2 Minute Sidebar

Multi-tap mindwarp

2007-01-12T04:57:00.000Z

I'm a latecomer to multifeatured cellphones and thus to text messaging on a keypad, but I wanted to pose a puzzle regarding the basic multiple-keypress text entry system. I'm referring to the system under which when you want to type the word "beer", you press '2' twice to get a 'b', then press '3' twice to get an 'e', then you have to pause or press the right arrow because next you need to press '3' twice again to get another 'e', and so on. In all, "beer" is keyed in via 2233~pause~33777.

Under this system, blessed are the words with lots of one-press letters such as "data", which you can bang out 3282. Four letters, four keypresses. But when the same one-press letter repeats consecutively, it's not as convenient because you either have to pause or press the right arrow. For example, "add", 23~pause~3. So my puzzle is: what is the longest english word which is entirely one-press letters and no pauses? The longest one I've been able to find is "pajama," a paltry six letters. Even so, I would be surprised to learn of a longer one.

I'd love to be able to coin a clever term for the class of words that "data" and "pajama" belong to, but the best I've come up with is unitap. Five-letter unitaps I've found include adapt, madam, and magma.

These puzzles occurred to me last night when I was visiting a hospital. There was a poster on the wall for the convenience of non-English speakers who require a translator. Point to your language and the staff will summon the proper translator for you; that was the gist of the poster. Anyway, the Tagalog entry read (in part) "Magpapatawag kami ng interpreter." I took out my phone and keyed that in gleefully. Magpapatawag! A twelve letter unitap!

The Biden Code

2006-07-12T01:28:00.000Z

By now, most people are hip to the affinity the global terrorists have for numerology. Nine-eleven is universal shorthand for the September 2001 attacks. The Madrid train bombings were three-eleven. London's attacks were seven-seven.

Democratic Senator Joe Biden, shown on a C-SPAN tape last week:

"I've had a great relationship. In Delaware, the largest growth in population is Indian-Americans moving from India. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

Hello? Bombay train attacks yesterday, July 11th? "7-Eleven," Senator Biden?

I can see the bumper stickers already: "Biden knew, Bombay blew." On the same bumpers as the "Coulter '08" stickers, methinks.

Coordinated attacks

2006-07-12T00:42:00.000Z

Wow. Check out these headlines:

Train bombs in Mumbai kill 147
Explosions hit Bombay commuter trains

Pretty much simultaneous attacks in both Mumbai and Bombay! I haven't been this stunned at the daily news since Beijing won the 2008 Olympics (Peking seemed like a shoo-in at the time).

Why is it that during our generation the Anglicization of place names has to change decade by decade? And notice that we usually get beat over the head with the new forms by pseudo-intellectual elite wannabes, like the news correspondents that went to Qatar before Gulf War II and told us it wasn't Kay-tahr anymore, it was "Gutter". However metaphorically true that may have been, if you telephoned the Qatar embassy in Washington D.C. they still pronounced it "Kay-tahr". Who do you trust, the multilingual native Qatari or the cue-card reader with the authoritative hair?

I strongly suspect that the acceleration of English transliteration changes is a direct result of some forty years of worshipful obeisance to multicultural pieties and the corresponding reduction of confidence in Western conventions. By way of example, about as quickly as Saigon fell and Jimmy Carter was elected cringer-in-chief, my world atlas changed Cambodia to Kampuchea. Of course, the name change was driven partly by the fact that the Khmer Rouge had wiped out the military regime that had exiled the monarchy, but the diplomats and intelligentsia of a truly self-confident world power would've kept calling the place Cambodia anyway. If, on the other hand, you have no confidence in the importance of your own culture and find revolutionary, genocidal whack-jobs enchanting, you'll roll over and enthusiastically adopt the new appellation.

Unintentionally hilarious postscript: The USA Today headline above which was originally "Bombay" on the website was later changed to "Mumbai". Heaven forbid that USA Today's media peers would have noticed the "Bombay" gaffe and thought them unsophisticated!

You've got (stupid) mail

2006-07-12T00:32:00.000Z

I've done it before and I'll do it again. A rainy day is a good day to rummage through the spam folder and marvel at the bottommost percentile of internet creativity, the van-in-the-alley of online commerce. The tragedy of course, is that when only a fraction of that bottom percentile of mouse-clicking meat sacks responds to each pitch, the efforts to continue the spam are assured.

Lest you think me too harsh, keep in mind that the following are actual spam "senders" who (apparently) are getting responses:

melting solid
Safety
piwowona
sport. gulag
Could haveDate:
youneed become
You Mngr. justine
Page. sprites
diskFrom to:
Pankow.
=?iso-2022-jp?B?GyRCOWI2NhsoQg==?=
Migrant plunges
xumo
Peseta E. Habituates
Monosyllables H. Camelot

Who other than someone near the extreme left-tail of the IQ bell curve would think (even momentarily) that he was expecting an email from "diskFrom to:", or that an unsolicited message from "Migrant plunges" would concern him at all?

And imagine my disappointment when "xumo" turned out not to be from the court of the galactic emperor, but instead was pumping traffic to an online gambling site. Heck, I would've at least smirked if xumo were doing the Nigerian banking scam:

We are top official of the former galactic government of Andromeda who are interested in export of goods to your planet using funds which are presently trapped in the Small Magellanic Cloud...

Come to think of it, has anybody ever tried spamming the Scientology domain with money-transfer pitches from Xenu's former ministers? Yes, it's probably a lawsuit minefield with the litigious Sea Org, but it's also comedy gold.

To further diminish your opinion of your fellow man, a sampling of the similarly un-compelling email subject lines:

pusegotefosag
Your cash, non-natty
{stk-sub}
$B$3$s$J;~4V$K$4$a$s$J$5$$(B(*^$B!#(B^*)
Success, weld metal
TEXTS RALLYING CRY SCHOOLS
Hi, nitro-cotton
nopiguz

Burn baby, burn

2006-07-12T00:22:00.000Z

When the going gets old, the old talk about their health and money. The second quarter, April-through-June, was my worst money quarter since I started trying to track such things. Everything my wife and I were trying to squirrel away was escaping through one of a dozen holes the market was punching in the fiscal edifice.

In summary, every dollar contributed to the retirement plans was eroded by market declines. Every dollar adding to the balance sheet in savings or paying the mortgage was offset by reductions in the value of my employer's stock. Our net worth at the end of the three months was the same as it was at the start.

There just weren't many good places to hide during that market pullback either, particularly for the 401(k) dollars, which have to stay in one fund or another. Most equities (particularly overseas) were tanking, and bonds were doing the same in the rising interest rate environment. Our 401(k) management should have jokingly opened a mattress fund:

The John Hancock Mattress Fund operates exclusively by concealing shareholders' federal reserve notes in the mattress of fund manager (and retired rum-runner) Buford Davis "Butch" Tucker. The fund's objective is to achieve long-term capital protection and asset concealment by stuffing cash in a Stearns & Foster queen and brandishing a .50-cal smoothbore black-powder rifle against solicitors, trespassers, and government "revenuers". Mr. Tucker is in his eighth year of fund management.

Management fees for the John Hancock Mattress Fund are in the lowest decile for the mutual fund industry. Trailing returns for one, two, and five years are 0%, 0% and 0%, respectively, in every period meeting or exceeding the performance of the Buried Mason Jar investment class as a whole. Past results are indicative of future returns.

Fighting the good fight for planning and saving, and occasionally losing in this manner, does make me understand the appeal of just spending it all. It doesn't make me agree with it or actually do it, but I understand it. It doesn't help that there's such an enormous gulf between just spending your wages and saving to generate even a little new income. It can take a lot of forbearance to do the latter. For instance, to generate fifty dollars a month in new interest income at today's money market rates requires saving around $12,500 in the first place. That's 250 fifty-dollar increments that have to be saved instead of spent, just to secure a new fifty a month. Nevermind the added insult that the interest income on all those post-tax dollars will itself be taxed! Isn't it just easier to spend it, especially when your computer is nearly four years old, the car is making odd humming noises, and you haven't bought a DVD since you used your gift cards from last Christmas?

See what happens?

2006-06-25T21:43:00.000Z

Are you wondering about the price of your gasoline? You may have noticed that the price of crude oil is off its highs, but unleaded gasoline hovers stubbornly in the vicinity of $2.90 / gallon. What's up?

I'll listen to competing theories from commenters, but my read is this: our Congress has managed to further boost gasoline prices, even as they have sought to blame the oil companies for "price gouging". How have they managed to do this? Some credit goes to their passage of last year's massive energy bill and its new seven-year ethanol mandate. Specifically, this year four billion gallons of ethanol are required to be incorporated into our automobile fuels. This amount gradually rises year by year to 7.5 billion gallons in 2012.

The problem with mandates of this kind, of course, is that they're legal requirements that brook no excuse. Domestic production not yet capable of producing that much ethanol? Tough. Internal transport of ethanol from the midwest to the coasts difficult or expensive? Too bad. Money is no longer an object, since the legal mandate trumps expense. So while July unleaded gasoline closed at $2.07 / gallon Wednesday, the July ethanol contract was closing at $4.08 / gallon. And no, that's not a typo.

We can thank our lucky stars, I suppose, that this mandated gunk is still usually just a tenth of our fuel (E10 blend, i.e. ten percent ethanol and the rest unleaded gasoline), else prices could be even worse. Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation here, nine-tenths gallon of unleaded plus one-tenth gallon of ethanol at the July contract prices is a $2.27 gallon of fuel. Add Wisconsin's minimum markup (9.2 percent, I believe), federal tax of $0.184, Wisconsin state tax of $0.327, and we're looking at a pump price of $2.99 a gallon, which appears to be in the ballpark of what we're actually seeing. Whereas if the ethanol were not required as part of the mix, the price would be reduced to $2.77.

Take a moment now to bask in the asininity radiated by our sainted lawmakers. Confronted with the problem that gasoline was getting expensive, they designated a partial substitute, created a law to make it artificially scarce, and now obligate us by law to use the more expensive concoction.

Part of the reason this is so frustrating is that one starts to wonder whether, given the nature of our government today, to complain is to open the door to even worse outcomes. Don't complain about gas prices, since then Congress will have to do something, and the people making the loudest suggestions might turn out to be ethanol lobbyists. Don't complain about illegal immigration, since that encourages the Senate to trot out a massive amnesty bill guaranteed to tempt millions more border crossings. Don't complain about drug prices, otherwise we'll wind up with a new budget-busting Medicare entitlement. It's a disheartening notion.

Is "constructive complaining" a remedy? In other words, don't just say "gas prices are too high." Rather, make sure to say "would ya open up the arctic wildlife refuge for some drilling already, jeez?" Or, "could you stop raiding the transportation budget so we could have a state tax amnesty for the rest of the year?" Or, "would you drop these stupid boutique fuel, oxygenation, and biomass mandates, for crying out loud?" I suppose that would be great if most people actually agreed on which remedy they want, but of course they don't. The resulting cacaphony of complaints and suggested remedies gets polled, push-polled, and focus-grouped for a few weeks and pretty soon the headlines read: "Gas prices too high, survey says." Oy!

Make-a-wish car

2006-06-14T04:11:00.000Z

3XHAR and I found ourselves stopped behind a heavily bumper-stickered automobile last weekend. I will highlight three stickers as representative of the vehicle: (1) "Free Tibet Free Palestine", (2) [yellow '=' on blue background], and (3):

"We are making enemies faster than we can kill them"

Now, that last one prompts two immediate questions from me. First, who has the figures on how many enemies we are making? Second, can we use that as an endorsement to speed up the killing and rectify the situation? Because when push comes to shove comes to punch comes to shoot comes to inventing an entirely new class of destructive capability, the United States takes a back seat to no one. Check the data if you don't believe me: the United States led the world in exports of rubble in the biennium 1944-45; greater rubble exports than the rest of the world combined, in fact. Interestingly, once the world's appetite for importing rubble was sated, the enemies disappeared -- which ought to be a cautionary tale on the utility of half-measures.

But aside from my knee-jerk reaction, do you see a consistent, unifying concept behind the stickers? I do not. They're a complete mess. Take "Free Tibet," for example, which the ChiComs literally did. In the U.S., the sticker's sentiment has practically universal support. Yes, we would very much like Tibet to be free. But the creator of the sticker mosaic, who is Deeply Concerned about a few hundred thousand Islamofascist wackos that are in a frenzy over the U.S. pouring its national wealth into Iraq, apparently doesn't even bat an eye at the hundreds of millions of Chinese who -- I dunno -- might be your enemy if you try to take Tibet from them.

Even putting that aside, let's focus on these enemies we are supposedly "making" now, presumably by having the temerity to actually fight them. I seem to recall that we weren't fighting them in 1993, and they bombed the World Trade Center. Did we call the military? Nope. We let the FBI handle it. Criminal matter, you see. So we weren't fighting them in 1996 when they attacked the Khobar Towers. The FBI was sent to investigate that as well. We weren't doing much fighting in 1998 when the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, nor in 2000 when the USS Cole was attacked. After 9/11, how much more of this "not making enemies" could we reasonably stand? And do spare me the drivel about our "agressive American imperialism" making enemies, since that "imperialism" at the time was guaranteeing that muslims could continue to live in the Balkans, that Kuwaitis could have their own country, that the wealth of the OPEC nations could be safely transported on the world's oceans, etc. Lame complaints about how mean and awful America is also fail to explain why London, Madrid, Bali, Casablanca, Egypt and Russia had to be attacked as well.

So given the rather obvious fact that our enemy, the militant Islamic radical, is motivated to kill by one's insufficient Islamic-ness, how will bumper-sticker guy make nice with the radical and still pursue gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgendered equality (the yellow "equal sign" sticker)? How, exactly, will he square that circle? He cannot, because the back of his car is completely divorced from realpolitik. Rather, it is cant. It is, metaphorically, religion. Recall Ned Flanders' frustrated appeal to God: "I've done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!" Bumper sticker guy wants all his stickers to be made true, even the stickers that contradict the other stickers.

Critter report

2006-06-09T03:00:00.000Z

I was out of town last weekend sampling the wildlife of the northern half of Wisconsin, dominated at this time of year by the wood tick. Happily, arachnids weren't the only animals crawling or hopping. Of mammals we didn't see a whole lot: deer, a badger, and chipmunks. Black bear have been scarce of late owing to an upswing in homo sapiens sightings adding bustle to the neighborhood. Of birds there were crows as usual, but also ravens, turkeys, vultures, red-winged blackbirds, blue jays, black-capped chickadees, goldfinches, hummingbirds, two kinds of nuthatch, a loon and an oriole. Orioles are notorious latecomers in the spring, such that once you see one you can be assured that the bird migrations into Wisconsin are complete. And though we never actually saw the whip-poor-will, we could set our watches by its nightly 9 pm chirpfest. Sources allege that the bird is only the size of a robin, which I find amazing considering how very loud they are.

I think the most interesting animal of the weekend though was a large moth, probably of the family Saturniidae, that was attracted to the screen door by the inside lights. Its total wingspan was about five inches, but also remarkable was the fact that its eyes reflected back a very noticable orange light. While this is rather common thing with mammals, I never thought to expect eye-glow among bugs.

Movie channel

2006-05-24T03:35:00.000Z

I had the opportunity to watch Batman Begins on cable. It was my first time seeing the film, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the other Batmans (Batmen?) I've seen. Peculiarly though, every time I see the title I read it in my head as Batman BAY-gins, pronounced like the former Israeli Prime Minister.

I'd keep this oddity to myself, only I noticed in conversation that 3XHAR, in referring to the movie, says aloud the same BAY-gins that I hear in my head. What funky cross-wiring in our heads makes both of us inclined to do that? And how many other people have this bug? It's not like it's "hah-hah" jokey-funny or anything, it's just funny-strange.

Social commitments

2006-05-24T03:32:00.000Z

I drove with my wife to a cousin's baby shower last Saturday, and brought some good books along so I could disappear until the shower was over. Unfortunately for me, part way through the shower my wife found me and assigned me to take photos of the gift opening. She still has not apologized for this.

I had my subversive fun though. One gift turned out to be a "Jesus loves me" porcelain bank. I had to think about that one for a moment before leaning down to whisper to an aunt, "Jesus saves!" That got my aunt giggling for a good thirty seconds.

ISOs

2006-05-05T03:52:00.000Z

There was a monkey pile in one of the financial message boards I read where people were rushing to denounce the incentive stock options (ISOs) awarded to executives. The main gripe was that the exercised options were draining money out of the company that "should" have been going to ordinary shareholders, or at least remaining in shareholder equity. One post read, in part:

I for one am against any "incentive stock options" for executive officers. Just like the other workers they do not need any incentives to perform what they were hired to do in the first place.

This is just the kind of straw man I love to pummel, but let me approach from my own, non-executive perspective. I am a non-supervisory technical professional with decent qualifications. There is a job description for my position. Nowhere on that job description do I see that I have to respond to a phone call at 2 a.m. to drive an hour round trip to handhold a client as he gets a unit back online. That might be in the on-duty serviceman's description, maybe the project manager's job description, but not mine. Yet I find myself doing such things from time to time. I think it is inarguable that it helps the company, its image, its efficiency, and ultimately its revenue.

Now the primary reason I will do that is professional pride, not ISOs, since I have done that sort of thing previously in the absence of ISO compensation. But it wears thin over time, particularly when the company's hiring is lagging its business upswing. Over time, you start to notice that the manufacturing and service guys are earning overtime premiums and sometimes big holiday windfalls, whereas your own extra hours and night calls haven't earned you one extra dime. You are salaried, after all. Six to nine months of that and you're checking the job market, shopping around for the higher salary -- since without the time-vested incentives there's little reason to put up with increasing work for a below-industry-average paycheck.

Now you can see that I'm already alluding to another reason for ISOs: they potentially allow a cash-strapped company to retain people with the promise of future compensation. The company gets to restrain the cash-burn going into professional salaries at the expense of future options costs. The future options only cost the company if the options are exercised in-the-money, which is only the case if the stock went up, which should only be the case if the company is meeting with success. Really seems like a win all around.

When you consider that it can literally take years for even a seasoned technical professional to become fully productive within a new company environment (new tools, new procedures, different product line), if ISOs really do diminish turnover among those workers then they're probably a bargain. Getting back to the original comment that fueled this rant, I think the commenter is just totally missing the point. ISOs are not for getting people to "do their job." I believe they're for motivating people to go above and beyond, particularly where straight salary awards are limited, and are an added retention mechanism for the more critical individuals. And while the original post admittedly addressed "executives" specifically, I have a hard time believing that there are not executives who are as critically important as certain other workers. One can quibble with the magnitude of the ISOs awarded -- did the CFO really merit 25,000 option shares when he was promoted -- but that's not what the post talked about. And since the posters did not sanction ISOs for anyone at all, how could it not have been a condemnation of the ISOs themselves?

The poster can rail on and on with, "Here's your salary, do your job!" But how does he respond when half of engineering gets fed up and leaves for Johnson Controls, say? The stick only goes so far when the economy is booming, and it's even less effective against highly-credentialed workers, even in the lean years. Sometimes there's no substitute for the carrot.

Bear-ly credible

2006-05-01T22:17:00.000Z

This story at CNN ("Arctic mission to spotlight polar bears") is another one written according to the ominous global warming template. It begins:

Two U.S. explorers plan to start a four-month summer expedition to the North Pole next month to gather information on the habitat of an animal they believe could be the first victim of global warming -- the polar bear.

While these explorers plan on going north, the credulous CNN story has already gone south, because I was told that the "first victim" of global warming was Tuvalu. "Ah," you say, "but they're just people. We're talking about the animal kingdom's victims of mankind here." Um, okay. Weren't we told that the golden toad was the first critter nixed by global warming? I'm not saying that there can't be multiple victims, but there can only be one "first." Perhaps the polar bear is intended to be the leading, page-one cute, fuzzy hostage to global warming then? Or is it the pika (american mountain rabbit)? Folks will have to get back to me when a decision is reached.

Next paragraph:

Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen plan to travel 1,100 miles by foot and canoe over the Arctic Ocean to test the depth and density of the ice in summer in a mission sponsored by Greenpeace, the environmental group said on Thursday.

So basically this is a story banged out based on a Greenpeace press release. That would help explain the alarmist bent. How does the rest of the story about this allegedly-scientific journey hold up? Not too well, I judge, based on this hilarious admission:

Unusually heavy snow and ice last year forced Dupre and Larsen to call off a similar mission [...]

Question: If heavy snow and ice prevents you from going out to measure the ice, aren't you biasing the outcome a bit? No wonder the trip is named "Project Thin Ice." They've already decided that when there's thick ice, they'll wait until next year!

The story ends on a sobering note, as all stories of this kind try to do:

The polar bear population fell 14 percent to just 950 in the 10 years to 2004, according to Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Looks like Greenpeace needs to jump on those miscreants at Polar Bears International, who are irresponsibly touting a figure of "22,000 to 25,000 bears". Or how about National Geographic, which writes that the Canadian arctic itself accounts for 15,000 bears?

If Greenpeace brings the same standards to measuring ice thickness as they do to counting bears, we're never going to hear from Dupre and Larsen again.

SPP feedback

2006-04-23T21:10:00.000Z

djb thoroughly responds to my request to poke at the ups and downs of participating in a stock purchase plan at work. I'll take time here to address some new issues he raises, and better explain a couple things.

I agree that there's no "pre-tax gain." I think I understand the W-2 taxing on the 15% discount for those who turn around and sell granted shares right away; it goes some way toward explaining why the company insists on being notified if an employee sells those shares within 18 months of the grant (the company needs to withhold some additional tax). But what does the employee declare as the basis price if he sells shares after, say, two years? I would have thought one would use the discounted price as a basis in that case. Is that correct?

It is interesting that your company’s program discounts from the lower of the prices, beginning or ending, in the six month period. Our program also did that for many years, but recently changed that, shifting to discounting from the end price only. The lame excuse offered by the HR drones was that there were new difficulties under Sarbanes-Oxley associated with properly expensing the discount. At the time I was very worked up about it because the company didn't have the backbone to admit that they were trimming an expense by taking away another part of a benefit, pretending instead that they had no choice. The fact that your company still does their SPP the old way is simply more proof to the contrary.

Your point about the company delaying distribution of stock certificates is well taken. In fact, it is usually a full two weeks from the end of each period before we get new stock certificates in our hands. Naturally there is a risk of significant price change during that time. My coworker and I though both have stock built up in our respective trading accounts that we've held for a long time. If we account for shares in a first-in-first-out manner, then it seems perfectly legitimate that if I know I'll be receiving a stock certificate in two weeks that has 300 "excess" shares, I can sell that number of shares immediately from blocs I've been holding for three to four years.

That's also a good point about wealth diversity. As of this date if I add together the value of all my company stock interests, it constitutes about ten percent of the net worth of my wife and I together. So if it all disappeared next week, that would be the extent of the impact. I feel okay with that, but admittedly I have not decided what the magic percentage should be (25? 30?) beyond which I sell down to purchase different securities. And I should probably think about that soon, because there's a natural (Enron-esque) tendency to not see over-concentration of wealth objectively when that concentrated wealth is going gangbusters.

As for the final queries, while I do not know for sure whether the company is acquiring shares from the open market for the SPP or whether it is inventing new shares, I can state unambiguously that the number of plan shares is finite. That aspect is written into the public filings. It is stated that for any six month period, the maximum shares issued is X (it's in the tens of thousands), and for the full multiyear plan period the maximum number issued is Y (a few hundred thousand). This makes me think that the shares are new issues, diluting existing holdings, since in that case a company has to publicly disclose how such shares are issued and what the maximum level of dilution will possibly be over the time period. The company is quite serious about those maxima, as we found out during the recession. The SPP was oversubscribed not from a sudden up tick in employee participation, but simply from the stock price falling so low. There was withheld money for about 1.5*X shares -- therefore, participants only received around two-thirds of the shares they signed up for. The excess dollars that did not purchase shares simply showed up on the next paycheck.

Warning: benefit-related post

2006-04-19T01:02:00.000Z

Since djb brought up DRIPs and stuff like that, I wanted to put this out there and see what kind of response I got. One of the programs at my company is a stock purchase plan (SPP) that full-time employees can participate in. Basically you can elect to have up to ten percent of your gross pay withheld for stock purchase. Purchase periods run six months each. At the end of the six month period, you receive a stock certificate for the shares bought with the withheld earnings, although your acquisition price is 0.85 of the market price at the close of the period. The company is apparently funding that 15% difference, your benefit for participating in the program.

Curiously, the company has less than one-third participation in this program (one can tell from certain email distribution lists), and most that do participate do so at withholding levels lower than ten percent. I was one of those persons too until a coworker and I sat down and crunched some numbers. We had been both been in the plan long enough that we had a fair number of shares we'd been holding for years. Given that, we thought, why not go to full ten percent participation for each period and at the end of each six months just sell the extra shares that we don't care to hold long-term?

Consider my coworker's situation: He had been participating to the tune of only two percent of his gross. I don't know what he earns -- let's suppose it's 75k per annum -- in which case he was buying $750 worth of stock every six months and holding it. If the stock is trading at $10/share at the close of the six months, then he acquires at $8.50/share and receives 88 shares and a couple bucks remainder. Now suppose instead he were to partipate at the maximum level, but at the end of the six months sells the difference in shares between ten percent and his usual two percent. In that case he has $3750 withheld, receiving 441 shares at the end of which he immediately sells 353 so he has his customary 88 left over to retain long-term. He receives about $3530 on the sale of the increment. Of course, he did have to make do without $3000 of his usual take home pay for the six months, but nets an extra $530 for his trouble in the end, better than a 17% return on his money in half a year.

Tax-wise, if my coworker has a large number of shares he's been holding from past participation in the program, his 353 shares could be sold from his long-term holdings, which I'm pretty sure get nicer tax treatment. Otherwise he calls it a short-term capital gain, and may have to report the sale to the company for additional tax (W-2) withholding. Regardless, from what I described here is there some big downside that I'm just missing? Because when I think of the SPP this way, it starts to resemble employer 401(k) matching in the sense that there's "free money" there for the taking. Granted, 401(k)'s are often not fully subscribed either, but the psychology there is a little easier to understand because people are walking away from money that they wouldn't have until 2030 or some such year. With the SPP, you can have the extra money in your hands in six months.

It gets spookier. Next quarter, if all employees were to suddenly experience an epiphany and we saw 100% enrollment in the 401(k), that's no skin off my teeth. I'm pretty sure the company would still put up their paltry match for everyone. With the SPP it's different though. The company's obligation to supply shares for the SPP program is finite. If the plan is oversubscribed in terms of shares, everyone's participation gets prorated and curtailed. This strikes me as an unstable situation: while it would seem to be to everyone's advantage to participate to the full extent of the SPP, the SPP as written will not support that! The only way my coworker and I get to enjoy the status quo ante is if most employees continue to not participate, so the prudent course of action (I suppose) is to not talk about the SPP with coworkers!

Tax software saved my butt

2006-04-14T22:19:00.000Z

This year's tax deadline looms. I was pretty sure I had some money coming to me, so I filed in February, as is my usual custom. I must say however that my taxes this year were more difficult than they've ever been in my lifetime. It's not just that the tax code is getting more complicated; it's also the fact that I have stuff, i.e. the house, other deductions, transactions on capital, and so forth. It used to be that I'd file 1040A and I could pretty much figure it all out on the back of an envelope. Nowdays if I had to depend on paper only, it would literally take me days to read through all the instructions, caveats, worksheets, and so on that say what to do. It's just my dumb luck that personal computers and tax software have happened to keep pace with my personal tax circumstances.

Just take for example the situation with capital gains. I had long term gains and short term losses. Honest to Pete there's a whole blessed two-sided worksheet, not counting instructions, for handling that alone. Of course, how you compute that affects your adjusted gross income figure. The AGI, in turn, affects what percentage of your itemized deductions you can actually take as deductions. It all weaves together, and it's not trivial! Sure, the software cost money, but the hours saved justified the expense five times over.

But just because there's software to help doesn't begin to justify the complexity of the tax code. With or without computers, it's an enormous drain on people's time and effort. There are armies of people whose labours are dominated by preparations and recordkeeping driven by tax compliance. Literally billions of man-hours are being squandered annually. This is work potential that would be released into more productive pursuits by a strict bout of tax simplification. It's almost magically wonderful if you think about how much benefit could be realized with so little cost.

The difficulty of course is political, and the longer the tax code is allowed to grow the harder it is to pull up the weed. Most parts of the tax code, just by costing somebody or benefiting someone else, develop a constituency thereby. There is a constituency for the tuition tax credit. There is a constituency for using work expenses as deductions. There is an enormous constituency for the home mortgage deduction. Each twist and turn of the code breeds its own vocal supporters. On top of that, the code's sheer complexity itself spawns its own breed of constituents. Do you think that H&R Block wants taxes to be simple? Tax attorneys?

That's why true reform is so hard, in this as in other realms. We say we want it but when it gets right down to it, we realize we don't.

Good Friday commute

2006-04-14T22:16:00.000Z

Didn't really have much problem driving into the city on the holiday. The weirdest thing of note was the guy walking the pedestrian bridge with an eight-foot cross over his shoulder. The cross sure looked like it had a wood finish, but it wasn't slowing the guy down at all so it had to be a cheap veneer or cardboard mockup. A real wood cross that size would've been ninety pounds, easily.

The other part that wasn't working for me was the orange reflective vest the guy was wearing. It made him look like a member of the Jerusalem Public Works Department instead of the savior. "Pilate expects these crosses to be delivered by the end of the flogging hour, so let's hop to it!" Pontius wasn't known to be solicitous concerning public employee union break schedules.

On a similar note, I remember five years ago receiving a postcard from a local church inviting the recipient to Easter services. The picture side of the postcard was a zoom view of a crucifixion re-creation, as seen from behind the cross. What really blew the image for me were the lag bolts, metal washers and butterfly nuts holding the crossbeam to the wood post. That's like having John Wilkes Booth whip out a phaser to shoot Lincoln -- it kinda' takes you out of the moment.

Speaking of which, the Lincoln assassination was also on April 14th, which in 1865 happened to be Good Friday as well.

GPS' Gilded Age ends

2006-04-14T04:47:00.000Z

Last trip story: Every air traveler is aware that use of "personal electronic devices" is prohibited on commercial airliners in the takeoff and landing phases. During those times, the pilot is using a lot of air-to-ground communication and navigation equipment, and its pretty important that it all function without EMI (electromagnetic interference) from the passenger cabin. But for the majority of the time in the air you are allowed to use certain gizmos -- CD players, laptop computers and one-way pagers being common examples. For years, since 1999 in fact, I have passed time on airplanes holding a GPS receiver to my window, scrounging satellites to get a position fix. I've always thought it was neat to be able to identify specific towns and highways from thirty thousand feet, to try to find landmarks and so forth. I also thought it was pretty cool to note a ground speed of 600 mph on one part of a Tokyo-to-Detroit flight when we were catching the jetstream just right.

Well imagine my annoyance when the American Airlines stewardess told me I couldn't have my GPS on in-flight. I was incredulous. "I am not allowed to use a receiver?" I asked. The stewardess replied with "no" and a stream of four other negative phrases for emphasis. So I scrounged through the back of American Airlines' flight magazine and sure enough, GPS receivers are now on the naughty list for the duration of flight. I was annoyed for a few reasons. First, the stewardess was harshin' my geek buzz and wasn't even trying to be nice about it. Second, I just felt in my bones that this was an ad hoc prohibition. I'd played with Magellan and Garmin receivers on dozens of flights and the greatest reaction I had provoked before was just a cursory check that I wasn't wielding a cellphone. On occasion, a stewardess would actually take interest: I told one once that the GPS said we were at 29000 feet. To my surprise, she then went to the captain to check my story and came back later, marveling that the little receiver was right. But apparently the novelty has worn off these days and the fun has to come to an end.

After my wife was done laughing at me (third annoying factor), she related my predicament to a United pilot who happened to be seated to her right. The United guy was commuting into O'Hare so he could start his work shift that afternoon. The initial reaction of the United pilot was surprise: "I didn't know they were prohibited." I can understand the surprise, considering that the rule varies from airline to airline, plus he knows quite well that the aircraft itself has its own GPS receivers operating in harmony with the rest of the avionics. Once past that, we started talking about the fact that any electronic device that has switching currents is going to produce EMI: radios, TVs, computers, games, you name it. And the pilot added that the aircraft has wires that run the entire length of the cabin for receiving signals, control, and so forth. Now, the chances are overwhelming that any one individual's GPS is no problem at all. But maybe twenty poorly-made units acting together become a problem when you add that to the twenty laptop computers and personal MP3 players already in operation. The United pilot said, "Obviously the airline isn't going to test them all to see which models are okay, so..."

I believe that to a great extent the economics of the situation is trampling the science. I would be willing to wager that my eTrex Vista, with its sub-watt power, low-res LCD and FCC Part 15 Class B compliance, emits far less EMI than your twenty-watt, 2 GHz, SVGA Thinkpad. I'd offer the Vista itself in that wager, and throw in the MapSource CD too. But the airline knows darn well that they'd be driving away their top fares if they kept businessmen from using their computers. You cannot say the same thing for the occasional GPS nerd, so I see how I wound up on the short end of that rule.

Spring break stories

2006-04-14T04:37:00.000Z

I spent some time in Tennessee and North Carolina last week. Near Nashville, I visited The Hermitage (Andrew Jackson's estate). It was a little pricey. I noted the irony to my wife: seeing the estate necessitated the confiscation of most of the portraits of Andrew Jackson from my wallet.

The scale of the Jackson estate was a couple notches down from The Biltmore (George Vanderbilt estate), which has 250 rooms totaling about 170,000 square feet. The funniest thing I saw there though really had nothing to do with the house itself. I was on a tour of some of the back hallways and balcony areas. On one part of the tour we went up a dimly lit, narrow stairway to emerge on the roof next to a copper dome that capped the huge spiral staircase. It was clear and sunny that day. As I emerged into the light, a mother and her teenaged daughter were huddled over on the left, both having a little sneezing fit. The dad explained drily, "sun sneezes". What an odd reflex reaction! And an inherited trait to boot!

I'll tell you about another funny malady I heard about on my trip. It's funny partly because most sufferers inflict it upon themselves, as I shall explain. An emergency room nurse turned me on to the affliction known as "Saturday Night Palsy." Medically, Saturday Night Palsy is compression of the radial nerve (on the inner part of your forearm). Naturally, if you press on that too long, you'll lose feeling and motor control of your hand. So where does the name come from? Well, it would seem to originate from the legions of amateur drinkers who tie one on over the weekend and then flop over to sleep it off (much of their body weight pressing on an arm pinned underneath). The same thing can happen to a drunk slumped into an armchair: the persistent pressure of a chair arm propping up the limb will produce the effect. When the person comes to the next day and feeling doesn't come back to the hand quickly enough, the patient begins to wonder whether he didn't seriously injure himself during his drunken -- and possibly unremembered -- escapades. An emergency room visit ensues, as does another diagnosis of Saturday Night Palsy.

Paycheck-to-paycheck nation

2006-01-04T03:48:00.000Z

What does it mean to live "paycheck to paycheck"? I peruse the Wall Street Journal, Motley Fool, and various finance columns and am told quite firmly that I don't want to be doing it, but what exactly is it? David Bach is a personal finance author. In Tuesday's column he says that "over 70 percent of Americans continue to live paycheck to paycheck." In order to have a statistic like that, there must be a clear standard that distinguishes the P2P versus the non-P2P persons. But what that standard is, I have never been able to find out.

Taken literally, if you are "living from paycheck to paycheck" and the paychecks stop coming, what happens then? You die? Too literal. You are flat broke? But then the above statistic implies that 70 percent of Americans have no net worth. That seems ridiculous. Maybe it means "no savings"? But then, what counts as savings?

I feel like I live paycheck to paycheck, but it's partly a self-imposed illusion that helps curtail spending. Admittedly, if I stopped getting paid I'd have to engage in drastic cost-cutting immediately and might resort to credit in as little as six weeks (I've never bothered to develop the much-advised "six month cushion"). On the other hand, sixteen percent of my gross pay goes into the 401(k) plan and another four percent into the employee stock purchase plan. That steadily increases my net worth, but maybe it isn't the kind of "savings" that the paycheck-to-paycheck folk talk about. Hard to tell. But in my circumstances, it just seems to make more sense to take pre-tax money and put it into a 401(k) earning 10% than take after-tax money and put it into a 3% account. It's certainly less of a spending temptation this way as well. I suppose I won't be the darling of the personal finance scolds, but so far it's working for me.

Feingold Watch

2005-12-23T04:56:00.000Z

This post is an extention of a long-running discussion with 3XHAR regarding our junior Senator from Wisconsin. I heard Sen. Russ Feingold on AM 1310 Wednesday say that what the administration was doing (with the NSA wiretapping program) was illegal. I tried to capture the senator's exact words by recording the next two hours of newscasts, but the news rotated through different soundbites each half hour and did not repeat the 16:30 quote. Nevertheless, Feingold used the "I" word ("illegal", not "impeach"), and this cuts directly to my "Feingold: idealist or cynic" question.

3XHAR and I have talked about this for at least a decade: whether Feingold is quite simply a fiercely independent and principled policy wonk with whom I happen to disagree nearly all the time, or is this characterization a carefully-maintained façade put forth by a shrewd, calculating politico for media and public consumption? There is a natural instinct, of course, to be admiring of the former and suspicious of the latter. Off the top of my head, I can recall a handful of occasions that reignited this discussion. There was the 1996 partial-birth abortion debate in which Feingold appeared to excuse medical infanticide, and later went back to edit the Congressional Record in order to alter his comments. And there was the Clinton impeachment in 1999 when Feingold voted with Republicans against a motion to dismiss the trial (fueling a fanciful discussion as to whether he would later vote to convict). Finally, one would be remiss to not recall the McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform," which contributed greatly to the senator's name recognition but in no way reduced the flow of money through federal politics.

Regarding the NSA flap and Feingold's outspoken criticisms, my main point is this: Russ Feingold is no dummy (Rhodes Scholar) and is no stranger to the principles and application of U.S. law (Harvard JD). Yet it is acutely obvious to even non-lawyers who take a half hour to familiarize themselves with the topic that (1) the executive branch, with about 140 years of precedent on its side, has both the constitutional responsibility and the power to safeguard the nation against foreign attack, (2) the United States judiciary themselves (see endnotes below) have stated over and over that this is not their bailiwick, and (3) Congress declared that "the president has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism" (see War Powers Resolution,1973 and Joint Resolution, 14-Sep-2001). That sounds like a hat trick across the branches as to where the power resides. Thinking otherwise invites conflation of national-security issues with law-enforcement.

Consider some of the natural implications of Feingold's allegations. Members of Congress (a few, not all) were repeatedly briefed about the ongoing NSA program. A majority of these Congressmen are lawyers themselves. Feingold is implying that Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, et. al. were for years aware of an illegal program, and acquiesced to it. Next implication: No serious figure disputes that the President has the authority to launch a Hellfire missile at Muhammed in Yemen; however, Feingold suggests that if Muhammed were to pick up the phone to talk to some Fariq in Ann Arbor, it would be illegal for our government to listen. I say: show me chapter and verse where that is written. Show me where Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Eisenhower and LBJ had to go to court to ask for permission to spy on a foreign power and their agents. Feingold can't. That's why he is hurling accusations instead of facts, and that's why I say he is acting out of naked opportunism.

Furthermore, when the Clinton administration asserted in 1994 that:

"[T]he Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes." [Emphasis added]

one might think that Feingold -- the stalwart defender of civil liberties, the maverick lone dissenter from the Patriot Act -- would have stepped up to oppose that supposed "power grab" which was considerably greater in scope than the one he now says is so upsetting. I know of no such kerfuffle.

--- endnotes ---

(i) 1972 U.S. Supreme Court "Keith" decision: The Court declared that the Fourth Amendment's presumptive requirement of a judicial warrant applies to wiretaps in terrorism investigations involving purely domestic groups. The Supreme Court noted however that it in no way was defining or restricting the "scope of the President's surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country."

(ii) Katz vs. United States, 1967, Justice Byron White: a warrant is unnecessary "if the President of the United States or his chief legal officer, the Attorney General, has considered the requirements of national security and authorized electronic surveillance as reasonable."

(iii) When things get down to the nitty gritty, some will try to argue that it is the administration's bypassing of the secret FISA court that makes the NSA program illegal. This assertion is paper thin, mainly for Constitutional reasons. FISA was an invention of Congress (1978) and legally speaking, the Constitution trumps statute. In other words, a law cannot remove a constitutionally-granted power. Going further, a judge (even a FISA judge) has no national-security responsibilities whatsoever. None. The administration, which has the responsibility, thus chose in this instance to bypass Congress' creation but notified Congress that they were doing so, a nicety that was probably unnecessary and now appears downright unwise in hindsight.

(iv) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (2002): "[The U.S. vs. Truong] court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. [...] We take for granted that the president does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."

Fortitudine Vincimus

2005-11-21T04:43:00.000Z

Ninety years ago this day, Shackleton's polar exploration ship Endurance sank after being trapped in the Weddell Sea pack ice since January.

For those interested in preserving the history of the Endurance expedition and the memory of Sir Ernest Shackleton: Join the James Caird Society.

Hint Hint

2005-11-19T05:31:00.000Z

If I wrote a letter to Santa on the Internet, would he read it?

Got the wrong counter girl

2005-11-18T03:16:00.000Z

Went to a really big Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles service counter this week. I needed a title transfer, temporary plates, and to put in my order for a special type of permanent plate. I swear that if I didn't need the temporary plates I would've just mailed the stuff in, but in Wisconsin you can only (legally) drive around for 48 hours without a valid plate or temporary tags. If you need valid tags this month, you're pretty much compelled to go for counter service.

I suppose I was lucky that six of the eight counters were staffed, but it was still a half-hour wait for service. During the wait I played at judging the experience and effectiveness of the employees, hoping to land one of the old hands when my number came up. I wasn’t so lucky. The woman I got had never heard of "Vehicle Collector Special" plates, and required protracted consultation with senior coworkers on how to handle my forms. That was after she tried to get me to fill in a separate pamphlet for regular collector plates. Those plates wouldn't help me though on my winter car. In Wisconsin, you're generally not allowed to drive "collector" plated cars in January, a regulation intended to force collectors to have at least one automobile they pay annual registration on.

So it took awhile, plus forty-five bucks for the title transfer, fifty-five bucks for registration, fifteen bucks for issuing the new plates, and five bucks for the honor of seeing a real live DOT employee. Oy!

Oh, and since we're on the subject, who's the genius that came up with disabled motorcycle plates? No, I don't understand. Unless somebody explains this to me, some day I'll be walking through the parking lot and see a motorcycle with these plates in the handicapped parking stall, and my brain will just blue-screen, right then and there.

Rare editorial

2005-11-11T02:56:00.000Z

Here's an intro you won't see every day on the editorial page:

What a week.
Not only are we in the throes of shearing and election time [...]

That from page two of the November 4th Penguin News (Falkland Islands). On page 15 there are lengthy procedures regarding the elections, undersigned by an elections official. In the Falklands, there is only one place to vote in town, but multiple other polling stations that travel by air and Land Rover to reach voters in the countryside:

Whilst bearing the above in mind electors are urged to attend their particular airstrips and voting areas promptly in order to save time.

All electors in the Falkland Islands are requested to give any assistance required in order to maintain the smooth running of the polling process.

Translated, that second line probably reads: "Please help pull if you find the polling station mired in the peat."

How blind is blind?

2005-11-11T02:52:00.000Z

Saw a fellow walking on the sidewalk the other day, kind've idly wagging a red-tipped white stick in front of him. He certainly wasn't using the broad sweeping motions of the cane that I'd come to associate with blind pedestrians. But then he also:

(a) was wearing spectacles, and
(b) had headphones on.

Probably the guy has severe myopia or macular degeneration or something such that he's "legally" sightless, but if you're okay with blocking out all environmental noise with your headphones while you walk the city streets, how blind are you really?

And is this the sort of person the braille on the drive-up ATMs is intended for? I've long wondered about that.

Back in the swing of things

2005-10-22T04:18:00.000Z

Wasn't I just writing about living long with equanimity? This should not be taken to mean that I shall refrain from skewering the stupidity that springs eternal (a phenomenon alluded to here). It's just too much fun.

Take for example a recent Powerball writeup in USA Today, "The Nation's Coloring Book." The article appeared due to the growing size of the jackpot, estimated at about $340 million. I'll gloss over the propriety of this government revenue source for now, for unlike most, at least in this case (1) participation is optional, and (2) there is an easily quantifiable probability of realizing tangible benefit in exchange for your money. What other government money-grabs offer these advantages?

No, what drew my attention was this part:

Mary Neubauer, spokeswoman for the Iowa Lottery, said hundreds of ticket buyers had played a set of numbers from the ABC drama "Lost," which featured a character who won $156 million by playing a string of digits obtained from a patient in a mental institution: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42.

This same phenomenon is written up in a dedicated article here, which adds:

According to a Wisconsin Lottery spokeswoman, more than 840 people selected those numbers across five states during last week's Powerball drawing, including 266 in New Hampshire alone.

Perhaps you can tell from my selective quotations where I'm heading, but these thoughts don't seem to occur to the article writers or the Powerball ticket purchasers. It's weird enough to plunk down a dollar on a one-in-146-million-chance of netting the nine-figure jackpot (less taxes). You can rationalize it as an entertainment expenditure or as an almost-break-even venture in the long run if the jackpot's high enough. Fine. But what I find sand-poundingly asinine is paying a dollar for the same 1 / 146,000,000th chance of winning just 0.12% of the jackpot. Why would you do that? Stupid!! Did these people think that nobody else in the entire country would play the numbers from the highly-rated, nationally broadcast prime-time television show? Did each one of these hundreds upon hundreds of people think that they were the only ones clever enough to play these numbers? Sheeesh!

If we could somehow get an address list of the people who used the "Lost" numbers for Powerball, we could sell that list at a steep premium to salesmen nationwide. Because these are the people you can hit with the craziest offers. Given the option to buy equal chances at $340 million or $400 thousand, they chose the four hundred thousand. It's like knowing beforehand that there's a donkey behind door number three, and going ahead and picking door three anyway.

Imagine for a moment what these rants will be like when I'm actually old....

Flat affect

2005-10-21T14:20:00.000Z

I'm mired in some sort of annoying grieving phase over the untimely passing of my father, Jujj Sr. The days immediately following such a profound event don't offer much opportunity for reflection, as one is overwhelmed with decisionmaking, ceremonial activities, and the attention of relatives. Then you go back to work, but you're really busy there too because you're catching up, and everyone would like to have a few words with you besides. Nay, it takes some time for things to start to approach "normal" again, and that's when it really sinks in that yes -- it's normal -- but different.

I catch myself making mental notes along the lines of, "I should remember to tell dad about that." I had to remove dad from the list I had for Christmas ideas. That one hurt -- more so than trying to decide what to do with the birthday card I had bought for him a few days prior. It seems unreal that I can't just pick up the telephone and call him up. Actually, my sister stumbled into that strange predicament barely an hour after dad's death, when she was calling to get word to dad's colleagues. The place where he used to work still has an extended outgoing voice message in dad's voice at dad's old extension, and that's the connection my sister got that morning.

The merely "annoying" grief arises when I do fun stuff that gets retroactively draped in melancholia. Last night my wife and I went to see the Wallace & Gromit feature film. I thought it was marvelous but at the same time I was thinking "Dad would really go for this film," and so it was a little sad too. Will the intensity of these moods slacken with time? Sure, but I suspect what will help more than time will be all those happenings and circumstances that dad could do without. Like snow. How that man despised Wisconsin winters! When I see the first flake, I will smile that dad needn't concern himself again with coats, shovels, sleet and slush.

I have a theory about an intangible that drags some people down as the decades wear on, and it's related to the concept of "normal, but different." When our lives change for the better, it usually happens so gradually that we don't take notice of it, or we discount the significance because we expected it. Negative developments on the other hand often seem sudden and capricious, and are recalled from memory more readily because of that. So if you're not careful while looking back through a prism of forty, fifty, or sixty years, you can trick yourself into thinking that the best of times were all way far in the past, and everything since has been a series of stairsteps down. Plan on living long? Best to remember that "normal, but different" doesn't always have to be a negative, and that building the positives in your life may lack drama but is essential nonetheless.

I intend to live out the senior years that my father was denied. My great-to-the-sixth grandaddy lived to be ninety-nine without aid of great wealth or medicine. Surely in this century that's not an unreasonable target to shoot for? That so much of what I now know will change or disappear, I will take in stride. I shall watch the stars slide past one another with my own eyes. And through it all I will remember.

Plus eight

2005-09-23T13:32:00.000Z

Between Thursday morning and Thursday evening the local gasoline hopped up eight cents a gallon. I think this is mirroring the jump in wholesale gasoline prices triggered by shutdowns as industrial workers evacuate from the coastal refineries.

Inflection point

2005-09-22T14:29:00.000Z

In my opinion, we could be looking at a temporary bottom in gasoline prices right now. Prices came down twelve cents a gallon off the weekend but have been holding now for the past two days. Don't count on the price stepping down again this late in the week, and of course the big threat for the following week is Hurricane Rita. That storm is menacing a whole different batch of refining capacity on the Texas coastline. We've all just experienced the sort of price spike a temporary, regional refinery shutdown can cause. If two of those events occur within a month of one another, the second could wind up being worse because the slack in manpower and supplies for repairs was already taken up by the first storm.

So I filled my tank and replenished my Strategic Premium Reserve last night. (I drive an older car that really appreciates the 93 octane). As an aside, I'm probably breaking one of Wisconsin's laws when I'm filling my five gallon gas cans. How can this possibly be? Well to begin with, I just don't like those plastic gasoline cans. I don't much trust them, don't care for them. They seem cheap. To my way of thinking, gasoline should be in a metal can. On the other hand, do you know what a quality five gallon gas can costs? Usually around forty bucks! Unless you're inclined to buy the NATO-style gas cans, which can be had from sporting catalogs for around fifteen bucks. Big savings -- but the cans are green, and there's the rub. Wisconsin statutes section 168.11 says I'm only supposed to dispense into a red container. It's the law, dadgummit! So if you wonder why I'm parking at the furthest pump, at night, lurking behind my big car to fill the gas cans -- now you know.

But back to the blasted hurricane. You'd have to be living under a rock to not notice that Rita has been leading the news all freakin' week, plus part of last week as well. I'd just like to make the point that Rita is not all that different from Katrina. Katrina also originated in the Atlantic, also passed over Florida, and also spent days lazily building strength over the balmy waters of the Gulf. And yet Katrina, which was about as swift as stealthy as an arthritic bull elephant, caught about a hundred thousand people (and three levels of government) with their trousers around their ankles. It just seems so silly and negligent -- more and more so as we trudge through this week's news of Rita approaching. And still approaching. And oh, look! Still approaching.

Gas prices in rapid decline

2005-09-17T15:12:00.000Z

I must have missed the blaring headlines about this, but the local price of gasoline has fallen ten cents a gallon in just the last two days, and is 35 cents off the post-Katrina peak. The price is still historically lofty, of course, even above the 1980 levels in inflation-adjusted terms. But "lofty" is a substantial improvement over "crazy."

As a driver of an old, fuel-inefficient vehicle, I have tried to be cagey in my fuel purchases. Even before that though came simple conservation efforts: fewer side trips, combining errands and the like. But a guy still has to get to work and back. When the price of gasoline is rising quickly, day after day, the proper strategy for purchasing is to fill up as often as possible. Better to buy all the fuel I can at today's lower price than at the new elevated rate of tomorrow. One just has to watch for the inflection point, noting when the runup has peaked.

The present, declining price environment calls for the reverse strategy. Don't fill up. Put in only a half tank today, because tomorrow's price will be lower. Go back to the usual fuel purchase patterns only when the price stabilizes for about a week. Furthermore, if you have five or ten gallons in cans as reserve, consider using that fuel now. It'll save you from buying at $2.75, and you can refill your reserve later when the price has bottomed.

This whole episode has been an interesting demonstration of the market at work; proof, I would think, that it is possible to endure a supply shock without running out of product as long as you allow the price to rise. I had to argue this with my coworkers a couple weeks ago as gas hit $3. One coworker, surprisingly, was alleging gouging and conspiracy. My case was straightforward. I first got my coworker to agree that a supply disruption existed. I then pointed out, "If you hold the price the same, you'll run out. Nixon tried that, and you had lines and shortages. Why would it be any different now?" The coworker was obliged to concede, at minimum, that some price increase had to occur to curtail demand.

That's when the other coworker jumped on me. "But people aren't going to drive less. They still have to get to work. They still have to go to the store." I replied that it's true that people will still do those things, and yet they will drive less all the same. For example, I switched around a visit with my extended family. Instead of the original plan of having them driving one or two large vehicles to visit me in my home over the weekend, my wife and I instead went to visit them, driving only my wife's compact car. As another example, this time of year I often have league sports events at seven in the evening. It's tempting to leave work at five, have some time at home and then go to the game, but that's more driving. So instead I have been staying late at work, saving on the driving. It's true that people are just trimming consumption on the margins, but you only need 4% trimming to get through a 4% supply shock. That's all it takes.

What the second coworker's statement is really about though is the inelasticity of American gasoline demand in the short run. People "need" to do a certain amount of driving, and those habits don't change easily. That's why it took about a fifty cent per gallon increase to result in the necessary curtailment of demand. But "inelastic" is different from "no elasticity at all," which is an exaggeration that my coworker was alleging.

Furthermore, over medium periods, we find more demand elasticity. The longer price pressure is applied, the more people will make long-term adjustments in their consumption. I know of two coworkers already this month who have purchased small used cars for the express purpose of saving on fuel costs, particularly in commuting. Behold, the free market at work!

Word verification ON

2005-09-17T15:10:00.000Z

This blog is a backwater. I like it that way. So when I realized this week that my private pond had been sullied by a comment spammer, I went virtual-ballistic. As though any reader who would encounter the spammer's meaningless word salad would have the slightest interest in following the links. Ridiculous. But I am told, "Oh, no. They just want the link planted on your page to raise a page ranking in the search engines." Feh. They'll get no unearned benefits, metaphysical or otherwise, from the Jujj's virtual court.

I quickly expunged the spam and activated one of Blogger's newer features, the "word verification." Should you wish to post a comment here, you will be shown a graphic of a word and asked to type that word in as verification that you are a human being with eyeballs and a brain, and not some automated spam-planting engine.

Nay, if a spammer expects to profit in this venue, he'll need to be like the rest of us and actually read the blogs. Read, smile, and nod quietly as the bloggy essence sinks in. Enjoy.

When the levees are down

2005-09-13T03:42:00.000Z

When things are at their worst, the maxim goes, that's when you find out who your real friends are. If that's the case, who were the better friends to beleaguered folks on the Gulf coast, post-Katrina? Mayor Ray Nagin, who wouldn't follow his own city's disaster plan? Or Wal Mart, which has managed to improvise relief distribution both before and after the storm? Would you be better off aided by director Brown's FEMA, or the Southern Baptists?

I admit to indulging in more than my share of hissing and spitting over which layer of government has exhibited the most incompetence during the disaster. A big problem with this line of argument though is that it implicitly assumes that government should be entrusted with all these responsibilities. If I paid my garbage man, my barber, and my neighbor's kid to team up and perform heart bypass surgery on me, it'd sound silly to complain afterward that it didn't go perfectly well. That would be true even if I gave them a lot of my money to do it.

You want a mountain of water and food somewhere at a certain time? You want transport? Yes, I know that you gave the government a lot of your money, but what if they don't deliver? It's almost impossible to sue them. It's equally hard to hold an actual government worker accountable -- whether criminally, civilly, or even to impede his prospects for advancement. You're much better off using your money (or pooling group money) to contract with private organizations for such things.

If you want government to do something well, then for heaven's sake give it less to do. Besides affording the government fewer meaningless distractions, it also costs less in taxes, leaving more for people to use in taking care of themselves.

That said, there will always be the infirm, and especially the poor. Lower taxes mean little to those who aren't paying in the first place. What becomes of them when the government is not tasked with their sheltering, feeding, evacuation, and so on? I say give this a try: have government concentrate on maintaining order. Just do that! Where there is order, then volunteers, charities, and even business can work to bring food, shelter, and transport. Bus drivers and Red Cross workers will not come when they are being shot at. This is understandable and already amply demonstrated.

Obviously, such devolution of government duties is a counterintuitive notion to many, but what else is on the table? The government failed to meet expectations, and American government is already the most humongous, most lavishly-funded the world has ever known. Is it wise to give it more money, to make it bigger?

Even if people refuse to rein in government, at the very least could we refrain from calling upon the government to hobble the companies that invariably come through as benefactors in times of crisis? In a similar spirit of tolerance, how about cutting the Southern Baptists a little slack when they ask permission to put up a nativity scene in the middle of town this Christmas? They're feeding tens of thousands of people on their own initiative right now. That should be worth something, even when it's not government doing it.

EPA fuel waiver

2005-09-01T16:45:00.000Z

If you wish, follow this link to read about the fuel waiver issued Wednesday. Of note:

These waivers only apply to volatility standards - the rate at which fuel evaporates - and the amount of sulfur in fuel.

If I understand this correctly, this sounds like a half-ass measure that fails to do anything for the so-called ozone non-attainment areas like southeast Wisconsin. The special formulation in these areas has to do with fuel oxygenation, not volatility or sulfur content.

Silly to even get my hopes up, really.

Uncle!

2005-09-01T16:36:00.000Z

All righty. The price of gasoline is now, officially, crazy-high. I have so decreed.

Perhaps you recall from May that I wrote about gasoline prices then, and said that they weren't at record levels (in the inflation-adjusted sense) and that we weren't in any kind of crisis. At the time I wrote, the price was $2.236 / gal. What a windfall such a price would seem today! With the price spiking up from the refinery shutdowns (a la Katrina), I am seeing non-reformulated area stations demanding $2.99 / gal. In Milwaukee, still mandated to use an extra-special reformulation, it's even worse with prices at least another 30 cents higher.

So I'm willing to declare some sort of crisis state now, albeit a low-grade one (excepting Louisiana and Mississippi, who have a real crisis going on). I think that the smartest mitigation measure that could be taken now is for the president to sign off on a waiver so that the EPA "non-attainment areas" can use whatever fuel formulations are at hand. This would get rid of the entirely artificial local price spikes that are due to sudden glitches in the supply and delivery of specialty gasolines. It would also simplify logistics, which is a good thing to do in a time of disruption.

I would also get behind a limited suspension of the Wisconsin state taxes, say for a three week period. This would further mitigate local economic disruption caused by the national price spike. Note that this only works if other states don't try the same thing en masse. The benefits here only accrue to the bold.

Of course the chance of these things happening don't seem great. For one thing, I don't expect George Dubya to recognize that there's actually a beneficial "small government" thing he can do (EPA waiver) when there's so many higher-profile, "big government" things (FEMA, federal troops, etc.) in play at the same time. He may surprise me though. There was a representative for the American Petroleum Institute on the news with Jim Lehrer Wednesday who seemed to imply that Bush had already won a waiver through September 15, but I can't confirm this. As for any form of state tax reduction, Wisconsin's governor has made it abundantly clear that whether things are affordable to the government takes top priority. If things become markedly less affordable for the taxpayer, they just have to muddle through somehow. This is true of most government, most of the time. If you doubt it, please listen carefully when elected officials talk about (a) tax cuts and (b) government programs. Only (b) actually "costs" the government money, but in spite of this (a) is routinely labeled as a cost as well.

Again, I don't mean to imply in any way that my tribulations with my wallet compare in magnitude to the destruction and displacement on the Gulf coast. They don't. It's just that you can read your fill about that elsewhere. I'm just writin' here.

But on the topic of destruction, let me bring up a couple observations. The Wall Street Journal noted Wednesday that the New Orleans levee system was supposedly designed to withstand a direct hit from a category three hurricane. What New Orleans got Monday was a flyby to the east from a category four, and the levee system broke down anyway.

Besides noting that the system didn't live up to its advertised strength, I have to ask: When the very existence of the entire city is at stake, does prudence demand setting the bar a little higher than category three? I ask this sincerely from a risk-reward standpoint, understanding that I might be off-base here. Maybe a category four or five hasn't passed that close to New Orleans in 200 years, and will not again for another 200. If that's the case, I'd concede the folly of spending five billion dollars beefing up a hundred miles of levees. Otherwise, I'm left wondering how it is the people down there have been content with their annual game of russian roulette. Bang, you lose fifty billion dollars.

Trinity

2005-07-16T02:04:00.000Z

Sixty years ago July 16th, the United States detonated the first atomic bomb in the test called "Trinity" in the New Mexico desert. It was the penultimate event of the Manhattan Project, which was to climax in the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of the Second World War. Trinity began the atomic age.

The Trinity test was experimental confirmation of the implosion-type weapon design. In an implosion bomb, the fissionable core (plutonium, in this case) is compressed by simultaneous detonation of a surrounding sphere of high explosives. The explosives create a shock wave that moves inward at high velocity, squishing the subcritical softball-sized core into a supercritical golf ball sized core. In the supercritical core, the fissionable material chain-reacts explosively. The inward pressure of the implosion and a surrounding uranium tamper helps hold the core together a few fractions of a microsecond longer, prolonging the chain reaction and increasing the bomb yield.

The other atomic weapon design was the gun design. The gun design used a more-straightforward method of assembling a critical mass; it would merely shoot one subcritical mass (like a soda can-sized bullet) down a barrel into a second, ring-shaped subcritical mass. As the bullet met the rings, the united assembly became supercritical, would chain-react and explode. The Hiroshima bomb was the gun design, using uranium-235 as its fissionable material.

The scientists of the Manhattan Project had a high degree of confidence that the gun-type bomb would work. They had run numerous experiments to convince themselves of it. In one experiment, a smaller version of the U-235 bullet was literally dropped through U-235 rings to briefly create a barely-supercritical assembly from which confirming measurements could be made. This experiment had a peak power production of twenty megawatts! With the implosion design though, the scientists could not come up with an experiment that gave them the same degree of confidence that the bomb would really work. They did detonate one full-scale implosion assembly (sans plutonium) before Trinity, but their scientific instrumentation was insufficient to properly distinguish a perfect implosion from an asymmetrical one. In this case, only a full test would do.

Interestingly, the implosion design was for a long time an also-ran, second-tier concept. The notion of lensing explosives was very new and fraught with technical difficulties that the gun design didn't have to contend with. It was thought that the gun design would suffice for the U-235 bombs and the plutonium bombs alike, as measurements with U-235 and plutonium samples had confirmed. Only it didn't turn out that way, for the initial plutonium measurements were performed on a tiny speck of plutonium created in a cyclotron (particle accelerator). If you bombard a uranium target with neutrons for a month in your cyclotron, you can then process your sample chemically and extract a wee bit of plutonium. But there weren't enough cyclotrons in the world that could generate enough neutrons to make enough plutonium for a bomb. The way to mass-produce plutonium is not on the muzzle of a neutron gun; it's in a neutron oven, which is to say, a nuclear reactor. And that's why Hanford complex was built in Washington state. Of course it was a while before the reactors could be built, and operated, and uranium retrieved to be processed for plutonium extraction. And after all this effort and expense the atomic scientists measured the mass-produced plutonium and found that it would not work in the gun bomb.

How could this be? It turns out that when you bombard uranium with a low neutron flux (cyclotron), you get a nice "clean" plutonium (Pu) 239. But in the neutron-rich environment of a 250-megawatt reactor core, you produce a far higher proportion of Pu-240 isotope. Pu-240 has a higher rate of spontaneous fission, meaning that as the plutonium is sitting there it's throwing off a lot of neutrons. In the planned gun design, the plutonium bullet would be producing so many initiating neutrons that the triggered bomb would start an energetic chain reaction a moment too early, before the bullet had fully entered the target rings. The plutonium gun design would fizzle. While it was still technically possible to create a working plutonium gun bomb, the higher velocity necessary to get the bullet into the rings and avoid predetonation required a gun assembly too large to fit in any bomber aircraft. Thus, the only way to use all the plutonium that Hanford was producing for the project was to get it working in an implosion bomb. The parallel development track being spearheaded by George Kistiakowsky suddenly became very important.

These are but a smattering of the challenges that the Manhattan Project overcame on the way to Trinity. As daunting as the technical problems were, there was also the scale of the industrial base that had to be created to produce the nuclear ordnance. As mentioned, the Hanford complex was built to create plutonium. But the scientists of the Manhattan Project could not just assume in 1942 that any one type of fissionable material or any one bomb design would be successful. So they also conceived facilities dedicated to uranium processing. To create bomb-grade uranium requires meticulously separating uranium's lighter 235 isotope from the more-common U-238 (the ratio before enrichment is only 1:137). How would this be achieved? Again, at the outset the leaders of the Project could not say with any surety which industrial process would be successful in achieving isotope separation. So they built them all. A calutron separation facility was built. A gas diffusion facility was built. A thermal diffusion facility was built. As each facility began to operate (with varying degrees of efficiency), complex schedules were developed in which partially enriched uranium from one facility would be fed as an input into another facility for final enrichment. The industrial undertaking was so massive that in less than three years the Manhattan Project had built facilities that were comparable in expense and size to the entire U.S. automotive industry of that time. And the entire wartime production of this new, multi-billion dollar industrial base amounted to tens of kilograms of metal, in aggregate probably smaller than a single beach ball.

I do not expect to be writing a post in August on either anniversary of the bombings of Japan, but that should not be taken as dismissal of the hellish enormity of what the U.S. Air Force brought to pass on those two days. Yes, I have read entire books documenting this. But August 1945 did not come about out of the blue on a mad whim. It was bought and paid for in Manchuria, Nanking, Pearl Harbor, Bataan, the Coral Sea, Midway, Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Iwo, Okinawa, and a hundred other places.

I had lunch with two coworkers on Friday. Entirely by coincidence, both of these coworkers' fathers were WWII veterans, both having served in the Pacific theatre. Both also occupied postwar Japan, meaning that both men were slated to be part of the invasion of the mainland had the nuclear strikes not ended the war in August. Both coworkers expressed certainty that their fathers survived the war because of the atomic bomb.

Try to imagine it from the perspective of the soldier. One week you are stockpiling and training for Operation Downfall, the landings to rival Normandy, only this time onto the home soil that bred the kamikaze. The next week your commander tells you that a new superweapon, dreamed up by physicists, with ten thousand times the power of high explosives, has just been used on the enemy and they gave up. If Jesus Christ himself rolled up on skates to hit you with a pie, it would seem less fanciful. At that moment, how would the Bomb not seem like a miracle?

Declining opinion of humanity

2005-06-24T03:12:00.000Z

There are many problems with growing older. To pick a depressing one at random, consider the phenomenon where the older, presumably wiser population keeps dying off and getting replaced by shiny new fools. If you live long enough, you find yourself totally surrounded by fools. Then you die.

This notion makes me increasingly sensitive to fool sightings. For instance, I've noticed the following flavor of fool on multiple occasions while driving. In every case I have the right-of-way. But since I, from time to time, am able to predict the whimsical impulses of bad drivers, I already have my foot hovering over the brake just as the guy turns left (for example) across my path. It is at precisely this moment that I can see the part of the guy's car that I would have plowed into if I hadn't just read his damn fool mind, and it's already got a huge dent there. How depressing is that? To summarize: the guy pulled that stupid stunt before, got hit, and didn't learn from it!

And to think, his vote counts the same as mine. That is, until he finally tries that move in front of a dump truck, after which he's only qualified to vote in New York, Florida, and Chicago.

The younger the subject, the greater the potential for foolish behavior. Take this Utah pseudo-Scout who was in the news last week. While nobody will say just how this eleven-year-old got lost, it is apparent that the kid wandered away from camp on his own initiative. He just up and left. Then to compound things, instead of trying to be found, the kid played escape-and-evade for four days out of fear of being "stolen" by "a stranger." I know that fourth-graders can be obtusely literal when they want to be, but after four days without food and water, one would think that even a fourth grader might consider contacting a stranger. Say what you will about kidnapers, but they typically provide at least a little food and water. Heck, Elizabeth Smart's kidnapers fed her for nine months. Now at least Elizabeth actually had abductors, whereas the lost boy only imagined them. But Elizabeth conceded that she could hear her searchers calling her name, and yet she did nothing.

What's Utah doing to their kids such that they don't want to be found?

Memo to a car dealer

2005-06-03T01:04:00.000Z

I have some suggestions for a certain area car dealer (you know who you are). When the cars you are selling are also an acronym for "Killed in Action," it's not a particularly good idea to be flashing "Memorial Day," "KIA," and "sale" across our television screens in succession. While you're at it, you might also consider not airing that particular commercial on the History Channel. During their broadcast of the Battle of Midway.

I'm not saying you need to apologize. I'm just saying that your marketing is probably not having the impact you intended.

I find it mildly reminiscent of the Sony VCR manual that showed Americans how to set the date to December 7th. Faux pas!

Legislating from the bumper

2005-06-03T00:55:00.000Z

A bumper sticker I saw yesterday:

Save Roe Now

I've been having a really hard time trying to get a handle on this one. Are we talking about the person, or the court decision? Because the person is Norma McCorvey, and as far as I know she's doing fine and doesn't need saving (Christian evangelicals got to her already, in 1995). Or maybe the bumper sticker bearer wants to save Norma from the annual awkwardness of her daughter's birthday (the daughter the Supreme Court was too late to help her abort). We'd all have to band together to get 150th-trimester abortions passed for that, though.

If it's the court decision that's being referenced, this presupposes that Roe v. Wade is imperiled. I don't see it that way myself, but if true, what is Roe v. Wade in peril of? Realistically, it can only be in peril of being overturned by a new Supreme Court decision. Abort by the courts, die by the courts; that's the risk you run!

On a lighter note, I also saw this sticker on the same trip:

Be kind to animals
Don't eat them

I might be inclined to do this once animals have extended this courtesy to one another generally. And it's not as though I've been running around in the forest dragging elk down with my teeth, for heavens sake. As for the notion that I should lead by example, I've been doing a yeoman's job for years in areas such as (a) personal hygiene, and (b) not copulating in public, and I haven't noticed any inclination on the part of the animal kingdom to follow my lead. So for the handful of animals I intend to continue eating: you had it coming!

Sith Slapped

2005-06-02T04:32:00.000Z

We're over two weeks now since the release of Revenge of the Sith, so I'm not sure whether the following litany of complaints can be considered spoilers anymore. After half a month, if you were gung ho to see Episode III, you've seen it and this material is known to you. Otherwise: you've been warned.

This movie has a screw loose from the first crawl:

War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku. There are heroes on both sides.

Really? Name one "hero" on the side of Dooku, the Sith Lord. It is difficult even to name a living thing allied with Dooku, since most of his warriors are droids.

Not that the battle droids don't have colorful personalities. You might think that a droid purpose-built for war might be short on human characteristics (much as astromech units lack facility with the spoken word). Well surprise, surprise! Battle droids yell and groan before keeling over. Battle droids scream "My eyes! My eyes!" if oil is sprayed on their optical sensors. Battle droids use throwaway phrases like "Get 'em," "Hey, you!" and "all right." They are also programmed to take the time to say things like "Uh-ohhhhh" when things are hurtling at them, instead of using that time to simply step out of the way. This programming flaw gets two battle droids smashed to bits by a moving elevator.

What's also unclear is why it is necessary for warships of a Droid Army to bother keeping their vessels pressurized. Surely the droids don't need to breathe? Having nine-tenths of the ship in vacuum still leaves a generous amount of space for Count Dooku to do front flips and for General Grievous to cough up a lung, yet would really cut down the mobility of infiltrating Jedi. Just a thought.

Not that Grievous himself seemed to have much difficulty operating in vacuum. He seemed to do quite well in vacuum, escaping from one ship's bridge to enter again elsewhere on the vessel via a hatch. I don't think I heard him cough once pressurizing or depressurizing.

So far this is pretty much griping from the "miscellaneous" bin. I said beforehand that I expected bad dialog and giant plot holes, so let's visit that.

Padme: "It's only because I'm so in love!"
Anakin: "No! It's only because I'm so in love with you!"

Oh, barf. Of course, the tragic core of this entire love affair is that the Jedi lack health coverage for domestic partners. This means that Anakin must ally with Sidious and the dark side of the force to access proper pre-natal services. Unfortunately for Anakin, Padme's pregnancy is stealthed: the very day of birthing her two full-term babies she is barely showing, and is able to run down her ship's ramp on Mustafar.

Padme is thus is forced to fall back upon the sorry medical care of the Old Republic. This is highly unfortunate, since the medical droid in charge observes:

Medically, she's completely healthy. For reasons we can't explain, we are losing her. We don't know why. She has lost the will to live.

Come to think of it, isn't this exactly what a refitted protocol droid would say? It doesn't know a thing about medicine really, and it's just covering its metal butt. The droid then proceeds to force the dying woman to deliver twins vaginally, rather than by c-section. Malpractice, anyone?

Is it crass for me to bring up Episode VI at this point?

Luke: "Leia. Do you remember your mother? Your real mother?"
Leia: "Just a bit. She died when I was very young."

Well, we can discount that conversation now. Lucas couldn't be bothered to get the plot pipes to line up. Unless we're meant to understand "when I was very young" to mean "ten minutes old." Sheesh.

Then of course, Yoda's adoption placement for the twins went something like this: Bail Organa's sitting right here, so let's give him one child. And send the other to that den of bandits and slavers on Tatooine. Specifically, let's have Vader's stepbrother rear the child. Maybe all's well that ends well, but I don't see the wisdom here.

At least the Leia adoption brought us an opportunity to see Alderaan briefly. Unlike the standard Lucas mono-environment planet (ice, desert, urban, lava, cloud, swamp, forest), we see that Alderaan has beautiful mountains, greenery, majestic architecture, lovely lakes, blue skies and white clouds. The downside of this kind of planet is that it's so complex as to confuse the viewer, so it was only natural that Lucas destroyed it at the outset (Episode IV, 1977).

I haven't seen any reviewer comment on this dialog, but it is unintentionally revealing:

Obi-Wan: "Did you press the 'stop' button?"
Anakin: "No, did you?"
Obi-Wan: "No."

Mind you these are two of the Jedi elite, imbued with peerless sensory and intuitive powers, who were standing side by side in an elevator. Little wonder then that the old Chancellor fellow who was the hub of galactic turmoil and who couldn't seem to stop chatting about the dark side kept humming along undetected.

Jonah Goldberg wrote essays back in 2001 and 2002 in which he attempted to explain what bothered him about Menace and Clones. To paraphrase, Goldberg said that what was brilliant about the Star Wars setup was that it was postulated to be "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." It was to be a fully-contained alternate reality, i.e. lacking in connections to and reminders of our own world. Then Goldberg proceeded to give examples of how Lucas littered Episodes I and II with betrayals of that great setup. But Goldberg's utlimate yardstick for franchise betrayal was still an example from a James Bond film (Octopussy) in which Bond issues a Tarzan yell while swinging from a vine.

Well Goldberg doesn't have to stoop to referencing Bond anymore, since Lucas integrates an unmistakable Tarzan yell into Episode III(*). The yell is issued by two Wookies on Kashyyyk, swinging down on vines to board an amphibious attack droid. Besides breaking the mood for about the twentieth time with another inappropriate intrusion of real-world culture, just what the hell were the vines attached to? The droids were making an amphibious landing. Do vines hang from clouds or something on Kashyyyk? And another thing: wasn't this supposed to be the remorselessly-grim, non-crowd-pleasing, not-for-kids, no holds barred, director must tell a dark, tragic story movie? All darkness and death; nope, no levity here!

I'll admit though, not even Vader can suppress the final, clichéd scream of "Nooooooo!" upon contemplating the theater entirely filled with people who just paid six bucks each to sit through all this.

(*) The extra-devoted Star Wars fan might counter here that there was a Tarzan yell in Return of the Jedi as well, but I hardly consider this exculpatory.

We got Jacked

2005-05-26T02:55:00.000Z

The radio idiocy devolution that was 105.1 "The Buzz" (WBZU) has reached its primordial blob endpoint as WCHY "Charlie" FM. I have disgustedly tracked WBZU's decline via personal email rants for years. The reason I had taken any interest at all in the station was because of their once-exclusive devotion to 80's hits. Their haste to abandon a pure eighties format and obstinate refusal to ever backtrack from their compounding programming missteps earned my undying scorn.

Format-wise, WBZU had pretty much completed its transformation to the new, faddish Variety Hits by February. The call-letter change this month just formalized things. The ridiculous "Charlie" moniker is part of the format: Variety Hits is known as the "Jack format." As this newsletter explains:

The JACK format debuted in Vancouver, B.C., three years ago, but in the U.S. it began on 105.5 FM in Denver a year ago on April 14. The format was created by Bob Perry and named after his radio alias, "Cadillac Jack" Garrett...

Apparently it is mandatory that every station of that format be a Jack, Joe, Dave, Doug, or some such. This site has a rather extensive listing of the spreading plague.

The mercy killing of 105.1 was announced in a chirpy, upbeat manner:

Eighties-formatted WBZU (The Buzz) made the move at 1pm today, becoming "105-1 Charlie FM," with the slogan "We play anything!"

Most of what you need to know about what was wrong with WBZU can be mined from that one sentence. I would sooner call Michael Jackson "child-safe" than I would have called the remaining, gutted shell of BZU "eighties-formatted." As early as 2002, less than two years into their existence, The Buzz was losing its focus, playing "The eighties, and more!"

The absurd conceit in play here can be described as follows: First is the notion that in order to get a solid listening bloc among age demographic X, you have to play music spanning time period Y, with the spread of years covered by X and Y being comparable. By itself, that's a perfectly reasonable notion. The problematic, follow-up notion is that X can be as large as a 20-year bloc, or that Y can span any contiguous set of years seamlessly. Combine these ideas and suddenly we have asininity on stilts. In my opinion, there are some pop music boundaries that are unbridgeable. The beginning of the video music era is one such boundary. The onset of the grunge era is another.

Consequently, The Buzz crafted atrocious playlists that had eighties standards rolled in with Margaritaville, Lying Eyes, The Boys are Back in Town, and Crazy Love (Buffet, Eagles, Thin Lizzy, Poco respectively). Unwilling to limit themselves to straddling just one gigantic musical gulf, they also played Melissa Etheridge, Hootie and the Blowfish, and other contemporary pop. I feel a little bit sorry for the poor on-air bastards that had to cue such jarring lineups, but if a guy is unwilling to take a stand and say "I will not in any way segue from Billy Idol into Deep Blue Something," then really he's become part of the problem.

The fact that management, as late as this year, persisted in calling WBZU "eighties-formatted" just confirms their cluelessness and denial of how far they had drifted and how thoroughly they corrupted the original concept. Quite obviously, the trend toward "we play anything," has been there at least three years already, chipping away at the station's identity before it had matured, and assuring that a reliable listener base would never take root.

Mandatory sensitivity training

2005-05-26T02:23:00.000Z

The company I work for is having another spasm of "mandatory sensitivity training." It has been awhile since we've been subjected to the sensitivity schtick. If one were cynical, one might note the utter absence of sensitivity training during the years that budgets were tight and the company's survival was on the line. But perhaps everyone just naturally becomes more sensitive (and requires no additional training) when budgets are tight. (There is a similar dynamic that keeps all of our scientific instruments in calibration until money becomes available.)

Anyway, would it suffice to point out that I have already been subjected to the sensitivity training? I have been trained! Isn't retraining redundant, a waste of my time and company resources? Apparently not, because the sessions are mandatory for everyone, regardless of previous indoctr... er, "training."

From the fact that we must be re-trained, some questions naturally arise. Is the retraining due to shortcomings or a lack of competence on the part of the initial trainer? If not, then it must be that "insensitivity" is the natural state of mankind, to which we revert after some period of years. Where might I find the study, published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, documenting the employee time-sensitivity decay curve? Are there any other variables (such as budgets, see above) that influence this falloff in sensitivity? It would seem that awareness of these variables might allow us to schedule future training more effectively.

Three days of spam

2005-05-10T21:43:00.000Z

It is time for another spam folder roundup!

My banking information is woefully out of date. My SouthTrust account information needs to be updated. I am told that my PayPal account has been "limited" and "suspended," both events occurring within 40 minutes of one another. Not surprisingly, I'm on my "final warning" -- again -- from eBay. Oddly enough, in the face of all of this astounding neglect on my part, nothing actually seems to ever happen my accounts.

According to the spam I need drugs, deeply discounted software, a lower loan rate, and hot stock tips. I have learned that "Barons [sic] issues strong bi [sic]." This is either an attempt to tout a stock or a tabloid report on British royals. It's hard to tell.

I am receiving spam from Catalina Chung, Humphry Wang, Marmaduke Dallas, salvatore liggin, refugio roswick, cyrus zaffuto, Vxjyarvzzhshm, Ãðèãîðüåâ È.Ñ., and Valerie {LASNAME}. That last one slays me. If you can't be bothered to properly link your super-duper last-name file (containing gems like Wang, Dallas, and zaffuto) to your spam-generating engine, you might want to consider a less intellectually-demanding line of "work." Panhandling, perhaps.

A spam subject line admonishes: "Avoid critical or shaming statements." A couple hours later: "Fast solution to your problems in a bed!"

Finally, why would anyone think that the following subject lines constitute a viable hook to a product or service?

blonde thyronine baptismal fortunate girlie doorknob
hoboken counterargument inexpert prague awake cedar

Yes, yes, I know that they're "trying to get past the spam filters." To which I point out: (1) They didn't get past the spam filters. I found them in my spam folder. (2) Word-salad in the subject line screams "I am spam!"

Look at it another way: have you ever heard a radio or television ad start out by blurting "Hoboken counterargument inexpert prague" et cetera? Could it be because that doesn't work well?

Gasoline prices

2005-05-03T03:47:00.000Z

News reporting on gasoline prices is like Entertainment Weekly writing about the latest blockbuster movie: whatever's happening now is the biggest thing ever, more expensive than Cleopatra and grossing higher than Gone With the Wind. When the movie industry refuses to acknowledge inflation in its comparisons, we generally understand that it's for the sake of hype and promotion. When the news does it though, sometimes people miss the hype aspect and instead think we're in a Crisis, which of course means that the government needs to Do Something.

First, let's get out our apple and at least try to compare it to another apple. The current U.S. average price for regular unleaded (at the pump) is $2.236 per gallon. The major historical post-WWII price peak is unquestionably the period from 1979 to 1981. In 1981, the consumer price index was about half what it is today, putting the price then at about $2.69 a gallon in inflation-adjusted dollars. Furthermore, it has been pointed out to me that we are considerably wealthier now a generation later, even in inflation-adjusted terms, which implies that gasoline is not as big a part of the average family's budget as it once was. In economic lingo, "energy use per dollar of gross domestic product" has declined by more than one-third since 1980.

To people who remember the seventies, this should make intuitive sense. Back then, there was a broad shift into more fuel-efficient vehicles that reflected the significant impact of the higher prices on people's budget choices. These days there is also a shift into new, efficient vehicles, but it is qualitatively different in that people are doing it "for the environment" rather than for their wallets. I have yet to meet the person who has purchased one of these twenty thousand dollar road-gerbils (e.g. Toyota Prius) and justified it solely on financial grounds. As a corollary I will note that I am not seeing a falloff among SUV and light truck drivership, which one would expect if gasoline prices were creating widespread fiscal woes.

Additionally, I would like to cite an anecdotal indicator. Anybody remember locking gas caps? My family purchased and used a number of them in the early 80s after somebody siphoned gas from one of our cars when it was parked in our own driveway. The thief used a cheap garden hose as a siphon, leaving disintegrating fragments of rubber as his calling card. Anyway, the absense of a resurgence in locking gasoline caps strikes me as an anecdotal indicator that the value of gasoline now is still considerably lower than the value it attained in 1981.

Even so, I understand and accept that the cost of gasoline is higher than recent historical averages. When I have to pay sixty dollars more per month as compared to two years ago to do the same amount of driving, I do notice it. But is this relevant to anything the government could or should do in the near term? From my perspective, that depends on whether or not the government is creating the problem of higher prices in the first place. When it is, I'd generally prefer that the government knock it off. When it isn't, I'd generally prefer to allow market forces to bring things back in line.

Consider on one hand the issue of "boutique fuels," a slang name for special, federally-mandated gasoline formulations in certain ozone "non-attainment areas" (southeast Wisconsin being one regional example). This topic alone could be the subject of numerous argumentative blog postings, but there seems to be little question that these special reformulations (being of lower volume in production) are far more prone to price spikes due to supply disruptions or demand miscalculations. Over the years this has resulted in hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars in additional cost for people to drive, all for a supposed environmental benefit that I would call "elusive" at best. This, I believe, is one place where the government could do good for both citizens and gas prices by stopping its meddling.

The subject of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is another that tends to arise in conjunction with oil price discussions, but it's almost a non-sequitur in that it will take years for that production to ramp up enough to put a dent in prices. I think it's a fine place to get oil from, and I'd rather have Alaskans receiving my petrol dollars than Prince Akhmed (Inuits not figuring prominently on al-Qaeda's donor lists), but the issue is just not relevant to near-term price concerns.

What about cutbacks or suspensions of state and federal gas taxes? This is an idea that sounds straightforward, but is actually fraught with twists, turns, and unintended consequences. The current federal gasoline tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, and Wisconsin's tax is now up to 32.9 cents per gallon as of April 2005 (segregated into a 29.9 cent portion and a 3.0 cent portion, the latter of which is slated for environmental cleanup of petroleum-contaminated lands). A break in state gas taxes would actually result in a direct reduction in prices at the pump; of that I am reasonably certain. The only thing to worry about in that case is whether the state legislature would simply forego that tax revenue and spend less money (dubious), or whether they'd instead find a way to tax you from a different angle.

With federal taxes on the other hand, a tax reduction would probably result in little or no price reduction at the pump. Why is that? Unlike instituting a price break that would affect only Wisconsin motorists, a gas tax reduction nationwide would result in a nationwide demand rebound, which would raise the price back up, and the price would be at equilibrium again pretty much where it was before the tax break. Put another way, the U.S. Treasury would simply be transferring what used to be tax dollars into oil company profits. That's not necessarily a bad thing in the long term, but there is no short-term benefit to the driving public, and we were talking about the short term here.

If one accepts that gasoline taxes are a prudent and legitimate way for the government to raise money from us, does the abovementioned price dynamic suggest an optimal policy over longer periods? Though it strikes me as counterintuitive, times of high prices may be the best time for a federal gasoline tax to be increased. There are several reasons for this: (1) The times of high prices are when the oil companies earn larger profits. Siphoning off money from oil companies to the government is less harmful at such a time. (2) The times of high prices correspond to the periods when fewer gallons get sold. Raising the per-gallon tax flattens out gas tax revenues year to year. (3) If there is any spillover at all of the increased tax to the pump price (and there should be little, if any), such increase would merely reinforce the market dynamic, at least on the demand side. (Admittedly, the supply-side in this case is not at full advantage because some of the profit dollars for increasing exploration and production are being redirected to the government).

Of course, implementing such a policy also demands that the tax be reduced when there are oil gluts. The tax reduction would be for the reciprocal reasons: that the oil companies are seeing lean times, overall revenues are rising on more gallons being sold, and so forth. I will dryly note though that historically, governments have been less than trustworthy in maintaining any uniform level of taxation over the long term. Also, I cannot readily envision a populace that would support their lawmakers as they raised gas taxes during times of already high prices. Hence this policy concept is entirely whimsical, ready for implementation on Planet Never.

Dubious fast-food milestone

2005-05-03T03:43:00.000Z

The spouse and I were out Sunday procuring much-needed tools and hardware for home maintenance, and so stopped for a late lunch at Burger King. In an ongoing effort not to eat complete crap twenty-four-seven, I ordered the BK Veggie, and so did my wife. This time though I did ask to try cheese on the sandwich.

Upon sitting down to eat, I discovered that not only did I have cheese on my BK Veggie, but also...

"Say, hon'? Does your veggie burger have bacon on it?" Now if your first thoughts are anything like mine were, you're thinking, "Mmmmmm... free bacon..." And I'm not saying that the bacon made the burger less enjoyable. No, siree! It was actually very good. But it kind of -- oh, how to put this -- defeated the purpose of having a BK Veggie in the first place. And what exactly was going through the mind of the dedicated Burger King employee when putting bacon on the Veggie sandwich? Anything at all?

Depending on your perspective, the sandwich maker should either be reprimanded or deserves some kind of award for innovation. I haven't quite decided yet.

Hitchhiking past Lucas

2005-04-19T17:06:00.000Z

Episode III is nigh, which means the time comes to find who among us has the fortitude to not reward George Lucas. After the manure-splattered wreck that was Episode One, I was through with paying full movie ticket price, and there was no way I was going to buy a DVD for what boiled down to three minutes of decent fight choreography. So I took my sweet time in getting around to seeing Episode II -- paying matinee price -- and despite those measures I'm still pretty sure I overpaid again.

You can tell that my relationship with Star Wars is one that evolved from interest, to passion, to restraining orders: nowadays there are a lot of rules involved. So let's be clear about my rules regarding Episode III. As before, I will not pay full ticket price. I will not wait in line to see it. I will not suffer a crowded showing. I will not inconvenience myself in any significant way to see this film. In this way, I might possibly get some small measure of satisfaction from the last installment of a once-admirable franchise.

Oh sure, the preview looked good. But they always look good. Obviously, the editors who splice the previews together remember some things about what made Star Wars so impressive. The previews focus on action and imagery, which are Star Wars' strong suits. Then eventually you see the actual film and find yourself wincing at tortured dialog and glancing at your watch, wondering when the characters will wind up hitting the inevitable plot milestones that everybody knows are coming, and which will arrive with no attendant surprises whatsoever. Perhaps you even reflexively turn away from the screen once or twice out of a vague notion that actually being visually engaged with a story so ineptly executed could be chipping away at your soul.

There are as many fan theories on Where It All Went Wrong as there are dunes on Tatooine, but my sense is that at some point Lucas became more interested in marketing to the viewer than in telling the viewer a story. How can I stay enthralled to a film if every twenty minutes I'm roused by unmistakable cues signaling "that last sequence will be packaged into a video game," or, "that character is a transparent hook to sell children's toys"? Characters both major and minor are afflicted with names that seem inspired by playground taunts or nursery school banter: Dooku, Jar Jar, Watto, Yaddle, Poof, etc.

I'm sure that hope springs eternal in some fans' hearts, and more than a few have convinced themselves that Lucas has managed to escape from his grandiose hackery for one final hurrah. There's just so little evidence to warrant optimism that positive outlooks like this sound like Battered Fan Syndrome. "Of course George still loves me. It's just that sometimes he has difficulty showing it." Consider for example the ultimate transformation of Anakin into Vader. We've known for years that Anakin gets horribly disfigured by falling into a volcano, molten pit, or some such. I have no idea where that plot item originated and how it was disseminated, but that's been the skinny for some time. Ask yourself though: how will Lucas choose to frame Anakin's fall? Will it be on a world (or a moon) that happens to have some lava on it? Or, rather, will it be a lava planet?

"Oh, Jujj!" you chortle. "A lava planet indeed!" But let us review Lucas' track record of constructing subtle, nuanced worlds blessed with depth and complexity. Tatooine (desert planet). Endor (forest moon). Dagobah (swamp planet). Coruscant (urban planet). If we're lucky, the name of the inevitable lava planet might avoid sounding like it was transcribed from the wall tile in a bathroom stall.

Ah, but it's all part of a grand vision, worked out flawlessly years in advance. Only when we see the totality of the completed project can we then appreciate the perfection of the individual episodes. Of course, nobody with any sense still believes this, with Episodes I & II having torn storyline holes big enough to drive a Star Destroyer through. True believers have tied themselves in knots trying to explain why the principal droid characters are in Episode I and yet lurch around the very same planet in Episode IV like they've never seen it before, with everyone professing to not recognize them either. Far more sensible to pick up Occam's razor and conclude, "Lucas doesn't care, and he certainly doesn't respect us."

My own pet counterpoint to the Grand Vision theory is the Queen Amidala character. In Episode I, she's quite simply a Queen. Fine. But in Episode II, Lucas suddenly remembers that he wanted the devolution from Republic to Empire to have some import, so the characters and their offices must be retrofit to fetishize representative government. Thus the position of Queen for the first time ever in reality or literature is transformed into elected office, albeit one with a spectacular wardrobe and staff allowance that seems to persist even after the supposed elective term is over. The scripts positively ooze with this ad hoc slapdashery.

It's not that there aren't directors who can tell a story. Heck, Sin City managed three good stories in two hours. And I'd wager fifty bucks that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy delivers strong imagery while still respecting the intelligence of its audience. Surely that puts both these films head and shoulders above Episode III, and more deserving of your entertainment dollar.

Tropical storm Bullcrap

2005-04-19T01:14:00.000Z

My homeowner's insurance comes due every spring. If I were to take the increases in recent years and project them backward, I would conclude that my parents must have been paying annual premiums of thirteen dollars in 1976.

What's driving the surge? Increasing property values and construction costs must factor in of course, but otherwise, who are the people that are racking up billions in insured losses that the rest of us are covering? And how am I in any way associated with their risk pool? If I had my own insurance company, here would be my top questions for a prospective policyholder:

Do you live in an area where storms are given names?
Do you live on a floodplain, or less than ten feet above sea level?
Do you live within 30 miles of an intersection between tectonic plates?
Is your county on fire, or has it been on fire in the last 24 months?

As a corollary on the last one, one could ask "When it actually rains three inches in your state, is it national news?" And it should go without saying that if you can actually see an active volcano from any point on your property, my office won't be taking your calls.

Anyway, it seems to me that when a homeowner can answer "no" to all the questions above, he shouldn't have to put up with fifteen percent annual increases in his insurance premiums.

Steroid season opener

2005-04-06T00:41:00.000Z

I am neither a big baseball fan, nor a big fan of Congressional hearings on baseball, but I still got a dollop of amusement from the Sanchez suspension:

Outfielder Alex Sanchez of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays was suspended 10 days for violating baseball's new policy on performance-enhancing drugs, the first player publicly identified under the major leagues' tougher rules.

Sanchez says he committed no violation:

"I'm going to fight it, because I've never taken steroids or anything like that," said Sanchez, who was released by Detroit in mid-March and signed by the Devil Rays. "I never take any steroids because I don't need them."

Sanchez continues:

"I know I did nothing incorrect," he said."I take stuff I buy over the counter. Multivitamins, protein shakes, muscle relaxants."

[...]

Sanchez did not identify any of the products he purchased over the counter, but described them as "something to give me energy, put a little muscle on my body. That's it."

First off, if Sanchez never takes any steroids because he "doesn't need them," an enterprising reporter should ask whether Sanchez "needs" the protein shakes and muscle relaxants. If yes, why? If no, then that would seem to contradict Sanchez' "I never take because I don't need" philosophy.

Secondly, where is Sanchez shopping such that he buys muscle relaxants over-the-counter? Is he talking about the Dominican Republic, or the back of a gym?

And lastly, if Sanchez is so sure that he hasn't been using banned performance-enhancing substances, why does he not identify the products he used? Quite possibly it is because he is not sure, and would prefer not to know.

My response

2005-04-05T23:47:00.000Z

The following was my email response to the email reproduced in the post below. The original email's snippets are blockquoted.

This was done in voice recognition

So... very... cool... (Despite the inherent wrongness in the physician having cooler tech toys than the engineer).

One of the greatest vagaries that I know of is medical ethics. Here you have medical experts, who present factual information, and this factual information gets contorted by the legal system and by the emotions of the general public, and then the know-it-all government gets involved and mucks things up even further.

See, there's gonna' be a divergence here. The stuff I was writing was mainly concerned with what the courts owed the case. I did not comment on the various legislative acts, nor did I take exception to official medical findings.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred (or more, for all I know), stuff of this type never gets waved under the nose of any magistrate or arbiter. That's perfectly okay. It means that there was no disagreement about what should happen, or that any disagreement which existed was resolved. But this particular case got into the justice system, and I find the case remarkable for what happened therein.

T. Shiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years.

I agree with [the writer's] appraisal of Schiavo's medical condition. I have not disputed this.

All we have is the verbal request, as stated by her husband and friends, that she did not want to have any extraordinary measures (tubes, etc.) and that she essentially declared herself as a do not resuscitate.

Well, that is what the courts have. The courts have the hearsay of the husband, and those that the husband chose to bring forward. Anybody with hearsay that contradicts this was not invited. My major criticism of the Florida courts is procedural.

This case was disputed. It went to court. There were no documents indicating T Schiavo's preferences. At that point, is it too much to ask to have an uninterested party appointed by the court to do factfinding, and verify that M Schiavo's (very sketchy) evidence is the only evidence extant? I don't see that as onerous or a high threshold, especially considering all the fighting and hair-pulling that has since unfolded.

Ethically/legally, the husband is the guardian. It makes no difference what her parents ask to be done or anyone else other than her husband.

Legally, what the Florida courts professed to matter were the wishes of Terri Schiavo herself. And if that is what mattered, the courts were remiss in only availing themselves of one side's evidence.

In case there's some misunderstanding here, I am not all broken up that T Schiavo has died. What spurred me to write was what I viewed to be remarkable procedural shortcomings in a life-and-death matter before the courts. If procedural short-shrift is allowed to become precedent, we pave the way for undesirable outcomes in the future.

If she had a mere stroke, but still had some cognitive function to provide quality of life this would be a more difficult case. One would expect a true guardian to do everything possible to provide quality care and treatments to maximize her quality of life and one would think there were ulterior motives if the guardian did not fulfill the obligation on behalf of the patient.

And when the "more difficult case" comes to court, I would have vastly preferred that in the Schiavo case they had set the precedent of permitting independent fact-finding.

Removing the feeding tube is not killing someone (medical ethics 101), and until society understands the medical profession with both its extraordinary capabilities of extending natural life and shortcomings of failing to provide immortality we will continue to have discussions like these.

I was talking about a court case. You are talking about medical ethics. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the reason that removing a feeding tube is not killing (from the medical ethics standpoint) is that there is an a priori assumption at work that you have discharged your duty of care and you have no further obligations. We would say the same thing about a patient on a ventilator, would we not? When the necessary obligations of care have been satisfied and the responsible parties have agreed to termination of life support, you turn off the ventilator. This is not an ethical violation, because your duty of care was terminated.

At the same time, I think we all understand that turning off the ventilator can be murder if, for example, some nurse unilaterally decides to pull the plug in the dead of night. Duty of care was still in place and was intentionally violated. Big difference.

So in referring to a court case in which it was to be decided whether a duty of care did in fact still exist, I do not think it hyperbole to say that if the court gets it wrong that they would be "killing" unjustly. And please recognize that this language does have different implications in court as compared to medicine. After all, if state court X were to decree that food should be denied death-row inmate Y, the court would never get away with claiming that they weren't killing Y.

Thus I believe I was using language appropriate to the venue.

Schiavo died 15 years ago.

Personally, I agree. From what I can tell, the characteristics that made T Schiavo a person perished when her brain perished.

But legally she did not die. And yes, the laws can be changed for the better or for the worse, and will probably say something different about this sort of thing in 25 years. That's a different discussion.

If she is truly alive then she needs to feed herself, communicate needs, experience happiness, sorrow, grief, anger, interact and show awareness to the world.

All of the above, to be alive? That's a little stricter than I'd like, but again, a different discussion.

Society is very quick to say that doctors are killing their loved ones.

Society is jerky -- which is why I prefer law, which is merely an ass.

Imagine the cases similar to this nationwide and the amount of funds spent in futility.

Whole 'nother topic!

No hard feelings.

Not at all. I'm just sorry it wasn't convenient for you to post your reply. Thanks for emailing.

An M.D.'s perspective

2005-04-05T23:38:00.000Z

I received an email response to my Schiavo's End post from an M.D. in northern Wisconsin. I liked it a lot, because I'm not often privy to the professional irritants manifest in medicine, which apparently extend past the "does this look infected?" standard query. (Engineers get that question too, but only in the context of personal computers).

So I'm happy to have obtained permission to post the email here (with minor changes for readability and to obscure identities). My email response will be reproduced in a subsequent post.

First of all, no offense to any of you or the beliefs of others; but as a physician, I see this case as cut and dried.

I was about to write a commentary in that blog-whatever forum but I changed my mind for now. I will write to all of you on a medical point of view. This was done in voice recognition, so there may be a few typos:

One of the greatest vagaries that I know of is medical ethics. Here you have medical experts, who present factual information, and this factual information gets contorted by the legal system and by the emotions of the general public, and then the know-it-all government gets involved and mucks things up even further.

T. Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. The persistent vegetative state means that the patient is in a coma but has active sleep-wake cycles. The sleep-wake cycles are non-cognitive and represent the most primitive portions of the brain.

Fact: a coma is a state of unarousable unresponsiveness. It can be caused by diffuse insults to the cerebral hemispheres (the cognitve higher functioning parts of the brain which separates humans from bacteria) or damage to the reticular activating system in the brainstem, which is necessary to maintain cortical operations.

Here is the CT scan of a healthy brain, left, and T. Schiavo's brain, right [image not posted]:

The entire parenchyma (brain tissue) is gone as the low oxygen (anoxic) insult caused permanent cortical cell death. Cerebral spinal fluid has replaced the void where brain tissue once was.

Fact: "Patients in a vegetative state have complete unawareness of self and the environment and show no evidence of purposeful responses to stimuli, but continued to have sleep wake cycles and preserved brainstem function" - MKSAP 13 American College of Physicians.

To see a summary of the Shiavo case, here is a web link, but I am sure you know the case details better than I.

Therefore:

All we have is the verbal request, as stated by her husband and friends, that she did not want to have any extraordinary measures (tubes, etc.) and that she essentially declared herself as a do not resuscitate.

The parents of T. Schiavo somehow were able to get tube feedings started and apparently there's been an ongoing battle for the last 15 years to have these tube feedings withdrawn.

Ethically/legally, the husband is the guardian. It makes no difference what her parents ask to be done or anyone else other than her husband. Ethical law, our medical teachings, provide a hierarchy for decision making and responsibilities in situations such as these. If the patient is not autonomous then the husband is next in line, then parents, siblings, close friends, etc.

One might argue that T. Schiavo's husband has things to gain by her death. If she had a mere stroke, but still had some cognitive function to provide quality of life this would be a more difficult case. One would expect a true guardian to do everything possible to provide quality care and treatments to maximize her quality of life and one would think there were ulterior motives if the guardian did not fulfill the obligation on behalf of the patient.

This is not the case here: this person is one fraction away from pure brain death and has been so for 15 years. She will never wake up, never hear, see, smell, taste, feel, or even have the ability to acknowledge existence as the entire cortical area of her brain is irreversibly destroyed.

[Kwik2Jujj], your statement I feel is incorrect: "Such painstaking agency for the disabled is not usually necessary, but this is not a 'normal' case like siblings quibbling over grandma's intravenous drip during her last month of Alzheimer's. What is being discussed is authorization to kill someone who was not dying, and in such extraordinary circumstances the lack of independent consideration on behalf of the person to be killed is bewildering."

Removing the feeding tube is not killing someone (medical ethics 101), and until society understands the medical profession with both its extraordinary capabilities of extending natural life and shortcomings of failing to provide immortality, we will continue to have discussions like these.

I therefore would be a murderer because I have removed tube feeds, ventilatory support, and IV fluids many times -- and in circumstances that were more "gray" than this one.

Schiavo died 15 years ago. Modern medicine has given her nutrition to sustain a few brainstem (not brain) cells that govern respiration and non-cognitive function, with no hope of her ever reaching consciousness. Withdrawal of the feeding tube is allowing her to truly die peacefully. If she is truly alive then she needs to feed herself, communicate needs, experience happiness, sorrow, grief, anger, interact and show awareness to the world. Medicine provided prolonged unnatural existence, so removing the unnatural means of existence is not killing.

Society is very quick to say that doctors are killing their loved ones.

I have been there. I have coded people back to life and I have failed at bringing people back to life. Families were thrilled that I saved their loved one's life -- treating me like God -- and a week later were threatening to sue my ass because their loved one was cognitively impaired or like Schiavo. I have coded persons where I did not have a directive, only to find the family barging into the room at the end of the code stating that their loved one is a DNR and they are going to call their attorneys. "Gee I'm really sorry that I tried to save your loved one's life, and I really would have tried to call; but if I did take an extra ten seconds to contact you he would have surely died and then you-all would have told me he was to be resuscitated and my ass still would be sued!"

Physicians play God because society wants it and we extend life by unnatural means -- so to take away extraordinary measures such as tube feeds is not killing, but merely allowing the patient to pass on. Which is what would have happened 15 years ago.

By the way... who was paying the tens of thousands of dollars per day for Schiavo to receive her care when there is no hope of her ever regaining consciousness or meaning of self?

Imagine the cases similar to this nationwide and the amount of funds spent in futility. Society needs to change its values. We need to provide the appropriate care to those in need, where there is reasonable chance of obtaining cognitive function. Millions of dollars are wasted on futile cases, and this money could provide care for hundreds or thousands of individuals who either don't have insurance or the finances to treat curable illnesses. We need a multifaceted team approach to allocate resources. Imagine funneling this money into Medicare... problem solved!

Morals of the bit** session:

1. Today over lunchtime demand to meet immediately with your attorneys to get your living will/power of attorney stuff drafted. It doesn’t matter that they can’t see you on short notice! You are an American and the Constitution says you can see any doctor and any lawyer at any time and get whatever you want, because medical and legal counsel are your God Given Right -- and by the way demand they don’t dare charge you a fee for this God Given Right!

2. Support legislation which allocates monies in futile cases to other areas of need, like research for cancer, deadly-but-curable diseases, and the Medicare problem!

3. Society -- including government, the legal and medical professions -- need to collaborate to set guidelines as to how to handle these ethical dilemmas.

4. Whether you or I or anyone else hold differing opinions on this, it comes down to this: money!! And availability of resources. If this husband were Bill Gates, he could pay for the hospital bed and feeds and there’s no financial strain on the system. But a bed is being tied up that could be used to save someone’s life.

Well, I did get a little emotional near the end. But then again [colleague] (as chief of the northern Wisconsin medical ethics department) and I deal with this every day, and it is extremely frustrating.

No hard feelings.

Any of you... feel free to reply.

Election time

2005-04-05T23:07:00.000Z

Somehow, 2 Minute Sidebar was nominated for this week's "best blog" runoff at MKE online. (This blog was notified via a comment written here). I have since petitioned acquaintances to vote on my behalf, and when pressed I have claimed that my blog is at least "okay" and "marginally readable." This alone should place it among the top thirty percentiles.

Voting is open until Thursday. Loyal reader 3XHAR opines:

I voted... but I'm not certain I voted for the right one. The holes on the left didn't match up with the verbiage on the right. So I voted for two different ones, hoping one of them was yours. Then I got some kind of error. I demand someone in charge determine who I voted for with subjective, ever-changing criteria! Only then will justice be done!

Thaa Reverend adds:

I like 2 Minute Sidebar so much, I voted twice! You think they'd log IP addresses and such to prevent ballot box stuffing, but this is Milwaukee we're talking about.

Admittedly, if I had time to burn I would engage in all manner of shenanigans to skew the vote in my favor. But I don't care to spend my time that way, and it isn't nearly important enough.

Not that there aren't any important elections going on today -- for it is an election Tuesday in Wisconsin, the first one since the big presidential one in November. I think that the biggest statewide race is for head of the Department of Public Instruction (i.e., the state school superintendent). Don't expect a large turnout.

Low turnouts though spell opportunity for the proponents of local school spending referenda. Since the direct beneficiaries of school spending increases always turn out to vote for the money, low turnout of the property tax paying rank and file tends to increase the chances for any given referendum's success. And in Wisconsin, it is not unheard of for essentially the same rejected school spending referendum to appear on the ballot for three or four elections in a two-year period, vying for a magic combination of stealth and voter apathy that will squeak it through. The process resembles the following:

"We would like an extra fifteen million dollars. Will you pay for it?"
"No."
"Now?"
"No."
"How about now?"
"No."
"But what about now?"
"... Oh, fine."

--- [pause one election cycle] ---

"Another eight million dollars?"
"No."

As school expenditures often constitute half or more of local property tax levies, they are primarily responsible for the property tax bills that non-Wisconsinites find astounding. It actually happens in this state that first-time homeowners who take out a 30-year mortgage may pay half that again in property taxes. Which is to say that if their mortgage payment is $1000, their property tax liability divided out monthly can be $500.

For example, let's consider a home purchase with a 30-year mortgage using 20% down at 5% (a rate that was obtainable in the last couple years). The monthly payment will be about $5.37 per thousand borrowed. Let us further assume that the tax assessment will be based on 90% of the fair market value. Therefore, to find the mill rate that will result in monthly property tax liability of $2.865 per thousand borrowed (half the mortgage payment), multiply by eight-ninths to get $2.387 per thousand valuation, and then by twelve to get an annual $28.64 per thousand valuation (a mill rate). Again, this is probably news to out-of-state readers, but a handful of Wisconsin communities do have property tax rates this high or even higher (e.g. West Allis in Milwaukee county, Fitchburg in Dane county). The overall average mill rate for Milwaukee County is about $26.

But by now I'm way off-topic. Vote for 2 Minute Sidebar. Thank you.

Schiavo's End

2005-03-30T03:35:00.000Z

This entry is intended to expand upon an existing thread that I participated in over on Manual Override. I am posting it here because (a) I have a few hyperlinks and those weren't working for me in blogspirit's commentary sections, and (b) the thread is a full week stale now. My principal objection to the outcome of the Schiavo case in that thread centered on what I believe to be inadequate consideration of Terri's interests by the courts.

The subsequent comments from 3XHAR and additional input from Salvius do not dissuade me from my objections. Salvius notes the abundant attention paid to the case by courts and others and reports that "Every single time a court has been asked to make the decision, they have decided that Terri doesn't want to live." My objection of course is not with the quantity of attention or decisions, but rather the quality. I believe that this is a classic garbage-in garbage-out scenario in which initial one-sided findings irrevocably skewed subsequent proceedings. Again, my contention is that it was the courts that made Michael Schiavo and his lawyers the exclusive voice for T Schiavo's wishes and that T Schiavo has not had the benefit of independent representation. Such painstaking agency for the disabled is not usually necessary, but this is not a "normal" case like siblings quibbling over grandma's intravenous drip during her last month of Alzheimer's. What is being discussed is authorization to kill someone who was not dying, and in such extraordinary circumstances the lack of independent consideration on behalf of the person to be killed is bewildering.

I think that this last point is critical, because deciding which judicial criteria to use depends on understanding the fundamental nature of the case. I allege that this is a "death case," albeit a civil one rather than criminal. Either way, a citizen is being condemned to death based on a court order. I understand that some may object to this characterization, and prefer to say that the court merely mandated the removal of a feeding tube. But if that were truly the full extent of the court order then it would be okay for someone else to go in and administer Gatorade by eyedropper, or give a glucose solution intravenously. I am willing to wager that this is not the case.

If, as I allege, the T Schiavo matter is a "death case," then the "clear and convincing evidence" standard mentioned by Salvius is insufficient, and the courts are obliged to use "beyond a reasonable doubt" as their decisionmaking standard. This is not a new judicial principle that is suddenly to be invented. Rather, it is historically understood as the threshold of evidence required by American justice for ordering death, and T Schiavo is as deserving as anyone else of the benefit of existing due-process principles. If she were to receive independent representation and then it were found beyond a reasonable doubt that yes, she preferred death to a lifetime of profound disability, then my objections disappear. But to accept the current court decisions as adequate is to say that T Schiavo is among a class of persons less privileged before the law than even our worst criminals. Respectfully, I dissent.

Doyle and taxes

2005-03-18T23:06:00.000Z

This is a topic that Joseph has already touched on, but there was a corner item in the business section of Friday's Wisconsin State Journal that caught my eye. It starts:

Wisconsin's sales tax laws have cost Lands' End both sales and jobs, an executive of the Dodgeville apparel company told the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee on Thursday.

Sounds okay so far, pending specifics.

Karl Dahlen, vice president and senior legal officer of Lands' End, was one of several Wisconsin retailers urging support for a proposal in Gov. Doyle's budget that would make it easier for the state to collect sales tax on mail-order and Internet purchases from other states.

What the newspaper is referring to, but is not doing a very good job of explaining, is Doyle's proposal to tax in-state residents for out-of-state purchases. It is not an effort to collect taxes on "purchases [originating] from other states," which is one way of reading that vague sentence.

Now, already I'm having difficulty reconciling just these two paragraphs. The first paragraph declared that there was a problem for Lands' End because of the state's tax collections. How, exactly, would expanding the state's tax collection powers assist Lands' End?

Customers have said they've taken their business to other companies because of the sales tax Lands' End has collected, Dahlen told lawmakers. That has led to "a loss of tens of millions of dollars of revenue in our direct-to-consumer business," he said in a statement.

So instead of asking for relief from onerous sales taxes so that local customers can help grow the business, this corporate clown asks for the scope of taxation to be expanded. Dahlen is either a shill, a moron, or extremely cynical, because he neglects to consider the entirely predictable course of Doyle's new tax initiative. Is there anyone above the age of thirty who is so naive as to think that if Doyle can actually pull this off, that no other governors would jump at adding this revenue stream in their own states? Dahlen thinks Lands' End is losing business now, because of sales tax on one state's customers? How much business will they lose when forty-five other states begin taxing their residents on Lands' End purchases? And how is it that Lands' End had managed to expand and prosper for the last forty years, but now suddenly needs the state to step in?

What Governor Doyle is asking for, and what Dahlen is supporting, is very much like a tariff. And when the states realize that they can collect these "tariffs" without Congress moving to stop them, we will have a form of interstate protectionism. The Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce in Article 1, Section 8, and the Supreme Court of the United States has many times considered and often curtailed efforts by states to either export their tax burdens (e.g., Louisiana's "First-Use Tax," Maryland v. Louisiana, 1981) or erect trade barriers (Bellas Hess v. Illinois, 1967). I especially appreciate these lines from Justice Stewart:

The very purpose of the Commerce Clause was to ensure a national economy free from such unjustifiable local entanglements. Under the Constitution, this is a domain where Congress alone has the power of regulation and control.

And who, pray tell, has benefited from interstate free trade? Consider this University of Missouri law school commentary:

In Quill Corporation v North Dakota (1992), the Court looked at a North Dakota "use" tax applied to sales by out-of-state corporations (primarily catalog companies such as L. L. Bean and Land's End) to North Dakota residents.

(Emphasis mine). The Court struck down the North Dakota "use tax."

Social Security's "bankruptcy"

2005-03-04T19:29:00.000Z

I shall use dgiese's comment as an excuse to expand on the trust fund post. Mister Giese is critical of politicos who use the word "bankruptcy" to describe Social Security's situation.

I agree that the word is inapt. Social Security does, after all, currently run twelve-figure annual surpluses (payroll taxes less benefit payments). On that score, it hardly seems bankrupted. And yet looking forward in time and computing the present value of the trust fund and all the program's anticipated revenues against liabilities (again, all in terms of present value), the best estimate is that the program is underfunded by $10.4 trillion. Bankrupt? Maybe, but in that sense when has the program ever not been bankrupt? Either way, the word just isn't a good fit for what we're talking about.

Here's an interesting thought experiment, and perhaps it will help in thinking about Social Security's future. Fast forward to 2018, or whatever year it is when payroll taxes become insufficient to cover benefit payments. This is the fiscal year in which the program starts using the T-bills from its trust fund. So let's be precise. The Social Security functionaries send a bundle of their long-stashed T-bills back to the Treasury, demanding money in return with which to pay retirees. The federal government has five choices for coming up with that money, of which only the first three are likely to be used:

Some combination of the above can be used, but those are the choices.

Now, suppose again it is 2018, but disaster strikes the Social Security bureaucracy. Barbara and Jenna Bush, armed with flamethrowers, infiltrate the trust fund bunkers and incinerate every last trust fund T-bill. How does the government, now without the trust fund, come up with the money to make up the year's difference between payroll taxes and benefit obligations? The federal government has five choices:

This is what people mean when they say the trust fund is bogus. The government is faced with the exact same options, with the exact same shortfalls, whether the trust fund T-bills are used or vanish utterly. There is no difference.

At minimum, I recommend chanting the following aloud: "The trust fund is not an asset. The trust fund is not money. The trust fund is not wealth." It won't fix the problem - but at least when the crunch comes you'll understand why.

Many smart people don't get this

2005-03-01T00:49:00.000Z

It is amazing, but I am willing to bet that most people still fail to understand the fundamental nature of the American Social Security system and its vaunted trust fund. As we are told time and time again, sometime before 2020 Social Security expenditures will exceed payroll tax revenues. On the one hand, some people (many of whom are Democrats) say that this is not a problem because of the $3.5 trillion-odd trust fund that has been, and continues to be built up to satisfy these obligations. Social Security is thus good until at least twenty-fortysomething, if not longer. On the other hand, some people (many of whom are Republicans) say that the trust fund is not much of a trust fund at all, consisting entirely of "I.O.U.s," therefore the years of painful budget reckoning are nearer. Charles Krauthammer is a specific example of someone in the latter camp:

Let's start with basics. The Social Security system has no trust fund. No lockbox. When you pay your payroll tax every year, the money is not converted into gold bars and shipped to some desert island, ready for retrieval when you turn 65.

Matthew Yglesias seems to reside in the former camp. Understanding, correctly, that the IOUs are Treasury Bills, he responds to Krauthammer:

By this standard, not only is my bond porfolio not real, my bank account isn't real, and, in fact, the cash in my pocket isn't real. The only "real" money, apparently, is stacks of gold bars. Now once upon a time, your U.S. currency was redeemable for gold bars and, thus, one might consider it real. Alternatively, perhaps U.S. currency in the gold standard days was a "mere I.O.U." Either way, we've been off the gold standard for some time now, and people would be alarmed to learn that this means their money is fake. Does the Post pay Krauthammer in dubloons?

Clever, no? But the big thing that Yglesias misses completely is that the paper he owns is fundamentally different from Social Security's paper. Matthew's paper money, paper bonds, and paper bank statements are legitimate, tradeable claims on money or services from others. Social Security's paper is issued by the federal government, and held by the very same federal government. Thus, the government holds a claim on itself. Social Security's paper is at best a recordkeeping aid between the Treasury and Social Security, but is no more a government asset than the notes I write myself so I remember to transfer money from savings into checking.

To summarize: When someone writes an IOU and hands it over to you, you have an asset. When that same person writes an IOU and keeps it for himself, he has a reminder. What the Social Security trust fund has in its vaults is file cabinets full of reminders (nod to David Frum).

If you grasp this concept, then you understand something that many politicians, journalists and commentators plainly do not.

Bumper tyrant

2005-03-01T00:46:00.000Z

Got stuck behind some joker this morning, whose one of seven stickers proclaimed:

I'm one of the 94% of Americans who do not hunt, and I vote.

First off, count me mightily unimpressed by the "and I vote" punchline. Because I suspect that this is one of those people who would curl into a fetal position were I to insist upon showing a photo identification in order to vote, or to actually register before the day of the election. So I'm not buying the braggadocio regarding the voting prowess.

Secondly, I think pro-mob-rule bumperstickers are uncool. "I am in the majority, so your liberty and privileges are subject to my whim." Of course this same person had a pro-family-farmer license plate frame. Well, I'm one of the 98% of Americans who are not family farmers...

Two steps back for LA Police

2005-02-24T23:51:00.000Z

The Los Angeles Police Commission has unanimously approved a new policy regarding the circumstances under which officers may fire at moving vehicles:

Firearms shall not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless a person in the vehicle is immediately threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle. For the purposes of this Section, the moving vehicle itself shall not presumptively constitute a threat that justifies an officer's use of deadly force. An officer threatened by an oncoming vehicle shall move out of its path instead of discharging a firearm at it or any of its occupants[...] (Emphasis in original)

Does this sound like a good policy to you? The new policy was approved in the wake of the fatal shooting of Devin Brown, which is discussed in this news report. Devin Brown was thirteen years old. He was also careening through Los Angeles driving a stolen car at four in the morning. According to police, Brown was backing the car toward the officer when the officer opened fire. The following quote is from the news report linked to above:

I don't think the community is over-reacting. I think that the death of a thirteen year old child certainly is a very compelling circumstance. It wasn't an indication that the person driving the car was armed and certainly if their alternative as getting out of the way of that particular vehicle before shooting and saving a life, I think that that's the choice that should have been considered.

Stop for a moment and ask yourself whether the police could have known, or should have cared, that the driver was "a thirteen year old child." And how is the hidden knowledge of whether the criminal driver is armed or not particularly relevant when the driver is moving a 3000 pound vehicle toward you? Lastly, how can we be sure that not shooting would have been the best decision? The officer, Steve Garcia, could have died instead of the criminal. More likely, the criminal could have killed another motorist in a collision. While these outcomes would not necessarily have occurred had Garcia held his fire, they were certainly prevented by Officer Garcia's actions.

But back to my previous question: does "Special Order No. 1" sound like a good policy to you? Think about this: Suppose somebody in Los Angeles decides that today, he's going to run people off the road and mow down pedestrians. Is the Special Order likely to result in more or fewer people being hurt during such a rampage? Remember, no matter how many people the motorist has already maimed or killed, the police are not allowed to shoot at the car. Read the Order.

Maybe I'm wrong though. I don't have the entire text of the Special Order, so maybe there's some other section that has an exception, saying "If the vehicle has already killed one or more children, elderly, or a member of any approved victim class, the use of deadly force to stop the vehicle is acceptable." Let me know.

Wrong time to shop

2005-02-24T23:49:00.000Z

No reasonable offer will be refused!

That's what my radio was telling me today about some boat dealer show. These dealers must be crazy people, since they feel the need to assure us that they accept reasonable offers. Apparently, unlike normal people, they usually do not. No wonder they need to do this boat show; they need to rehabilitate their image.

Still, it's obviously the wrong place to go for a good deal on a boat. I want to go when they're accepting unreasonable offers. "Fifty bucks for the Mercury outboard? That's extremely unreasonable sir! But since we're not interested in reasonable offers today, it's yours." See, that's when you get the really good deals.

State refund & random question

2005-01-29T05:33:00.000Z

As indicated in a previous post, I filed my taxes electronically on Monday night. Wisconsin state refund was electronically deposited to my account Friday. That's a new speed record, in my experience.

I have a completely unrelated question that I've been wondering about for a few months. Why is it that the blogger user stats just suddenly stopped updating about three months ago? Just stopped cold, they did. So my profile page is looking a little ridiculous, with the "Recent Posts" dated 03 November. Ditto for Joseph and Salvius. Frozen in time.

Is this the blogger service dropping the ball, or did they change something and we just missed it?

Math moment

2005-01-29T02:14:00.000Z

Yesterday, I noticed another thing that my wife in I have in common. And by that I mean, "have had in common since before we met." After all, it's not particularly remarkable to develop a number of things in common once you're married. But this new discovery adds to an already long list which includes (but is not limited to):

Hard to say how remarkable such stuff is. It is in our nature to take note of patterns and coincidences. So here's the new one I just noticed: Both my wife and I have social security numbers whose prime factorizations are three and one other number. Put another way, my SSN divided by three is a prime number, and so is my wife's SSN.

But this leads to the question: Is this really rare? Maybe lots of SSNs are this way. How are we to know, aside from undertaking a brute force operation sampling a great many numbers between our two SSNs? Interestingly, prime number theory tells us that there are shortcuts to these answers.

I'm going to have to dance around a little here to avoid publicly giving out too many hints about my SSN. Suffice it to say, the numbers for my wife and I start with the digits '39', and then differ. So let's re-state the question: "What is the spacing of numbers in the vicinity of 390 million where the numbers factor into two primes, one of which is three?" Well, this of course relates directly to the spacing of primes in the vicinity of 130 million. For example, the number 130,000,001 is prime. The next higher prime is 130,000,007. If we multiply both these numbers by three, we get two neighboring SSNs in the vicinity of 390 million that factor into two primes, one of which is three. In this case, the spacing between the SSNs is 18 (the difference between 390-00-0003 and 390-00-0021), or three times the difference between the two original primes. But is 18 a typical spacing?

Well, mathematicians in the 19th century figured out that the average spacing of primes in the neighborhood of a number N is very close to the natural logarithm of N, written ln(N). Furthermore, this formulation becomes more and more accurate the larger N is. This is a consequence, or perhaps an alternate way of stating, the Prime Number Theorem. Since I'm not a mathematician I'm probably not stating it well, but there it is. So using the Prime Number Theorem we can characterize the average spacing of primes in the vicinity of 130 million, and by extension the spacing of 3-times-prime numbers around 390 million.

From there, the answer falls out rather easily. The natural logarithm of 130 million is about 18.7. Multiply by 3 and you get 56. So on average, one out of every 56 SSNs starting with '39' factorize into three and a prime.

I'm going to stick to telling my wife she's one-in-a-million. One in 56 just isn't quite as flattering.

e-file bargains 2004

2005-01-25T18:26:00.000Z

I got a valuable tip last week from a USA Today article. It noted that competition between tax preparers participating in the IRS' Free File partnership had finally driven Intuit (makers of Turbo Tax) to offer free federal e-filing to all filers.

This is an interesting development. I'm not certain as to why the government sponsors a Free File program. The article claims that the original mission was to help low-income taxpayers. Help them avoid tax preparation fees? Help them get refunds faster? Perhaps, but I suspect that the initiative mainly helps the government cut down on their manpower costs, since workers will have millions fewer paper returns to key in to computers. As "low-income" returns are often very simple returns to file on paper, the surest way to get those people to go electronic is to make it so there's no fees associated with switching over.

So how is it that I am able to file for free? Well, small outfits and newcomers to the tax preparation business saw the Free File program as a way to get their foot in the door and introduce their products to a wider audience. In the drive to get the greatest exposure, these companies "exceeded the mandate" and opened up free filing to more and more people. Eventually a couple small companies opened it up to everybody, regardless of tax status. This was intolerable to the giant Intuit, who along with H&R Block dominate the personal tax-software market. So Intuit followed suit, probably to protect their market share. Since I have been switching back and forth between Turbo Tax and Tax Cut the last few years, it seemed time for me to seize the opportunity to save a little money filing.

By the time I sat down to consider using Free File, H&R Block had jumped in with both feet as well. Since I used Tax Cut last year (and it worked reasonably well), I followed their link. Note that you must follow the link from the IRS website's Free File page in order to get the no-cost preparation and e-filing. You won't see this deal if you go to Intuit or H&R Block directly.

There are a couple downsides to this kind of filing, and they're mainly associated with the fact that you're running browser applets instead of a regular resident software application. For one thing, I only recommend doing your filing this way if you're confident in the reliability of your internet connection. I did both my federal and state returns over the course of three-plus hours, a stretch that few dialup connections would maintain straight-through in my experience. Another downside, at least with the online Tax Cut filing, is that in the end you do not wind up with a dot-T04 file like you would if you had the resident software package. Since I don't have that file, it means that if I want the convenience of being able to import 2004 information into next year's return, I'll have no choice but to use H&R Block's online filing. (You do get a full printable PDF of your returns though, for your records.) Lastly, probably owing to the fact I filed so early, I noticed a number of typos in H&R Block's web scripts, plus a few places where their error messages were misleading or confusing.

On the up side, all the federal and state preparation and e-filing that last year cost me $45 net (and additional hours of fiddling with rebate forms) cost me only twenty dollars (and less time) this year. There also was none of the usual software patching, where the release CD you would buy from the store has to be corrected with updates when you sit down to actually use it. And for the first time ever, a preparation software correctly queried for and handled my own peculiar combination of W-2s, capital gains, and Schedule C / Self-Employment information on the first walk-through. In years past, regardless of whether I used Intuit or Block, I always had to go back multiple times or even fiddle with the internal forms manually to get the return to come out correctly. So that's real progress from my perspective.

From H&R Block's perspective, they still have me as part of their market share, and they received twenty dollars of my money (state filing) without having to get one or more boxed software packages to me. No CDs, no booklets, no sharing revenues with Best Buy for retailing it all. Seems like a decent arrangement all around.

"Industry average"

2005-01-22T02:40:00.000Z

We had the annual benefits meeting at my workplace this month, where the HR guru from corporate dropped in to explain the latest changes to the insurance arrangements. The news was less bad this year than in previous memorable meetings, but a lot of the same obtuse catchphrases reappeared, including the dreadful "industry average."

Some background: Once upon a time, I was hired. Dinosaurs roamed the earth. Well, it wasn't that long ago, but we did get point-of-service (POS) type health insurance coverage for employee premiums of zero. It was one of the factors that brought me to the company, offsetting the rock-bottom salary offer. This benefit, like several others since, eroded considerably. First step was to make only HMO-type coverage premium-free; if you still wanted POS, you had to scare up some out-of-pocket. The next year, everyone had to pay some portion of premiums. Over the following years, the portion of the premium that the employees had to come up with was steadily enlarged.

So you see what the net effect is. The underlying premiums are increasing, sometimes at double-digit rates. But at the same time the company is making you pay an even larger fraction of that premium. So year to year, the premium being deducted from the paycheck was increasing twenty or thirty percent! So you'd get a raise in the summer quarter, hopefully. Come winter quarter you'd get the un-raise, where the company would take back a chunk of what they'd given you earlier. A darkly comedic money dance.

But it's the HR blather that really gets my goat. "We are targeting a twenty-eighty employee contribution, which is in line with the industry average." "Office co-pays are increasing fifty percent, putting them closer to the industry average." To put it bluntly, if I had known I was joining an "industry average" obsessed company, perhaps I should have restrained myself over the years and put forth a more "industry average" effort. When the CEO comes to rally us, I don't recall him asking for and expecting average performance. For heaven's sake, the word "leading" is right under our company logo on the website. Wonder whether HR ever noticed that.

Now, being both employees and stockholders, most of my coworkers can understand fiscal necessity. We can understand restraining spending and curtailing benefits to present a picture of responsibility to the institutional investors and other important ownership blocs. But "approaching the industry average" is a direction, not a justification, and the highly-educated (and correspondingly irritable) engineering pool knows that. The HR panjandrums should learn the difference, otherwise in a not-too-distant meeting one shall receive such a magnificent verbal wedgie that the HR flack will go gimping back to corporate with the world's first and only Fruit-of-the-Loom brand do-rag.

Penguin News

2005-01-22T02:32:00.000Z

Fran Biggs of the Penguin News (Stanley, Falkland Islands) announced today that she thinks a full electronic edition of the newspaper may be available in February, and that the annual rate for access should be fifty pounds sterling or less. This is great news for overseas subscribers, who in the past have only had two comparatively unattractive options for reading the paper. One option was to receive the paper "by post," which involves a large markup to cover postage (driving the annual rate to 82 pounds) and delays that meant your news was usually two to four weeks old upon receipt. The other option was to download back-issue PDFs from the Penguin archive for free, but of course back-issues don't appear until they're a good five or six weeks old. So either way the news was considerably dated.

I am further informed that it will be possible to pay for this new service by credit card -- again an improvement from paying by international wire transfers, which have proven for me to be both inconvenient and expensive. This fervent kelperphile eagerly awaits futher information.

Greetings, leeches!

2005-01-21T04:42:00.000Z

Is your household pulling its own weight, federally speaking? The 2004 tax season is just about upon us, so it's a convenient time to find out. For Federal figures, I'm going to rely on Treasury projections for the full fiscal year, found here. What we'll do is look at overall receipts from income tax and payroll taxes, divide by the U.S. population, and compare the per-capita receipts to your per-capita household payments. Are you pulling your own weight, or are you a tax slacker?

On the government side of the ledger, we're looking at $913.1 billion in individual income taxes. Add $577.7 billion in "employment and general retirement (off-budget)." I take this to mean the Social Security portion of payroll taxes, which are neither considered "income" taxes nor considered a federal budget item. Then there's "employment and general retirement (on-budget)," which must be Medicare tax receipts, at $169.0 billion. The ratios look correct: the Medicare rate is 1.45% and Social Security is 6.2%, but the Soc contributions are capped while Medicare's are not. This is the bulk of what individuals pay into the system. We're not going to delve into the smaller line items, like estate taxes, since (1) they're small, and (2) as you're reading this, you're probably alive. So total projected federal receipts from individuals: $1.6598 trillion. Divide this by 294 million people in the United States.

I get $5646 per capita. I'd peek at your answer, but you're really, really far away at the moment, and the teacher is watching.

Consult your pay stubs for 2004. Add up your Social Security and Medicare contributions, then double that figure. Since we included all Soc and Med receipts as part of individual taxes above, we must consider the "employer portion" to be your tax on this side of the ledger as well. Add your federal income tax paid. If there's more than one of you at home, repeat for each person and take the sum. Divide by the number of individuals. Is the final figure above 5646? Yes? Then right now you are a net contributor to the work of the federal government. Congratulations, I guess. If not, then I will gently point out that the government is getting its work done in spite of you, using someone else's earnings. (Please do better next year!)

It's a considerable amount of money you have to earn to just break even with federal average collections. My spreadsheet here says that if you're a married couple with two kids in Wisconsin with a $120k mortgage on a $180k house and contributing 10% toward your retirement, your household gross has to exceed $106k for your four-person family to be pulling its weight. By comparison, the dual-income no-kids couple (somewhat smaller house, no freeloading offspring) is in the black after $54k.

Another eye-opener is how much the typical taxpayer is paying in his payroll taxes. And again, when I talk about payroll taxes, I include the "employer portion" as part of what you are paying. The fact that half the tax never appears on your pay stub is immaterial. It's still all money that you earn from your employer and goes into the U.S. Treasury. The above breakeven two-earner couple with two kids pays only $8,160 in federal income tax because of four exemptions, $16k in itemized deductions and the child tax credits. But their payroll tax contributions are a whopping $14,600.

Conservative radio talk show hosts make lots of hay in talking about how the top ten percent of earners pay such-and-such a percent of income taxes, and those statistics are true as far as they go. But it rather overstates the case by focusing solely on income tax, and ignoring the enormous flow of payroll tax money that the low-income earner is contributing to. Even so, when a household of four has to gross $106k to be average taxpayers, it does again demonstrate the extent to which the high earners carry the rest of the populace.

And that, I suppose, is the flip-side to "tax cuts for the rich" rhetoric: "Tax cuts for the leech," instead?

Urchin Report

2005-01-11T02:14:00.000Z

I was driving to work Monday from very far away. That's because I was driving to work from a body shop that had finally granted me a loaner car, fifteen days after I was hit by a vehicle that came shooting out from a parking lot. December 26th that was, and since that day my life has been a muddle of inconvenience, phone tag, and more than a few miles of walking.

But that is, as they say, a whole 'nother story.

Nay, the rant this morning comes from the Greater Milwaukee Area; Greenfield Avenue to be specific, 7:50 a.m.. For it was there that the school bus stopped right on the Avenue, bringing to a halt all traffic in both directions, for it is law in Wisconsin that when the bus' red lights flash and it swings out its cute little octagonal stop sign that no motorist may pass the bus from any direction for fear of smooshing an incautious child. Fair enough.

Only as I came to a stop and started looking around, there were no children. There was a house on the right. There was a house on the left. Where were the children? Five seconds pass. Ten seconds. Surely the school bus stopped to pick up children, yes?

After a protracted interval, a small boy emerged from one of the house garages, jogging the length of his driveway toward the school bus. By this time ten cars were piled up both east and westbound, waiting. And as the child slowly lumbered toward the bus, he glanced backward. And I thought, "aw jeez..." For the backward glance could only mean that, yes, the even younger (and slower) sibling was now emerging from the garage. Criminy. From the time that bus stopped to when traffic was permitted to move again was no less than forty five seconds, and was probably closer to a minute when you consider that I didn't start timekeeping right away.

So what is to be my cantankerous, heartless, geezer-like "point" here? Mainly that, things sure as heck weren't like this when I was a lad! Nobody's at the bus stop when the school bus comes through? The bus keeps right on going! Lumping it two miles to school a few times teaches you something about punctuality. Furthermore, that bus this morning was pulled right up to the end of these kids' driveway. Door-to-door service! In our day, we got to mill about on some arbitrary road shoulder (nope, no sidewalks). Those kids this morning have the day to day convenience of only having to make it to the end of their driveway to patiently wait for the bus, but even that was too much to ask. Instead, two dozen commuters had to wait for them. Fifteen man-minutes of time lost unnnecessarily. Fifteen extra automobile-minutes of idling, for what? So two pre-teen children don't have to spend five minutes of their time waiting for the bus. Does this seem like an intelligent tradeoff to you?

And is it really the kids' fault at that age? Of course not. It's the coddling parents and bus driver who won't impose a higher standard. And the kids pay for it later when they find out they're soft.

Is there a hypertext markup key for "end of rant?" Bracket-slash-'eor'-bracket.

Bidding war

2004-12-29T17:11:00.000Z

Seen in the news:

Asia quake death toll tops 13,000

Toll from Tsunami rises above 25,000

Quake, tsunamis kill more than 26,000

Toll From Tsunami Rises to More Than 51,000

Tsunami death toll tops 56,000

Disaster’s toll surpasses 58,000

Officials warn of disease; death toll tops 60,000

Quake, tsunami deaths top 76,000

Tsunami death toll tops 80,000

Red Cross fears tsunami toll could top 100,000

Twenty, twenty, who’ll give me twenty? Thank you, sir! Twenny fi’, twenny fi’, yes, and thirty, thirty thousand corpses, the gentleman in the back. Can I see forty, forty, forty?

Makes you just wanna’ say, “Phuket!” But I suppose the regional governments already said that years ago by declining to implement an Indian Ocean tsunami warning network.

Memories of Reggie

2004-12-29T04:04:00.000Z

Following the unfortunate and untimely death of NFL star Reggie White, I decree that now is a great time for Packer fans to recall their favorite Reggie White moments. I will cite two:

(1) Week 6, 1993, nationally televised Sunday night game at Lambeau versus the visiting Broncos. John Elway is engineering a comeback in the final minute of the game. Reggie White sacks Elway on consecutive plays, third and fourth down, to seal the Packer victory 30-27. Impressive.

(2) Packers vs. Vikings, 1995. Warren Moon rolls right to pass, inexplicably delegating receiver Cris Carter to block Reggie White. In an amazing display of power, White throws Cris Carter about five yards backwards. The receiver hits and bounces at Warren Moon's feet! Moon had to actually hop back a half-yard to keep from getting tripped up by his teammate being thrown at him. Reggie then charged Moon to finish off the broken play.

Elephants gone wild!

2004-12-16T14:40:00.000Z

A story picked up by many websites:

Wild elephants in Thailand stumbled upon a feast when they found a tapioca delivery truck with a flat tyre.

The driver, Somkuan Sirisat, said he had gone for help to repair the tyre last night – and when he returned, he found five or six elephants surrounding his truck and devouring its contents.

"Five or six?" Is it that hard to get an accurate count of elephants? It's not like you have to squint or anything.

"I was too afraid to go toward the truck," Somkuan told television station ITV.

Maybe if he could have been assured there were only five elephants, Sirisat would've gone in. Because when there's a sixth, they can flank you!

Army rangers were sent to the scene, said one of their officers.

A policeman and the ranger said the elephants found their windfall in the Ta Takiab district of Chachoengsao province, 56 miles east of Bangkok.

ITV showed the elephants milling around the truck, one of them holding in its trunk a tarpaulin it had apparently removed from the truck.

See, in the "Elephants Gone Wild" videos, unlike other video series, the subjects remove the tops of vehicles instead of their own tops.

The elephants left the scene after eating their fill.

The footage showed signs in the area warning drivers to "beware of wild elephants foraging on the road at night".

Yet another reason to be proud of being an American, my friends. In this country we've practically eliminated elephant muggings. Granted, we've done it by rounding all the elephants up into internment camps (i.e. zoos), but desperate times call for desperate measures. I mean, Think Of The Children.

Spamming me

2004-12-13T22:10:00.000Z

And now, a survey of the From: lines arrived in recent email. Remember, the spammers use these totally realistic, entirely plausible names to get past spam filters and your discriminating eye. Would you be able to tell these are in fact spam and not, say, one of your friends or relatives?

Telephone game

2004-12-09T14:00:00.000Z

A scare-email was forwarded to me today. It's funny because often these scare-emails mimic the game of "Telephone" in that the message keeps mutating as it travels, and in this particular case the message itself is about telephones! The forwarded email reads, in part:

Starting Jan. 1, 2005, all cell phone numbers will be made public to telemarketing firms. So this means as of Jan. 1, your cell phone may start ringing off the hook with telemarketers, but unlike your home phone, most of you pay for your incoming calls. These telemarketers will eat up your free minutes and end up costing you money in the long run. According to the National Do Not Call List, you have until Dec. 15th, 2004 to get on the national "Do not call list" for cell phones.

The message forwarder himself writes, by way of introduction:

I received the following imbedded e-mail which covers the fact that on Dec 15th telemarketers can start calling your cell phones.

This makes me chuckle. First, the scare-email, which contains no actual evidence or references of any kind to support its claims, is referred to as covering "fact." Second, the date for the onslaught of the telemarketing scourge has been bumped up to December 15th. And did you get that part about how the telemarketers will "end up costing you money in the long run"? What - do they sometimes make you money in the short run?

All this is not to say there isn't legitimate concern about erosion of cell subscribers' privacy. There exists a consortium of cell companies that want to put together a database; a "Wireless 411." The claimed motives are pure but cell users don't trust the companies. I don't blame them. For anyone who wants the skinny on this and possible implications, which are considerably more complicated than anything the chain emails dream up, I would suggest reading:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/cell411.aspIf you're still uneasy after reading that, you can always put your cell number (or any other phone number) on the national do-not-call registry. Notice that it's still just one registry - not a separate list for cell phones as the scare-email hilariously alleges - and there's no absolute final due date for registering. I find it easiest to register over the internet, at

http://www.donotcall.gov

Recurring dream

2004-12-08T02:12:00.000Z

The dream is a once or twice a year thing. It's never exactly the same, but the theme is: It's late in the semester, and I've barely done any of the work in the course. In fact, I can hardly remember attending any of the classes. Is there a project due as well? Then I wonder if I'm already past the drop date for pulling out of the course entirely. It's one of those dreams that induces an anxiety that will sneak up on me at odd times during my waking hours the rest of the day. I think it's the only one, really.

I suppose that since I have spent a majority of my life to date in school, it shouldn't be too shocking that this dream still pops up from time to time. But recently a coworker of mine said he had this dream again, and this guy is easily in his fifties (with a daughter in college to boot). This strongly implies that I'm going to be having this kind of dream throughout my working life. What bemuses my coworker is that "it's not like college was particularly traumatic or anything!" Agreed. So why the residual anxiety?

Contrast this with an anxiety dream that has vanished: the "I'm in public in my underwear" dream. I reckon that the frequency of this dream correlates to when a person is growing, changing, and thereby anxious about his physical self. Eventually, most people (I think) grow comfortable and confident with that aspect of themselves and the dream is purged. So there is definitely an age aspect to it.

This concept was best encapsulated during a conversation some years back, when my Grandpa Clyde was still alive. He was talking about how when he was a young man he and his friends would skinny dip out at the lake. This amazed and alarmed my younger, pre-teen cousin Matthew, who asked, "You didn't have any clothes on?"

"That's right," Clyde affirmed.

Matt, still incredulous that Grandpa didn't understand the grave risk he had taken, asked "But what if some girls came by and saw you?"

Clyde quipped, "Well then they got a treat!"

Bad science again

2004-12-07T01:15:00.000Z

According to the New York Post, Fox is planning a TV series called "Darkside," to be set on the far side of the earth's moon:

Plans are under way at Fox — which wants to make a "Lost" of its own — for a new series about a group of of astronauts who go missing after tracing a distress signal to the dark side of the moon.

When they arrive on the other side of moon — which is cloaked in perpetual darkness and beyond radio contact with earth — they discover a mysterious compound.

Now, I realize that this bit was in the New York Post's entertainment section - so I'm just going to poke at it rather than get all indignant - but where did anybody ever get the idea that there's a side of the moon "cloaked in perpetual darkness?" And is the Post staff writer endorsing this notion, or is he just repeating the gobbledygook fed to him by Fox's silly concept people?

The real, astronomical situation is not hard to understand. The same hemisphere of the moon is always facing the earth, okay? That much is obvious from simply looking at the moon from time to time. So there is a "near side" and a "far side." When the moon is full, the near side is fully illuminated. Again, obvious. Why is it not equally obvious that when the moon is "new" that it is the far side that is fully illuminated?

I am envisioning coaching a room full of scriptwriters, each holding a softball in outstretched arm in the direction of a bright lamp. After three hours, when the concept starts sinking in, they shuffle to the next room to test whether bowling balls fall to the floor faster than baseballs, etc.

Sorry, that started sounding indignant toward the end there. That could be aftereffects from years of growing up with well-meaning adults asking, "So how long have you been interested in astrology?"

A Thanksgiving story

2004-11-24T21:07:00.000Z

A Thanksgiving related story, actually. It's about a time when close friends and family gathered at my in-laws' place, and that evening we teamed up for a game of Pictionary. There was an easel set up, and it was the turn of the opposing team (including father-in-law Paul and friend DJ). Paul was drawing.

Paul drew three little sailboats. The number was apparently important, because DJ proceeded to dub them, "Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria," and Paul nodded assent. So far so good, apparently. So then Paul drew a wavy line before the boats and a flat oval blob on the side of the wavy line opposite the boats. He pointed at the blob, emphatically. It was a large object on the... shoreline, then? It was...

"Plymouth Rock!" DJ shouted.

"Yes!"

And Paul and DJ proceeded to celebrate. I turned toward teammate 3XHAR, and he was looking at me with this expression of "what the hell just happened?" And I asked aloud, "That being where Columbus" (pause two seconds), "dropped off the Pilgrims?" I was momentarily stunned at how Paul and DJ could have possibly been on the exact same ahistorical wavelength. Of course, we gradually succumbed to laughing fits over the absurdity of it, and the tale is now a family gem.

So Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and be sure to reflect fondly this holiday on how Providence guided the Puritans to hitch a ride with Columbus, sign the Santa Maria Compact and settle the Bahamas!

Regards,

Kwik2Jujj

Phish out of water

2004-11-16T21:46:00.000Z

Spam and phishing emails are still getting past my ISP's filtering. An html-formatted phish email pretending to be PayPal arrived today. Of course, the phishes are always html-formatted because it's the only way to conceal their blatantly fraudulent hyperlinks. Anyway:

You are receiving this notification because PayPal is required by law to notify you at least quarterly that your account statement is available.

Oh, good Lord. But the funny part is in a sidebar of the formatted email titled "Security Center", where it says (in part):

PayPal will always address you in emails by your first and last name, or by your business name if you have a Business account.

So how did this email address me?

Dear PayPal member:

Bzzzzzzzzt! Bad phisher! Bad! No biscuit!

Along these lines, the feel-good story of the day: State of Virginia jury recommends nine-year sentence for spammer. That'd be nice if it sticks. Unfortunately, since the guy was a prolific spammer for several years he's built up millions with which to pay lawyers.

If someone spammed you with an offer to send out goons on your behalf to beat up a convicted spammer, would you respond to that spam?

Pardon the pause

2004-11-15T19:12:00.000Z

With the Presidential Election over and done with, a survey of blogdom might lead one to think that there's nothing left to talk about. You'd certainly think that about my blog anyway. A thousand pardons! The only politically compelling thing going on 'bout now on my radar screen is the crusade to bar Arlen Specter from the Judiciary Committee chairmanship. Well, that and the fact that 55 million Americans are not leaving for Canada and France after all. Par for the course when you're talking about campaign promises, I guess.

As for current events, we have Yassir Arafat's death from... nothing, apparently. Wasn't cancer. Heart disease? Nope. Ulcers? Nope. Rickets? Gout? Dropsy? More stunning lack of curiosity from the mainstream media.

As I was saying

2004-11-05T23:06:00.000Z

Scroll or click down to my "Math-impaired" post. I state:

Those networks [CNN, ABC, CBS] are very partisan, very bad at math, or both.

I had reached that conclusion based on evidence on hand at the time. Now, the New York Times has an article that confirms the baser suspicion:

The critical moment came at 12:41 a.m. Wednesday, when, shortly after Florida had been painted red for Mr. Bush, Fox News declared that Ohio -- and, very likely, the presidency -- was in Republican hands. Howard Wolfson, a strategist, burst into the "boiler room" in Washington where the brain trust was huddled and said, "we have 30 seconds" to stop the other networks from following suit. The campaign's pollster, Mark Mellman, and the renowned organizer Michael Whouley quickly dialed ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC -- and all but the last refrained from calling the race through the night. Then Mr. Wolfson banged out a simple, two-line statement expressing confidence that Mr. Kerry would win Ohio once the remaining ballots were counted.

Got that? ABC, CBS, and CNN refrained from calling Ohio for Bush at the behest of the Democratic party. This is not a Brent Bozell hypothesis or a "vast right wing conspiracy" allegation; this is the Times. As I observed a week and a half ago in this post:

[O]ne thing this election will be remembered for is that the major established media news organizations finally and decisively chose to be partisan organs.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

By the way...

2004-11-04T04:31:00.000Z

I hope you took my advice and placed a few friendly wagers on a Bush victory in the wake of the Redskins loss. You're probably not going to catch too many "investment" tips from this blog, so get 'em when they're hot.

As for me, I happen to work primarily with engineers who, with the exception of hustling products out the door sans adequate testing, are otherwise averse to gambling. So my pre-election "wagering" consisted of standing pat on certain equity positions in the Nasdaq. Yes it was profitable, but you just don't get that same smug sense of self-satisfaction as you get from winning a face-to-face bet.

Math-impaired

2004-11-03T16:36:00.000Z

Apparently, Kerry has conceded the election. The evidence in the numbers is overwhelming. I'm looking at a 136 kvote margin in a state that has at most 155k provisional ballots and maybe 10k overseas absentee. When you compute how those uncounted ballots would have to break for Kerry, it's just inconceivable that Ohio would flip. And that's assuming that all 155k provisionals are valid, when in fact a substantial number will inevitably be tossed.

And yet CNN, ABC, and CBS still have not called Ohio for Bush. Kerry himself is calling Ohio for Bush! Those networks are very partisan, very bad at math, or both.

Quick point

2004-11-03T13:15:00.000Z

The crowds of Democrats who have been whining for four years about the supposedly obsolete, useless, nonessential Electoral College are oddly silent this morning. How quickly they have lost their enthusiasm for election reform!

Larger point: All the rhetoric about a "stolen" election in 2000 is exposed as just so much hot air. Because if there is any legitimate way to close the gap in Ohio, Kerry will be perfectly willing to govern having won only twenty states and with a more than three million vote deficit in the popular tally. Without any hint of irony!

Waiting for Michael Moore to spout a conspiracy regarding Fox calling Ohio for Bush early...

Yelling at my TV again

2004-11-02T20:52:00.000Z

Some campaign commercial was yammering about how Congressman Bedfellow (not his real name) had increased funding for "first responders." This apparently is the hip buzzphrase for emergency personnel in the Homeland Security apparatus. Of course this catapulted my wife and I into a discussion about the drastically underfunded and neglected "second responders," which is to say, the gapers and the rubberneckers. What about them? Are they not also an integral part of any tragic scene?

The primary need among the second responders is, of course, a better view. Whether it's a matter of allowing the second responders closer or bringing the action closer to them is negotiable. But thus far I am aware of no major candidate who has chosen to help, much less champion the second responders, even though I have to believe this is an automatic vote-getter.

What's a guy gotta' do to...?

2004-11-02T20:50:00.000Z

Get sick, win a trip to Paris! Don't get too excited though, because this deal's usually only open to dictators and terrorists, folk the French find it advantageous to curry favor with. In this specific case we're talking about Yasser Arafat.

It's 'round about this point I usually hear an objection to labeling Arafat a terrorist. These objections never cease to amaze me. Did not Arafat personally orchestrate the second intifadeh, the main hallmark of which was the bombing of Israeli civilians? Was he not the leader of the PLO and Black September? Did he not personally order the murder of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel Jr.? It shouldn't take the deaths of that many innocents in order to take this relatively small truth-in-labeling measure.

I even get static from my wife on this. I joked to her that maybe Arafat was feigning illness after tiring of staring at the walls of his crumbling Ramallah compound for thirty months. You know, holding the thermometer next to the kerosene lamp until he hears the nurse coming back -- that sort of thing. My wife admonished me to "be nice." "The man might be dying!" And that's bad how, exactly? I asked her whether this schadenfreude prohibition is also in effect for Osama bin Laden. Or how about Saddam? She hasn't ruled on that yet.

On the flip side, it also amazes me how little respect other figures are accorded, despite their achievements on behalf of vast swaths of humanity. My computer's background image at work is a small, plain black-and-white photo of Ronald Reagan with Margaret Thatcher. This once earned a derisive snort from a coworker, which begs the question, "Just how many millions of people does one have to free from tyrranical government to earn Windows wallpaper status?" Sure, Reagan may be a hero to millions in Poland and the Czech Republic, but apparently my coworker has higher standards than that. He's probably waiting for the right rock band to catch his fancy...

Exploiting a Packer victory

2004-11-01T16:54:00.000Z

Are you quietly hoping that Bush is reelected? Are you distressed that the Washington Redskins lost their pre-election home game, auguring a presidential loss for the incumbent party? Worse yet, were you a conflicted conservative cheesehead on Sunday?

If you are... jeez! Snap out of it and use your brain! There's a big difference between patterns that have plausible cause-and-effect relationships, such as a major league baseball team's payroll affecting whether the team has a winning record, and data-mining artifacts where relationships are discoverd in retrospect and persist only as long as pure chance allows.

Once you get that straight, you can ascend to to the next plane. Namely, exploiting (for fun or profit) the poor thinking habits of others. For example, this is one of those nice opportunities that lends itself to a substantial trading advantage. Election futures and polling in recent weeks peg Bush's election chances consistently better-than-even, around 55 to 65 percent. Therefore, if you run into a pro-Kerry coworker emboldened by Washingon's Sunday loss, it's a great opportunity to draw that coworker into an even-money bet. That spread between the wager (fair for a 50-50 contest) and the "true" probability (skewed in your favor) always makes you money in the long run, and hopefully the near-term too.

Still got lingering doubts? Hesitant to buck the oracular power of two squads of athletic millionaires chasing after a ball for three hours? Well consider this: Maybe we're just intepreting the data wrong. Maybe when the Redskins lose, it actually cuts against the last popular vote winner's party. Would that not also be consistent with the available data? Of course it is! So what do you think of the predictive power of the Packers-Redskins game now?

MSM Strikes Back

2004-10-27T04:20:00.000Z

Regardless of which presidential candidate is victorious next Tuesday (or in December, if the lawyers have their way), one thing this election will be remembered for is that the major established media news organizations finally and decisively chose to be partisan organs. Monday saw the latest in a notable series of one-sided hit pieces in this election season.

As you no doubt heard, on Monday the New York Times published a story about the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives from an Iraqi military facility (Al Qaqaa). This is taken to be prima facie evidence of mismanagement of the war. Never mind that the Duelfer report counts ten thousand different sites having weapons or munitions at war's end, and that the coalition has destroyed 240,000 tons of explosives to date, and has consolidated an additional 160,000 tons awaiting destruction. For the Democrats, whose wartime leadership is (apparently) historically flawless, nothing less than perfection is good enough. The coalition has deprived Mideast tyrants of twenty Hiroshimas worth of conventional explosives? But one-tenth of one percent of that got away. Inexcusable!

Of course, the Times trips over itself in its efforts to imply that the explosives disappeared out from under the nose of George W. Bush, quoting every defensive official they could trick into thinking that the coalition dropped the ball.

One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official.

This to reinforce the standard story template that there were insufficient troops for the other story template of the poorly planned war. What the Times doesn't get around to admitting is that they really don't know when the explosives were moved out. The presence of the explosives hadn't been definitively checked since January of 2003, and no UN official was there after March, i.e., before the war. In fact, it was left to NBC to bring up the unfortunate fact (noted by its own embedded reporters) that the explosives were already gone before the first American soldier set foot on the site, merely a day after the fall of Baghdad. Someone should ask the Times how many invading soldiers would be necessary to secure explosives that are not there. Someone could also ask them how it feels to team up with CBS for yet another big story to be significantly debunked within 24 hours.

There are quite a few other good questions one can ask of critics on this occasion. If these explosives are as bad as everyone says, doesn't this just underscore how dangerous and treacherous Saddam always was? Does it not also illustrate once and for all the foolishness and impotence of the United Nations, which year after year consented to the continued existence of this mountain of explosives? Inasmuch as the runup to the invasion provided ample time for the explosives to disappear, are the critics ready to concede that the much-maligned "rush to war" maybe spent too much time on ineffectual diplomacy after all? And if we now agree that 380 tons of high explosives can disappear before the invasion, is it asking too much to be more open-minded about the possibility of a couple trailers of WMDs going missing as well? These are all natural questions that could have been raised with intelligence officials and politicians in conjunction with this news story. That such questions never occurred to the Times simply demonstrates that the writers are ideologues first and journalists during whatever time they have left over. A real journalist would see that a dictator who stockpiles four hundred kilotons of explosives while his citizens die of malnutrition is a monstrous threat to civilized nations.

But the Times got in its dig. The damage was done. Twenty four hours was all that John Kerry, Joe Lockhart, the DNC and a horde of sympathetic columnists needed to pound on the President. That there is little logical basis for their allegations of sloppiness or incompetence here is material insofar as their rhetorical attacks will ease slightly, awaiting the next news "gotcha". But the attacks themselves will be remembered more vividly than the refutation, and that is the point. As Churchill observed, "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

Marketing II

2004-10-25T22:04:00.000Z

And what is a presidential race, if not in large part a humongous marketing campaign? I'm not the first person to bring this up, but I find the Kerry-Edwards "Hope is on the way" slogan to be really weird. I mean, if your candidates are the ones who are going to win and deliver the goods, then they are your hope. Right here, right now, these are your candidates and they are your hope. On the other hand, saying "hope is on the way" implies that hope ain't here yet. These guys? Nope! Makes me think that a Hillary agent planted that slogan. "Hope is on the way... in 2008."

Not that this is the only slogan that Kerry has adopted. He's drumming on a few recurring themes to rally positive support. I believe I've distilled them all down into one bumper-sticker sized promo, offered here free of charge:

Kedwards

Marketing I

2004-10-25T22:01:00.000Z

It was worth a try. 'Tis the time of year that asian lady beetles make it their mission to barge into our home for the winter. These insects amuse me, and I think they're cute. But they offend my wife's sensibilities, and she goes after the insects with grimly lethal effect.

I've tried softening the bugs' image by referring to them as "ladybugs," a somewhat erroneous moniker, but my wife doesn't go for it. So I announced last week I was renaming our houseguests "liberty bugs."

I have been informed that "liberty bugs" makes them "even more annoying," and have been instructed to stop.

A wedding day

2004-10-22T01:28:00.000Z

As alluded to in the previous post, it appears that the Governor's wedding went off in fine fashion. It was a sunny spring day in Stanley with higher-than-expected temperatures (around 55F), albeit with considerable wind. I was only able to download one webcam frame every three to five minutes or so, but that sufficed to get a general idea of what was transpiring.

Recall also in the previous post, I was going on about how I imagined the Governor was having a crummy day on that Monday back in March. He was missing his sporting events and was obliged to get back to business in the capital. The Governor boarding the Islander nine-seater aircraft bound for Stanley doesn't absolutely end that anecdote, though.

The arrival and departure of FIGAS aircraft in the countryside ("Camp") is a cooperative effort, requiring at least one local person on the ground at the landing site to put up the wind sock, get out the firefighting equipment, and establish communication with the aircraft over the two-meter once it comes into view. Each airstrip I saw had a small shed (which I invariably dubbed the "terminal building") in which the necessary support equipment was located. Aside from the erectable sock-pole, there were no other structures. The firefighting apparatus consisted of tanks and hoses on a trailer which would attach to your Land Rover. Everyone in Camp has four-wheel-drive vehicles and trailer hitches, so anyone's vehicle can serve as fire truck.

The ground liaison is also responsible for assuring that the runway is clear. Chiefly, this means clear of sheep and clear of upland geese. Now, midwesterners can relate to geese. They're a nuisance all over the place, it seems. But what's with the sheep? With all the fences and gates separating airstrip and fields, can't they at least keep the sheep off the runway? As we were laconically informed at Goose Green, "Yes, but then the grass would get too long." The natives were polite enough not to add a big, "ah-DUUHHHHHHH!!" at the American suburbanite's expense.

What goes for landing applies to takeoff as well, and by the time the FIGAS plane bearing His Excellency was bouncing down to the far end of the airstrip for takeoff, a group of upland geese was browsing around toward the opposite end of the runway. Since someone else was serving as fire truck, the Land Rover we boarded (soon bound for Port Howard Lodge) was duly appointed to chase off the geese. So Wayne, who was driving, jostled us down the field and got the geese airborne. As our Land Rover pulled off to the side, the Islander aircraft started accelerating for takeoff.

Apparently though we had taken insufficient interest in where the geese actually wanted to go, because as we watched the geese all did a one-eighty, turning back en-masse to re-cross the runway in flight. The pilot had to pull back the throttle, abort the takeoff, turn around back to the start and do it all over again. Whether the Governor was ticked or just figured it was par for the course that day, I cannot say.

All that nonwithstanding, Mr. Pearce is certainly enjoying a far better day today. We'll find out soon whether Penguin News has a fast enough turnaround to get a picture on the front of their Friday paper.

Update: The Falkland Island News Network and the South Atlantic Remote Territories Media Association have the faster turnaround in getting news and a picture up. See article here.

Kwik2Jujj and The Governor

2004-10-21T03:31:00.000Z

Thursday 21 October is the wedding of His Excellency, The Governor Howard Pearce to his fiancé, Miss Caroline Thomée. Governor Pearce, in case you haven't delved far into the links from this web page, is the top representative of Her Majesty's Government in the Falkland Islands, and exercises executive authority there.

I am almost certain that the wedding is to take place in Christ Church Cathedral in Stanley. It's hard to really know because I can only read the cover pages of the weekly Penguin News online, and those haven't even mentioned the Governor by name in the wedding stories, much less divulged the site of the ceremony. But a webcam portal has been set up, over which I was able to glimpse the wedding rehearsal earlier today. The interior of the Cathedral and the window configuration visible over the webcams match photographs on this site and my own pictures of the Cathedral's exterior from earlier this year. Anyway, the actual ceremony is scheduled to start at 1215 Falklands Summer Time on Thursday (1015 CDT, 1115 for folks in Ohio) in case anyone's interested in stealing a peek.

So, I believe I was about to embark on a rambling story with no real point to it. And I shall. My stay on the Falkland Islands was only one week long, and yet I encountered the Governor on two separate occasions. Permanent Falklands residents might not immediately relate to how charming an occurrence this is. As a Wisconsin resident, I literally go 'round for years and years without seeing our governor. I think I saw Governor Thompson once in all the years of his tenure, and I have yet to encounter Governor Doyle. Of course this has something to do with having millions of fellow citizens instead of just a few thousand, but the twice-in-a-week happenstance was striking nonetheless.

The first and more-noteworthy crossing of paths was near Port Howard, on Monday 01 March 2004. My wife and I were arriving on West Falkland via the Falkland Islands Government Air Service (FIGAS) following our two-night stay at Darwin House. We actually landed at an alternate grass airstrip that day because the regular airstrip nearer the settlement was in use for Camp Sports, the annual all-island late-summer games. As we were disembarking from the Islander nine-seater aircraft and trundling over to a waiting Land Rover from Port Howard Lodge, the Governor was waiting to board the plane for a return to Stanley.

Though the Governor was with another gentleman at the time, it was really quite tempting to briefly intrude - maybe get a photograph. Ken Greenland (of Darwin House) had said of Pearce that "he's really quite personable." But it also seemed at the time that Pearce wasn't having the best day. I had heard that the Governor was on West Falkland to present the Governor's Cup for the horse racing, but it seems he hadn't been able to do so on account of overnight rains muddying the course and delaying the morning's events. So His Excellency was missing the barbeque, not able to present the trophy, and was probably not looking forward to spending the rest of that beautiful Monday in his office at Government House. I declined to barge in on his disappointing day.

I saw the Governor again on Saturday, this time at Mount Pleasant. He was seeing somebody off on the Lan Chile flight that my wife and I were also departing on. If I remember correctly, we were already on board the plane when he appeared on the tarmac. It was another short appearance.

Such were our encounters with Mister Pearce. Nevertheless Mr. Governor, "2 Minute Sidebar" transmits most pleasant wishes from some crazy American who you almost, but didn't quite meet! All the best to you, your new bride, and our Falkland friends.

Think news skews your views?

2004-10-13T02:44:00.000Z

You may have heard last week that AT&T intends to cut another 7,400 jobs. A big headline today was that GM is cutting up to 12,000 jobs (albeit from its European operations). I bring this up because I'd like to propose a little experiment for someone (anyone) to try.

The experiment: Carefully comb through your daily newspaper for one month. Document each and every news story mentioning individual companies adding or slashing jobs. At the end of the month, tally up the stories to find the newspaper's net reported job loss figure. Using that figure, project how many months until the United States has zero jobs.

You then have two choices: (1) Buy guns, trade goods, and precious metals, OR (2) Think about what's wrong with your newspaper.

I'll bet India has less fraud

2004-10-13T01:37:00.000Z

Here's some big-time voter registration fraud. See this story from Denver:

9News has discovered a record number of fraudulent voter-registrations across the state. [...] Most of the fraud has come from registration drives, where people at grocery stores or on the streets ask you to sign up. 9News has learned many workers have re-registered voters multiple times by changing or making up information about them.

I wonder what it's going to take before legislatures and law enforcement become motivated to crush this growing trend. Because it won't abate until a few thousand people get something on the order of $5,000 fines and/or 30 days in jail. When you've got folks willing to tell a reporter (or even a video camera) that they've registered "about 35 times" and they just chuckle about it... that only happens because they've never ever heard of anybody being punished for such a thing.

And why should it be that these activist organizations bear no responsibility for turning in piles upon piles of fraudulent government forms? One lightning-quick reform idea would be to make the form submitter co-responsible for the document, a responsibility which could be mitigated by attaching copies of three government-issued identifying documents (for example). Because allowing these organizations to crisscross the country and just dump all the responsibility for distinguishing real voters from fakes onto the county offices is absurd.

Plus, consider this: a few vote fraud prosecutions and you have a county fund for hiring the necessary temporary labor for cleaning up the voter registry. A few election cycles and you could be back to a low-fraud equilibrium.

A big opposing force to these remedies is the weird notion that registering to vote is supposed to involve an absolute minimum of inconvenience - so convenient in fact that apparently we don't even insist upon proving residence or identity. Why should registering to vote be any easier than renewing your driver's licence? Why must it be easier than applying for student loans? Yes, I understand that this is one of those sacred rights we have as citizens. But the First Amendment is right up there too - and to me, allowing this sort of sight-unseen, utterly unaccountable registration and voting chaos to persist is like letting folks yell "Fire!" in crowded theatres.

Kerry vs. TraitorCo!

2004-10-11T23:21:00.000Z

Kerry campaign press release, 3 February 2004:

George Bush continues to fight for incentives to encourage Benedict Arnold companies to ship jobs overseas at the same time he cuts job training for our workers and cuts help for small businesses that create jobs here at home.

(Note that the link to the original source, a press release on John Kerry's own campaign website, has long since vanished.)

John Kerry, February 2004:

We will repeal the tax loopholes and benefits that reward Benedict Arnold CEOs and companies for shipping American jobs overseas. Instead we will provide new incentives for good companies that create and keep good jobs here in America.

Wall Street Journal interview, May 2004:

But the Benedict Arnold line applied, you know, I called a couple of times to overzealous speechwriters and said "look that's not what I'm saying."

Benedict Arnold does not refer to somebody who in the normal course of business is going to go overseas and take jobs overseas. That happens. I support that. I understand that. I was referring to the people who take advantage of non-economic transactions purely for tax purposes -- sham transactions -- and give up American citizenship. That's a Benedict Arnold. You give up your American citizenship but you want to continue to do business and deduct and do everything else. That's what I'm referring to. [...]

Washington Post, 5 August 2004:

But Kerry campaign officials said Kerry's use of the "Benedict Arnold" designation had to do only with firms that incorporated overseas to avoid U.S. tax liabilities, not firms that have engaged in "outsourcing."

Mickey Kaus, 9 August 2004:

Discriminations catches the Kerry campaign erasing from its Web site the primary-campaign denunciations of "Benedict Arnold CEOs" that don't fit Kerry's new, narrower, business-friendly definition of "Benedict Arnold."

The Boston Globe, 19 June 2003:

Documents obtained by the Globe detail John Kerry's 1983 investment of between $25,000 and $30,000 in offshore companies registered in the Cayman Islands. The document below, signed by Kerry, shows his pledge to purchase 2,470 shares of Peabody Commodities Trading Corp. through Sytel Traders, registered in the Caymans.

Caution: All-political

2004-10-11T23:13:00.000Z

You are probably already familiar with the standard Kerry-Iraq flip-flop. Back in 2002, Kerry was unwilling to be stranded on the unpopular side of yet another successful war effort (like he was in 1991 for the Gulf War). Back then, he wrote in the New York Times:

If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community's already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act.

But by 2004, while trying to run leftwards of his Democratic primary opponents, Kerry agreed with Chris Matthews' question on Hardball that he was unhappy with the conduct of the war, and was an anti-war candidate:

I am -- Yes, in the sense that I don't believe the president took us to war as he should have, yes, absolutely.

His vote against funding the Iraq and Afghanistan occupation and reconstruction in October 2003 matches the sudden leftward cut.

Let's see if I can paraphrase a Kerry defense: "Oh, but you see, Kerry was and is still behind the decision to go to war, only Kerry would have done things altogether differently. You know, so that France, Germany and Russia would have tens of thousands of soldiers there, no looting would have occurred, no insurgency, and so forth. So he wasn't against the war, only against how it turned out."

Well, nevermind that the guy in the Oval Office doesn't have a magical Futurescope to help with decisionmaking, and nevermind that these staunch allies of Kerry's America have pre-emptively nixed any hint of lending soldiers, now or ever. Can we at least say that Kerry wasn't flipping or flopping, and instead was just slathering an added layer of nuance to an increasingly complicated position? Well, Kerry's debate answers Friday night in St. Louis sure make it hard to put the flip-flop tag out of mind:

Well, let me tell you straight up: I've never changed my mind about Iraq. I do believe Saddam Hussein was a threat. I always believed he was a threat.

Mere minutes later, regarding Iran:

I don't think you can just rely on U.N. sanctions, Randee. But you're absolutely correct, it is a threat, it's a huge threat. And what's interesting is, it's a threat that has grown while the president has been preoccupied with Iraq, where there wasn't a threat.

Got that? There was no threat in Iraq. But Saddam Hussein was a threat.

Kerry needs to be careful, because flip-flopping that violently in the space of a few minutes could re-injure that rotator cuff. And did you notice that Kerry is saying directly that Iran is a huge and growing threat? Is Kerry on the verge of warning us that Iran has WMD stockpiles, even though the gathered intelligence might not be perfect? Could Kerry be laying the groundwork for another year-and-a-half "rush to war?" You'd think MoveOn.org would be alarmed.

Two shares!

2004-10-09T05:26:00.000Z

In my paleoquotology post a couple weeks ago, I blegged for info on how I might discover what MCI shares from 1986 may have grown (and re-shrunk) to today. Meanwhile, I sent my wife's ancient stock certificates off to be converted into their modern equivalents.

If only were as easy as the bank had implied. The form and the certificates have returned, with further instructions, most of which relate to the forms my wife needs to produce in order to have herself take sole ownership of the property (as her mother was "custodian" in 1986). We'll have to send back the original form and certificates, plus a signature guarantee from a particular type of bank, plus a W-9 form, plus a certified birth certificate (for cryin' out loud), and (finally) a cover letter. Now, the bank knew from the get-go that this was a custodial account. So I don't see why they didn't mention in the original correspondence that all this may be necessary.

But here's a better question. It says right on the stock certificates that they were issued 14 April 1986. The date's stamped on there, along with my wife's name. So given that my wife's ownership of the stock is indisputably over eighteen years old, how is it that the bank thinks it possible that my wife herself is not eighteen - and thus requires the certified birth certificate, et. al.? What sort of bizarre, twin-paradox circumstance are they envisioning and legally safeguarding themselves against?

Bunch of overly-officious, bureaucratic nincompoops...

Fantasy psycho

2004-10-04T04:54:00.000Z

I invite you (yes, you!) to share with me here the name of your "fantasy psycho," i.e. the celebrity who is both (1) very attractive in your eyes and yet (2) either demonstrably criminal or obviously crazy. I am asking for the celebrity individual who maximizes the above sum for you.

For me, I'd have to say Winona Ryder. Cute! Nuts! But if you think Winona isn't crazy enough, then how 'bout Anne Heche? Still attractive, and way more bonkers.

Tough sell

2004-10-04T04:42:00.000Z

NBC 15 News in Madison had a short piece recently about a fundraiser intended to help a family pay medical bills for their son. For the purpose of this post, I'll refer to the young man as John Doe, mainly because I don't want the fellow or his family to Google later and see me (a total stranger) writing unflattering things concerning him. But if you want the name, you can check this news story from August.

I digress. The TV news story mentioned that the young John Doe had been terribly injured and is still hospitalized following his fall from a balcony August 28th. We are told the family is in financial straits and that the medical bills are huge (though nobody mentions even a rough figure or the matter of insurance). We are given information on how to write and send cheques to the John Doe Medical Fund.

So why am I drifting toward writing something negative here? Or anything, for that matter? If you consult the story above, or related ones such as here, you see that young Doe (an incoming freshman to UW-Madison) critically injured himself by pitching over a balcony rail, most likely in the act of vomiting while extremely intoxicated. The TV news story pushing the charity case graciously omitted these unflattering details. But I think these details are pertinent. Nobody wronged this fellow by doing anything bad to him. He wasn't struck down by some unforseeable malady or dreadful disease. He wasn't maimed while soldiering, or volunteering, or doing anything at all productive. As such, I put this individual and his family way, way, way down on my list of targets for monetary donations. Above panhandlers, surely, and yet well below IDF pizza.

Let me be clear: It would be great for this guy and for society in general if he were to make a rapid, full and complete recovery. That would be a very positive thing. But I think it's also good for society when people who hurt themselves in dumb ways feel embarrassed about it, suck it up and face the consequences themselves. That would actually make for an instructive, perhaps even inspiring story of growth and responsibility.

WI DMV 4U

2004-10-01T14:34:00.000Z

What's not to like about a clever personalized plate, unless (of course) it's so clever you don't get it? Seen today: "12 SQRD," which can only elicit one reasonable interpretation:

Gross

(As a noun, first entry).

John Kerry's guns

2004-09-28T12:55:00.000Z

The Democrats know that they alienate many of their potential voters when they emphasize gun control, or tout bills that sound like general gun bans. The modern campaign strategy is to skirt these topics if possible, and to use pro-hunting rhetoric when out in the boondocks. This is something that Howard Dean could have pulled off rather well. As governor, Dean presided over a state with few gun restrictions, low crime and a strong hunting reputation. John Kerry on the other hand is managing to look ridiculous trying to don the hunting mantle with two decades of anti-gun Senate work to his credit.

Take Kerry's visit to Wisconsin in July, when he was asked what kind of hunting he preferred. As quoted by Mark Steyn:

I'd have to say deer. I go out with my trusty 12-gauge double-barrel, crawl around on my stomach... That's hunting.

Except that most Wisconsin hunters agree that no, that's not hunting. Not for deer anyway. The idea of low-crawling for deer is absurd.

Kerry put on his hunting act in Racine, West Virginia as well. Showing what a sporting type he is, he accepted as a gift a Remington 11-87 semi-automatic shotgun. What tripped Kerry up was the fact that he had co-sponsored legislation (S. 1431) that would have banned the very weapon that he was admiring there for his supporters.

More recently, the sunset of 1994's assault-weapons ban brought the opportunty for Kerry to bash Bush over the head with what he figured to be a guns, crime and terrorism issue:

"Every law enforcement officer in America doesn't want us selling assault weapons in the streets of America," Kerry said. "But George Bush, he says, 'Well, I'm for that.'"

I must have missed the chain of streetside gun kiosks that dotted the landscape in the early nineties. Having made his attack on Dubya, Kerry ties together his supposed hunting bona fides and the assault-weapons issue:

"I've handled all different kinds of guns and I've gone out and I've shot - I've shot birds and deer and you name it," Kerry said last night during a rally in Allentown, Pa. "And I believe in the Second Amendment. But I'll tell you this - I have never thought about going hunting with an assault weapon, with a weapon of war."

Among other points, this quote backs up Salvius' contention that much of the posturing over these guns exploits ambiguity over what guns are actually being talked about. No, people do not go out hunting with "weapons of war," i.e. AK-47s, M-16s and so forth, but these are not what the assault-weapons bill was about. Those weapons of war are military issue, fully automatic battlefield weapons, which have been heavily taxed and regulated in this country since 1934. The assault-weapons ban of 1994 concerned semi-automatic weapons, many of which have been and are still used by hunters and other sportsmen (e.g. target shooters).

So at best Kerry is peddling caricatures and non-sequiturs. But then he goes and gives an interview for the October issue of Outdoor Life. Put on the hunting garb, Mr. Candidate!

Outdoor Life: Are you a gun owner? If so, what is your favorite gun?
Kerry: My favorite gun is the M-16 that saved my life and that of my crew in Vietnam. I don’t own one of those now, but one of my reminders of my service is a Communist Chinese assault rifle.

Got that? Even though Kerry, by his own words, would never think about going hunting with an assault weapon, and even though he voted for legislation that prevented his fellow citizens from owning such a gun, Kerry will boast about owning an assault rifle to Outdoor Life magazine.

Wait - it gets better. Because the natural next questions are, "What model assault weapon are you talking about? How did you obtain it?" The New York Times actually showed a glimmer of curiosity and asked the Kerry campaign about this:

Mr. Kerry's campaign would not say what model rifle Mr. Kerry was referring to, where he got it and when, or how many guns he owned. A spokesman for the senator, Michael Meehan, said Mr. Kerry was a registered gun owner in Massachusetts. On Thursday morning, Mr. Meehan said he had not been able to ask Mr. Kerry about the rifle because of Mr. Kerry's hoarse voice; he did not respond to further inquiries.

Say, Mr. Meehan? Could you maybe have the poor, mute Senator write the answer down on a scrap of paper then instead?

Paleoquotology

2004-09-23T13:00:00.000Z

Here's a challenge for netizenry: Is there a resource on the web that will tell me what a share of MCI, purchased in 1986, would be worth today? This question interests me because my wife recently received a notice from a New York bank asking her to send in her MCI stock certificate for conversion into an updated security (and before it gets classified as abandoned property). My wife had acquired the stock (two whole shares!) as part of a public school class project eighteen years ago.

Of course, since that time MCI grew, was acquired by Worldcom, and under Worldcom has suffered mightily along with much of the telecom world. So I'd be surprised if the updated securities could even buy us dinner. Still, I'm interested in how many times the shares may have split in their heyday, what the peak value was, and so forth. And while there are many quote servers and historical lookup resources on the internet, I don't know of one that would take the takeovers and conversions into account.

Hail, ants!

2004-09-23T12:29:00.000Z

And by that I mean: Welcome to Salvius, who very recently posted a comment here. His visit speaks volumes for his ability to endure conservative ranting tinged with a technical undercurrent. Also, let me be the first here to register my strong admiration of the great state of Ohio for its large number of electoral votes. Very impressive.

Phone phollies

2004-09-16T23:32:00.000Z

I picked up the telephone last night to place a couple calls, and:

We're sorry. The number you are calling from has been disconnected. For assistance, please call your customer service center.

It took a little experimenting to establish that I could still place local calls, but direct-dial long distance was gone. I was further dismayed when an 800-number didn't go through on the first try (subsequent attempts succeeded).

So what's up? I logged in to my local telephone provider's website, and they still showed "Worldcom" as my long distance connection. Note though that this is not who I pay my bills to. Worldcom merely owns the connections that my long-distance provider leases in order to provide service to people like me. My long distance is (was) provided by GTC Telecom. I logged in to their website that provides my billing information and found no special notices or alerts. I did find though that they have billed me for no calls whatsoever since August 2nd. Mysterious. I sent GTC Telecom a detailed email describing my problem and situation, for which I have yet to see any response.

Today, however, I spotted on their primary web page a notice that "We have changed our underlying carrier to Sprint." Well, good heavens, that could explain a lot.

This change should be invisible to you and your service should not have been interrupted.

That's where they are wrong. See, my local telephone provider gives us the option of blocking switches of long-distance provider unless the order is given by the customer personally (the "anti-slamming" protection). So if GTC Telecom told my local carrier to switch me (their customer) from Worldcom to Sprint, my local carrier would ignore that. The big mistake on GTC Telecom's part is not notifying me in any way. While it's possible they may have tried to email, it is equally possible that my internet provider's spam filtering ate their lousy notice. Something this important should have been snail-mailed, or at least heralded in my online invoices. They did neither.

Presently, I'm a little miffed at not being notified of this action, and even more miffed that GTC Telecom still hasn't responded to my rather elementary email given eighteen hours already. I'm used to small operations like this being short service-wise, but we're talking email instead of personal service, and I can't even get that? To their credit, GTC Telecom says they'll credit me if my local phone provider dings me for the switch to Sprint (seven dollars and eighty cents, it turns out), and they give contact info and instructions for achieving that. But this is immaterial until I get my service back. The GTC Telecom number alternates between being busy and just not answering. I can hope that now, after switching the long distance carrier lines to Sprint, everything might magically fall together on its own -- but that seems iffy.

Please, no taunting from those of you who have discarded your land-lines altogether.

Sunset

2004-09-15T02:32:00.000Z

We have just seen the close of a decade-long exercise in gun-control silliness with the expiration of the "assault-weapons ban," an anti-gun bait-and-switch that squeezed through in the early Clinton administration, when the Democrats still controlled the House. The bait: The government will get rid of scary, dangerous "machine guns." The switch: The bill outlawed the manufacture, transfer and sale of hundreds of models of otherwise-unremarkable semi-automatic rifles.

Was anybody really fond of this bill? The only reason I can think of to like it is if you were for sweeping gun prohibitions, and you thought that this was a necessary stepping stone in that direction. But given that the law marked the high-tide of recent gun control rather than the first swell of a flood, I'd have to think that the law's proponents must be disappointed. By failing to build upon the ban, the bill's authors in the end are seen to have crafted ineffective legislation that went nowhere, to the benefit of no-one.

Perhaps that sounds harsh, but consider the following. It seems to me inarguable that from the gun-prohibition standpoint, ground has actually been lost in the last ten years when you consider the progress of concealed-carry in the states. So then you're left to argue effectiveness or benefit, i.e. that you saved lives or reduced crime, neither of which has been clearly shown. That the efficacy would be difficult to measure or detect should surprise no-one, since semiautomatic rifles aren't often used by criminals owing to their large size, substantially higher cost, and tendency to attract unwanted attention. A Justice Department-sponsored report noted that crimes with guns classified as assault weapons amounted to only two percent of gun crimes even at the beginning of the ban in 1994.

Meanwhile, the violent crime rate has fallen 54 percent since 1993. Simple math dictates that even had the ban eliminated all assault-weapon-related crime (and it did not), and even supposing that all violent crimes are gun crimes (they are not), that would at most have accounted for two of the 54 percent drop. And even that assumes that the assault-weapon crimes didn't just become pistol crimes, bat crimes, knife crimes, or whatever. So little wonder the Justice Department couldn't detect any benefit in crime rates from the ban. The best that could be hoped for was almost undetectable, and the effects (if any) were overwhelmed by larger trends from increased incarceration rates, dramatically higher rates of federal gun crime prosecution since 2000, and so forth.

I would be remiss in not directly acknowledging the arguments of the Brady Campaign (formerly Handgun Control Inc.) with regard to assault weapons, which you may peruse here. My big counterpunch to their advocacy is that they are entirely avoiding the important points: Was overall crime reduced as a direct result of the legislation? Were lives saved? Instead they point out (repeatedly) that assault weapons were involved in fewer crimes (and arrests). Of this I have little doubt, but why should anyone care? To illustrate, suppose that twenty thousand highway fatalities in the 1980s involved Ford cars and trucks. We could ban the sale and transfer of all Fords in 1990, beginning the "Ford Ban." We would probably notice a sharp downturn in Ford fatalities in the 1990s as a result of the Ford Ban, but that says exactly nothing concerning overall highway fatalities! It is a non sequitur.

The Brady Campaign makes several further arguments of debatable relevance, concerning for instance the meaning of the terms "cosmetic" or "rare." Two percent of crimes are made to seem less rare, I suppose, when you note that these still amount to a few thousand crimes, but in the end we're still talking about a small percentage -- and the Brady Campaign still cannot show that those crimes disappeared along with the guns. I frankly find the Brady Campaign's arguments concerning semiautomatic rifles to be at points misleading, ignorant, or downright silly. If someone should have questions regarding a specific point, I'd be happy to address them.

Plus Three

2004-09-11T04:53:00.000Z

"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."

President Ronald Reagan
"What do I tell the pilot to do?"

"A group of us are going to do something."

"We're going to rush the hijackers."

"Everyone's running up to first class. I've got to go. Bye."

"Today is a proud day to be an American."

"America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world."

"We're going to find out who did this and we're going after the bastards."

"I fear that all I have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve."