I can’t imagine why men might not be nice to this person.
Some of you might say that this kind of thing just evens the score for vulgar mudflaps; but that only works if you accept that the kind of university-educated women who sport these bumper stickers are on the same level, culturally, as the dumber sort of truck driver.
The Daily is lousy. I’m not talking about the technology (which is lousy, and which has been criticized elsewhere anyway); I’m not sure whether I should cut them a break there, but I will, because it’s early days. I’m talking, rather, about the journalism, the writing and editing: it’s bad. As near as I can tell, the whole thing is shallow fluff.
It’s a newspaper for people who aren’t particularly interested, which raises the question: who the hell is supposed to read this thing? If you’re not particularly interested in the news, you’re not going to pay $1 a week for this; and if you are particularly interested in the news, you’re really not going to pay $1 a week for this.
They do know one thing about all their readers: every one of them has an iPad. So there’s a whole bunch of things like ‘Judd Apatow: what’s on his iPad’ and ‘What I Love On My iPad’ with Nolan Gould, who is a child actor.
Mr. Gould likes, among other things, Angry Birds and Notebooks. About Notebooks, he says
I’ve got a writing app where you can write and make books and stuff on it. Maybe I’ll write a book — I like to write stories. A lot of the time when I’m traveling, I come up with a good idea and need to write it down.
The copy informs us that Mr. Gould is a member of Mensa. News you can use.
But that’s not all. The comments are lousy, there’s a full-page story about Groundhog Day that consisted of a giant photo of a groundhog, and seventy-three words, including the headline and byline. This paragraph is over half the length of the entire Groundhog Day ‘story’.
The ‘opinion’ section is small, which is probably wise given that opinions are not what you’d call in short supply on the Internet. But there is room in there for a column where Michael Maiello laments how shallow and ignorant the American public are — and while doing so, he manages to get in a swipe or two at Sarah Palin. How original and insightful.
In the end, though, these are all quibbles. The biggest problem with The Daily is that there’s just not much information there. One of the lead stories today is about the snowstorm that struck much of the country yesterday. This features a movie that includes a scene of what looks like a freeway filled with abandoned cars.
Nowhere in the story or in the movie do they say where this is. The story hints that it might be in Chicago — in which case: where in Chicago? The Daily doesn’t tell us. The USA Today iPad app works better, provides far more information, and doesn’t come with a subscription charge. The Professional Journalism Types working for Rupert Murdoch had exactly the same access to the USA Today app that I do, and yet they came up with this thing as their higher-priced competition.
Truly, the future of journalism.
Dramatis Personae: TINO, NICOLE, and a GENIUS.
An Apple Store. TINO and NICOLE approach the GENIUS, behind some kind of bar. TINO is carrying a laptop computer in one hand and a battery for same in the other. The GENIUS is — I am not kidding — wearing a neckbeard and a black fedora that’s a little too small for him.
TINO: Hello, my good man, this battery is defective: look how it’s bulging!
GENIUS: Hmm.
GENIUS looks at the battery and then starts typing away, entering the computer’s serial number into another, functional computer.
GENIUS: Ah, here’s your problem, there. This battery, it’s out of warranty. It’s over a year old. You’ll need to buy a new one.
TINO: When was it sold?
GENIUS: Yeah, well, it was sold in November of 2008, that was. The warranty on the computer is for three years, but the warranty on the battery is only for a year. It’s pining for the fjords. It’s nineteen months old. Now, if you’d bought AppleCare…
TINO: I don’t buy AppleCare because extended warranties are a sucker bet, and I buy a new computer every three years anyway. And this battery isn’t worn out from use; it has failed because of a manufacturing defect. It won’t even fit in the computer because it’s so bulgy.
GENIUS: It’s designed to do that!
TINO: It’s not designed to fail.
GENIUS: No, it’s designed to bulge like that to prevent a fire! Beautiful plumage!
TINO: Be that as it may, it’s nevertheless an ex-battery, and it’s an ex-battery because of a manufacturing defect.
GENIUS: You must have overcharged it!
TINO: I don’t think so, and in any case part of the reason the thing costs $129 is because of all the fancy circuitry in it to prevent overcharging, premature battery failure, and the ignition of fires. If it’s been overcharged, that’s still because the battery is defective.
GENIUS: It’s just resting!
TINO: It’s not bleeding resting!
TINO leaves, because he fears that if he doesn’t, his next action will be to leap across the genius bar and beat GENIUS around the head and neck with an iPad.
TINO sits on a bench in the mall and reads RSS feeds.
Something happens inside the store. Five minutes pass. NICOLE comes out of the Apple Store carrying her laptop bag, saying that they replaced the battery under warranty.
Curtain.
In short, Apple replaced the battery under warranty. They did not specifically need to do this; since batteries are wearing parts, they’re only warranted for a year. But there’s a big difference between a battery that’s failed because of use, and a battery that’s failed because of a defect. Apple has had a lot of problems with defective batteries.
In this case, there was a way for the GENIUS to replace the battery on Apple’s dime. Possibly an unpublicized extended warranty on these batteries, because they’re known for high rates of failure.
But he didn’t do that right away. Things could have gone like this:
TINO: Here’s a failed battery, my good man!
GENIUS: You know, this thing is technically out of warranty, but I’m going to replace it anyway, because it’s defective and because Apple isn’t about trying to nickel-and-dime you to death!
TINO: Bully! Apple always has your back! Quality and Service, that’s the thing!
Note that the end result of this — us getting a battery — would have been exactly the same. But the way things actually unfolded, Apple spent the money replacing that battery while making us feel like they were our adversaries. Had the guy replaced the battery without first telling us to buy a new one, and without first telling us that this was our fault, he could have made us see Apple as an ally. Instead, this guy’s approach resulted in the situation being one of Tino & Nicole vs. Apple and their dodgy OEMs.
From a New York Times story about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which now own over 160,000 houses through foreclosure:
Fannie asks contractors to mow lawns twice a month during the summer, and pays them $80 each time. That’s a monthly grass bill of more than $10 million.
Don’t you think that you’d be able to get a lawn mowed for less than $80, particularly when you’re contracting to have them mowed in bulk? And when nobody is going to be particularly picky about the job you’re doing, as long as the lawn actually gets mowed?
A story in the Washington Post says that banks should follow a policy of redlining — that is, not making loans to minorities.
Of course, it doesn’t come right out and say that, but that appears to be the inescapable conclusion. It appears that members of minority groups don’t pay their mortgages back at the same rate as whites, regardless of income level.
Minority homeowners have been disproportionately affected by the foreclosure crisis and stand to lose homes at a faster pace than white borrowers in the future, according to a report released Friday by a nonprofit research group.
[...] High-income black borrowers, for example, were 80 percent more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure than their white counterparts, while Latino borrowers were 90 percent more likely.
Now, I’d expect minorities to default on their obligations more often than whites. On average, members of minority groups are poorer than whites. The very biggest problem with being poor is that a minor misfortune — say, a car breaking down — can turn into a major disaster pretty quickly. I’d be surprised if foreclosure rates for white and blacks of comparable financial means weren’t similar.
But here we’re told that even ‘high-income’ minority borrowers don’t pay back their loans at the same rate as white people.
Housing experts have pointed to a variety of factors to explain the disparity, including higher unemployment rates in minority communities and traditionally fewer financial resources for black and Latino borrowers to fall back on.
Meaning: they’re poorer. But remember, higher-income minorities are actually more likely to default than their poorer cousins from the same minority groups. So this can’t be it.
One possibility that’s not addressed in the story at all is that members of minority groups tend to buy property in bad neighborhoods at a greater rate than whites. When real-estate values fall, they fall first and fastest in the ghetto-adjacent areas, leaving a lot of the mortgagees there under water on their loans. People of all colors are far more likely to stop paying their notes when the outstanding balance exceeds any plausible value of the property.
There are some quotes in the article that explain the problem by means of the chicken and the egg:
“I think it reflects that minority borrowers were targeted by the sellers of these [risky] mortgages,” said Barry Zigas, director of housing and credit policy at the Consumer Federation of America.
Yeah, well, when you’re poor, it’s riskier to lend you money, so you get a riskier mortgage. And as there’s a headline in the Post here, atop this very story, saying ‘Minorities hit harder by foreclosure crisis’ — meaning ‘People who lent to minorities hit harder by deadbeats not making their payments’ — it would seem that the lenders offering risky mortgages to these people knew exactly what they were doing.
Research has shown that minority borrowers were more likely to receive subprime loans during the housing boom even if they had credit scores, incomes and loan sizes similar to those of whites. Some housing experts say that minority borrowers received higher rates on subprime loans compared with similarly situated white borrowers, resulting in higher monthly payments and quicker defaults.
Though, since nobody is forced to accept a certain loan, this paragraph really just says ‘Minorities are so stupid that they take worse loan terms than they could get’. That’s a rather shocking thing to read in a left-wing paper like the Washington Post, which is why they couch it in the passive voice and put the blame on the lenders.
Of course, had the lenders not made loans to the minorities, this would have been because of racism.
The caption on this photo from the June 3 Warren Sentinel reads:
On Friday, May 28, checkpoints were held on East Criser Road, West Strasburg Road and Commerce Avenue. The Commerce Avenue checkpoint was a part of the 522 Blitz for the 2010 Click it or Ticket campaign.
“We conducted three separate checkpions [sic] and screened a total of 1000 cars. We had three suspended drivers, three child restraint violations and two seat belt violations overall,” said Traffic Enforcement Officer Don Orye.
Now certainly some of the people approaching this mess weren’t wearing their seatbelts, and they put them on before being checkpointed. And some people saw this and used an alternate route all together.
But since this involves 1000 cars and finding a total of eight violations — .008 of the cars, that is, or .08% — you’d think the appropriate headline would be ‘Warren Countians and Front Royalty Are Exceptionally Law-Abiding’ or possibly ‘Tax Money Down The Tubes As Police Inconvenience Thousands To Detect Eight Minor Violations’.
Mind you, if you consider that the real point here was to detect seat-belt violations, the success rate was only .002. But if you believe that, you have to ask how they caught the ‘suspended drivers’. Obviously this ‘seat-belt checkpoint’ involved demanding to see at least some fraction of drivers’ licenses.
Trolling my St. Louis news feeds, I came across this:
According to Missouri Department of Transportaion (MoDOT), all southbound lanes of Interstate 55 are closed at Meramec Bottom Road. It is estimated that the highway will be opened by 10 a.m.
Emergency crews are currently blocking all southbound lanes, and multiple vehicles are stopped in the road. According to Missouri State Highway Patrol officials, there was accident with minor injuries.
For an accident with minor injuries, they close the Interstate. Nothing must be allowed to inconvenience the officials!
The timestamp on the traffic camera shows 9:10 a.m., and there’s a tow truck already there loading a car; this means that an accident with minor injuries means closing the Interstate for at least an hour.
A proposal to replace shoeboxes. The story rubs me the wrong way almost immediately.
Product packaging is one of consumerism’s most toxic byproducts — transient, temporary, and lacking the vaguely utilitarian excuse for existence that the product it contains can claim.
Yes, I suppose that shoes are vaguely utilitarian. I mean, if you’re that kind of person. Sigh!
Christ, you can almost smell the contempt from here.
This is a variant, I think, of the activist’s credo (‘everyone is fucked but me’). The writer isn’t really saying that e.g. shoes are only ‘vaguely utilitarian’; she’s thinking of all those other things. Packaging for TVs, for instance, that are used to watch circus-freak reality shows rather than BBC Four. Packaging for things that the great unwashed not-me wants.
The design:
According to the story:
The innovative structure replaces both the shoe box and the shopping bag, and requires 65% less cardboard than a traditional box thanks to a carbon structure die-cut from a single flat piece of material that requires no additional printing, assembly, lamination, stapling or glueing. Rather than woven, the bag portion is stitched with heat, which means less work and waste.
Oh, joy, the carbon structure — which I think means ‘cardboard’; the word ‘carbon’ has a pretty definite meaning, but these days it’s standing in for all kinds of things — has no polymers and no glueing. And you are left with a ‘clever little bag’ that conveniently serves as an advertising medium.
Packaging should be reduced wherever possible; you’re not going to find too many people, of any political stripe, who think that anything should be over-packaged. But what’s on display here is a special kind of idiocy, because it entirely ignores the fact that a shoe box, as packaging goes, is almost perfectly recyclable. How do you recycle a shoe box? You put something else in it. There are whole chains of stores dedicated largely to selling what amount to shoe boxes without shoes in them because there are people who need more boxes than they need shoes.
Actual smart packaging redesign would approach the shoe box by trying to figure out how to make it even more reusable. Make it stronger than it strictly needs to be to hold shoes; make it better looking; make it easy to label the end of it. Boxes for kids’ should be able to be easily turned into little dollhouses, or Battle-Smurf fortresses, depending on taste.
At the cigar store, they sell empty cigar boxes to people who don’t like stogies but who do have some use for the boxes. Very few cigar boxes make it into the waste stream, because they’re so damned useful for other things. That is the way to improve packaging: by making it better for re-use.
A genuine attempt to reduce the amount of packaging that winds up in landfills would approach the problem from that perspective. Approaches that start off by moaning about ‘consumerism’, though, seem always to tend to be more about self-aggrandizement by way of Grands Projets than about actually making a difference.
A headline on the Washington Post website:
Plan to fight Metro suicides delayed
The picture this calls to mind is of a despondent guy standing on a platform while Metro cops repeatedly slug him with their fists. The question: he’s despondent; would he fight back? And if he doesn’t fight back, is this a ‘fight’ or just a guy getting a shit beat out of him?
Steve Chapman at Reason writes:
Isaac Newton formulated three laws of motion, No. 3 being: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. If he were still around, he’d propose a fourth: For every action, there is an unequal and opposite overreaction.
[...]
Last week, a 17-year-old knucklehead exposed his idiocy to the world by venturing onto the field at a Philadelphia Phillies game and running around waving a towel. When a pursuing policeman got weary of the chase, he pulled out his Taser and shot the kid.
For that, the officer won praise from players, sportscasters, and city police commissioner Charles Ramsey, who said the cop “acted appropriately. I support him 100 percent.” The cop was in line with department policy, Ramsey said, because “he was attempting to make an arrest and the male was attempting to flee.”
The recommendations from the Taser company themselves, as well as from something called the Police Executive Research Forum says that people should only be zapped if they are dangerous, but I’m sure that nobody is surprised to hear that the officer in question ‘acted appropriately’. No matter what havoc police wreak, they are always found, after the fact, in an investigation that’s secret because it’s a ‘personnel matter’, to have ‘followed appropriate procedures’. The procedures that, appropriately followed, apparently produce results that the public doesn’t think make sense are, of course, never questioned.
I was reminded of all of this by a traffic report I heard while driving around this morning; a couple blocks of 6th St. NW in Washington is closed ‘due to police activity’. This is troubling for a couple of reasons.
First, because in these cases you rarely hear actual information about what’s going on. DDOT says on Twitter that it’s for a ‘suspicious package’. You don’t need to know this to make decisions about your route, but hearing reports of ‘police activity’ just kind of creeps me out. ‘Police business, citizen. Nothing to see here.’ The word ‘citizen’ would be said here with a sneer; it’s not a term of respect. Civis Americanus sum, which, for the benefit of those whose Latin is rusty, these days increasingly means something like ‘Shut up and go away’.
Second, ‘police activity’ always trumps everything else, without any need for further justification. In the case of a ‘suspicious package’, shutting down two blocks of a significant thoroughfare might be the right action; if it’s a bomb and it explodes, people will complain that the cops didn’t shut down enough streets. The real problem is that the threshold for what counts as ‘suspicious’ is ridiculously low. What’s a suspicious package? Any package. Or any bag of old tube socks. You’re not allowed to question this reasoning.
‘Police activity’ of the kind that shuts down roads, though, usually means a collision; sometimes they’ll call this a ‘police investigation’ on the radio. These situations are particularly galling; take a few pictures, and then pick up the bodies and shove the wrecked cars off the road. What’s there to investigate? Two or more cars ran into one another. One of the drivers is probably more at fault than the other; but determining this to 99% confidence does not justify shutting down half the lanes on the Interstate (and creating unsafe traffic for miles around; remember that the official justification for draconian enforcement of traffic laws is to enhance safety) for an hour.
This is no concern of the police and of the traffic authorities, though; they are already where they need to be, and if they’re not, they have sirens and flashing lights. All those people backed up in traffic? Presumably they’ve got some business of their own to attend to, but as it’s non-police business, how important can it possibly be?
And this same kind of idiocy extends to the ‘suspicious package’ business. The traffic report of 6th Street being closed has a timestamp of 8:35 a.m. on it, so the road was closed some time prior to that: let’s be generous and say 8:30. It’s currently 10 a.m., so traffic in downtown Washington has been screwed up for an hour and a half, so far.
Here’s the solution: build a deformable, high-density box — kevlar lined with ferroconcrete lined with lead lined with more kevlar, maybe — with a big hole on one side, and a big hook on the opposite side. Outfit the inside of this box with TV cameras and lights and robot arms. Put this box on the back of a flatbed truck, and equip the flatbed truck with police lights and a siren and a small crane. This truck is a standard item, used for delivering building supplies. Park this thing in a police garage.
When a ‘suspicious package’ is found, deploy the truck to the scene (with a siren and lights, you can get between any two points in DC in 20 minutes at the most), lower this box over the package, withdraw to a safe distance, and examine the thing by remote control. If it’s a bomb, you might have to shut down streets etc. to get it out of there or to detonate it in place. If it’s not a bomb, you now know this and can get the hell out of there and let the city get on about its business.
To the government, though, the police business is the real business of the city.
