Tinotopia

Arguments

So lately there’s been more discussion about whether people of the same sex should be allowed to legally marry.

The argument being advanced in favor of same-sex marriage is essentially that homosexuals are being denied equal protection of the law because of their sex.  Certain legal benefits and rights are available to John and Jane, should they present themselves to the world in a certain way.  Should John and Jim do precisely the same thing, however, they get no special consideration, benefits, or rights.

The argument most often heard against same-sex marriage is that it’s an abomination!  God (pronounced, usually, ‘Gawd’) has spoken!  Marriage is a holy sacrament, a bond between a man and a woman, patterned after Adam and Eve! Perversion! Decadence! Et cetera!

In short, the only argument I’ve heard against same-sex marriage is one of conservatism per se.

Now, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with conservatism per se.  Society and culture are very, very complex systems, and small changes in one place may have huge consequences elsewhere (e.g.: poor handling of Germany after WW I leads to bad traffic in Fairfax County, VA, eighty years later. But that’s another rant entirely.)

But very little in American society is about conservatism per se.  Especially in the last fifty years or so, the general trend is quite the opposite — in favor of novelty for its own sake (usually to our detriment).  So it seems a bit absurd to respect an argument of blind conservatism these days.

Benefits and the Cost of Marriage

Let’s look at what marriage gets you, in the United States.  There are a number of legal rights:

• Automatic Inheritance
• Automatic Housing Lease Transfer
• Burial Determination
• Immunity from Testifying Against Spouse
• Medical Decisions on Behalf of Partner
• Visitation of Partner in Hospital
• Visitation of Partner’s Children

Anyone with a good lawyer can secure all those rights without marriage, though. The real Marriage Bonanza comes in economic terms:

• Assumption of Spouse’s Pension
• Bereavement Leave
• Crime Victim’s Recovery Benefits
• Exemption from Property Tax on Partner’s Death
• Insurance Breaks
• Joint Bankruptcy
• Certain Property Rights
• Reduced Rate Memberships
• Sick Leave to Care for Partner
• Wrongful Death (Loss of Consort) Benefits
• Social Security Survivor Benefits

All of those benefits cost money.  Every single one of them.  For simplicity’s sake, we’ll just examine the last one, Social Security survivor benefits.

There’s a set of rules that determines whether or not you get this benefit.  Essentially, though, you get it if your spouse dies and you’re old enough, or if your parent dies and you’re young enough.

The Social Security Administration paid $5.1 billion in survivor’s benefits in December, 2000.

It’s impossible to know how many gay people there are in the U.S. — the census doesn’t ask — but 10% is the figure usually used by most gay-rights groups.

If we assume that gay people would marry at about the same rate as heterosexuals, and that they live as long, legal same-sex marriage would cost Social Security about $500 million a month in survivor’s benefits alone.  (It’s hard to find information on what proportion of survivor’s benefits are paid to children, which are presumably more common with heterosexual couples.  I am assuming that this is a fairly small slice of the pie.)

That $500 million a month is $6 billion a year, or $20 a year for every man, woman, and child in the country.  And that’s only for one benefit paid by one agency.

Which is ultimately why same-sex marriage is opposed so vehemently by "conservatives" in the government.  They’re never going to support anything that would cost the government billions and billions of dollars a year, particularly when there’s a thousand years of tradition backing up their "brave moral stand".

How and Why the State is Involved
(and what it has to do with religion)

So why are these benefits paid to married people at all?  Why not eliminate the marriage benefits all together, and save the country hundreds of billions of dollars a year?

Because marriage is by far the cheapest method of obtaining more taxpayers.  It’s much more economical than conquest.

The society as an organism is interested in its own survival.  Marriage and all the hooha surrounding it is society’s way of bringing new members into the society in an orderly way.  It’s such a terrible sin to have a child out of wedlock or by a Man Not Your Husband not because there’s anything wrong with procreation, but because society doesn’t know what to do with that kid.  What’s his name, to begin with?  What claim does he have on his father’s property when his father dies?  In a country with a hereditary system of government, who becomes the king?  Does the government even know he exists? Et cetera.  Possibly this would be simpler in a matriarchal society, but there you are.

This escapes a lot of people in the U.S., because we see religious matters and state matters as completely separate things.  Even the most rabid American Christian conservative sees that the church and the government are two separate things, even if he thinks the Ten Commandments should be posted on the wall at the D.M.V.  It’s important to remember that in England, whence comes our culture and legal system, the church and the state are effectively different branches of the Crown’s system of governing.  The most important laws are codified in the language of the church, and all the rest in the language of law.

The church’s sanction is much more powerful.  The most the state can do to you is lock you away for the rest of your life, or hang you by the neck until you are dead.  The church, though, can see to it that you spend eternity on fire after you die.  For a person of faith, this is a much more effective deterrent.  And you’ve got to be caught and tried to earn the law’s sanction.  Since God sees and knows everything, there’s no escaping the punishment promised by the church.

And this is why the church is so closely involved with life’s transitions.  

The Book of Common Prayer — basically, the Anglican missal — specifies that newborns must be Baptized with a number of witnesses (godparents) in attendance.  It also is quite strict on the points that no minister may refuse to Baptize a child, provided that the rules are followed, and  that any child to be Baptized must not have been previously Baptized before.

This is important because it’s the church register that determines who exists, in the eyes of the law.  If you’re Baptized twice, you’ve got two identities.  If you’re not Baptized at all, you can’t be identified and thus taxed.

Likewise, in the Order for Burial of the Dead, there are no fewer than six prayers specified to be said by the minister while "earth is cast upon the body".  The idea is that the minister, a representative of the Crown and a respectable person, is in attendance until an allegedly dead person is quite decisively buried.

So, to get back to the main point, the state subsidizes marriage between heterosexuals in order to regulate fucking, basically.  The state’s purpose for existence and means of survival is the control (or regulation, anyway) of people.  Just as the state monitors the ports so it knows who’s in the country, it has a role in the legal creation of offspring, for the same purpose. The traditions and cultural taboos surrounding marriage make the state’s job of dealing with its new small citizens or subjects much easier; the state spends less (presumably) subsidizing marriage than it would peeking in every bedroom window, thus justifying the subsidy.

All of this might be obsolete these days, now that the tax man has a computer and you’re required to show official identification for all complex transactions — thus assuring that there a person running around unknown to the state would run into serious difficulties.  Regardless, the fact remains that the state’s interest in marriage is as part of society’s larger sex-control apparatus, an apparatus designed primarily to regulate the production of children.

Deroy Murdock, in a generally well-reasoned article today in National Review Online, seems to misunderstand the church/state relationship.  He says that "Legal requirements that people get licenses before tying the knot have made gay marriage a public rather than private concern."  He fails to understand that marriage has always been a public concern, and always about the person’s (and the couple’s) relationship with the state and society, and that the church and the language of the sacrament was just the way that relationship was codified.

Modern Problems, and a Suggestion

Now that I’ve said all that about marriage being important, historically, in the regulation of sex and of the production of offspring:

The modern purpose (benefit to society) of marriage is to simplify the legal relationship between two adults.  Parents tend to die long before children, and siblings often drift apart.  There is a legitimate societal interest in the majority of adults having a legally-established relationship with another adult of similar age.  Marriage is ideal for this.  Presumably, each party (i.e. spouse) to the marriage have an interest in the well-being of the other party; the law recognizes this by, for instance, allowing one to make medical decisions for the other should he or she be incapacitated.  Unmarried people are  at the mercy of the state or of distant relatives in these kinds of situations.

Ultimately, I suppose the right solution is to adapt the institution of marriage to better serve its modern purpose: to pair people off into mutually-responsible units.  This both makes the people involved happy, and it simplifies the state’s relationship with these people, by establishing a secondary point of contact for every married person, in the event that that person turns up wandering the streets in his bathrobe, or dead, or otherwise in need of some assistance, identification, or advice. It also tends to foster relationships where each party to the marriage acts as a "sanity check" of sorts on the other. This is the nugget "marriage increases stability" argument, I believe.  It is not merely a coincidence that Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, Mark Chapman, and John Hinckley are (were) all unmarried.

The modern purpose of marriage, though, has nothing whatever to do with getting additional financial benefits from the government or anyone else.  The laws surrounding marriage should be reformed to provide only the legal short-cuts that automatically assign heirs, power of attorney, joint credit, etc., and to eliminate the mandated benefits windfall that makes up the government subsidy of marriage today.

(It shouldn’t cost you anything to get married, either, of course: if Nicole and I were married instead of just shacked-up, we’d have paid over $5000 more in federal income tax last year, paying for the marriage subsidy.  This is the main reason we’re not married.  I can’t believe that the moral conservatives on the Hill are not screaming about this — but that’s the topic of another rant.)

I believe that, under reformed marriage, very little would actually change, after a period of initial turmoil: the market would favor insurance plans that gave discounts to married couples (if it’s profitable now, it would still be profitable for the insurance companies), and employers who offered spousal benefits.  Sure, it costs money for the company to offer employees "compassionate" leave to deal with a sick or dead spouse.  It probably costs more money to have them come in to the office and screw things up because they are, understandably, not paying attention.

If those benefits were mandated by the market and not the government, though, allowing people of the same sex to marry would not be this absurd political dilemma.  Same-sex marriage could then wind up saving everyone money and trouble, and we wouldn’t have the odious spectacle of "conservative" politicians complaining about gay people wanting "special rights".

At home, my desk sits out in the middle of the room. I can’t deal with a desk that’s pushed up against the wall. I like to have something to look at, even if it’s only a wall that’s five feet away.

Anyway, the desk is in the middle of the room. One good thing about this is that it gives me ready access to all the wires dripping down behind (i.e. in front of, that is to say on the side I don’t sit on) the desk. One bad thing is that all these wires are out in plain sight. Here’s what it looks like:

You can see my toes (in socks) at the bottom of the photo.

Roughly speaking, from left to right: Toshiba DC adapter for scanner (which is an HP); 100 mb Ethernet hub; USB hub; UPS, into which are plugged: Sony DC adapter for laptop; unbranded Chinese DC adapter for Ethernet hub; unbranded Chinese DC adapter for speakers; Toshiba DC adapter for laptop; Archos DC adapter for CD-R drive; Viewsonic DC adapter for flat monitor.

This mess behind my desk is bad enough, but it’s a real nightmare when I’m travelling. I have to carry power supplies for my computer, my cell phone, my CD drive, my digital camera, and who knows what else. The exact inventory varies depending on the purpose of the trip.

It occurs to me that I am not alone. All this electronic stuff runs off DC power; if you don’t plug a brick into the wall to power your electronic device, it’s because it’s doing its power mojo inside. The only electronic items I know of that actually use the AC power itself for anything are TVs and VCRs. Everything else is purely DC.

Most manufacturers of DC-powered consumer electronics, though, seem to believe that their products are unique; so every device comes with its own power supply, one that’s usually incompatible with nearly everything else on Earth.

Radio Shack (among others) sell switchable power supples (like the one at left), that will produce any one of a number of voltages on command. These usually come with an assortment of plugs, one of which will probably fit the thing you need to power.

The biggest problem with these, though, is that you can’t power more than one thing at a time. I often need to charge my cell phone while I’m using the computer, or my computer and CD drive, or even all three at the same time.

The adapter shown above will not power most laptops, which usually like to see around 16 volts. Radio Shack sells a power supply that will power a laptop, but it’s a completely different animal, and comes with different plugs (so it won’t also recharge your cell phone, for instance).

And, adding insult to injury, these switchable power supplies are almost always of the very cheapest manufacture. There’s not much to the things, electronically speaking, so they’re pretty reliable nevertheless. But the cables are incredibly cheap — and pretty long — and they will break before too long.

I’ve written about this before, and even suggested a possible solution. Unfortunately, that solution has at its base the assumption that I am the Absolute Monarch of The World. Since we are still living in the interregnum, I propose another solution, to be used until I can force DC power supply manufacturers to bend to my will.

This solution is a modular DC power system, meant to be used behind a desk, on the road, or wherever it’s needed. It doesn’t use any radical new technology, it just repackages existing technology in a more useful and convenient form. Here’s an illustration:

The whole thing is about the size of a largish laptop power supply of current vintage.

There are a few basic components:

1. AC plug. Available in all major world standards. When you leave the country, you shouldn’t need to use those clumsy adapters that are always falling out of the wall.

2. AC cord. Available in a number of lengths, to suit your needs. Possibly there should even be an automatically-rewinding version for tidy packing.

3. AC/DC adaptor. The heart of the system, it accepts AC input on one side, offers it on the other, and outputs DC power in between. You can thus plug it directly into the power cord (see 16V module above), or you can plug it into another AC/DC adaptor (like the 3.6V and 12V modules in the drawing). The drawing shows three adaptors plugged together, but in practice the number that you could connect would be effectively limited only by the space you have available (AC/DC adaptors don’t use enough power, generally, for electrical limitations to be much of a problem). Most of the adaptors would probably have receptacles for two DC cords, should the user have two devices that use the same voltage.

4. DC cord. This is standard across the range, and available in a number of lengths. You might want a three-meter cord for powering your laptop while you sit on the sofa, but only a 10cm cord for charging your cell phone, since it wouldn’t be subject to tangling.

5. DC plugs. DC plugs would be available for everything under the sun, because this is where the modular power system meets the devices made by any number of manufacturers. Since some manufacturers will perversely use impossible-to-duplicate or very rare connectors, there would be a kit that would allow the end user to connect any DC plug to the system without too much trouble.

The main point here is that everything unplugs from everything else. This makes packing a lot simpler, and it allows the user to customize the lengths of the cords to the particular purpose — cutting down on tangling and bulk.

And the modular design lends itself to other uses, too! A UPS module (much larger, of course, to hold batteries) could hold a number of DC modules, eliminating the tangle of AC cords. An inverter module with a cigarette lighter plug on it would allow the things to be used in cars, boats, and RVs.

The main market, though, would definitely be the traveller who wanted to cut down on bulk and tangles, while maximizing convenience.

Near where I live, there’s this surreal hair-cutting establishment.

Actually, perhaps I should take a step back. Very near where I live, there’s this plaza that wraps around an arm of a little man-made lake. This is Washington Plaza, the architectural centerpiece of Reston when it was built back in 1962.

There are some restaurants, a bookstore, a pharmacy, and about five hair-cutting establishments in or near the plaza. Some residences open onto the plaza, and some of these — the ones nearer to the center of things — have been partially or totally converted into commercial space.

In one of these is a surreal hair-cutting establishment. It caters only to men, which may explain some of the surreality of it; this kind of place died out in the USA, for the most part, a number of years ago.

The whole place is decorated — if that’s not too strong a word — in mid-1970s faux-saloon style. I couldn’t quite say at the moment whether there are any sham WANTED posters on the wall printed with liberal use of Old West typefaces, but it certainly feels like there are.

Definitely on the walls are all sorts of panoramic photographs of various barbers’ conventions from the 1960s and 1970s, all held in large Manhattan hotels. The photographs are enormous group shots, usually taken from a balcony, of an entire ballroom full of people seated for dinner. Most of the men in the photos have unfortunate moustaches or side-whiskers, or both.

There are two rooms: a waiting room, and a cutting room. Both rooms have old commercial linoleum-tile floors and ceilings stained dark from tobacco smoke. The waiting room contains, in addition to the possibly non-existent WANTED posters: two ancient sofas, a huge coffee table covered with well-thumbed magazines and huge ashtrays, a fairly nice antique washstand that supports a TV and that serves as the establishment’s cash drawer, and one of those giant oval rugs that’s more like a spiral of soft(ish) rope than anything else. The overall effect is of being in someone’s ne’er-do-well uncle’s living room circa 1978. This impression is not lessened by the fact that you enter from the sidewalk through a sliding glass door.

The cutting room contains four hair-cutting stations, each with a chair, basin, mirror, etc. Only two of them appear to have been in use in the last twenty years. All of the basins are very, very ugly — they’re proper hair-washing basins, with the cutout for your neck and all, but other than that they are seashell-shaped, and made out of some kind of cookies-and-cream porcelain that must have been ugly even when they were new. Now, they’re awful. The basins at the two stations that are not in use are cracked. The other two basins are also cracked, but not as badly. The walls of the cutting room are covered with the panoramic group shots (see above), as well as a portrait of Robert E. Lee, which has a Confederate battle flag draped over it.

Two people work in this gem of a place. One, presumably the owner of the photos, the attendee of those conventions, the fan of General Lee, and the seeming owner of the shop, has an unfortunate moustache and a huge paunch, and looks to be about 50 years old. The other seems to be about 80 years old, allegedly speaks no English, and only does "razor cuts". He appears to have some sort of age-related mental debility. If you walk into the shop and do not assert yourself, your hair will be cut by the man with the paunch and the facial hair. He will bully "Frenchie" (as he calls the other guy) away from you and back to the television (which shows nothing but soap operas).

(In case you don’t believe any of this, please examine this photo I found on someone else’s website.)

The last time I was there, Frenchie was pushed out of the way and I sat down to wait for the other guy. He was already with a customer.

Frenchie looked out the window for a while, then came in to watch some TV, and then went back to the window. Sideburn-man and his customer, a skinny little Indian guy wearing an out-of-style golf shirt, came out of the cutting room. Sideburns went through the process of wrenching open the drawer under the TV (it’s an antique washstand, remember: the drawer doesn’t slide very easily), gave the guy change, and told me he’d be ready in a couple of minutes.

He swept up the Indian guy’s hair with a broom, put his combs back in the Barbicide, and did all those other post-customer things that barbers do. He then took out an enormous Meerschaum pipe, sat down in one of the spare barber’s chairs, and started getting ready to smoke.

When I say this was an enormous pipe, I’m not kidding. This is the kind of pipe that Svejk is pictured smoking in Josef Lada’s illustrations.

I’d never in my life seen anyone smoke one of these before, not even in Bavaria. He packed it full of the most foul-smelling tobacco I’ve ever come across, and lit it with a single match.

After he was lit, he said he was ready for me. He proceeded to cut my hair while smoking that pipe. Since both his hands were occupied with the hair-cutting, he would talk while holding it between his teeth. This resulted in the pipe bouncing up and down, spewing smoke and embers all over the place. It was also impossible to understand what he was saying, but that wasn’t a problem because I wasn’t listening anyway; I was too busy trying to keep hot coals from burning through the cape.

In good time he finished, and it was time to jiggle out the till drawer again in the other room. When we went out there, we found the skinny Indian guy coming back through the sliding-glass door with a handful of flyers. All the while looking at his feet, he handed one each to me, Mr. Pipe, and Frenchie. He mumbled something at us, but it was unintelligible. I smiled broadly at him, tipped Pipe man, and left.

So.

All of that was just to establish the right mood, to let you know the background, to allow you to better understand the situation I was in when I was handed this flyer.

I was handed this flyer in early 2001. It’s dated April 1998, says it’s "Issue 2", and was established in 1992. It is obviously not published with any great frequency.

The basic premise of it seems to be that the skinny Indian guy (whose name might be Jacob Coipuram) wants donations to build this Jesus Nagar, or Jesus City, on 1/2 acre in India.

(Nagar does not precisely mean city. I don’t think there is an exact equivalent in English. It means something closer to community.)

Jacob isn’t pushy, though. The flyer explains that the funding will be according to "God’s provisions" and that it will be completed in "God’s planning time". I suppose you should just read the flyer:

And people say that nothing interesting happens in the suburbs. It’s hard to have this bizarre a morning in New York.

Most of my banking activity is conducted at a distance. My salary, royalty checks, payouts from brokers, etc. are all deposited directly; my accountant pays the bills; and I get cash from ATMs.

So it was an unusual experience the other day when I went to the bank in person. I needed a few thousand dollars in cash or its equivalent — money orders or cashier’s checks — to buy a car.

My day-to-day accounts are at Suntrust bank, because they haven’t egregiously pissed me off yet, and because they have a branch near my house.

That branch’s lobby was closed when I needed my money, and they didn’t have the ability to generate cashier’s checks from the drive-up, so I was directed to a Suntrust counter in a nearby Safeway.

The bank-in-the-grocery-store is something that I thought was dying. The concept was popular in the 1970s, when banks were rarely open past 3 pm; now, there’s less need for it. All over the country, but especially (it seems to me) in the Washington area, banks are starting to get arrogant again, and the supermarket mini-branch is making a comeback.

The Safeway branch I went to was staffed by two teenage girls, both wearing generic mall casual clothes: jeans and shirts from Express or The Gap or some such store. One girl had an unfortunate case of painful-looking acne.

The girl without the acne was already with a customer, so I drew acne-girl. She put aside her calculus homework (literally), and aksed when I needed.

I told her that I needed a cashier’s check or money order, whichever would cost me less. As it turned out, I needed a money order, because I didn’t have with me the name of the person from whom I would actually be buying the car.

So I handed over my driver’s license and my bank card. It took a while, but eventually she figured out who I was, and how much money I had in my account.

Trouble was, she didn’t know how to generate a money order. Neither did the other girl. The branch manager, who had until this time been hidden somewhere, popped out and started assisting. She was obviously a banking professional, but it had been a while since she’d worked as a teller, so the process was still bumpy.

So bumpy that at one point I asked them whether they had the entire amount in cash. They didn’t, and they seemed a bit surprised at the notion. That a bank branch would have a few thousand dollars on hand — we’re talking about an amount that you could easily fit into your pocket, even in $20 bills — was, apparently, unthinkable to them.

Eventually, I got three money orders (there’s an upper limit on the amount of an individual money order, a limit that was determined with certainty only when the computer refused to generate one with of greater denomination), and a few hundred dollars in $20 bills.

(When buying a car from an individual, always plan to pay part of the price in cash, in small bills. If you have a cashier’s check for $5000 in your pocket, it’s going to be a lot harder to pay $4500 if you discover that the tires are bald.)

The fifteen $20 bills were counted out by the teenage girl. She had to restart once, because she was momentarily unclear on what came after $180 ($200) — looks like she needed more math and less calculus. She had a hard time counting the bills, and they wound up in a big pile, not a neat stack, on top of the counter.

Oh, yeah, and the counter was entirely at eye-level. In the past, the tellers’ windows were designed for privacy, so the other people in the bank couldn’t see what you were doing. The idea is that if it’s widely known that you’ve got $5000 in your pocket, you are more likely to be a target for robbery.

At this Safeway branch, though, all the money goes over the top, and everyone nearby can hear the teller count out the cash. The two people in line behind me (all of this took a while), the customer at the other window, and the people in line behind him all knew that I was walking away with several thousand dollars in cash or a cash equivalent.

Now, I don’t object to teenagers working, or even to them working in banks. I realize that Suntrust has to maximize their profit, and so they have to get the cheapest labor they can. And for the teenagers, working in a bank, even for lousy wages, is better than working at McDonald’s.

But I object to the fact that Suntrust is now failing to provide professional care for my money. Banks have long built fancy buildings, solid buildings, to communicate to their customers that the bank is trustworthy, that it is going to take good care of the assets entrusted to it.

The Suntrust counter at the Safeway continues this architectural tradition: while most of the store is utilitarian and lit with fluorescent lights, the bank area has a lot of wood paneling, (fake) marble, carpet, fancy lighting, etc. But it’s all meaningless when the teller is wearing a T-shirt and doesn’t know how to count money.

I see this, as I see a lot of things recently, as a symptom of the ongoing death of the middle class in America. Rich people still get professional bankers, competent and dressed in wool, to count their money out to them. But the poor have long endured unprofessional bankers, in the person of clerks at the yellow-signed check-cashing shop/Western Union bureau in the ghetto.

And now, at least after 3 p.m. on a weekday, and at least if you’re a Suntrust customer, this is the best banking service available in Reston, Virginia, a high-midle-class suburb in the wealthiest county in the United States.

Part of this povertization of the middle-class experience is due to the fact that what were once almost exclusively middle-class experiences are now accessible to the lower-middle-class and to the poor.

When the Pennsylvania Turnpike was young, the service area restaurants along the way were Howard Johnson’s, with table service, real plates and cutlery, and white tablecloths. Now, they’re generally Sbarro or McDonald’s, almost invariably filthy.

In the early days, driving across Pennsylvania was something the middle-class did. The poor would take the train, if they went at all; they wouldn’t tend to own cars. Now, the middle-class is more likely to fly than to deal with that fairly arduous drive.

The poor experience hasn’t really moved up the ladder to supplant the old middle-class experience, though; rather, the middle-class experience that used to mean white tablecloths and table service has been pulled down, to somewhere halfway between the old poor experience and the old middle-class experience, and lodged there, as the only option in between the true grinding poverty of government assistance and the expensive world of the wealthy.

It’s possible to chalk much of this up to the Faith-Popcorn-BS-"cocooning" trend: cinemas have gone downhill because the middle class, with all the money, is at home watching DVDs; going to a restaurant is a miserable experience because the middle-class is going to Williams-Sonoma and creating their own dining experience at home.

More likely, the cocooning trend is a reaction of the middle class to the decline of their public options. The middle class is not sitting at home at night, counting out money for each other.

And the problem is this: The United States’ ease of social mobility is a crucial component of the culture that has resulted in so much entreprenurial success in this country. Fifty years ago, there was a large difference between the day-to-day experience of someone with a household income (in 2001 dollars) of $20,000 and someone with $90,000. Today, this isn’t so true. The $90,000 household can just go to Burger King more often. The $20,000 family is not going to strive as hard for advancement, because unless they become fantastically wealthy, their lives aren’t going to change that much.

UPDATE: A reader has informed me that the PCGA-AC5N is available in the USA through their cleverly-hidden service parts website. As of 8 April 2001, it’s on this page, listed as the "PCGA-C5N", a typo that means that this page will never come up on a search for "PCGA-AC5N" (which is the model number that actually appears on the thing).

Functionally-identical power supplies are also available from Laptops for Less in the USA for $65, or The Power Up Shop in the UK for €88.39 including tax and free shipping anywhere in the EU.

This means, of course, that nearly everything else on this page is obsolete; I am leaving it up for historical purposes, though, because I believe that most of the points here are still valid.

(The electronic-looking thing behind the computer and to the right is the guts of a PCGA-AC5N.)

I have, among other computers, a Sony Vaio PCG-N505VX laptop. It’s a great computer in general, but it’s powered by the dreaded PCGA-AC5N.

The PCGA-AC5N is an AC adapter; you plug it into the wall on one end and into the computer on the other. All laptop computers have something of the sort (except some older Toshibas, but we’ll ignore that for the time being).

The adapter that came with this computer is broken; it stopped working when the computer was about 91 days old (Sony computers, unlike nearly all others, have 90-day warranties). No problem, right? I just go down to Radio Shack or get on the web and order a new one.

Not so fast. Sony has long been enamored of creating their own standards for connectors (the mini-phono jack on a Walkman was an early ‘innovation’ of theirs; these used to be called Sony plugs, and they used to use them on everything, including places, like the audio-out or -in on VCRs, where everyone else used a different standard, and where the little tiny plug didn’t really offer any advantages).

The DC connector on the adapter is pictured at right. Unless you own one of these computers, you’ve never seen anything like it. It’s a little smaller than an ordinary coaxial DC plug, and a hell of a lot more fragile.

What’s more, it’s patented (I am told) by Sony. While Sony has decided that this plug is not the way of the future (their current computers use more normal plugs), and that (apparently) it’s not in their interest to manufacture these power supplies any more, they also refuse, it seems, to let anyone else manufacture them. (I was told this by someone at Digital House Communications, who generally seem like a good outfit despite their practice of advertising via Usenet spam. They offered to fit my old plug onto a new power supply, though — but hell, I can do that myself.)

After being told that, I called everyone I could find who listed the thing on their website. Nobody had them in stock (contrary to what their websites said). I even called a few outfits in the UK. No dice. Nobody in the USA or Britain had one. The Sony USA on-line shopping website doesn’t even list the thing. I conclude that Sony has stopped making them.

(I wound up borrowing another PCGA-AC5N from a friend who had a spare. I’d like to have my own, though, and I’m sure the friend would like his spare back.)

Which means that if you need a replacement power supply for this computer, you’re SOL. The best you can do is find another 16 volt DC power supply and graft the original plug onto it. (Good luck finding a 16V power supply; Radio Shack doesn’t stock them, except for a huge variable-voltage one that costs the earth.) I have cobbled one together from a Toshiba laptop power supply, and it works fine. I have a lot of spare Toshiba laptop power supplies, and I’ve attached a standard coaxial DC jack to the wires that formerly terminated inside the power supply case. The Toshiba power supply then plugs into that, giving me a very long DC power cable with a bolus of electrical tape in the middle. This powers the computer, but it certainly isn’t pretty.

I thought of putting a standard coaxial power jack in the computer (so I could use just about any power supply). Then I thought better of it; there’s just not a lot of room:

The jack sits just under the bottom row on the keyboard, and in a pretty visible location. (For a laugh, compare the relative sizes of the power connector, IEEE-1394 connector, and USB connector in that photo.) Replacing the jack would require screwing around with that panel, not to mention managing to fit the back of the thing into the fairly crowded case.

Note (13 August 2001): I used to have some information here about the PCGA-AC16V2. A Japanese website called VAIOethics — easily the best all-Vaio resource out there — had a page (with photos, no less) that hinted that the PCGA-AC16V2 might be effectively interchangeable with the AC5N. Actually, it might have more than hinted at this. My Japanese ability is terrible, and everything in that language only hints at information to me.

While I was writing this up, the page there with this information disappeared. I had a copy of VAIOethics’ photo of the AC16V2 and AC5N side-by-side, and I put it on this page.

I recently got e-mail from the guy who runs that website, complaining that I’d used his picture without permission. I apologized and asked whether I could continue to use it, and he refused, puffing himself up with moral indignation and citing the fact that it says (with some justification, I think) "I hate Sony" at the top of this page. Considering the amount of money I’ve given to Sony over the years, I think I could stand to be on the receiving end of that kind of hatred.

Whatever.

If you’d like to see the picture and the information, it now seems to have moved here. You can get a fairly bad English machine translation here.

The AC16V2 and the AC5N have the same electrical characteristics (actually there’s about a 5% difference in the quoted output, but if you know anything about these doodads you know their output varies by a hell of a lot more than 5% from what’s written on the label anyway), and the AC16V2 in the photo at VAIOethics (the 16V2 is on the left) has the same oddball plug as the 5N.

But the page for the thing on the Sony USA website — taht link is now defunct, of course — hints that the AC16V2 (and the Picturebook) changed designs in fall of 2000, though, so it’s possible that there are two entirely different things running around calling themselves AC16V2s. (There’s also an AC16V1 available; it looks to be exactly the same thing, but in purple and silver instead of charcoal gray.)

The whole experience has certainly put me off buying another Sony laptop, despite the fact that I’m completely happy with it, otherwise. I think in the future that I’ll look for something with the same characteristics (in this case, extreme portability) from a company that focuses on manufacturing computers, not consumer electronics. This $2000 machine is on the verge of uselessness because of a $0.25 piece of plastic that Sony isn’t making (or at least selling — it’s not available on Sony’s website, so even if they still make it, they’re falling down on the job) any more. I don’t expect the same kind of support for a computer from Sony that I do from, say, Toshiba or IBM, but this is absurd. If Sony wants to be taken at all seriously in the computer business, they need to better understand how the business needs to work. Just creating neat machines (which they do) isn’t enough.

Sony product pages (in Japanese):

PCGA-AC5N

PCGA-AC16V1

PCGA-AC16V2

Sony seems to sell all of these in Japan; at least they list prices for them all.

Sony Notebook Accessory Compatibility Chart

Does not list the N505VX.