Weekend Cinema

When you’re too drunk to drive to the theater, Weekend Cinema keeps you safe at home!

I was going to write up a detailed analysis of the Stewart-Cramer smackdown (short version: Cramer lost) but I’m too whacked to do it. So I’ll just link to the interview:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

The thing that still bothers me is Cramer saying something to the effect that “today’s investors don’t want to know about stuff like P/E ratios and the like.” DUH. Dad, if you’re reading this, you would probably agree with me that P/E ratios are one of the fundamental things you should know about investing in a stock… if you’re not interested in fundamentals, you should just spend your money or leave it in the bank.

What’s this world coming to anyway?

Programmers. Argh. (4.0, Premature Indigestion)

I suffered mightily from indigestion Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. I thought I was having a blood pressure spike, as the symptoms were about the same: chest pain/pressure, general feelings of uneasiness and shakiness. DoubleRed said her dad had a mini-heart attack with the same symptoms; we got out the BP machine Wednesday night and I was a tad high but the thing tends to read high anyway. Shortly after that, I began a long series of loud burps… about one a minute for an hour. Every time I’d let one loose, I felt a little better. By bedtime, I got to feeling fairly decent.

Thursday… let’s say whatever was causing the issue decided to move out. For Too Much Input, hover over this text. I still had a touch of whatever it was yesterday evening, but Mrs. Fetched attributed that to the Mexican food we had for lunch. Lord knows I’ve not exactly been eating right lately.

Skipping back a little… I got punted to a new department, which became official Monday. The new boss (not same as the old boss) came by Wednesday afternoon to get an idea of how I manage to get stuff done. I gave him a heads-up… as the new guy, he should expect a certain manager (the same one from Programmers 2.0, in fact) to start trying to poke his nose into the situation and dictating how I do my work.

I was right. I just didn’t expect it this week.

The opening shot came this morning, as part of an email chain concerning an update that we’d been handling through the week. Had I kept my mouth shut, I probably wouldn’t have had to worry about it, but I asked if we needed to update the translated User Guides as well. Another PITA engineer, who thinks his input is far more valuable than it actually is, wanted to know why we had French and Spanish for one product and Portuguese for another — the hobgoblin called Foolish Consistency rides that one hard — and the simple answer is that we sell one product through North America and the other in Brazil. “But we sell the other in Canada too,” said a manufacturing guy, and the seagull manager took wing with a comment to the new boss:

[You need] to make this multi-lingual translation routine and seemless [sic] for all our products.

I responded, “Routine and seamless? Good luck with that one.” We sell different products into different markets, and the markets often shift under our feet before I manage to finish the documentation. There is no “routine” when it comes to translation, simple as that. And seeing as it costs a fair amount of money for translation, there is no “seamless” unless we want to throw money away on translations we aren’t going to use… in this economy, that’s just stupid. I’ve already requested close to $10K for translations this year, and we’re not even through March yet. It also “seems” to me that someone who can’t even be bothered to turn on the spell checker in Notes should not be telling a writer how to do his job (“his” in this case is me).

I should have expected him to dig in… I have to give him this much, he won’t back down from a war of words even when he’s outmatched from the get-go. (Don’t start a flame war with a writer.) I suppose that’s a characteristic of empire-building; you can’t even admit to yourself that you’re on the wrong side on an argument. He whined about requirements (and there wasn’t even a Requirement Spec for this particular product), that the time and cost for translations seemed excessive (although he can’t really know since he’s not the one actually managing the process)… but the next part started (as Mrs. Fetched says) making my ass twitch:

We have impacted release dates in the past due to lack of translations. This is a problem area that needs to be fixed. […] delivery dates *MUST NOT* be gated by lack of documentation. This has to get fixed.

I wrote a nice little email that took him apart, paragraph by paragraph. In this particular case, we have had exactly one release date held up due to lack of translations (in 12 years), but he seems determined to hold that over my head at any opportunity… completely ignoring the myriad times development issues have held up releases. Perhaps if he was focused on hardware development instead of empire-building, they might meet more deadlines, but I didn’t say that. I went on to mention that documentation release dates keep getting pulled in, and the requirements for translations at the first build means I need to have completed and approved documentation (in English) 4–5 weeks earlier than that, so the translators have something to work from.

This took me to about 11:30 a.m. I wasn’t sure whether it was over the top (and the guideline is if you aren’t certain it’s not, it probably is), so I left the mail unsent and went to make a deposit at the credit union and grab some lunch (tried a random place along the way, a tad expensive but worth it). I figured a long hour, which included a motorcycle ride since I rode Little Zook to work, would give me some needed perspective. Alas, when I got back to work and looked over the email, I did some editing but didn’t see a need to tone it down at all. I sent it to my boss, who told me to not send it, let him handle it, and thanks for the info. No problem… I preferred to get some actual work done anyway.

With that not settled, but my participation thankfully out of the way, the discussion turned to yet another product. This is a “business services” product, so it doesn’t get end-user documentation, and people started questioning whether it should be done. As a necessity, I pointed out that we haven’t ever done translations for those kinds of documents, and asked whether we needed to start. One of the responses gave me a good laugh to end the day:

Maybe you'll have better luck getting an answer than I did.

And that’s the crux of the matter… I’m not going to request two grand or more for something I haven’t been told is needed. Maybe I should stop worrying and start stimulating the world economy.

But the indigestion, and its subsequent cause, are both gone now. There are days that the life of a chicken rancher looks like an improvement…

The Road to Irrelevance

Amazingly enough, I’m not talking about the Republican party. Compared to the latest moves by the Catholic Church, the goplets are actually taking their wilderness experience to heart. But there are a lot of similarities: two institutions that have both seen better days, and are now increasingly the demesne of old men — or at least people who think like old men… little or no imagination nor willingness to acknowledge that things are changing out from under them.

Not being a Catholic, I don’t see the Catholic Church as anything but another Christian denomination… even if they were the denomination at one time. They may be the oldest, largest, and richest denomination, but that’s it. But their insistence on placing tradition on an equal footing with Scripture is driving them down the road to irrelevance, step by step. Any outfit that still wants to ban birth control in an era of overpopulation is simply not going to be taken seriously by anyone outside the institution… and many inside, for that matter. An institution that still refuses to let half the world’s population advance beyond secretarial or janitorial work, based on what’s (not) between their legs, is severely limiting itself by cutting out half the labor pool. (There are other denominations with the same self-limitation.)

Looking at the history of the Catholic Church, it’s fairly obvious that a church can have one of spiritual power or political power. The early church ministered to the lowly, even the slaves, and grew in spiritual power until it displaced the pagan religious structure of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately, this was the seed of its downfall: when the Empire collapsed, the church was sucked into the power vacuum and it accreted political power without even trying (although there were certainly ambitious priests who helped the process along). Being literally the kingmaker of Europe, it grew corrupt over the centuries until the Protestant Reformation forced some institutional soul-searching and internal reforms, which culminated 450 years later in Vatican II. But the last 20 years or so have seen some backsliding (heh) from the reforms, back to a more hard-line and hidebound set of doctrines.

Tradition serves a nation or institution well, during times that things aren’t changing much. It has been said that you could pluck citizens from ancient Rome and drop them in 1909, and they would be able to adjust — and adults living in 1909 would have a harder time adjusting life in 2009 than the civis Romanis would with 1910. The institutional memory of the Catholic Church reaches all the way back to Imperial Rome, and nothing that large or old can change course quickly even if they claim the desire… and it would require a truly impressive change to jettison the very things holding them back the most.

Remember… for every Catholic that insists that Protestants are going to Hell, there is a Protestant that insists the same about Catholics. [For the record, I take neither stance.]

An Open Letter

From: FARfetched
To: “Climate change skeptics” and other Global Warming deniers

Undoubtedly, many of you have been strangely warmed by the first Alberta Clipper to come south in about five years. Those video clips of snowbound New Englanders and Chicagoans, even if you’re one of them, have given you that warm fuzzy feeling of vindication… here’s your “proof” that you know better than those intellectuals — what do they know? After all, they’ve only spent their entire careers studying the incredibly complex system we call the Earth’s climate.

Well, here’s a news flash for you, Bubba… have you checked the calendar lately? This is the season known (in the Northern Hemisphere anyway) as “winter.” The birds fly south to warmer climes, snow falls in the north, people put away their boats and get out their skis? Remember? It’s cold because it gets cold this time of year. Do you really think that global warming means palm trees will start growing along Buffalo’s Lake Erie waterfront? Don’t be silly.

Winters are a lot less harsh than they used to be, not only in my lifetime but since I moved to Planet Georgia in 1982. Back then, hard cold snaps like this were a yearly occurrence, and below-zero (F) temperatures something you’d see roughly every other year. Not any more — the weather dudes tell us our single-digit temps are the first in 5 years, and we haven’t seen below-zero weather for 10 to 15 years. In Michigan, people now complain bitterly about large amounts of cold and snow that were commonplace when I was a kid.

Don’t take my word for it, look at what’s been happening to global temperatures over the last 160 years or so:



Sure, there are blips either way, but since the Industrial Revolution kicked into high gear the trend has been up. This year might be a blip down, maybe not. I noted last year that August was a lot more pleasant than usual; only the first few days were over 90F here.

There’s also that little minor detail about the Arctic ice cap, and how it seems to be getting smaller nearly every year. By the way, the chart above depicts average temperature rises; the Arctic is warming much faster than… say, the southeastern US.

So enjoy your shot of cold weather; it will be gone in a few days. I know I enjoyed a milder than usual August last year; if a few days of bug-killing cold is the price to pay for that, I’ll pay it. None of us know exactly what the weather is going to bring us in two weeks, let alone a month; the farther out we go, the more we have to rely on trends (which suggest warming overall) and computer models (ditto). But I do know that we’ll all be bitching about how hot it is in 6 months or so.

Sinnertors FAIL (as expected)

Well, the Senate had the bailout vote today, and (along with both Obama and McCain and ¾ of the Senate, dangit), both sinnertors from Planet Georgia voted for it. One of them is up for re-election, and the race has been tightening a bit lately… although I’ve often said, the pod people would elect Satan if he ran as a Republican, and call him a “defender of moral values.”

Anyway. I wrote both of them earlier in the week (as well as my reprehensible, Nathan “Raw” Deal), urging them to vote NO and come up with a better idea. I was 1-for-3; Deal voted the way I wanted him to… I think for the first time ever. So here’s the excuses the other two had to offer.

Sen. Isakson:

The cause of the decline was the funding of marginal credit mortgages (subprime) through the creation of mortgage-backed securities… The market for these securities declined and ultimately evaporated, thus causing a liquidity problem for the financial institutions and a credit crisis for American consumers and small businesses.

… The Treasury has proposed using up to $700 billion dollars to purchase, at a discount, these mortgage-backed securities. … If the Treasury properly discounts the securities to, say, 50 or 60 cents on the dollar, and holds the securities to maturity there should be little or no cost to the Treasury. …

While I am not a big government regulator, if the investment bankers on Wall Street were held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as our national banking system, this would not have happened. …

… Not a dollar of the $700 billion will go to the brokers who created the securities. Instead, they will go to the investors who bought them, and then only after they take a significant discount or loss. Properly executed, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve believe this proposal will restore liquidity to the credit markets and return confidence in the financial system.

Mrf. I’d like to believe our tax dollars would be buying discounted paper. The bill, though, says only that the purchase price is not to exceed 100% of the stated value. FAIL. There’s nothing in the bill about accountability… indeed, the bill removed “mark to market” requirements that forced companies to value their paper at what it’s worth. FAIL #2. Finally, the “investors who bought them” are (in many cases) foreign banks that demanded their cut at the trough. FAIL #3, hit the showers dude.

On to Sen. Saxby Chambliss, running for re-election this year. Amazingly, Jim Martin is giving him a real contest at the moment, and even the pod people think this bailout idea is a stinker. So you’d think he’d be a little more circumspect with his ayes and nays? Well… you know, I’m going to have to take this one down point-by-point, and I didn’t want to do that.

I strongly believe that doing nothing will destroy the financial security of millions of Americans and possibly lead us into a depression. I just as strongly believe the bill as now negotiated will arrest the crisis and begin to turn our economy around.

Ah yes, lead off with the false dichotomy. Voting this bill down = do nothing. How about: flush this steaming load and come up with something that actually addresses the problem? FAIL.

I know that my vote in favor of this package was not the politically popular thing to do, but this is not a popularity contest. This is about the future of our country and the future that my children and grandchildren will inherit. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind or my heart that my vote in support of this measure was the right thing for our economy, for Georgians, and for our country.

Translation: I was paid well for my vote. But where have I heard that “this is not a popularity contest” cant? Oh yeah: McSame during the debate.

I did not support the original proposal submitted by the Administration because it did not address the critical needs of the American taxpayer, community banks, retirees, and small businesses and it concentrated too much power in a small group to administer the plan. …

Moreover, when the House rejected the plan, the economy suffered a $1.2 trillion dollar blow in the stock market, which only made more apparent the impact this credit crunch is having on Main Street. Specifically, in some cases, Georgia community banks are unable to make auto loans.

And the new plan does? As I understand it, it’s the plan the House rejected with a few tax credit extensions and a bump in FDIC coverage. FAIL #2

Oh dear, a $1.2 trillion dollar blow, and no mention that 2/3 of that came right back the next day. And banks are unable to make loans? Making loans is what banks do; either they make loans with necessary and prudent conditions attached or they close. End of story. If they can’t make loans, they might as well shut down.

TAXPAYERS ARE PROTECTED. In its current form, the legislation before the Senate protects taxpayers in many ways. Accountability, safeguards, and oversight measures are numerous. …

NOT A BLANK CHECK. I opposed the President's initial request to simply give a blank check to Secretary Paulson. I also opposed the second version submitted by the President and Congressional Democrats that would have given taxpayer money to liberal groups such as ACORN. …

NO GOLDEN PARACHUTES. CEOs and other executive officers who drove their companies into the ground will not be able to walk away with millions leaving taxpayers holding the bill. Those companies that choose to participate in the program will be subject to strict compensation limits.

NO NEW GOVERNMENT SPENDING. The language is clear - all revenue generated through the repayment of any assets purchased and any sold must be used to pay down the national debt. No money will go to pork projects, new government spending, or liberal groups such as ACORN.

Oh gasp! Liberal groups! Dude: would you please point me to a conservative advocacy group for low-income housing? Fouled it off, still 0-and-2.

HELP FOR MAIN STREET. As this crisis continues, community banks are being affected more and more. Car loans and home loans, even to those with good credit, are drying up. … If we allow this to continue, jobs will be lost, more retirement accounts will be impacted, and credit will get even tighter.

So handing Wall Street a huge wad of money is going to fix Main Street? FAIL #3, hit the showers. If we’re lucky, you’ll hit them permanently come Nov. 4.

But wait, there’s more!

PUNISH CRIMINALS. The Federal Government is actively investigating cases of fraud and abuse. Where wrongdoing is found, the perpetrators, including, if implicated, members of Congress will be brought to justice. …

ADDRESS THE UNDERLYING CAUSE WHILE WE TREAT THE SYMPTOMS. We are seeing the symptoms now - lack of trust in the banking industry, daily tightening of the credit markets, losses in personal retirement accounts - and while this legislation addresses those issues, it also goes further to treat the cancer that got us here. This legislation authorizes the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to modify the 'mark to market' accounting procedures that magnified this crisis by forcing banks to mark down the value of assets they had no intention of selling in the near future. This mark down of value caused a corresponding loss of value to the institutions. The SEC has already begun the process to modify this procedure.

whiff Sax-dude, you already struck out. You can stop swinging. Any time now. So banks can hold a big steaming load of crap, and call it solid gold as long as they don’t try to sell it? Um… exactly how is this going to do anything to help with the lack of trust in the banking industry?

RETURN TRUST IN THE BANKS. By increasing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) protection on bank accounts from the current $100,000 to $250,000, taxpayers and bank customers can once again trust that their money is safe in the bank of their choice.

DEBT REPAYMENT. Toxic loans will be purchased at a discount and 100% of the monies repaid to the government will go to reduce the debt we incur in this process. While we shouldn't expect full repayment, it is possible that all of the money expended will be repaid.

Yeah, and it’s possible that I’m the Queen of England. What’s the discount rate? 99 cents on the dollar? Whiff again.

PROTECT OUR NATIONAL SECURITY. If we do not act and this crisis spreads like a cancer to every segment of our economy, it will destroy not only taxpayer savings but it will erode our ability to fund our military, supply our troops with the resources they need, and protect our homeland.

Oooo, and I thought the terrorism card couldn’t be played on this one! You might have fouled that one off if there had been a pitch and the umpire wasn’t busy trying to push you out of the batter’s box.

NO TIME FOR POLITICAL FINGER POINTING. There is plenty of blame to go around but now is not the time to throw stones, now is the time to address this crisis and get our economy moving again.

Too bad you didn’t think of that before you started whining about ACORN. Whiff and the umpire dodges while the pitcher scratches his head and goes, “WTF?”

blah blah blah However, history warns us against inaction by hard lessons learned. Delaying to act would be a repeat of the mistakes of the 1920s, when thousands of banks failed before significant confidence was restored to our financial markets.

Dude, you just made it harder to actually FIX the problem. Like Mrs. Fetched, your rush to DO SOMETHING NOW is wasting time and energy while doing little to solve it.

And the ump gets some help from the 1st- and 3rd-base umpires, the catcher, and a few fans… they escort Saxby “Ignorance is” Chambliss off the field, still swinging at a ball that has long gone by.

Judas Priest. The pod people tossed a guy who left pieces of himself in Vietnam for this?

Start Bailing, Everyone

This brief clip shows a younger Bush-league speaking at a high-dollar fundraiser: “Some call you the elite, I call you my base.” Here, in the waning months of a far too long Reign of Error, that was enabled by a single vote (in the Supreme Court), Bush-league is trying to throw one last meaty ol’ bone to his “haves and have-mores” base. Of course, I’m referring to the Wall Street bailout package, known by some as the Paulson Plan.

In perfect Bush-league administration form, they ignored the problem until it became a crisis, then started beating the Fear Drums and attempted to ramrod a real stink-bomb through Congress — what amounted to a check for $700 billion with carte blanche for Paulson to do with it as he pleased, even including a pre-emptive Congressional pardon for violations of any laws along the way. Basically, he could have pocketed the money and bought him a nice little palace in the Keys without any repercussions even possible.

Amazingly, the goplet lapdogs in Congress and their media talking heads opposed it — some on the Dem side suggest that the idea was to force it through Congress without goplet support, then use it against Democrats running for re-election. Two problems: the Dems insisted on bi-partisan support (knowing it was going to be unpopular) and people overwhelmed Congress with variations of “there’s nothing in it for us, we’re not paying for it.” I was one of millions who beat the house.gov and senate.gov servers to death this week, I’m happy to say, telling my sinnertors and reprehensible what I thought of this bailout. I got a detailed response from Sen. Isakson, the only one of the three not up for re-election this year, who called for several sensible modifications. Of course, none of them appeared in the version voted on today (and Sen. Isakson supported).

After the bill went down in the House on Monday, the so-called revision is basically the same bill with a couple of tax credit extensions and an increase in FDIC coverage — basically, the same pig with a fresh coat of lipstick. And the House and Senate servers continue to get hammered.

I’d like to think Speaker Pelosi was playing a subtle game on Monday. The goplets blamed her for their decision to vote down the package on Monday, after she mildly criticized the right-wing economic policies that led to the current problem. I want to think she’s dangling tax cuts in front of the goplets (ooh, shiny!) so that the bill passed with their support (while peeling away votes from her own caucus), but this Congress has been way too quick to roll over for Bush-league for me to believe it.

I remember writing a story during my high school days that had, as a backdrop, “the economic collapse in 2000.” We are being told that this bailout package is necessary to avoid a real collapse in 2008… but many economists say it won’t help. If we do end up with an economic collapse, at least the people who perpetrated this massive theft will go down with the rest of us — of course, if things stay together, we’ll probably drown while holding the fat cats out of the water. I can only hope that if Obama gets elected in five weeks, that he’ll give each congressional Democrat a shiny new spine for Christmas. You know the Republicans are bought and paid for by Wall Street, and they’ll do what they always do: shovel as much money as they can at the people who need it least and blame the rest of us for not working hard enough or whatever. They will obstruct, filibuster, whine like the crybabies they are on every show that points a camera at them, but we can hope that by 2010 they won’t be more than a noisy non-entity.

The Great Gas Panic of 2008 Continues

The media says things will ease up tomorrow. And theoildrum.com suggests it gets worse for the next 2–3 weeks. Frankly, this is worse than Katrina, at least from a supply standpoint — it’s like living in an early episode of FAR Future! If it gets any worse, and I mean any worse, the South will come to a standstill next week.

When a gas station gets a shipment in, people start calling around to tell their friends and relatives, everyone rushes in to fill up, and then they’re out again. We got a phone call this morning, and I took the Civic in to get half a tank (my last $20 of gas money). But except for the occasional fistfight, people seem to be taking it in stride. They’re blaming oil companies, politics (yeah right, like Bush-league would hose his party’s base in an election year), whatever, but otherwise they shrug and line up. I explain what’s really happening: oil production in the Gulf is still only 1/4 normal; refineries in Texas are restarting more slowly than anticipated (see link above); and this all went down at a time when inventories were well below normal to begin with.

I figure it’s highly unlikely to happen, but here’s a few lessons we could learn if we really wanted:

1) Seeing as a similar situation happened 3 years ago, this isn’t a once in a lifetime thing. Or even a once in two terms thing. In a world of tight oil supply, we need to understand this is going to happen again. And again.

2) Our leadership needs to, um, lead. Planetary Governor Bok-Bok could have done more than wag his finger at gouging (necessary, but not sufficient). What he should have done was told us, “Look, supplies might be tight for a few weeks and we’ll all have to work around it. I’m asking gas stations to place a $30 limit on purchases through the end of the month, and reduce that to $20 per purchase if necessary. I call on employers to let people work at home where possible. All citizens should avoid making unnecessary trips, and use carpools or transit when they can. If you have to drive, take the most fuel-efficient vehicle you can."

3) When you have to haul a work crew and gear around, using a big SUV is smart. For solo commuting on highways, the same vehicle is not so smart. Maybe the Magic Drill Fairy will put some oil under our pillow in 5 years or so, but if people insist on driving barges to work, it’s not going to make a difference. We need to discourage that behavior, by whatever means necessary: from huge surtaxes on huge vehicles not used for construction work, to just pointing and laughing. If it gets the gas hogs off the road, it works.

4) A good regional passenger rail system would be good for tourism, business, and citizens — and be fairly immune to gasoline supply glitches.

I don’t have a whole lot of faith that people will do the right thing, though, until they can’t do anything else.

Phony to the Gills

Gosh. Who could have ever suspected that China would ever stoop so low? Talk about insecure.

First, China Brings Bullshots to the Olympics exposes the “fireworks display” in which the footprints march from Tiananmen Square (after stomping dissidents flat, no doubt) to the stadium as computer-generated. (A “bullshot,” the article explains, usually refers to a screenshot from a game that's been Photoshopped to make it look more impressive. It works quite well for video, too.) If China makes anything better than the rest of the world, it's fireworks… so they must have (correctly) assumed they wouldn’t get Beijing’s toxic hot-sour soup air cleaned up in time.

Now, we learn that the little girl who sang at the opening ceremonies was lip-syncing. The girl with the real golden voice was not considered pretty enough by the organizers… so they set up this sham.

Beijing hasn’t just lost face, they’ve lost their entire head and half their neck. This stuff is childish… it reminds me of a 12-year-old girl stuffing her shirt and telling older guys she’s 18. C’mon, China, if you think you’re all growed up at least act like it.

These Are the Good Old Days

A rant I wrote back in August and never got around to posting

There aren’t too many ways to get on my nerves, but one thing is almost certain to set me off: start whining about how much worse things are nowadays than they were 40, 50, how-many-ever years ago. Anyone, who didn’t sleep through every single moment of every single history class they ever had, should know better than to barf up that kind of slop.

“Morals have deteriorated in this generation,” is a perfect example. Um, no — or not nearly as much as blue-noses wish us to believe. The world has always harbored child molesters, adultery, teenage pregnancy, incest, and all the other nasty stuff on the other side of the line. I doubt it’s much more prevalent than it used to be, but we are more honest about its existence. Personally, I think it’s better to have this kind of stuff out in the open — sunlight, after all, is a disinfectant. Is it better to pretend your kid didn’t get molested, as was likely a generation ago, or to make a public legal example of the perpetrator? I hate to bring up the Catholic child-abuse scandal, but it was a scandal precisely because it had been covered up for so long. If the rogue priests had been immediately defrocked and turned over to the authorities 30 years ago, it certainly wouldn’t be an issue today. Another example: is it better to pack your pregnant daughter off to a relative’s, or to the abortion clinic; or would being there for her and helping her to cope with the situation be more like a… parent?

Pick a time in history, and just try to convince me that it was morally superior to today. We had Jim Crow from 1876 to 1964 and beyond, and slavery before that. Abortion, pornography, prostitution, and gambling were all legal and widespread until the Comstock laws of 1873. (They remained widespread after that, but went underground, enabling organized crime syndicates.) It took over 100 years of trying — from 1832 to 1938 — to get child labor laws on the national books. And if you think eminent domain gets abused today, study up on what the railroads did to people who happened to be in their way. Don’t even get me started about the abuses of feudal lords during the Middle Ages. No, morals are no worse than they’ve ever been — but we have correctly decided to talk about the problems and make them more visible. Being honest with ourselves probably makes us more “moral” than our ancestors.

What is happening is that people aren’t going to church nearly as much as they used to — and some of those who continue to go conclude that everyone else is morally inferior these days. But 60 or 70 years ago, church was often the only social connection available to common people, especially outside urban areas. In other words, people went to church because that was all there was to do after the chores were done. Nowadays, churches have to compete with lots of other ways for people to connect — including the Internet — and, as usual, conservatism (i.e. the inability to cope with change) has left far too many churches stuck in the 19th century. Look at the churches that are growing: they usually include more modern music styles, no dress codes, and outreach programs that are relevant to the world we live in. None of that is “diluting the gospel,” which is how most conservative church-goers dismiss any attempt to introduce something into worship other than what they grew up with.

Here’s another howler: “Kids (or pick a minority) have all the rights these days.” This is usually followed by an extreme (and rare) example, made to sound like it happens all the time. The people spewing this kind of garbage are usually the ones who enjoy(ed) abusing their kids, or lording it over minorities, and resent the very thought that those low-lifes could be their equals. And from what I remember about school, if “teachers don’t have any rights” nowadays, they (or their previous generation) brought it on themselves. In the not-so-good old days, any conflict between a student and a staff member was automatically resolved in favor of the staff — regardless of who was truly at fault. The only exceptions would be if the kid’s parents were on the school board or had other political connections. Disputes between students were resolved in the most expedient manner possible — in other words, the easy way instead of the right way. Don’t try to tell me it wasn’t so; I was there and saw it, several times from the wrong end.

Oh, and God help you if you caught out the teacher in class. Somewhere back in elementary school, we were studying inventors. The teacher had made a poster of different inventions and their inventors. Unfortunately for me, her poster said that Henry Ford invented the automobile and I knew he didn’t… and made the mistake of saying so. When she insisted, I started naming autos that preceded Ford and she started screaming about me contradicting her. I guess that’s when I realized that school was about something other than actually learning. There was never an apology or admission that I was right — and as a mere student, I never expected one. From then on, I pretty much coasted from (I think it was) 4th grade right on to graduation. Getting good grades was easy enough; just keep your head down, read ahead, and knock out the homework while the teacher was going on about something you’d already learned on your own.

I do feel for the teachers who are actually trying to make a difference with their students, but they’re usually the ones who aren’t going to have the worst problems anyway — even the bad kids know who’s phony and who isn’t. I also feel for the kids, like The Boy, who couldn’t cope with the boredom and conformism and drop out (which is not to say I approve, but I understand the motivation). Is it really asking too much to find out where a student’s talents and interests lie, and try to help them develop them? Oh yeah, that would mean increasing school taxes. Not on this planet… God forbid you pay another $10 a year in school taxes to improve the local schools. It was a bore-a-torium for your generation, why should it be interesting for the next? The only idea that seems to be gaining traction these days is to make school a year-round prospect. Daughter Dearest has just two more months of this; I hope she can avoid flaming out.

Is it any wonder that people are simply opting-out? The deck is stacked, the casino’s rigged, and the smarter ones are simply choosing not to play the game. “It builds character” is something I’ve never heard said by anyone who actually had to do whatever onerous chore someone else was stuck with. If you’re not going to help: stick your smarmy platitudes where the sun don’t shine, waddle away, and let me either deal with this on my own terms… or not.

Carole King said it back when I was a kid: “These Are the Good Old Days.” They are now, anyway. Enjoy them while they last.

By the Numbers

Some random numerical thoughts…

Chance of rain today (forecast): 30%
Amount of dry pavement on the way home: 20%
Number of times I patted myself on the back for remembering the rain suit: 1
Cost to fill the motorcycle gas tank: $5.50
Chance of rain tomorrow: 30%
Hours The Boy’s girlfriend has spent at FAR Manor since Friday evening: 50
Hours on the road for Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest this weekend: 20
Days until The Boy gets rid of the ankle bracelet: 7
Days until The Boy gets an involuntary TB01: 8
Days it took to finish the floor: 18
Boxes of flooring left over: 2
Days before my vacation starts: 18
Days of vacation I wish I had: ∞

What’s got your number? or what numbers got you?

Upper Floored: Preparation (H)

In between me buying a new motorcycle and looking about 50 years into the future, we’ve been working on putting down wood flooring in Daughter Dearest’s bedroom. We’d done the hallway before — we know what to do now, it should be a breeze, right? Rip up the carpet and glue down the new floor….

Of course, any job at FAR Manor is going to turn into a complete hairball.

First, we found a mixture of plywood and particle board under the carpet. And that’s not all: I’m not sure exactly what those spots are, but they look like blood. It wouldn’t surprise me that FAR Manor was causing pain even while it was being built.

The instructions for the new flooring specially say that it can’t be put down over particle board. To make things even more “interesting,” there was a pretty significant sag in the middle of the floor, almost two inches (no, I’m not exaggerating). I looked at Mrs. Fetched and said, “I was right about this place.” (While she was going completely berserk, and driving me berserk wanting to buy this place, I saw its many flaws and described it as a pig in a poke. Like any data that doesn’t fit the previously-made decision, she ignored it. At the time.)

We got two opinions on what to do. Our carpenter friend, who advised us on the last floor job, said it would be fine to just glue (and possibly nail) the strips to the floor as it was. A second person, who would be the one to do the work, said it had to be straightened out — we could either jack it up from the ground floor (yeah right) or put some shims between the sub-floor and the plywood that would eventually be the substrate for the wood floor. Cosmic Rule of the Universe Number One: given two choices, Mrs. Fetched is always going to pick the most complicated option. If I don’t fall in line immediately, she’ll besiege me with whines, nags, dire predictions, until I throw my hands up and say some variation of “Do what you want — you’re going to anyway.” Of course it’s not an issue to her: she’s not the one doing the actual work.

In a vain attempt to get some peace, I had The Boy help me measure the sag and mark some spots. I figured I could partially even it out, enough to satisfy Mrs. Fetched’s mania for complicating things. I wasn’t having much luck, and she called in the people who caused all the commotion. Upon inspecting the floor, they informed us that there was a layer of plywood under the top layer, and if we could crowbar it out it would save them some time. Well… taking a crowbar to FAR Manor is a pleasure surpassed by very few things, and one of those is taking a crowbar to the chicken houses. J (the son of our carpenter friend) has been our extra resident for a couple of months now; he tends to be quiet and helpful so he doesn’t get quite the coverage of M.A.E. or Lobster. We spent a happy evening of echar la casa por la ventana (literally, not the Hispanic idiom for a wild party) because the particle board came up in pieces and we could toss the small- and medium-size pieces down to the front yard instead of carrying them. In fact, Mrs. Fetched caught me singing some happy 80s tune, and wondered why I wasn’t mad anymore. How quickly we forget. :-P

Somewhere in there, Mrs. Fetched got one of the farm trucks, and we finished up by loading up the fragged particle board. I got a perfect action shot of J tossing a big chunk on the first attempt.

That got us through the long weekend. Last night, Mrs. Fetched and I cut 1/4-inch plywood to lay down over the new floor (the guy who did the work said it would be best if we did). I was hoping to come home to find it already nailed down, but Cosmic Rule of the Universe Number Two says: if I don’t do it around here, it doesn’t get done. Taking a hammer to FAR Manor is less satisfying than a crowbar, but it’ll do in a pinch.

Tomorrow, we get to glue down the floor… since it’s Daughter Dearest’s room, she gets to help. A lot.

Duty

Iowa Victory Gardener writes an excellent Memorial Day post.

No matter how low our opinion of the “Commander Guy,” we must never lose sight of the people that he’s sending overseas to die for the glory of his ego. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of our underequipped, thinly-stretched soldiers would rather be home with their families today (you and me) — enjoying a Memorial Day barbecue, or even doing house work — but duty calls, and the good soldier answers. As Gordon Dickson wrote: “Soldier, ask not - now, or ever, where to war your banners go.”

On this Memorial Day, as we are engaged in the Second Oil War, let us all — soldiers and civilians alike — remember that we all have our duty. Let us perform it to the best of our ability.

For those of us who want our troops home with their families next Memorial Day, we too have a duty, a duty to act on our convictions. I don’t use the term “Second Oil War” lightly — the first was Desert Storm, aka Kuwait — as it’s easy to see that this is about nothing but oil. The proof is as easy as looking at Iraq and Darfur — why are we embroiled in one and not the other? I remember a protest sign from the First Oil War: “What if Kuwait exported broccoli?”

So what is our duty, those of us who want an end to this waste of time and lives? If the true reason for war is oil, then it’s up to all of us to make oil less important. It’s not easy, though: oil pervades nearly everything in our lives. It’s in our fertilizers, plastics, (of course) our gas tanks, and the asphalt we drive on is what’s left over when all the other stuff is pulled out of the oil. Manufacturing, mining, shipping, lumbering, agriculture, all require diesel fuel.

Admitting that oil is necessary to our “non-negotiable way of life” is one thing, it’s quite another to admit that we are past — or at best, very near — “peak oil,” the maximum point of oil supply that we will ever see. Supply is dwindling, and will continue to do so, while demand has just kept going up. That’s why we’re already paying post-Katrina prices for gas before hurricane season has even started. We can’t do anything about the supply, but we can — and it’s our duty to — do something about demand.

One of the lasting legacies of WWII is the collection of posters and other artwork, exhorting the civilians of the time to support the war effort — by supporting rationing, growing one’s own food in “Victory Gardens,” recycling scrap material, carpooling (even though we, hard as it is to believe, were the Saudi Arabia of the day), and all sorts of other sacrifices. Quite the contrast to Commander Guy’s “go shopping,” huh? Even during the 70s, we had myraid PSAs on the radio that drilled us with all sorts of tips to save gas. Where are those PSAs today? Well heck, we don’t need them — we know what our duty is. Let’s get to it.

Our friends and loved ones overseas are depending on us.

There Goes the Neighborhood

When I first moved out here, I figured that the subdivisions would catch up to me about the time I retired. I wanted to retire when I was 50, but that’s only a couple of years away — and barring a life-changing event, retirement isn’t in the cards for a long time.

That hasn’t stopped the subdivision from coming, though. This is going in just down the road from FAR Manor, a farm across from my in-laws’ that the owners sold last year.

“No Gas Day” Bunk — and a Better Idea

While I expect regular readers of Tales from FAR Manor are intelligent types, there are plenty of people out there who either aren’t too smart or turn off their “critical faculties” when reading the latest email.

Take the latest craze: No Gas Day (Snopes link). The idea is to not buy gas on May 15^th, under the assumption that it will lower prices. The first problem with that is, even if the entire country were to participate, it wouldn’t make a difference. If you don’t buy gas on Monday, you’ll buy it over the weekend (so you won’t run out) or Tuesday (because you’ll probably be running low). So over four or five days, let alone the entire month, there’s no difference in sales.

The second problem is that demand is at near-record highs, at a time when oil production is starting to decline (according to statistics published on The Oil Drum, we may have reached Peak Oil at the end of 2005). In short, gas prices are high because people are buying all they can get and then some — gasoline inventories have been declining all year and hit a 50-year low at the end of April.

Do you want gas prices to come down? Not buying gas for one day, when you’ll buy it the day before or after, isn’t going to make a difference. What will bring prices down is to not use so much of the stuff. Fortunately, it’s not that difficult to cut out 5%, 10%, or even 20% of what you’re using now — we in the US are much more efficient than we were in the 1970s, but there’s still a lot of slop in the system. You can save 5% to 10% just by following some simple Tips to Improve Your Gas Mileage (FuelEconomy.gov link); you don’t have to buy anything. If you have a standard-shift car, give Pulse and Glide driving a try. Just coasting downhill in neutral is enough to give me a 10% boost in gas mileage (36 to 40 mpg).

Simple lifestyle changes, like telecommuting or carpooling, can save 20% or more — and these are the kind of changes that will improve your quality of life and still don’t require you to ride a bus or buy a hybrid. Wouldn’t it be great to not have to drive to work all the time? It would certainly be less stressful.

If everyone used 5% less gas, prices would come down. Of course, the temptation would then be to slack off and watch prices go right back up…

Home 0wn3rsh1p – a Thought Experiment

James Kunstler’s column today is the sort of thing that brings FAR Manor to mind. Not so much the state of architecture, nor even the shoddy build quality of most homes today.

My first thought upon reading it was that the real failure isn't architecture — or even construction — so much as people collectively have a “busted give-a-damn.” But then I thought about it a little further. Owning — or rather, being 0wn3d by — FAR Manor has taught me that two things are required to maintain a home: 1) money; 2) time (and improving a home requires the same, just more of it… lots more). Anyone who marketed any part of a house as “maintenance free” should have been summarily drawn and quartered, but that's another story. This tale is going to be a thought experiment that will perhaps illuminate the current situation.

Let’s look at Joe and Jane Average. They bought a tract house back when Joe had a decent manufacturing job and Jane was working part-time as a bookkeeper. Like most people these days, they bought something a little more expensive than they should have, but figured they could sell it in a few years for a tidy profit. Then comes the perfect storm: the decent job went to China, the local housing market cratered with the job market, and a birth-control failure led to a couple of unexpected kids. Joe’s “lucky” — he’s working a couple of so-called part-time jobs, six and a half days a week at crap wages, that bring in about 3/4 of what he used to make on a 40-hour shift. Jane still has her bookkeeping work, but she hasn’t had a raise in three years and is mostly tied up minding the kids.

Instead of owning the house, the house now 0wns them. They tried selling it, but the few offers they got for it weren’t enough to cover the mortgage, so they’re stuck. Fortunately, they were smart enough to nail down a decent fixed rate before things went to hell; most of their acquaintances with creative financing got foreclosed on last year, and most everyone else is looking at that reset and sighing in resignation. What Joe and Jane are bringing in would be enough, except for the credit cards. They ran up some plastic debt back when things were looking good; they bought a few luxury items and figured they’d have plenty of time to pay them off. Then the clock ran out and left them hanging — everything not going into living expenses is now barely keeping them abreast of the credit cards.

So the siding's starting to look a bit grungy, and it’s even coming loose in a couple of places. The fake-wood trim needs to be repainted, and the front door frame is dry-rotting at the bottom. The living room carpet is, to put it nicely, shot. Joe has little experience with construction or carpentry work, Jane none at all — they could do some maintenance, but neither one has much time or any energy to do so much as paint the trim.

They’re holding on by their fingernails, folks. They nearly got burned by a debt consolidation “service” that was saturating the radio with ads last year, which turned out to be little more than a scam — there may be legit ones out there, but they don’t trust any of them now. They looked into bankruptcy, but Bush-league made sure that door was slammed in their faces. Their few friends are in worse shape than themselves. The car is starting to make a weird noise (the second one got sold a few months ago, just before it went to pieces; they used the money to pay their property taxes). The bright spot is that they should be getting a few hundred bucks back on their taxes, which will go to fix the car.

Is it any wonder that people aren’t maintaining their houses?

Compared to Joe, I’m far better off. My job hasn’t been outsourced (yet), and I have (if Mrs. Fetched allows) a little time on weekends to fix steps or work on a wood floor. FAR Manor, as I’ve found by pulling up carpet, is far from quality construction (and I give Mrs. Fetched hell about buying this place every time, you betcha)… but it’s mostly maintainable. I can manage a few of the things that need to be fixed, and the few things I want to do.

The Averages might have a way out, though — now the thought experiment begets a thought experiment within itself. Jane’s bookkeeping skills have saved their bacon, so far; she set up a budget and has managed their money the way a skilled kayaker negotiates a Class V rapids. One mistake, or the submerged rock of an unexpected expense, could spell disaster; but so far so good. She made a little extra money this spring doing taxes — a local tax preparer was swamped with complex (i.e. expensive) returns, and farmed out many of the 1040A and EZ jobs to her. A little of the money treated the family to dinner at a cheap Mexican restaurant; the rest went to a credit card payment, opening up a little breathing room.

But I digress. One day, one of her neighbors sees Jane playing in the front yard with her kids. She just landed a job at a big-box store, nothing to brag about but it will help to supplement what her husband Frank makes doing odd jobs. Would Jane watch her kids (close to Jane’s in age) in the afternoon? She couldn’t pay anything right away, but —

“I have a better idea,” says Jane. That afternoon, Frank brings the kids over. While the kids get to know each other, he tacks up the loose siding and pressure washes the whole house. The next day, he paints over the trim. The house is looking better already. Joe gets home and silently picks up the trash in the yard before collapsing with a beer in front of a TV he suddenly can’t stand to watch.

That weekend, the two families get together and have a cookout during the few afternoon hours that Joe has free. Frank says he can replace the front door, frame and all, with a better one that he bought for a job (that fell through) some time back. Joe offers to trade the lumber he’d bought for a deck, back when he had a life, and the deal is struck on the spot. “I’ll keep an eye out for some carpet for your living room, too,” Frank says. “If there’s no hurry, I can probably get a roll-end for nothing or next to it.”

At his jobs, Joe gives Frank’s name to co-workers — there are always things that need to be done, and people willing to pay someone else to do them. Jane starts getting money instead of barter for the day care work, and takes in one more kid (all she feels comfortable handling). Slowly, almost reluctantly, the credit card debt gets whittled down. Jane manages to squirrel away a few hundred bucks for emergencies; the car will need new tires sooner or later and gas prices are only getting worse. Joe and a co-worker start car pooling to split the expenses.

The Averages are nowhere near out of the woods yet; a major sickness or accident could put them under in a heartbeat. They have put their house back on the market; it’s the nicest one on the street now. But as tempting as it is, I can’t in good conscious pull a deus ex machina and give them an offer that would pay off all their debts with enough left over for a deposit on an affordable apartment.

In the end, it’s not completely their fault that they bought the Endless Growth line; it seemed true for so long. But they are slowly bartering their way into (what they hope is) a better future.

Ridiculous

Middle of April? check
Planet Georgia? check

Now could someone explain WHY there is SNOW mixed in with the light rain this afternoon?

As if it couldn’t get any worse, my hands smell like a chicken house.

Someone just shoot me.

No Test Left Behind

A post on 43 Folders today linked in turn to a Brian Kim post about things that schools should be teaching: personal finance, communicating effectively, social skills, sales (yuck!), and time management. While I think the important things about sales would be covered in communicating and social skills (which themselves are heavily related), there’s some good points to chew on here.

I responded in part to the 43 Folders post: “On one hand, I find myself wishing I'd been taught time management in high school — on the other, I probably would have (as Kim says) regurgitated the answers to pass the class then promptly forgotten about it.” Another response thought that school should teach kids how to change a tire and iron a shirt.

While it’s certainly a valuable life skill, time management just wasn’t relevant for me in those days. School days were pretty well planned in advance: I’d get up, eat, catch the bus to school, go to classes, ride the bus home, do housework and homework (what little I didn’t finish in study hall or history class), eat supper, run 5 miles (I was on the cross-country team), then usually do what I pleased in those 2–3 hours before bedtime (the softball field a couple blocks away in season, reading or messing with electronic equipment otherwise).

Time management and personal finance might be more relevant to kids these days than it was for my generation. Like many of us, today’s kids tend to have more discretionary income and less time. But when I was in school, “home ec'” (as we usually called it) was primarily a cooking class — even then, I wondered where the "economics" part of it went. We learned more about money management in shop class, where we had an assignment to list what tools we would/could buy with $100 then had to justify our choices. But if there is an existing class that would be ideal to cover these topics, home ec' is it.

Of course, today’s NCLB-driven schools are focused primarily on teaching kids how to pass standardized tests — and doing very little to teach useful life skills. Nowadays, they don’t even give kids time to visit their lockers between classes… if they’re even assigned lockers. Instead, they drag around knapsacks loaded with 30 pounds of books and other materials (I'm not exaggerating). How could you even teach them time management when you don’t even give them the time to do the planning that’s a part of it? Where in this avalanche of SAT cramming is there time for learning real necessities like basic home and auto maintenance, meal planning (including nutrition and cooking), writing, or planning a budget? Today’s school curriculum is well-suited for anyone who can afford servants or contract labor for such things, but 99% of the kids are getting short-changed.

Daughter Dearest had a finance job for a few months, entering stuff into QuickBooks for a small local company and helping with the payroll(!). While she was constantly afraid she’d make an expensive mistake, she probably learned more about bookkeeping and finance during that one afternoon per week than she did in her entire school career. (They amicably parted ways a couple of weeks ago; between school and chorus, there isn’t much afternoon left for work. That may change, now that she can drive herself around.)

Most of the things I can do (and blog about here) are things I learned on my own, either because I was interested (electrical, early on) or needed to fix something (plumbing, much later). No school taught me how to cut and glue pipe, or how to solder. I learned how to cook and clean long before I had home ec' in junior high (not because I wanted to… hi Mom!). I also learned how to type before I had typing class (but this was something I did want to learn). Bookkeeping… now that was practical, I learned how to balance a checkbook in bookkeeping class. As was the basic math that is pretty much a prerequisite. College English was the only humanities class I actually enjoyed in high school, but that was more about honing the writing skills I already had (I learned to type because I wanted to write a novel).

(I’m sure I wrote this once before, but can’t figure out for the life of me where.) In a better world, schools would evaluate each student, identify their talents, and tailor their education to develop those talents (and throw in the basic life skills things I’ve been ranting about). But an intelligent move would raise taxes… OMG, we can’t have that!

Programmers. Argh. (3.0, when “RTFM” is Just Too Much Effort)

I had to bang out an emergency project today — well, they’re all emergencies these days, but that’s beside the point. Knowing it had to be done today, I seriously considered working at home; I decided not to because The Boy is around and I didn’t want him interrupting me with spurious requests for money, car keys (missing driver’s license notwithstanding), a ride to somewhere, blah blah blah. There was also some camera work to be done, which usually involves my physical presence anyway.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Instead of The Boy, I had people popping into my cube all day and committing Documentus Interruptus — some of them were asking about the project I was trying to get done in spite of the interruptions. It was difficult at times to hold my tongue. Worst, though, was a programmer from down the aisle.

“Where in the manuals would I find Voice Quality Metrics?” “There’s a description in the Feature Guide, and instructions in the Troubleshooting Guide.”

“Where in the manuals would I find Loop Diagnostics?” (same answer)

At one point, I was about to get into The Zone — a rare state where I can out-produce just about anyone — when he popped in and barked my name a bit too loud, causing me to jump several inches.

“Sorry. Where would I find Loop Voltage Management?”

“Description in the Feature Guide. Instructions are either in Management or Provisioning, I can’t remember.”

“How could I find out?”

“Um… have you tried looking at the table of contents?”

I think he got the hint, because he didn’t come back the rest of the day.

The second most annoying visit was from the Vietnamese guy in Tech Support, who waved his hand alongside my head to get my attention (I have my iPod going most of the day, partly because the guy across from me is on the phone being Super Consumer Advocate half the time). Naturally, he wanted to know about the emergency project he’d just delayed.

I’d seriously considered, early on, grabbing a conference room and closing the door so nobody could find me. In retrospect, that’s exactly what I should have done.

I never did get to the camera work. Maybe tomorrow.

If you want to see the previous installment…

Universal Healthcare: Necessary but not Sufficient

Family Man wrote a brief post about the state of what could laughably be called “healthcare” in this country, after he found that his insurance wouldn’t cover a stop-smoking medication (WTF??). My response got a bit long for a comments page, so I decided to put it here.

This actually started with a trip to the chiro-cracker today. A little money shook loose and we were all feeling somewhat kinked (in the neck & back, not the other way), so Mrs. Fetched called them up and got us back on the monthly plan. There’s a big whiteboard behind the counter, where they usually flag their evening seminars and the like; today it had a bunch of negative statistics about the medical profession. I have a feeling there was a lot of FUD involved, but the things that stood out for me were the huge number of unnecessary surgeries (for whatever definition of “unnecessary”) and the number of emergency cases due to drug interactions or allergic reactions to drugs. Both of those could be attributed to the profit motive — in other words, a system devoted to healthcare rather than profitcare would naturally attempt to minimize both.

In the system we have today, everything in the medical system is geared toward maximizing profit. Providing some level of healthcare is necessary to keep people from demanding change (although that has begun, and may be too late to stop), but that hasn’t been the primary concern for quite some time. We’ve all heard of — or perhaps experienced — the assembly line-like visits of “managed health care,” and read the articles about people with cancer or other major illnesses whose doctors have their hands tied by HMO bean counters. The Boy’s diabetes medication, now that he is not covered by our insurance (not at home and not in school), is pretty much unaffordable for him. Drug companies have to recoup their “research costs,” although much of that research is funded by taxpayers (that is, you and me) and their marketing budgets are often higher than their research budgets. Then, of course, you get episodes like Merck trying to downplay (or even hide) serious side effects with Vioxx — because, after all, there’s money to be made.

FDA analysts estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in the five years the drug was on the market.

(The numbers were on Wikipedia, take with an appropriate amount of no-salt.)

The other side of the coin, of course, is how the profit motive promotes unhealthy activity — smoking this cigarette makes you cool, drinking that soda improves your life, open a beer and you’ll immediately be surrounded by Hot Babes™. This processed-to-hell-and-back "food product" is soooo easy to fix and tastes great! (just don’t look at how much sodium & cholesterol is in it) Oh, and by the way, watch this TV show and that TV show — it’s much more relaxing than exercise.

Now you have a McMansion you can barely afford and can’t get rid of, and you spend two (or more) hours a day commuting to/from a job that stresses you out. Your spouse works a similar job, so neither one of you have the time or energy to fix healthy meals. Breakfast is a sausage and egg biscuit in the car, lunch is a dash to the burger stand, and supper is a pre-packaged whatever.

So one day you wake up: you’re 45 and your weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol are in the “sucks” range. The doc diagnoses your spouse as “pre-diabetic” (you don’t exactly know that that means, but it sounds scary) and tells you both to get some exercise and start eating better. Oh, and by the way, here’s your prescriptions.

But we don’t have time to take care of ourselves! We have a lifestyle to maintain!

And you, one might say, are the “lucky” ones. You make your weekly pilgrimage to Wal-Mart, buy a bunch of stuff you don’t need and gripe about how shoddy it is, without a single thought about the people wearing the blue vests. They have many of the same problems as those of us “comfortably” in the middle class, but when the time comes to make that trip to the doc, the price tag attached to those prescriptions is simply beyond their means.

More and more people are standing up and demanding universal healthcare. President Clinton tried taking the initiative, but it was shot down by the usual suspects and their shills in Congress and talk radio. But these days, even Bush-league must at least pay lip service to the grass-roots demand that something be done. Katiebird has a series of articles on Eat4Today that are simply titled, “Cover Everyone” — great stuff.

Universal healthcare will help those folks in retail jobs, not to mention people who can't find a job that can put food on the table, but it isn’t enough. For many of us, from the middle class on down, our very lifestyles have become toxic. We’ve bought into the mantra of “more” (try chanting it, drawing out the ‘O’), not realizing that it has given us less: less time because it’s wasted in a long commute, less money because we buy too much house and fill it with too much stuff, less health because we don’t take the time to exercise or eat right. We’re on a treadmill, all right, but it’s not the kind we should be on.

There’s no pill that can cure lifestyle problems (unless the drug companies are hiding a formula that will make people resistant to marketing… not likely), but it’s our lifestyle that is making many of us sick. We could create a perfect health care system that covers everyone, but the Constitution won’t let us ban marketing or even destructive lifestyles. I’m not sure we could even legally ban unhealthy food (especially since a certain amount of things like carbs, fat, sodium, and cholesterol are necessary nutrients). No, if we want health for ourselves and our neighbors, it has to start with us. We should work to Cover Everyone — that’s only right — but we also need to invent a better way of life, one that will keep us out of the doctor’s office in the first place.

Product Design

This is something that happened a couple of weeks ago. Indeed, it was almost 17 years to the day after the wreck that brought Daughter Dearest into the world a month early.

As part of our personal campaign to reduce gas consumption, we bought a used Pontiac Sunfire a while back. It has a few glitches — A/C doesn’t work (surprise), the suspension needs attention, and the stereo is possessed by a demon that doesn’t like bumps (it turns itself to full volume when you hit one) — but it gets over 35 mpg. You can put up with a few quirks for that kind of gas mileage.

So we let The Boy borrow it one night (about a week before he wrecked my Civic), and he ended up staying with our friends because he got a flat tire near where they live. He put the fake spare on, but it was thumping and he didn’t want to drive it. So we went to take care of things, figuring the donut was just low on air. I aired it up, then Mrs. Fetched saw the bulge in the sidewall. Turned out The Boy made a wise decision for a change! He must have hit a pothole pretty hard, because the regular tire had a dented rim and was cut, although he swears up & down that “it just went flat.” I drove it as far as a gas station along the highway, and decided The Boy was right about the thumping. The manager said it would be OK to leave the car there if we parked it around the side. No problem.

Mrs. Fetched was in her “do something NOW” mode, and her first thought was to use the Civic’s spare. Nope: it's a four-lug wheel, and the Sunfire is a five-lug. “Hey,” she said, “isn’t his Lumina a five-lug wheel? We can go get the spare out of the trunk.” Aside from it being a 30-mile round-trip, sure. But she was determined to get it done, time and space be damned. Light too — it was getting dark, so we grabbed some flashlights. Then when that spare turned out to have large holes in it, she had me jack up the car (which took a while) to get a tire off it. Just to keep the axle in the air, I put the spare on and left it jacked up.

With a tire in hand, we headed back to the car. By this time, I was getting rather disgusted with the whole situation, not that it mattered. I got the jack out of the trunk and started cranking away. It took a long time to get enough air under it to get the new tire in place, and the jack was slightly leaning but not badly. I started wrestling the tire onto the hub, and —

SNAP

The fender came down onto the tire, almost catching my finger in betwen. Another tenth of a second, and I would have had a hard time typing “yhnujm” for a long time, perhaps permanently. The jack was buried under the car. Fortunately, a guy just getting off work from the Ford dealership across the street and gassing up his vehicle saw it happen and came over with a hydraulic jack. Hooray, some decent equipment arrives on the scene! We got it jacked up… and it turned out the lug pattern on the Lumina’s wheel has a slightly larger radius than the Sunfire’s. So we’d wasted an entire evening, and I’d almost lost a finger, for nothing. Figures.

My peevery got diverted away from Mrs. Fetched, though, when I saw the jack. Definitely not a safe design, with forks instead of eyes where the scissors go into the bolts. The jack may have still collapsed with eyes, but it would have been a lot slower and would have given me more time to get my fingers out of the way. This is what happens when the bean counters want to “get another 0.3 cents out of the per-unit materials costs” — product safety ends up getting compromised.

Under no circumstances should accounts ever be allowed to dictate product design, unless it’s for something like accounting software or machinery. Let them live with their own decisions, instead of endangering the rest of us.