fifteen years. It used to be that by the time the durable goods factory (for instance) cut shifts, there was already a huge supply of durable goods in the pipeline, and the slowdown in demand had in fact been going on for quite some time. Today, a well managed company is going to make much quicker changes, so you’d expect to see more, smaller corrections rather than big, disruptive ones that come too late anyway.

And when the durable-goods factory does lay people off, they’re going to be able to find new jobs much more easily somewhere else thanks to the Internet. It used to be fairly complicated to get information about things outside about a 50-mile radius from where you were standing; now, it’s extremely simple. We understand this on some intellectual level, but our models of the world — both the informal ones we use to make sense of things, and the formal ones that the people on CNBC use to attempt to predict the future — have not fully integrated that information yet.

But this isn’t what I mean. I mean, I’m interested in what you might call micro leading indicators, the signs that indicate that a company or organization has just stopped giving a damn. These aren’t necessarily customer-service failures in any meaningful sense of the word, but things that suggest a plan or style of management that could lead to serious failure if the course doesn’t change. I saw a number of these yesterday at Costco.

The camera display there:

There are two problems here, really. The first, more subtle one, is that most of these cameras suck, and they’re almost all the same ones that have been sucking there for at least a couple months. Costco has never been a good place to buy cameras if you are particular about what you get, but it’s got worse in the past few months.

The more serious problem is that none of these cameras have any power. No batteries, no plugged-in power. The SLRs don’t even have lenses. This is a change from Costco’s previous approach. It means that Costco has spent the cost of one of each of these cameras for the purposes of a demo — but you can’t actually demo them because none of them do anything without power.

This thing is one of those dummy models. These are hateful to begin with, and something that you used to not see at Costco. I’m somewhat willing to forgive that because it’s a clock radio, and can’t be demo’d properly anyway without careful configuration, a radio signal, and an iPod or iPhone. This is a bit better than most dummy products, though, in that it will run through some kind of demo program if you hit the snooze bar. Unfortunately, it’s unplugged, and has been unplugged on this shelf for at least two weeks. You can see the power brick there next to it. The clock radio next to it is plugged in, but if you want to demo the one that works with the iPhone — sorry, Charlie.

They’ve gone to the trouble of plugging this TV in, but not of supplying it with a signal. This might not be such a terrible thing, since it’s a good price and since Sony hasn’t managed yet to destroy its reputation in the TV market as they have in so many others. This is a 1440×900 display, though, which is 16:10, not 16:9 as are most TVs these days. How well does this thing actually work? How does it deal with the scaling, and with the fact that TV signals are not quite the same shape as the screen? Impossible to say without buying it and taking it home.

Sylvania beat Sony again? Yes, in merchandising incompetence at Costco. This one isn’t even plugged in, and it certainly doesn’t come with a premium brand name. Sylvania started out over 100 years ago as a company that repaired burned-out light bulbs. They don’t actually manufacture consumer electronics; the company just licenses the name, in the case of TVs to Funai.

Making sure that all of this stuff is right — and particularly ensuring that the cameras have power — does take time and effort. Costco always has the manpower to have someone uselessly checking your card when you come in the door (that guy is really there to keep you from carrying stuff out the in door; you can’t buy anything without a membership card, so requiring you to have one to come in is pointless), and another to ‘make sure you have received all the items you paid for’ when you go out the door. Preventing shrinkage is very important to their business, and they staff accordingly. Catering to the customers is at least equally important, but since this is very hard to measure it is often one of the first things to slip.

If these leading indicators are accurate, I’d expect to soon see at Costco the following continuing indicators of the same trend:

• Safes on display locked so you can’t see the interior.
• Computers on display password-protected so they use electricity, but don’t allow you to do anything other than admire the case.
• More dummy electronics displays
• More slightly out-of-date products, or less desirable versions (e.g. only unpopular colors of iPods, maybe)
• Longer lines at the tills
• Eventually, sharply falling sales and membership renewals

The Virginia senate has effectively rejected two of our democratic governor’s pet causes: a doubling of the state cigarette tax, and a bill to ‘close the gun show loophole’, i.e. a law to require private individuals to conduct background checks on other private individuals to whom they sell guns (firearms dealers are required to conduct the checks no matter where they sell the guns).

In a Washington Post story about this headlined ‘Va. Still Holds Guns, Tobacco Dear’, a particularly obtuse state senator from suburban Fairfax County is quoted:

“Virginia still seems to be ruled by the gun lobby and the tobacco lobby,” said Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax). “I think there are many members who are unwilling to oppose them for fear of retribution at the polls. And there also is a sort of traditional Virginia ‘past’ that is supportive of tobacco and guns.”

So: this is the fault of the gun and tobacco lobbies in Virginia; but members are unwilling to oppose those lobbies because, if they do, they expect retribution at the polls.

Or, in other words, many of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia prefer that their state government not double the tax on cigarettes, and not make it harder to buy guns; if their representatives do not respect these wishes, the citizens are likely to vote them out. It seems to me that the vote, then, is representative democracy at work. Ms. Howell would apparently prefer a king.

That’s the headline on the Washington Post story: Local Police Want Right to Jam Wireless Signals.

There’s no good paragraph to excerpt in the story; the lead is about the Obamacade in the inaugural parade. A better lead would have been more clearly about the authority the feds apparently have to jam cell phone signals in certain situations.

Paragraph #2:

It is an increasingly common technology, with federal agencies expanding its use as state and local agencies are pushing for permission to do the same. Police and others say it could stop terrorists from coordinating during an attack, prevent suspects from erasing evidence on wireless devices, simplify arrests and keep inmates from using contraband phones.

I’m sure that this would be a useful item in the cop toolbox. But how many people think that the police wouldn’t abuse this power? The current cop mindset in the United States is one that leads to things like the Prince George’s County (MD) police storming the house of the mayor of a town in the county, killing his two dogs, and restraining him and his mother-in-law on the floor for hours because someone had anonymously sent a box of marijuana to his address — a box that was actually delivered by the police themselves?

The police wound up breaking down the door, shooting the dogs, etc. because, as they constantly claim, there might be a threat to their safety otherwise. ‘You never know what you’re going to find’ when serving a warrant, police spokesmen say again and again in justifying this kind of thing.

Maybe the reason they don’t know in advance what they’re going to find is that they’re not interested in finding out. From a recent Washington Post magazine story about the raid:

“The guy in there is crazy,” [Berwyn Heights, MD police officer] Johnson remembered a Prince George’s County officer telling him when he arrived. “He says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”

“That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights,” Johnson replied.

Police work, ladies and gentlemen! You’d think, since the police spokesmen talk so much about the uncertainty and risk and so on that necessitates these home invasions, that they police would at least make the slightest attempt to figure out ahead of time what they’re going to be up against, no?

Apparently: no. The investigative work in this case, at least, didn’t even extend to having the slightest idea who their target was. Presumably they checked to see whether anyone living at the address had a criminal record, but I wouldn’t even be too sure of that.

There are 27 towns and municipalities in Prince George’s County, and the police in this case were so unfamiliar with the ‘community’ that they constantly talk about that they didn’t know that the guy was the mayor of the very municipality they were operating in.

Do you really think that a group of people so detail-oriented and respectful of civil authority would scruple to not just eventually jam all cell phone communications anywhere within, say, a 200-foot radius of every police car?

They wouldn’t do this at first, of course. But after they’d had jammers for a few years for use by SWAT teams and so on, they’d claim that the use of phones by people in cars during traffic stops represented some kind of threat, and they’d hook jammers up in all their cars. Cops would wear little portable jammers on their belts for those rare cases when they’re forced to venture more than 200 feet from their cars.

It’s worth noting that Brett Darrow’s 2007 recording of a St. George, MO police officer threatening to arrest him on phony charges was made by a camera that continuously uploaded its take. It’s a reasonable assumption that locally stored recordings of disputes between citizens and cops would generally be found to be corrupted, erased, or otherwise gone — just as the video cameras in police cars seem to malfunction at an astonishing rate, most often when there are suggestions that the recordings would tend to make the cops look bad.

In the District, corrections officials won permission from the FCC for a brief test of jamming technology at the D.C. jail last month, after citing the “alarming rate” of contraband phones being seized at prisons around the country.

“Cell phones are used by inmates to engage in highly pernicious behavior such as the intimidation of witnesses, coordination of escapes, and the conducting of criminal enterprises,” D.C. corrections chief Devon Brown wrote to the federal agency.

My main point isn’t about law-enforcement incompetence, but note that one of the needs they cite for this disruptive power is entirely the result of their own incompetence at keeping phones out of prisons. Either visitors are bringing them in, or their own guards are corrupt. Fixing either of those problems would be difficult, though: easier to just jam cell phones in the vicinity of the jail. That ordinary people would be inconvenienced by this isn’t important — they are mere citizens, after all.

The stated justification for all of this, of course, is movie-plot terrorism threats.

“When lives are at stake, law enforcement needs to find ways to disrupt cellphones and other communications in a pinpointed way against terrorists who are using them,” New York City Police Commissioner Raymond F. Kelly told a Senate panel Jan. 8. He also cited the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when hostage-takers used media spotters and satellite and mobile phones to help them outmaneuver police at hotels, train stations and other targets.

This, of course, ignores entirely the fact that much of the Mumbai carnage was the direct result of police incompetence. Witnesses to an early shooting at a railway station said that armed police there didn’t shoot at the terrorists.

It also ignores entirely the fact that if the police are known to jam cell phones, terrorists simply won’t depend on cell phones. They’ll use some other kind of radio that the police aren’t equipped to jam.

This would be an inconvenience for the terrorists — and I’m all for inconveniencing terrorists — but the police jamming would be an even greater ‘inconvenience’ for a citizen who might see something in the vicinity of an attack that might be useful to the police — but only if the citizen could call 911 on his cell phone.

This weekend, it was some kind of problem with my ‘credit balance’, even though I was trying to ‘purchase’ an app that was free. Now, it’s this:

Since ‘modifying’ an item takes, oh, the blink of an eye — or maybe a couple of seconds if you have to replicate databases — I cannot understand why a multi-billion dollar company is operating an online store — with custom client software, no less — in this way.

So, if you spend $3 million on a Super Bowl ad for beer, or corn chips, or candy bars, you advertise something that you sell every day — and something that you intend to go on selling every day until the end of time.

If you spend $3 million to advertise a particular car, you advertise something that you’ll only be selling for a year or so. But it’s a very expensive something as things go, and your ad also serves to strengthen your overall brand. Most Super Bowl ads are really about advertising the overall brand more than they are about selling a specific product.

So why do there seem to be as many ads for movies during the Super Bowl as for anything else? With the exception of certain ‘franchises’ of endless sequels — nearly all of which are incredibly bad and short-lived — there’s no ‘brand’ as such to establish in movies. Any particular movie is only going to be in the theaters for a few weeks; it’ll then be available as an expensive DVD for a few months; and then it’ll be in that giant bin at Wal-Mart, or on the Amazon four-for-three deal.

If it turns out to be a fantastic movie, of course, it’ll be in the theaters and on the regular-price DVD rack longer; but then this would be the case even without the Super Bowl ad. But these movies aren’t going to be fantastic; one of them is another The Fast and The Furious sequel, for Christ’s sake. And all of these movies being advertised seem to be scheduled for release in about five months, by which time most people will have forgotten about the ads anyway.

How on Earth does this pay off? Must be something about Hollywood’s Chinese accounting.