Just-In-Time
As predicted, the sky clouded up this afternoon, so I'm hoping that there will be enough clouds in the right place for a nice sunset. Unfortunately, sunsets around here are not in a great location, so they don't have the impact that a sunrise lifting up behind the lake does.
I went to Walmart this morning and bought a few necessary things. While walking around the store, I wondered how much stuff Walmart would have for sale when the effects of all the tariffs kicked in. I can't imagine how much stuff Walmart sells that is made in China, but it must be more than half.
I remember a long time ago that a lot of businesses, in order to save money on storage space had a concept that was known as JIT, which stood for "Just-In-Time".
The idea was that instead of storing weeks' worth of stuff to sell, the business set up its deliveries so that things it needed to sell got there when they were needed and not before. A lot of companies adopted this concept, and it just so happened that I had a friend who worked in "Mean Time Management" when I lived in Miami. And his job was to arrange everything so products got to the store "just in time."
I don't know if businesses still do that because it only works if the deliveries are always on time. But it made me wonder if Walmart depended on just-in-time delivery because the whole delivery system could easily break down with America and China arguing about tariffs. And not just for Walmart, it looks to me like Amazon is even more dependent on Chinese-made products, and Walmart and Amazon are probably responsible for 90% of everything I buy. Maybe I should've stocked up on underwear while at Walmart this morning.
Theboondork
Needless to say, I was standing outside in the cold at 3 a.m. last night, continuing my effort to take Milky Way pictures.
And like most things in life, there is some amount of experimentation involved to get it right
After all, everybody's cameras are different, the lenses are different, your location is different, the location of the Milky Way is changing, and the times to see it are different. All of which means there is no "right way" to take the picture. There's just a lot of trial and error, and many 3 AM mornings standing in the cold pushing various buttons on the camera, which I barely understand in the daytime, and become hopeless in the dark.