Gold Belly for Family Foods

No COGS
Just logistics and packaging.
Instgruct what should be frozen and for how long.
Promote and sell 3rd party food

Incumbent....Anyone Got an incumbent

Assuming Dick Chaney doesn't change his mind, the 2008 election will be relatively unsual in one regard. There will be no incumbent running on either side. For the purposes of this discussion, an incumbent includes the VP of a president who has been termed out.

Last time this happened? 1952 Eisenhower v. Stevenson. Time before that? 1928 Hoover v. Smith. Twice in 80 years or 20 elections, or 10% of the time.

That's about all the research I feel like doing right now. If anyone wants to find previous examples and post them, I'd love to see it.

The Box

I just read "The Box : How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson. It is a description of the history of the cargo container shipping industry.

I know how dry this sounds, but in this and future posts I will attempt to combine information presented in that book, with my own ideas about the almost immeasurable impact this simple and seemingly obvious technology has had on society present and future.

What just stirred me to post on this was watching Bruce Springsteen record "Erie Canal" for his latest CD, We Shall overcome: The Seeger Sessions. Highly recommended tinyurl.com/rn4g4

Beside the awkward fact that Erie Canal is a love song to a mule, the lyrics echo back to a time when production, and cities, had to be near the best possible shipping. Here are the lyrics:

I've got a mule, her name is Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal

She's a good old worker and a good old pal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day

filled with lumber, coal and hay

And we know every inch of the way from Albany to Buffalo.

Chorus:

Low bridge, everybody down

Low bridge for we're coming to a town

And you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal

If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal.
We better get along on our way ol'gal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal

'Cause you bet your life I'd never part with Sal, 15 miles on the Erie Canal.

Git up there mule, here comes a lock,We'll make Rome about 6 o'clock

One more trip and back we'll go, right back home to Buffalo.

Albany, Buffalo, Chicago, Detroit, New York grew because they were on the water. Factories, even in New York, were blocks from the docks because the cost of transportation was so high that it was economical to locate manufacturing facilities in prime locations.

Our ability to move goods has fundamentally determined where our cities are. Where people live and work.

The Box - the standardized multimodal shipping container - has totally changed that. Wherever you are, be it Buffalo or a suburb of Beijing, you can manufacture to your hearts delight and stuff your goods in cheap, secure boxes. When full these get pulled by a truck to a rail yard, and then on to a domestic destination (with the last leg back on a truck) or to a port for a trip overseas on a ship carrying 2999 more boxes.

The industrial revolution made it easy to concentrate physical power in a way previously impossible, and reduced the cost of such power so greatly as to be economically irrelevant in most cases.

The current information revolution is doing the same thing to data - previously unimaginable amounts of information can be transported anywhere, basically for free.

Both of these changes created incredible wealth, and did or will change how people live their lives.

My thesis is that The Box - an ugly, cheap, low-tech innovation if ever there was one - has had a similar effect. And more importantly, is becoming more and more important. Multi-modal transportation really is the super highway of stuff. And when stuff can be moved fast and cheap it changes where you make stuff, how much stuff you get, and even how you view stuff.

I know this post is very conclusory. More to come.

Here is My Card

The size of a business card was not standardized until 1958.

No coincidence that the same year saw the introduction of the most powerful piece of plastic since the credit card - the Rolodex.

Come to think of it, credit cards adopted the same dimensions.

If Military Power was Sufficient to Defeat Terrorism.....

Israel would be the safest place in the world. And it isn't.

If you don't believe me, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_in_the_Israeli-Palestinian_conflict_2005 In 2005 3,225 Palestinians were killed by Israelis and 950 Israeli Jews were killed by Palestinians. Even if you ignore the Palestinians - and why not, everyone else does - the numbers are staggering. 72% of Israel's population of 7 million are Jews. That calculates out to about 5 million souls.

So about 1 out of 5,000 Israeli Jews were killed last year by terrorism. 9/11, the most dramatic terrorism attack in U.S., and arguably world history, killed 1 in 100,000 Americans. So on a pro-rata basis, every year the Israeli's go through an event 20 times worse than 9/11. Every year.

I know the analogy, like all analogies, is flawed. Still, as that scum sucker Britt Hume once said about some lie he told on Fox - "Its illustrative of something."

War on Terror. War on Poverty. War on Drugs.

Not a real war in the bunch, unless you have adopted the revised meaning of literal as figurative. So there is a literal war on terror, and a literal war on poverty, and a literal war on drugs. And I could literally eat a horse. Mmmmm, horse.

War without end. The long war. Undeclared wars.

If the Israeli experience tells us anything it is that a great military can win battles. Iraq tells us that we can overthrow a government. By the way, lets call this conflict what it is - Gulf War II - The Overthow of Saddam. Or, more skeptically - Gulf War II - Finishing up Poppy's Business.

What we need to learn is that, in the long run, this is a PR war. We win by NOT making people hate us faster than we can kill them.

$1 Billion is the New $1 Million

Or something.

The price tag for the 9/11 memorial being planned in NY at "ground zero" is now pegged at $1 billion. $1 billion. $1 billion.

$1 billion, $1 billion, $1 billion equals approximately $300,000 for each of the 3,000 or so victims.

Lets pause and think about how $1 billion, $1 billion, $1 billion could be spent.

First the obvious - $300,000 to each of the families of the deceased.

Maybe a $1 billion, $1 billion, $1 billion bounty for OBL.

Hey, how about this - homeland security. Maybe something like port security.

Lets put this in perspective: the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, a tremendously moving place, cost about $10 million. With approximately 50,000 Americans killed in that conflict, the cost per death memorials was $200.

If I Had a Hammer

Or rather, if I was a web programmer....

I'd build a Barry Bonds Schneid Counter (BBSC.) The BBSC would track the start of the great melon headed one's 2006 campaign for the record books. But rather than counting dingers, it would count games and at bats until he hits one out. Its looking like no juice means no juice. As of today he has played in 13 games of 16 games, has a batting average about 40 pounds under his weight, and has appeared at the plate just shy of 50 times (including walks.) All without a single dinger.

The tracker would have him continue to shrink physically from his pumped up slugger self, back to his lithe youthful self as the 'roid metabolites drip out of his toes.

So here you have it - Baby Barry, Bulky Barry and Bobble Barry.

Good Comedians Gone Bad

"What do you mean funny, funny how?"








Bill Cosby and George Carlin were both extremely funny when young. Now both are just blow-hards. And not in that good “Woody Allen I make serious movies and marry my step-daugher” kind of way.


"I'm funny how? I mean, funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you?"

Coach - $255; Business Class - $794; Corporate Jet - Priceless

Congresspeople are allowed to fly on corporate jets, provided they reimburse the company.
$3.6 million was reimbursed to corporations for air travel from 2001 to 2005. Last year Tom Delay flew to his arraignment on a jet owned by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco.

The reimbursement, however, is not for the actual cost or value of the flight, but the commercial fare for a similar flight. This means that the cost ends a huge bargain. The commercial rate is typically under 1/5th the cost of a private flight.

But what is the cost to us? Companies get to essentially bribe members, and they can fly along and buddy up in the process.

I've got nothing against having important people like Senators and Representatives fly on private planes. But it would be much cheaper in the long run if the government paid for it.

When You Think About It

Noted San Francisco Columnist Herb Caen was really just a blogger.

That may be interesting, but this is funny. When I spell checked this entry (note, the site I use for creating the blog is www.blogger.com) the spell check function didn't recognize "blogger" as a word. AND, I just discovered this very second, that it also doesn't recognize "blog."

War and Pussycats

The image file I uploaded of this Hello Kitty toaster was around one megabyte in size - almost exactly the same size as a text file containing Tolstoy's epic War and Peace.

Blue State, Red State. Nice State, Dead State

When looking at murder rates we see that 63% of Blue (Democrat) states are in the bottom 20 (bottom being the good part) while 22% of Red (Republic) states are simiarly nonviolent.

On the flip side, and aren't we always, 21% of Blue states are among the 20 highest murder rate states, while 52% of Red states are in that bad grouping.

Draw your own conclusions.

Show Us Your Wrath!

New Orleans' French Quarter was largely spared by hurricane Katrina. If, as Jerry Falwell suggested, the storm was the Almighty striking out to smite sin, we can only draw one conclusion. God's aim is worse than Dick Chaney's, which raises all sorts of questions about who will win in the battle of good vs. evil.

Makes You Proud to be an American, Right?

Today, President Bush described Pakistan as "a force for freedom and moderation in the Arab world."

Freedom = a coup in 1999 that brought General Pervez Musharraf to power.

Arab World = "that part of the world."

Sigh.

Blackberry Pie

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion agreed to pay $612.5 million to patent holding company NTP to settle a long-running dispute that had threatened to shut down the popular wireless e-mail service for its 3 million users.

3 million is a lot of users, but the amount of press this has gotten is nuts.

Hoisted by Our Own Petards

Mohammad al-Qahtani, the so-called "20th hijacker" has apparently given the US a lot of information, but is now claiming he lied under the pressure of torture. My guess is that he is lying now, but it would be a lot simpler to disbelieve him if we weren't actually torturing people.

In case you are wondering, a petard is a terms for a small mideavil bomb used to blow up gates and walls or 19th Century animal trap, consisting of a rope and a bent branch that caught the desired beast by one leg as it stepped into a loop in the rope and pulled it up into the air.

Oddly, the phrase in the title to this entry refers to the bomb, not the cartoonish snare. It appears first in Hamlet, and then repeatedly in Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Ever Wonder...

how on TV cop shows 35+ year old detectives in suits, overcoats and street shoes consistently outrun 20 year old 'perps' in sneakers?

Can't Get that Tune Out of Your Head?

The Dubai Ports World controversy highlights one thing about the Bush administration. At some point Bush decided that his virtue, his song was steadfastness. No backing down. No admission of error. Stand tough. We may only have one song, but we sing it well and often.

There are reasons to support the DPW deal. For all the problems with the Emirates, since 9/11 they have found religion (sorry) and been pretty supportive of the US. We want to encourage this sort of shift, especially in the Arab world.

That said, the downside, especially politically, for the Bush administration is massive. It has put GOP congresspeople in an untenable situation. Support the deal and open a door for criticize in the upcoming elections, or go with the polls and oppose the deal and further drive down the administration's ratings.

It would have made SO much more sense for Bush to say "I just found out about this deal. It is troubling. We are going to put it on hold and reevaluate it." and then let the deal quietly die. But backing down just isn't in the lyrics of Bush's tune.

More on Dubai Ports World

It turns out that The Coast Guard raised concerns weeks ago that it could not determine whether a United Arab Emirates-based company seeking a stake in some U.S. port operations might support terrorist operations.

This deal is clearly a political blunder. Whether it is bad for the US remains unclear to me. What is clear is that the nexus between the UAE and the 911 attacks was much more direct then any connection with Iraq. As the Republican Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean said "There's no question that two of the 9/11 hijackers came from there and money was laundered through there."

Foxy!

Watching Fox News is like picking at a scab for me. Its irritatingly compelling.

One thing I love is that their crawl (the scrolling "news" that runs on the bottom of the screen) regularly updates the Terror Alert Level. It is currently at yellow for "Elevated" where it has lived since August 2005. According to the Department of Homeland Security, yYellow means that "All Americans, including those traveling in the transportation systems, should continue to be vigilant, take notice of their surroundings, and report suspicions items or activities to local authorities immediately." That helps.

Fox also promotes the use of "Democrat" in lieu of "Democratic." For example, "The Democrat Senator from NY, Hillary Clinton" or "The Democrat Convention will be held in faggy San Francisco." This odd construction makes it clear that the speaker wants to head off any subconscious inference that the opposition is truly "democratic."

But by far, the most offensive bastardization of language and communication is their use of "homicide bomber." Fox began using this term in the Spring of 2002. This Orwellian dysphemism substitutes "homicide" for "suicide" belongs. So, Timothy McVeigh bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was not a "homicide bombing" despite the fact that he killed 168 people because he thoughlessly didn't commit suicide in the process.

I guess that they think that "suicide bomber" attributes some sort of moral creditably to the murder because he is willing to kill himself in the process. Were Japanese kamikazes "homicide pilots?"

To add insult to linguistic injury, Fox not only uses this language in their own copy, but they substitute homicide for suicide in quotes that they run from the Associated Press. See http://mediamatters.org/items/200502230006.

Imagine....

No, this isn't a paen to Lennon's overplayed anthem.

Rather, imagine the reaction of the right (think Fox News) if Clinton or Gore had done the UAE port deal.

If you are conservative, this is a test of your intellectual honesty. Regardless of what you think about the deal itself (personally I am ambivalent about it) if you can't fess up and admit that attacking a Democratic administration would rise to the level of blood sport you fail the test.

Is it Redundant to Have a Pet Name for a Dog?

Allison and I are, I hate to say it, German Shepherd Dog (GSD) fanciers. Actually, I guess this isn't really true since we eschew breeding related activates, opting instead for rescue. "Breeding related activities." Sounds like a euphemism.

We've noticed that people tend to label GSD's with vainglorious and/or Germanic names like King, Kaiser, Fritzie, Zeus, Wolfgang and Heidi.

I've yet to meet an Adolph or Fuhrer. I've known a few Rommels but I guess that’s ok since he was a General (the Desert Fox Terrier?)

Speaking of WWII tank commanders, a little known fact that 15% of all bull terriers are named Patton (General George's favorite breed.) After WW1 he brought home his first Bull Terrier and named it "Tank." His sidekick while he kicked Nazi butt was a dog, named William the Conqueror (pet name Willie who had his own set of dog tags.) A Bull Terrier won the on 2006 Westminster dog show, no doubt leading to a huge increase in their popularity. NOTE - Bull Terriers are NOT Pit Bulls.

Back to GSDs - it turns out that breeders have an even more Teutonic edge. Look at this list of GSD breeders (I'm not making any of this up.) Rotterbarental , Gebirgshaus , Vom Paukenschlag, Kiesthaus (specializing in giant & oversized dogs), Kiesthaus (specializing in “Huge/Awesome” dogs) Vom Haus Dettmer, Vom Brandon Haus , vom Himmelhoch , Holtgrew's, Haus Juris, von der Graf GSD's, Alpenhof, and von Trapp Family Breeders.

Ok, I made the last one up.

After WW1 GSDs were renamed (as a breed) Alsatians in England to avoid the negative connotation with trench warfare and global misery.

Anyway, I waste a lot of time thinking of funny names for GSD. We named our latest adoptee (shown above and a rescue from New Orleans who had an interim name of Neville) Rebel. His full name? Rebel Yellen.

Here are some other names under consideration:

Schmutzy (sounds German, right?)
Shedsy (we may rename Rebel)
Schmaltzy
Lord (Why yes, Lord IS my shepherd)
Dongle
Dufus

If I had 2 GSDs, one pure black and one pure white, how could I not name them Ebony and Ivory, and hope that they lived in perfect....

I've always thought that the dog show world (parodied effectivly in Christopher Guest's movie "Best of Show") is not only weird but vaguely racist. Dog shows are largely about "confirmation" which means how closely they conform to the breed ideal. A little too eugenic for me. However, in an interesting bit of reverse discrimination - pure white GSDs are generally bannedfrom shows. A dog can be pure black, or any sort of mixed color, but not pure white. There are even white shepherd organizations to promote the pure race - er breed. Ironically (?) Hitler had a white GSD named Blondi. I've got to stop now. I'm getting dizzy.

Playing the Odds

From The Atlantic: If you hope to obtain a bachelor's degree by age twenty-four, your chances are roughly one in two if you come from a family with an annual income over $90,000; roughly one in four if your family's income falls between $61,000 and $90,000; and slightly better than one in ten if it is between $35,000 and $61,000. For high schoolers whose families make less than $35,000 a year the chances are around one in seventeen.

Also, a survey of 146 top colleges and found that only three percent of their students came from the bottom economic quartile of the U.S. population—whereas 74 percent came from the top one.

Compensate with Volume

Each unit of Sony's Playstation 3 is expected to cost the company about $900 to produce, but will likely be priced around $300 to compete with Microsoft's Xbox 360. I wonder if they will pay me $600 to not buy one.

Finally an Ugly Teacher

For some reason all the female teachers who have had sex with students are blonde. More troubling, they have, until now, all been pretty damned good looking. It makes it hard to have the proper reaction that this is sexual assault when they are hot. So I'm glad that Ms. Schweikert, pictured above, has joined this ignoble club. How dare she!

Seven Things You Don't Know About the United Arab Emirates

With the UAE in the news following a deal to have their government owned company manage US ports, it is a good time to learn a few things about this unusual country.

1: The border demarcation treaties of 1974 and 1977 between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were never made public so the exact border of the two countries is only known to their governments.

2: Among various human rights violations the UAE has been accused of (including child sex trade) is the use of children as jockeys in camel races. In part in response to this criticism they have developed robotic camel jockeys. In your face Sony!

3: About 80% of the population is non-native, with the majority of foreigners coming from India and Pakistan.

4: Due to extreme oil wealth, the average income for the 20% of the population that are citizens is nearly as high as Western European democracies.

5: You can go skiing in Dubai thanks to the worlds largest indoor snow park. The "Mall of the Emirates" is connected to " Ski Dubai which covers an area about the size of three football fields. One run is over 1200 feet long and admission is $35 which includes Winter clothing

6: They were previously known as the "Trucial States" or "Trucial Oman" where "Trucial" referred to a truce between Great Britain and a number of Arab Sheikhs.

7: There are seven emirates in the UAE. They are: Abu Dhabi, Ajm?n, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Qaiwain.

This Just in....75% of Americans Make up Three Quarters of the Population

Why undercut a legitimate point by relying on meaning less statistics?

One statistic you hear over and over is that women make only 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. This ratio gives the false impression woman working in the same position as a man makes 25% less.

All the wage-gap ratio reflects is a comparison of the median earnings of all working women and men. It doesn't compare those with equal work, equal training, equal education or equal tenure.

So, the while the wage gap is a measure of inequality, it does not measure discrimination per se. It does not provide an understanding of reasons for disparity which may include factors such as that more women choose lower-paying professions than men; they move in and out of the workforce more frequently; and they work fewer paid hours on average.

It is estimated that about a quarter of the wage gap, or 6-7% results from actual discrimination. This is an important issue on its own, and doesn't need to be supported by contorted math.

Shooting Lawyers in a Barrel

Harry Whittington is the first person Chaney ever shot by accident.

The Daily Show suggested that Chaney didn't take a hunting safety course because he received a series of deferrments.

Anyway calling the activity in question "hunting" is a bit of a stretch.

In 2003 Chaney when pheasant killing in Pennsylvania, but he didn't have to waste time hunting downt he little fellas. Upon his arrival gamekeepers released 500 pen-raised pheasants from nets for the benefit of him and his party, of which at least 417 where killed. Cheney chalked up about 70 of the birds.

Sporty!

Things that Make You Go.....What the....?

As opponents of the Bush administration go, I am pretty skeptical of many of the claims about them. I don't think we went into Iraq for oil. I don't think that the ties to Halliburton are a reason for the waste and abuse in the rebuilding. I didn't believe that the partial privatization of Social Security or the private nature of the Medicare drug program were intended to benefit industry.

But then you see this, and you gotta wonder.

The Interior Department's just-published budget plan, will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government. Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011.

I mean, its not like we could use the $7 billion.

OK, a Real, Honest Joke

An orthodox rabbi walks into a bar is in full regalia. Black coat, black hat, beard.

He's got a parrot on his shoulder. The parrot is huge. Red, yellow, and blue. Lovely plumage.

The barkeep stares for a moment and says "Wow, he is really amazing. Where did you get him?"

after a pause the parrot replies "Brooklyn, there are a million of them all over the place.

Inappropriate Fantasy

OK, time to expose my darker side.

I've occasional thought about renting a car for a week , putting it up on jack stand, pulling the wheels off, and setting the cruise control speed to - oh say - 140mph. After a week the odometer would have logged a good 20k plus miles. I figure it would get really good mileage given the lack of wind or rolling resistance. You have to figure that the clerk would be surprised when the car was returned.

All German Shepherds are Male

Over the past 15 years I have owned 3 GSDs (German Shepherd DOGs - only breed to have dog in the offician name) and have fostered another half-dozen or so. In all that time no one has ever asked "what's her name?" Regardless of the dog's gender, it has always been "Whats his name?" I wonder if this is reversed for more "feminine" dogs like poodles or cocker spaniels.

An interesting side-note. A female dog is referred to as a bitch. A male dog is a dog. So, and I am not kidding, people in the show world will refer to a female dog that looks somewhat masculine (think Bea Arthur) as a "doggy bitch." I have not seen the opposite (a bitchy dog) but I'm sure its out there.

White Guy Olympics

Isn't it nice that they have reserved a whole Olympic for white (ok, and Asian) people?

I think its time to ban all sports with a: costumes b: highly subjective judging c: differences that are so imperceptible that an ordinary person can't tell the difference.

I can relate to speed skating. Whoever is faster wins. I'm not saying that figure skaters aren't terribly talented athletes, but the scoring leaves me limp. And don't get me started on Ice Dancing.

Rock, Paper, Scissors, Dynamite

While the Moslem world freaks out over a bunch of cartoons, some of which were actually published in a Danish newspaper, lets not forget that the Taliban blew up ancient statues of the Buddah. Nary a word of condemnation from the Islamic world.

As I would have said as an eight year old - Takes One to Know One!

12 Step Program.

Since the President has told us that we are addicted to oil (foreign or otherwise,) lets take a quick look at how we are using that oil. Sound like we are going the wrong direction? Wondering what is the cause? One word. Horsepower.

At the latest auto show there were 18 models with over 500 horsepower. These machines not only suck up gas, but are deeply antisocial. This kind of power is useful only for street racing.

But it is not the proliferation of supercars that are the issue. Check this out - in 1975, before the first oil crisis, new cars in the US averaged 136 horsepower. In 1982 this number had dropped to 99 as car makers worked to raise fuel economy. By 2004 the average had jumped to 210 HP.

While environmentalists focus on SUVs, the real problem is that midsized cars now routinely have 250 HP or more. My 1973 BMW 2002 was the progenitor of modern sports sedans, and it made a respectable 130 HP. My 1980 BMW 320i made perhaps 150 HP and was the archetypical reasonable performance sedan of its day. Both of these cars got well over 30 MPG on the highway. Now we see cars like the Mazda 6 has 215 HP and gets mileage in the low 20s and the Nissan Altima has 250 HP and gets even worse mileage.

We could save a lot of fuel by just dialing back these silly levels of horsepower.

The Box that Changed the World is.....

not the PC. Not even the Ipod.

Its the shipping container.

Before the standardized cargo container came into being in the early 1960s a port could load or unload about a half ton per man hour. Now that number is closer to 5,000 tons per man hour.

The time in port shrank from weeks to hours.

Ships increased their carrying capacity by over 4 fold.

Along with these efficiencies you have to add a much lower breakage rate, the virtual elimination of theft, and greatly reduced damage from weather and the like.

Moreover, shipping containers enabled multimodal transport (from truck to train to ship to train to truck.)

The net effect has been to reduce the cost of shipping to the point of being almost negligible.

Without this innovation inflation would be higher and the development of Asian manufacturing economies would have been impossible.

The second industrial revolution was about motors and engines and the ability to reduce the cost of physical power while making it possible to apply it in a greatly concentrated fashion. Similarly, the technology revolution is about reducing the cost of the transfer of information, and allowing its concentration. In its own niche, the cargo container did the same by driving down the cost of shipping and making "densification" possible. It is hard to underestimate the affect that this technology has had on the world economy and peoples' lives.

I'm an "Idea" Guy

"Note to self: Feed mayonnaise to tuna fish. "

Name that movie.

My ideas are
1: Raise lambs in fields of mint and
2: Feed chickens only rosemary

Mmmmmm

Random Dosages

When we take our dogs to the vet they calculate medicine dosages based on the dog's weight. Why then are medicines not dosed based on weight for people? It seems odd that we use the same amount of a drug for a 105 pound woman as for a 250 pound man.

Tax Burden

Contrary to (at least my) expectation, when you include all government taxes, the tax burden for various income groups is roughly the same.

Income Group	Pretax Income	Average Tax Receipts	As % of Income
Bottom 20%	$7,946	$1,449	18.2%
Second 20%	$20,319	$2,847	14.0%
Middle 20%	$35,536	$5,622	15.8%
Fourth 20%	$56,891	$9,835	17.3%
Top 20%	$116,666	$21,623	18.5%

This, taken from the NY Times, includes federal and state income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, utility taxes, alcohol, gasoline and tobacco taxes, and sate sales taxes.

Howard Yellen

Ban the Tube

CRT monitors that is. Flat screen monitors have gotten very cheap, but tube based units have fallen further ($49 for a 17" monitor in today's insert.) The problem is that CRT monitors create huge disposal problems due to toxic materials. OK, don't ban them, just apply a $100 tax to cover the cost of disposal. Let the market take it from there.

Howard Yellen

In Praise of Hopefully

The use of "hopefully" as an adverb ("Hopefully it will rain before the cows come home") is despised by many writers, editors and other ner-do-well's. I object! Hopefully is a useful and logical construction and should be used whenever possible. For a lucid discussion of this hot linguistic topic see:

http://www.bartleby.com/61/41/H0274100.html

That piece is from the the usage notes in The American Heritage Dictionary, edited by Geoffrey Nunberg. He wrote a good piece about the piece about usage at http://www.bartleby.com/61/7.html

Finally, if you want to see a list of usage notes from that dictionary, which is a cool way to waste a lot of time, see:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/note4index.html



Howard Yellen

You Call it Corn - I Call it Amazing

From corn we get:
Flour
Oil
Sugar
Whisky
Fuel
Starch
not to mention
Cornflakes
Popcorn
and of course Cornnuts

In fact, only 1.8% of the corn grown in the US is used as food.

Howard Yellen

Neflix Quagmire

Have any of you gotten "stuck" with Nefflix?

I have had the same three movies out for....I'm not going to admit how long. I never seem to be in the right mood for them. And so they sit. And so I pay $15 a month to not watch 3 movies a month. For the record, my three movies are:

1: Ikiru
2: Requiem for a Dream
3: Anger Management

Give in and just send them back! Thats what I say. Anyone else willing to admit to this and disclose what movies they have?

Howard Yellen

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Big corporate scams are obvious - Enron, Worldcom,

But there are scores of small rip-offs that we deal with every day. Let me share three that have gotten under my skin. These are clearly nits, but pick I must.

1: The St. Mary's Garage in San Francisco has a early bird special that lets you park all day for $20 if you arrive by 9AM. After that it is $30. They advertise the special with two giant signs. The full rate is only displayed on one complex board that you don't see until you pull into the ticket dispensing area. They do not pull down the early bird special signs or put up a "$30 All Day" sign. How many people park, only to get an unexpected $10 bonus?

2: My Treo cell phone with service by Sprint makes it impossible to hang up on a call if you answer another through call waiting. So, I have had times where I was using minutes on one active call, and the other call that has long ago disconnected also continues to bill.

3: If you use a credit card at Safeway the terminal tries to steer you to entering a PIN so it will be treated as an ATM transaction. It takes 5 or 6 steps to use the card as a credit card, while using an ATM card only takes 2 steps. Why? Safeway pays less for ATM transactions. Meanwhile, you get charged cash advance fees on your credit card if you use it as an ATM card.

Anyone else have examples of these sorts of irritating practices?

A Heart, A Brain, Some Nerve

Check out www.lifesharers.org its a way to do some good, and buy some insurance.

Evolving Canine Values

I apologize in advance for the personal nature of this post, but I have gradually changed my thinking about dogs, and I wanted to share these observations in case it resonates with some number of folks out there.

For me it is like smoking. I have never smoked, but I used to think that banning smoking in public places was kind of extreme. I certainly thought it was absurd in bars, and I also thought that folks with private offices should be able to smoke in them.

I am now fully onboard with very restrictive restrictions, but not prohibition. I am glad that you can't smoke at the ball park. You may agree or disagree, but it does show a set of evolving values.

When I was a kid we got our first dog from friends who had backyard bred their pups. She was a collie/shepherd mix and a great dog that lived to almost 16 years old and to an extent defined my childhood. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake to breed her.

Now, don't get excited here...I am no PETA activist. I eat meat (although I try to buy cruelty free products) and still think that anyone without a dog for a pet is nuts.

About 15 years ago I adopted a German Shepherd pup from a rescue organization. She died a year ago. Before she died I adopted another GSD from a different rescue. He is also a terrific dog and we love him dearly. We have also gotten involved in GSD rescue and are currently fostering a dog that was rescued from Katrina. Before we took him in, we were foster parents for about 6 dogs over the past year. I don't know if I'll be able to let this one go.

Anyway, there are fantastic pure breed dogs available through breed-specific and general rescue organizations. There are also equally fantastic mutts at every shelter (kill and nonkill.)

The point is that there are A LOT of dogs out there. Too many. We don't need any more. I've come to view, even caring well-done breading, as irresponsible. I also think it is wrong to buy dogs.

Forget about the arguments about puppy mills and whether they are good or healthy dogs. The bottom-line is that they are unneeded.

Please, spend a few minutes online doing research. Type in "German Shepherd Rescue" or "Dalmatian Rescue" or "Doberman Rescue" and you will see hundreds of great dogs looking for homes.

If you don't fancy a breed, even better. Just haunt the local shelter until you find the right dog.

I think most folks have not really thought about this. I certainly hadn't until I got involved with rescue. I think its time for our attitudes to change a bit.

How Long do 72 Virgins Last?

Apparently the Koran (our spelling) says that under certain circumstances you go to paradise and get 72 dark eyed virgins.

So what is the deal? Do you have to ration them. One a week for a year and a half? What happens when you run out? Or do they stay virgins, regardless of what you do with them?

Seems very complicated. Do you have to buy Ramadan cards for all of them, or only the ones who are still virgins?

Anyway, I'll confess my problem with Islam. They are deeply anti-canine. The only dogs allowed are hunting and guard dogs. I don't trust people who don't like dogs.

MMMMmmmm, but I do dig that falafal.

Me, Myself and I

I hate fifth grade English teachers. All of them. They tell us shit and we believe it for the rest of our lives. Language is complex and flexible.

Lately I've noticed an overusage of the personal pronoun "I" where "me" should be used. Too many people were corrected with a stern "I" and now overcompensate by throwing it in where it doesn't belong.

You end up with incorrect, stilted sentences like "I asked him to give tickets to Allison and I." Or "I'm looking forward to having you stay with Allison and I."

The "rule" is actually very simple, of course. Eliminate Allison (no jokes please) and see how it sounds. "I asked him to give the ticket to I?" WRONG. I'm looking forward to having you stay with I?" WRONG.

I has become a seemingly more sophisticated construction, despite it sounding bad and being technically incorrect.

Me not like.

Throw Away Lines

I watch Law and Order as much as the next guy. OK, maybe more.

It seems to me that the time for "disposable" cell phones that don't require a valid ID to acquire has come and gone. These make it too easy for criminals, and yes, terrorists, to communicate in an untraceable fashion.

If you have to show ID to buy beer or an Uzi, maybe its time to require the same for cell phones. It seems to me that the civil liberties/public safety balancing act is pretty easy here.

RACE ....The Final Frontier

TV commercials almost never portray what would appear to be an interracial couple. There are same race couples, and multi-racial groups, but no interracial couples. Of course, no gay couples either.

The interesting thing is that this barrier was breached in actual TV shows long ago. Just not in ads.

My extension to the maxim "There are no stupid questions."

Its a lot easier to ask a stupid question then it is to answer one.

1920

was the year women gained universal suffrage through the 19th amendment.

So my question, for any constitutional oringinalist out there, is this: Would you have objected to the Supreme Court deciding in say, 1915, that women should have the right to vote? Or, perhaps in extremis, had the 19th amendment not passed,would you oppose an activist move by the Court to confer universal suffrage today?

Correction....

In 1920, a New York Times editorial ridiculed Robert Goddard and his claim that a rocket would work in space:

"That Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react--to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools."

In 1969, days before Apollo 11's landing on the moon, the newspaper published a tongue-in-cheek correction:

"Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error."

Must Reading

Am I the only one who thinks it - uh odd - that the only reading we allow to the prisoners in Guantanamo is the Koran? I should think we would be better served by expanding their reading list. Maybe John Grisham.

Handicapping

Isn't it odd that "handicapped" has become politically incorrect in all uses except as relates to parking?

Well, this may be politically incorrect, but I don't think you should be able to park in a handicapped spot in a Porche. In fact, such spots should be limited to mini-vans, station wagons, and crappy old American four door sedans.

The Catastrophic Presidency of George W. Bush

You heard the phrase here first. Posterity is going to glue catastrophic and W together like Lewis and Martin, New Jersey and Exit, and statutory and rape.

Euphemisms

How did "gaming" come to refer togambling and "sportsman" to hunters and fishers?

Which Came First?

Well, provided you believe in evolution, the egg preceded the chicken.

The first chicken egg was delivered by, evolutionarily speaking, a very, very near chicken. Whatever the final mutation was that made this chick a true modern chicken, its parents lacked that characteristic.

You Big Fruit

"A tomato is a fruit!" How many times have you heard someone declare this old saw as if they have just shared a great truth.

The tomato is not a fruit, it is a vegatable. Granted, botanically a tomato is a fruit sincee A fruit is any fleshy material covering a seed or seeds. By this standard so is a zuccini, an eggplant, a green pepper, cucumber or a jalepeno.

Horticulturally speaking, the tomato is a vegetable plant. The plant is an annual and nonwoody. Most fruits, from a horticulture perspective, are grown on a woody plant (apples, cherries, raspberries, oranges) with the exception of strawberries.

But as always, the law decides. In 1893, the United States Supreme Court ruled the tomato was a "vegetable" and therefore subject to import taxes. The suit was brought by a consortium of growers who wanted it declared a vegetable to protect U.S. crop development and prices. Fruits, at that time, were not subjected to import taxes and foreign countries could flood the market with lower priced produce.

Lemmings

Don't jump off cliffs in packs. A 1957 movie by Disney created this false impression, thus smearing an entire mammalian specie and giving rise to an over-used metaphor. For shame.

A Modest Proposal

Given bankruptcy reform that has made things harder for individuals, how about some protection for consumers?

When a company goes BK, consumers should be put in line ahead of commercial vendors. For example, airline ticket holders should get refunded ahead of all nonsecured debt. A company that sells gas to Delta should be behind an individual with a flight from Atlanta to LA.

Wanna do Lunch?

One of the recurring themes of this blog relates to ongoing changes in the English language. Words change in meaning over time.

I have noticed that folks who work in stores (grocery, shoe, whatever) refer to their meal-break as "lunch," regardless of the time of day. So a cashier at a supermarket would say, at 2:00AM, "I'm going to take my lunch in a half hour."

Will lunch cease to mean the midday meal? Stay tuned for the next 50 or so years and we will see.

Are you Grotesque?

Well, if you are a an unusual carved creature stuck on the side of a building, it depends on whether you spit.

The word "Gargoyle" shares a root with the word "Gargle"; they come from "gargouille", an old French word for "Throat". A gargoyle is a waterspout.

Similar statuary that do not spew water are simply Grotesques.

A House of a Different Color?

I live in a Victorian house built in 1900. There are several dozen essentially identical houses in my neighborhood. Call it early urban sprawl, back when the Castro was the suburbs.

So question - why do all the houses have garages? Cars didn't become common until years later. The first Model T rolled off the assembly lines in 1908. San Francisco already had an extensive mass transit network by the turn of the century.

I can't imagine that they were intended as urban "barns" for horses. So what's the deal?

Class Action Settlements, Last in a Series

Another notorious case involved claims that accused AT&T and Lucent of cheating customers by not informing them they were leasing old telephones. Consumers’ bills didn’t clearly explain that they were being charged for leasing a phone that they may have thrown away years ago. Some individuals unknowingly spent more than $1,300 leasing a phone that could be replaced new for $10.

The case was settled in 2002 for $350 million, of which $300 was to go to the plaintiffs, and $50 million in the form of prepaid phone cards to be donated to charities. The lawyers received $84.5 million in fees and expenses. About 92,000 class members ultimately collected a total of only $8.4 million. The rest of the settlement money was returned to AT&T and Lucent.

For the AT&T, Lucent case class counsel’s compensation was presented as being $84.5M as compared with $350M for plaintiffs (or 15%), when the actual result was $84.5M compared to $8.4M, a the ratio of more than 10 to 1 (or 1000%.)!

Class Action Settlements, First in a Series

One of the most notorious class action settlements in history was the Bank of Boston in which the settlement provided that class members (many of whom had no actual knowledge of the suit) would receive credits of up to $8.76 to their bank accounts – while the accounts were debited up to $90 to pay their attorney’s fee.

Sobering Math

World War II lasted, for the US, 1347 days. As of today, Sept 18, 2005, the war in Iraq has lasted 905 days. Just 442 more days to go.

Undoctored Image from TV Needs no Comment

No Whammy! No Whammy!

Has anyone else noticed that daytime network game shows have all but vanished. All that is left is The Price is Right, and that is more of a science demonstration as they keep Bob Barker going at age 125 with various tubes, electrodes and catheters.

In 1984 when I was "less then optimally employed" I saw something amazing on a daytime game show. The program - Press Your Luck staring Peter Tamarkin.

In the show contestant's collected "spins" by answering trivia questions, and then used the "spins" on a board with dollar amounts. The person who amassed the most in cash and prizes at the end of the game won.

The show was most memorable for the Whammy, a red cartoon creature wearing a cape. The Whammy's spaces on the game board took away the contestants money, accompanied by an animation that would show the Whammy taking the loot

In the second part of the show The contents of the spaces on the "Big Board" changed every few seconds , as well as the highlighted square (which bounced around as well). A game space contains either money, a prize (the dollar amount of which would accrue to the contestant score), or a Whammy.

On one episode of Press Your Luck in 1984, a self-described unemployed ice cream man named Michael Larson made it onto the show. With the use of a then exotic VCR, Larson was able to memorize the presumed random patterns of the game board. It turned out that the patterns were not random. He was able to press the button at a time when only prizes and no Whammys were on the board. Larson spun over 40 times in a row without hitting a 'Whammy.'

Normally one would hit a Whammy about a quarter of the time. I was so shocked by his run (like rolling 7 10 times in a row at a crap table) that I called my brother at law school in Ithaca to get him to watch.

Larson bagged $110,237 in cash and prizes. His total was a record by far for a single appearance on a game show up to that time.

The Press Your Luck board's patterns were significantly reworked after this incident, increasing from the original five patterns to thirty-two, and such a run was never repeated on Press Your Luck again.

The Larson episode was split into two half-hours that aired on June 8th and June 11th of 1984, but it was not rebroadcast for nearly two decades after that. Every once in a while I wondered about what I had seen. Was it magic? Was it cheating? Game Show Network finally aired portions of it in 2003 as part of a two-hour documentary called "Big Bucks."

Michael lost all of the money that he had won. Michael actually robbed of his cash one Christmas night after leaving it all lying around the house in an attempt to scan serial numbers on $1 bills for a radio contest. He was thrown out of his house by his common law wife, and was hardly heard from by his family again until his passing in 1999.

Copywrite, Schmopyright....Its funny.

Outsource FEEMA to Wal-Mart?

At Wal-Mart,Emergency PlanHas Big PayoffBy ANN ZIMMERMAN and VALERIE BAUERLEIN
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 12, 2005; Page B1

The Federal Emergency Management Agency could learn some things from Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

On Wednesday, Aug. 24, when Katrina was reclassified to a storm from a tropical depression, Jason Jackson, the retailer's director of business continuity, started camping out in Wal-Mart's emergency command center. By Friday, when the hurricane touched down in Florida, he had been joined by 50 Wal-Mart managers and support personnel, ranging from trucking experts to loss-prevention specialists.

On Sunday, before the storm made landfall on the Gulf Coast, Mr. Jackson ordered Wal-Mart warehouses to deliver a variety of emergency supplies, from generators to dry ice to bottled water, to designated staging areas so that company stores would be able to reopen quickly if disaster struck.

For the rest of this story, check out the first comment on this post.

City of New Orleans

Consider this - prior to its fall to the Goths (476 according to the redoubtable Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) Rome had about as many occupants as New Orleans before Katrina (between 500K and 1 million.)

Before the Goths had their way with Rome, the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns and Vandals paved the way. You gotta love saying Ostrogoth and Visigoth.

Just a few hundred years later the population was down to about 10,000. Transpose the recent images of the abandoned Big Easy and picture the Eternal City in its stead.

Oh, and Mike Myers Coffee Talk character Linda Richman was right - the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an Empire. Discuss.

Don't worry...the dragoon are coming!

We all know what the cavalry are but dragoon?

A dragoon is a soldier trained to fight on foot, but transport himself on horseback. In other words, they move as cavalry but fight as infantry. The name derives from their primary weapon, a carbine or short musket called the "dragon."

Who knew?

OK, this is the last time I am going to explain this to you.....

Toilets DO NOT flush backwards below the equator. With all due respect to my Australian assistant Kim, who swears she has seen it, its a bunch of crap. Read this for details:
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/1998-11/910045585.Es.r.html

or this

http://www.ems.psu.edu/~fraser/Bad/BadCoriolis.html

Or do your own damned research!

I know that people have seen this work at the equator. Its a fake. A scam. Michael Palin even got conned by this on one of his PBS series.

I'm sorry to debunk this, but I'm sure you still believe in lots of dumb stuff.

SS Mousetrap - 2 trivia items

The great thing about blogging is you can go back to see what you have written. That way you don't repeat your stories. I was sure I had posted the first of these 2 items, but low and behold, I hadn't.

So, do you remember the game "Mousetrap", shown left? You moved around the board and added pieces to the Rube Goldberg machine that eventually dropped a mousetrap on your opposition.

Any idea who invented it?

Answer: Rube Goldberg.


OK, Item two. This one comes from a guest blogger, my brother David. On May 9, 1961, Newton Minow, then Chairman of the FCC gave a speach in which he decried the television landscape as a "vast wasteland." Click here for an edited version of that speech: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_Speech

In 1964 Gilligan's Island premiered and the "mighty ship" was named the SS Minnow to express the producer's displeasure with Mr. Minow's assessment of the quality of television.

In Praise Of Spam

Embrace spam. Not the meat, the email. Why? As intrusive advertising goes, its pretty benign. You can avoid it pretty easily. It doesn't waste paper like junk mail. It doesn't take up your time like TV ads. It doesn't interrupt dinner like telemarketers.

So, ignore it. Delete it. Block it.

Get over it.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Smoking kills about five million people every year. This is a list of a few of the famous people who have died from tobacco-related diseases or smoking addiction. The list is biased towards older folks. Current smokers have a few more years to go. Still, it doesn’t take a keen sense of history to realize what has been lost.

Stephen Ambrose
Louis Armstrong
Desi Arnaz & Lucille Ball
Mary Astor
Tallulah Bankhead
Count Basie
Leonard Bernstein
Art Blakey
Humphrey Bogart
Bobby Bonds
Walter Brennan
James Brown
Yul Brynner
Anthony Burgess
Prescott Bush
Rusty Burrell, original bailiff on The People's Court
Herb Caen
John Candy
Johnny Carson
Raymond Carver
Lon Chaney, Sr.
Graham Chapman
Grover Cleveland
Rosemary Clooney
Ty Cobb
Nat King Cole
Chuck Connors
Gary Cooper
Noel Coward
Bing Crosby
Bette Davis
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Joe DiMaggio
Walt Disney
Jimmy Dorsey
Morton Downey, Jr.
Dwight Eisenhower
Duke Ellington
T. S. Eliot
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Cotton Fitzsimmons
Ian Fleming
Curt Flood
Errol Flynn
Bob Fosse
Sigmund Freud
Clark Gable
Jerry Garcia
Jackie Gleason
Frank Gorshin
Stephen Jay Gould
Betty Grable
Ulysses S. Grant
Dashiel Hammett
George Harrison
Robert A. Heinlein
Lillian Hellman
Hubert H. Humphrey
Chet Huntley
John Huston
Burl Ives
Peter Jennings
Etta Jones
Spike Jones
Boris Karloff
Buster Keaton
Brian Keith
Eddie Kendricks
Michael Landon
Meyer Lansky - Famous gangster. Possibly related to me on my mother’s side.
Julie London
Roger Maris
Bob Marley
E.G. Marshall
Dean Martin
Lee Marvin
Groucho Marx
Zeppo Marx
Walter Matthau
Roddy McDowall
Steve McQueen
Audrey Meadows
Ann Miller
Robert Mitchum
Claude Monet
Garry Moore
Agnes Moorehead
Pat Nixon
Lloyd Nolan
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Patrick O'Neal
Roy Orbison
Jesse Owens
Robert Palmer
Bert Parks – Mr. Ms. America
Vincent Price
Denver Pyle
Anthony Quinn
Eddie Rabbitt
Jason Robards
Harry Reasoner
Pee Wee Reese
Lee Remick
Cal Ripken, Sr.
Jack Ruby
Babe Ruth
George C. Scott
Rod Serling
Dmitri Shostakovich
Frank Sinatra
Ed Sullivan
Spencer Tracy
John Wayne
Wolfman Jack
Frank Zappa
Warren Zevon

Jawboned!

In 2000, when oil prices "spiked" to $28 a barrel, G.W. Bush said the following, speaking of President Clinton:

"What I think the president ought to do is he ought to get on the phone with the OPEC cartel and say we expect you to open your spigots. One reason why the price is so high is because the price of crude oil has been driven up. OPEC has gotten its supply act together, and it's driving the price, like it did in the past. And the president of the United States must jawbone OPEC members to lower the prices."

He also intimated that he would remind his friends in the Mid-East that his pop had recently saved their lamb (bacon is not hallal) and they owed it to us.

Well, it's 2005 and oil is over $70 a barrel.

Game Theory

Poker has imperfect information and a high degree of randomness.
Backgammon has perfect information and a high degree of randomness.
Chess has perfect information and no randomness.
Duplicate Bridge has imperfect information and no randomness.


More or less.

Tivo

I love Tivo. Really, I love Tivo. I tried an integrated DVR in my Dish system, and its features were so far behind I bought a second Tivo. I have given away several Tivos as gifts. Did I mention that I love Tivo?

I have kept a partial list over time of features I think could/should be added.

This list ignores big things like the ability to download movies for future viewing instead of using Netflix, the ability to share files P2P over the net, etc. Instead it is focused on small, feature based changes.

My theory is that Tivo was born fully formed, like the Apple Macintosh, and has such huge feature and usability advantages that it seems like no one will ever catch up. I think they need to release new versions with new, cool features, on a regular basis to maintain distance from competition and to keep the core user base excited and busy proselytizing. Did I mention that I love Tivo?


1: Ability to move the time bar to the side, or eliminate it. It gets in the way.
2: Ability to tell Tivo not to change the channel while you are watching a show unless it is for something you specifically told it to record (not one of its suggestions)
3: Ability to lengthen buffer.
4: Ability to make buffer persistent.
5: Ability to select multiple shows for a single action (delete all checked, save until x date, etc.)
6: Slow sound (Ability to listen when playing slowly by having sound come buffered at you every couple of seconds)
7: Fast sound (Ability to listen to sound when playing at 2x speed (I can do this with my DVD))
8: Ability to tell Tivo to record a show, even if it will miss the beginning due to another recording (2 shows start at 9PM. The first is a half hour long. The second is an hour long. Have it record the first show and half of the second.) Similarly, if you have added a buffer to deal with, for example, a sports event that might go long, have it pick up the next show already in progress.
9: Selectable forward skip (I know there are work-arounds for this)
10: Better web functionality (ability to program wish lists, etc.)
11: Undelete files deleted until they are actually gone like on a PC.
12: Built in wifi
13: A Tivo radio for off the air recording as well as XM/Serius.
14: Internet radio recording software like Replay Radio.
15: Google type search functionality for shows.

Pet Rocks

What is a "Pet Rock"? Pet Rocks were a 1975 fad originated in California by salesman, Gary Dahl. They spread like wildfire to the rest of the country. Here was a pet that took no care and still gave its owner a few moments of pleasure. Gary Dahl, as California advertising man, was having drinks with his buddies one night in April 1975 when the conversation turned to pets. As a lark, Mr. Dahl informed his friends that he considered dogs, cats, birds, and fish all a pain in the neck. They made a mess; they misbehaved; they cost too much money. He, on the other hand, had a pet rock, and it was an ideal pet - easy and cheap, and it had a great personality. His buddies started to riff with the off-the-wall idea and pretty soon they were all tossing around the notion of a pet rock and all the things it was good for. Dahl spent the next two weeks writing the Pet Rock Training Manual - a step-by-step guide to having a happy relationship with your geological pet, including instructions for how to make it roll over and play dead and how to house train it. "Place it on some old newspapers. The rock will never know what the paper is for and will require no further instruction.' To accompany the book, Dahl decided to actually create a Pet Rock. He went to a builder's supply store in San Jose and found the most expensive rock in the place - a Rosarita Beach Stone, which was a uniform size, rounded gray pebble that sold for a penny. He packed the stone in excelsior in a gift box shaped like a pet carrying case, accompanied by the instruction book. The Pet Rock was introduced at the August gift show in San Francisco (the gift market is much easier to break into than the cutthroat toy market), then in New York. Neiman-Marcus ordered five hundred. Gary Dahl sent out homemade news releases of himself accompanied by a picture that showed him surrounded by boxes of his Pet Rocks. Newsweek did a half-page story about the nutty notion, and by the end of October Gary Dahl was shipping ten thousand Pet Rocks every day. He appeared on "The Tonight Show," twice. By Christmas, when two and a half tons of rocks had been sold, three-fourths of all the daily newspapers in America had run Pet Rock stories, often including Gary Dahl's tongue-in-cheek revelations about how each rock was individually tested for obedience at Rosarita Beach in Baja, Mexico, before being selected and boxed. A million rocks sold for $3.95 apiece in just a few months, and Gary Dahl - who decided from the beginning to make at least one dollar from every rock - had become an instant millionaire. Copycat rocks flooded the market, including one cleverly marketed as "the Original Pet Rock," and dozens of quick-buck entrepreneurs joined the action selling such ancillary fun as Pet Rock Obedience Lessons and Pet Rock Burial-at-Sea Services. Immediately after Christmas 1975, Gary Dahl himself relabeled leftover Pet Rocks as Valentine's Day gifts for loved ones in need of a low-maintenance pet, but the Pet Rock quickly became last year's fad. Dahl quit his job in advertising and formed Rock Bottom Productions and two years later he was interviewed by Don Kracke, the inventor of Rickie Trickie Sticky bathroom appliques, for Mr. Kracke's book How to Turn You Idea Into a Million Dollars. Dahl confided to Kracke, "I've got four more ideas. Wait 'll you see'em!" We have been unable to determine if any of the four ideas have seen the light of day. Whatever his fortunes after the Pet Rock, Gary Dahl has become one of the great motivational figures of recent times. To Don Kracke and to other inventors, like Ken Hakuta (author of How to Create Your Own Fad and Make a Million Dollars) and Robert L. Shook (author of "Why Didn't I Think of That!"), the story of the Pet Rock is a never-ending source of inspiration to create new crazes that sweep the nation and make millions for the genius who thought of them. To most noninventive people who remember it, the Pet Rock, like Deely Bobber head antennae and the Hula Hoop, has become one of the mind-boggling examples of inexplicable market-place mania. But Ken Hakuta does have an explanation for the periodic success of what he calls "useless dumb jokes" like the Pet Rock: It gave people a few moments of absolutely meaningless pleasure in a troubled world - no small accomplishment. "If there were more fads," Hakuta observed, "there would probably be a lot fewer psychiatrists. ... Instead of paying $100-an-hour therapy sessions, you could just get yourself a couple of Wacky Wallwalkers (a rubber toy that sticks and wiggles on a wall, which earned Hakuta $20 million) and a Slinky and lock yourself up in a room for a couple of hours. When you came out, you'd be fine."

Things I am interested in

This is a partial list of some of my random interests.

Item	Why
Title 9	Huge cultural change in gender relations
Containerized Cargo	Transforming world economy 20’ at a time
Liberty Ships	Won WW2 but no one knows
Language Issues	Read McWhortor
Game Theory	See related post
Why some countries work and why others don’t	answer: corruption
Things people believe that aren't true (sugar rush, the cold gives you a cold)	Because a glass of punch doesn’t hurt
Dot com survivors	It would help to understand what worked
Book called Flux	Women with choices making them. Why?
Mormonism	The American religion. Amazing history.
Radicalization	Why people decide its ok to do extreme things
Moon Illusion	Big on the horizon. Small at the zenith. Why?
Prosecutorial mindset	OK, I watch too much Law and Order
Things that are better	Why dwell on just the negative? (weather forecasting, economic controls, food costs, race relations, women’s rights, car safety)

Hybrid Bullshit

Most new hybrids are focused on performance, not milage. For an interesting alternative see:

http://www.megawattmotorworks.com/display.asp?dismode=article&artid=156

2 Ideas

1: Newspapers regularly carry absurdly small print, long, boring notices about bankruptcy, class actions, liquidation of assets, etc. This little goldmine for papers is a result of requirements that "constructive notice" be provided. Why not change the rules so this can be done online for free on Google, Yahoo, etc. It would save paper, money and people could actually find this stuff if they are interested.

2: Could not be less related to item 1. How about ionic air cleaners (like the ones that the Sharper Image sells) built into refrigerators?

Minority Rule

The US Senate is many things, but it is not a democratic institution. Every state gets 2 votes, regardless of population. If the 52 senators from the 26 least populous states joined hands they would control the Senate despite the fact that they represent only 18 percent of the American population.

The Word of the Day is "seigniorage"

After two bellyflops, Congress is considering a dollar coin again. This time it might actually work. http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/27/pf/new_dollar/

Why the push for dollar coins? The nominal argument is that it would save the Mint a mint. Paper money doesn't last long. Coins do. Believe it or not, the savings add up to billions over the long hall.

In this new push, however, the motivation is the seigniorage. That delectable word refers to the difference between the cost of producing a coin (or stamp) and its face value (its selling price.) Seigniorage happens when money is lost or put into collections.

Consider the very successful State's Quarters program. It costs the Mint less than five cents for each 25-cent piece it produces. The government makes money whenever someone "buys" a coin then chooses not to spend it. The Treasury estimates that it has earned about $5 billion in seigniorage profits from the quarters so far.

So the new dollar coins are an attempt to cash in on this phenomon.

But this begs a larger question about our currency. Why are we using the 4 coins and 6 bills currently in widespread distriubtion (if you include the $50 bill?)

The last time we kicked out a coin for being too "cheap" was the half cent which was retired in 1857. Note, the actual story of retired coins is a bit more complicated.

So, for almost 150 years a penny has been the smallest denominated coin. In that time a penny has lost 95% of its value. That is, what cost 1 cent in 1857 now costs 20.5 cents. A dime back then bought what $2.05 buys now.

Here is the cost of each coin, the seigniorage for each, and the margin the Mint makes on each.

Coin	Cost	Face	Seigniorage	Margin
Dollar	10	100	90	900.00%
Quarter	4.25	25	20.75	488.24%
Dime	1.9	10	8.1	426.32%
Nickel	3.1	5	1.9	61.29%
Penny	0.8	1	0.2	25%

The conclusion is obvious. Lose the nickel and penny. Make the dime the smallest value coin, which is worth almost exactly what the half penny was worth when it was phased out.

Independent Trials, Gambling and Human Behavior

Some years ago a smart casino owner added a “tracking board” to roulette wheels. This shows the numbers that most recently “hit.” When red came up several times in a row, players increased their betting on black. After all, red can’t keep coming up. Apparently no indictments were brought down for violating the law of independent trials which says that previous spins of the wheel have absolutely no impact on future outcomes. For an interesting take on trying to win against roulette see this book: http://tinyurl.com/a9nbj

Why are we so influenced by a previous result that has no predictive value?

It seems that human beings have a deep need to search out patterns and assign causality to random events.

I wonder if this isn’t hardwired into our neurology. One of the things that living things are really good at is pattern recognition. Arguably it is our advanced pattern recognition abilities that define “humanness.” We make our way through life by identifying patterns and acting on those insights. Perhaps it’s not a surprise that we go overboard and find relationships where none actually exist.

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll provide the topic:

Was Nixon the last liberal president? If you can overlook the whole Watergate, attack on the constitution thing it is interesting to look at the record:

1: Ended Vietnam War (ok, he made it worse first, but still)
2: Established EPA
3: Began normalizing relations with "Red" China (as opposed to "fake little island government likes to call itself" China),
4: Oversaw actual desegregation of schools in the South
5: Supported the ERA (Speaking of the ladies, did you know that Pat Nixon's original name was Thelma Ryan?)
6: Signed the Clean Air Act
7: Raised taxes and established a revenue sharing system which redirected funds to the state and municipal levels.
8: Expanded Head Start program
9: Expanded Social Security benefits
10: Pressed for detente with the Soviet Union
11: Imposed a wage price freeze. Simultaneously he removed the United States from the gold standard. The freeze was replaced by complex system of wage price controls. Hardly a free market crusader!
12: Signed the ABM treaty
13: Supported affirmative action

I know the election is over, and Bush actually won this time, but....

From Colin Powell's Memior:

"I particularly condemn the way our political leaders supplied the manpower for that war. The policies - determining who would be drafted and who would be deferred, who would serve and who would escape, who would die and who would live - were an anti-democratic disgrace. I can never forgive a leadership that said in effect: These young men - poorer, less educated, less privileged - are expendable (someone described them as economic cannon fodder), but the rest are too good to risk. I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed and so many professional athletes (who were probably healthier than any of us) managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units. Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country."

Powell was a smart guy before he became W's bitch.

A Technology Whose Time has Come

I was riding home on the F Market trolley line sitting near a woman engaged in a fairly loud cell phone conversation. I realized that it was not the fact that she was sharing her conversation that bothered me. It was that the conversation was SO inane. It's one thing to arrange a meeting place, remind someone to pickup milk, or otherwise use the technology to do something useful. Conversations of the "what's up? Not much. What's doin'? I don't know, maybe get a burrito...." don't belong in the public sphere.

See the link for a solution?

http://www.cell-block-r.com/

What to do when hungry in NY

I just got back from a quick business trip to New York. Living in San Francisco we are not deprived of much in the way of food choices. However, there are a few tasty items that are better eaten East of the Hudson. Here are my favs:

Black and White cookies
Knishes (potato and kasha)
Pizza by the slice
Cannoli
Yo0hoo (available elsewhere but not in the small glass bottles)
Chuckles
Cheescake
Corned Beef with Dr. Browns Black Cherry soda (preferably at the 2nd Ave Deli)
bagels
Calzone
Biali (for an interesting book on this bagel relative by the NY Times food writer see http://tinyurl.com/afu3e)
Dunkin Donuts

Any other thoughts?

Moo?

Ok, a grown female is a mare. A grown male is a stallion, or if castrated, a gelding. Young females are fillies and young males are colts.

What is the common name of the animal? A horse (of course, of course)

Try this one:

A grown female is a cow. A grown male is a bull, or if castrated a steer. Breeds include Angus and Hereford.

What is the common name of this animal?

Amazing But True

This one is very short. How sweet it is is up to you. In the history of these United States only 2 sitting senators have been elected President. Can you name them?