More John Kerry stuff.

It appears that the Kerry campaign has hired G. Clotaire Rapaille as a consultant.

We at Tinotopia have run into Clotaire once before, when we looked at a story about SUVs by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. In that story, M. Rapaille featured prominently:

Over the past decade, a number of major automakers in America have relied on the services of a French-born cultural anthropologist, G. Clotaire Rapaille, whose speciality is getting beyond the rational — what he calls “cortex” — impressions of consumers and tapping into their deeper, “reptilian” responses. And what Rapaille concluded from countless, intensive sessions with car buyers was that when S.U.V. buyers thought about safety they were thinking about something that reached into their deepest unconscious. “The No. 1 feeling is that everything surrounding you should be round and soft, and should give,” Rapaille told me. “There should be air bags everywhere. Then there’s this notion that you need to be up high. That’s a contradiction, because the people who buy these S.U.V.s know at the cortex level that if you are high there is more chance of a rollover. But at the reptilian level they think that if I am bigger and taller I’m safer. You feel secure because you are higher and dominate and look down. That you can look down is psychologically a very powerful notion. And what was the key element of safety when you were a child? It was that your mother fed you, and there was warm liquid. That’s why cupholders are absolutely crucial for safety. If there is a car that has no cupholder, it is not safe. If I can put my coffee there, if I can have my food, if everything is round, if it’s soft, and if I’m high, then I feel safe. It’s amazing that intelligent, educated women will look at a car and the first thing they will look at is how many cupholders it has.”

Ooookay. Anyway, G. Clotaire Rapaille’s advice to the Kerry campaign? That Kerry needs to act ‘less French’ and to give more ‘one- and two-word answers’ to questions. He also was advised to buy clothes from K-Mart, and to spend time in bars drinking from bottles.

To a French “medical anthropologist”, that’s what makes an ordinary American: being short with words, poorly-dressed, and uncouth.

With political advice like this, how can Kerry fail to inspire the electorate? He’s a shoo-in!

A school system in Merrillville, Indiana is finally doing something about the real issues in education. Here’s the whole story, with my emphasis added::

MERRILLVILLE, Ind. — Officials have banned pink clothing for the remainder of the school year out of concerns that the color has become associated with gang activity. Administrators last week told students at the city’s high school and two middle schools to avoid wearing pink clothing or accessories, said Michael Berta, associate superintendent in the Northwestern Indiana district. “There is no evidence of gang activity. But because of the growing use of the color pink we decided to be proactive. Girls and boys are supposed to avoid wearing pink,” Berta said Monday. None of the district’s 6,500 students have been disciplined for wearing pink, he said. Berta said the issue came up at a recent administrator’s meeting when a principal remarked that there were more students wearing pink. “Not only were there more kids wearing pink T-shirts and pink hats, but also pink shoelaces, which was unusual,” he said. Clothing retailers said pink is a popular color in current styles. “About 30 percent of my items for this season are pink. It’s ‘in.’ I have pink in every shade,” said Amanda Zipko, owner of Amanda Gayle’s boutique in Schererville.

The school authorities notice that ‘more students’ are wearing pink; so it simply must be some kind of ‘gang’ symbol. Oh, brother.

And people wonder why I call for the total abolition of public education. B.S. like this is just one small part of it.

It’s not really my intention to write much about the presidential election; as far as I’m concerned, the contest is between one anti-Constitutional gang of thugs and another. Maybe I’ll change my mind at some point down the road, but in general I’m not all that interested. Getting worked up about things people say during a political campaign will get you nothing but high blood pressure, to begin with; and I have less idiotic things to worry about, besides. Nevertheless, this makes two posts in a row commenting on John Kerry, simply because he happens to have caught my attention today.

I am not a fan of George Bush, but John Kerry — really the entire Left — scares the bejeesus out of me. There was a story in the Washington Post today headlined ‘Kerry to Unveil Plan to Reduce Gas Prices’, and it was accompanied by this photograph:

I’m sure this is what we all want in the White House: someone who appears to believe that the price of commodities is (or should be) manipulated and set by the government, and who appears in public surrounded by children waving black-and-red flags. With stylized eagles on them.

The whole thing reminds me a bit too much of Roderick Spode.

Besides, I thought that the democrats wanted gas to be expensive, to better discourage people from buying those evil SUVs.

(Those flags are actually the flags of the United Farm Workers.)

So John Kerry has proposed a plan whereby the federal government will require high-school students to perform ‘community service’.

John Kerry believes we need to think big and do better and get more young Americans serving the nation.

What the hell is it about politicians that makes them think that it’s a good idea to compel young people to work for the state for free? Replace ‘high-school students’ with any other group of people, and the insanity is clear. If he were to suggest that black people, or middle-aged executives, or welfare recipients, or immigrants, or even politicians, be compelled to ‘volunteer’ for make-work projects of the state’s choosing, he’d be laughed off the stage, and people would seriously question his fitness for office.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that high-school students can’t vote. Maybe the headline should be “Compulsory Unpaid Labor Plan For The Statutorily Disenfranchised”. I thought that had ended by 1865.

Service Should Be a Graduation Requirement: John Kerry believes that knowledge of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship - including the duty to serve your community - are as important to American adults as knowing how to read and do math.

Note that the only way to ’serve your community’ in John Kerry’s warped universe is by ‘volunteering’ to do things that don’t actually need doing (if they needed doing, someone would already be paying to have them done). You are not ’serving your community’ by working in a gas station, or by stocking shelves at the grocery store, or by flipping burgers — despite the fact that people in your community need their gas pumped, their shelves stocked, and their burgers flipped. It’s not service unless you’re forced to do it, and not paid for it.

Kerry’s own website doesn’t expect these hordes of forced volunteers to replace people who are actually being paid to do work now: “No state would be obligated to implement a service requirement if the federal government does not live up to its obligation to fund the program,” it says.

So they expect this forced labor to actually cost the state money. Let’s get this straight: there’s a group of people you plan to require service from, for no payment. Yet you fully expect that this program of indentured servitude will cost you money in the end. That isn’t service, it’s welfare.

Kerry also proposes a slightly less-wacky system where high-school graduates would perform ’service’ for two years and in return have the government pay for for four years of college tuition, based on the average tuition at a state university. But:

If service members decide not to go to college, their award can be used for job training, to help start a business, or to make a down payment on the purchase of a home.

This ‘award’ sounds like what I’d call ‘money’, but with some strings attached. So how much money is it? The best statistics I could find indicate that the average annual tuition at a state university in the U.S. is $5,254; so four years would be $21,016. This is the amount of the ‘award’ that Kerry proposed to pay people for two years’ service. That’s a little over $10,500 a year, or $2.62 an hour based on a 40-hour week and a 50-week year.

So maybe the headline could also be: “Kerry Proposes Paying Government Workers $2.62 an hour”. The minimum wage in the United States is $5.15; so Kerry is proposing paying these people — these ‘volunteers’, who are, remember, the ‘backbone’ of American society, and whose participation in the grand American Experiment is a Shining Beacon To Us All — just a tiny bit more than half the minimum wage.

A private employer who did such a thing would wind up in jail; but Kerry is using this scheme to run for president. Good thing he’s so electable, or he might have to stop talking through his hat.

That’s the Washington Post’s headline, not mine. It appears over this story, which doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know: customer service sucks.

What is interesting is the common thread that runs through each of the customer-service horror stories told by the Post: these are solely failures of procedure. One case involves a defective washing machine, but even there the real problem rose out of the seller’s and/or the manufacturer’s total inability to live up to their promises.

Why is this? These companies can achieve all these miracles — machines that wash your clothes, pocket telephones that work in almost any inhabited spot on the globe, and so on — but they seem determined not to be able to deal with their customers when anything goes wrong.

There are a number of interesting stories in the article, but the one that’s most fascinating is that of a woman who attempted to buy a washer and dryer:

Consider Katie Kannler’s struggle to get a new stacked washer/dryer delivered to her Arlington townhouse in February. It arrived on the scheduled delivery date but was defective — the dryer handle was missing. The delivery man promised to call her within three days to set up a new delivery date.

So far, so good. Ideally, a missing handle would have been noticed at some point in the process before the thing got to the customer’s home, but mistakes happen.

Unfortunately, the delivery people didn’t call back. This is a failure, but a small one. Maybe they mistranscribed her phone number; maybe they lost the paper; maybe the guy who was supposed to call her was sick that day. None of these should ever happen, but it’s still at least comprehensible that they would. So

On the fourth day, after no call, Kannler called Home Depot where she had bought the appliance. Home Depot said it had nothing to do with delivery; she needed to call GE, which delivers all the appliances Home Depot sells.

And here is the utter customer-service failure. Ms. Kannler does not have a relationship with GE; she has a relationship with Home Depot. Home Depot sold her a washer and dryer, and Home Depot collected the money. That Home Depot subcontracted some of what they sold to M.s Kannler to another company is none of Ms. Kannler’s business or concern — but since Home Depot has collected her money, they don’t really give a damn any more. It gets even worse, though:

GE, however, said it wasn’t responsible because Kannler ordered a Maytag. But Maytag referred her back to GE.

So: Ms. Kannler gives money to Home Depot; Home Depot says that delivering the thing isn’t their problem, and hands her off to GE. GE, in turn, hands her off to Maytag. Maytag, having only manufactured the thing (presumably without the missing handle) sent her back to GE. If Maytag were truly interested in building customer loyalty, they would have sent out a repairman with a spare handle — but they might be excused as she didn’t actually have the dryer in her house at the time.

“I spent all afternoon on the phone, and no one would tell me what was going on,” said Kannler, who finally went back to Home Depot to talk to the store manager. She could only talk to a salesman, who gave her another number to call — the local delivery firm — before her problem was resolved.

Because the store manager, or the salesman, couldn’t possibly have handled this for her as part of their bargain to deliver to her home a functioning and complete washer and dryer. Why bother? Let the customer do the work.

I don’t bother doing business with people like this. It’s a violation of Retail Rule #3 to make your customers work for the privilege of giving you money, and of rule #8 to expect the customer to give a damn about how you do what you do.

Now, to put this rule into practice you need a definition of ‘work’ just as observant Jews do. If you define ‘work’ too broadly, responsible retailers will have to drive up to your house with a truck full of merchandise and hold it up for your inspection while you eat chips and watch TV in your underwear. I don’t think it’s ‘work’ to require someone to come to your store; I don’t think it’s ‘work’ to require them to pick their own merchandise off the shelves and bring it to a till themselves. I don’t think it’s even necessarily ‘work’ to require the customer to figure out for themselves what product will best meet their needs (though see Customer Service Rule #6).

Taken to an extreme, it’s not ‘work’ for IKEA to require the customer to evaluate products, pick them from shelves in a warehouse, load them into his car, and take them home and put them together himself — because IKEA makes this system known to customers up front, and because it compensates the customer by offering furniture at lower prices than just about anywhere else. Each time they require the customer to do work, there’s some advantage to the customer, too; the customer isn’t working for IKEA, he’s working for himself.

Home Depot, though, doesn’t sell assemble-it-yourself washers and dryers, and ‘do it yourself’ does not refer to troubleshooting the store’s twisty maze of subcontractors.

A new machine was finally delivered, but it was so noisy that Kannler called in a Maytag repairman. His conclusion: It was improperly installed. But, he said, it was up to the deliveryman to reinstall it. A GE repairman showed up last weekend and fixed “something that had not been tightened down properly” during installation, GE spokeswoman Kim Freeman wrote in an e-mail. “While we feel badly that these consumers had a difficult experience — it is the exception, not the rule,” she wrote. On Friday, Kannler reported the machine was still not working properly. A Maytag repairman has scheduled yet another visit.

Which makes three times, on this one delivery, that GE has got it wrong — never mind the bureaucracy, the buck-passing, and everything else. But it’s the exception, remember, not the rule.

The Post says that customer service is going downhill because of the famously declining economy, but I don’t buy it for a minute. When things were booming, customer service sucked because, companies said, they couldn’t hire sufficient staff. Now that the unemployment rate is up, companies say they that customer service sucks because they’ve got to cut costs.

The bottom line is, most companies don’t give a shit about customer service; and since the problem is so wide-spread — since so many companies are so bad at it, there’s no real competitive disadvantage to treating your customers badly. What are they going to do? Everyone else is just as bad.

And it’s not that customer service costs so damned much, either. GE, Maytag, and Home Depot each spent far more money running around to Ms. Kannler’s house and answering her phone calls than they would have had someone just bit the bullet and paid for a new goddamned handle right off the bat. These people are spending staggering amounts of money trying to keep from spending any money.

Which is the mystifying part. Customer service, like advertising, doesn’t cost — it pays. It’s perticularly cheap compared to the cost of attracting new customers to replace the ones who’ve left, vowing never to give you another penny. The mysterious thing is why in most fields nobody has decided to compete by streamlining their procedures so that they don’t spend most of their time making it plain to the customers that the company’s procedure is more important than customer satisfaction, and further that the company’s procedure is not even geared to result in customer satisfaction. Besides retaining and attracting customers, they’d spend less time arguing with people, and thus save more money.

Now that American IT jobs are fleeing overseas, more American geeks are themselves looking to do work outside the country. This is a challenge, of course, because few countries are as welcoming of immigrants or ‘guest workers’ as is the United States.

And to make things worse, the U.S. government is apparently prosecuting people who do work overseas that the government doesn’t like. Like, for instance, arranging computer security for online casinos.

A recent New York Times article reports that US prosecutors are beginning to use the federal aiding and abetting statute to investigate and potentially prosecute those who, through perfectly lawful activities, assist online gaming companies that flout US law. This includes banks, broadcasters, ISPs and advertisers who help these casinos get their message out.

Thank goodness we’ve got the federal government on the job, helping to make sure that people don’t gamble online. And thank goodness the world is at peace and there are no other things that the government could be doing with these resources. Imagine: if we were, say, under threat from a loose coalition of fascist theocrats determined to destroy western civilization, the feds might have to go soft on gambling. And then where would we be?

Today on the BBC we find two headlines: for this story about Europe’s growing awareness that al-Qaeda’s war isn’t about opposition to Hollywood, Halliburton, and George Bush, but rather about opposition to western civilization in general:

…And this headline, for this story about yesterday’s Spanish elections:

Given the BBC’s political bent, I hardly think that this is the comparison they were trying to draw.

Oh, sure, there’s nothing wrong with the housing market:

Louie Guimmule is among hundreds of people who want to buy into Chatham Square, Old Town Alexandria’s newest townhouse development, where prices start at $560,000 and reach $1.1 million. When he stopped by the construction site last Saturday, dozens of prospective buyers, sleeping bags in hand, were lined up — a full seven days before the developer was planning to accept contracts on the first, still-unbuilt units.

As the Post article observes, it’s not uncommon to see people camping out to get tickets to certain popular movies and concerts; but these people are generally either very young or are obsessive nerds; and besides, they’re not camping out to get tickets at all but to get particularly good tickets for the same price as less-good tickets. Here, though, we have relatively wealthy people waiting in line at a construction site for the opportunity to spend $500,000 to a million dollars to buy a house.

Usually, when you spend a million dollars to buy something — anything — you don’t have to camp out to do so. In the million-dollar range, there’s very few things where the demand exceeds the supply. Why is housing different? Why is it that people will not just line up but camp out on the sidewalk so they can line up for days in order to spend a million dollars on a house that they haven’t seen because it hasn’t been built yet?

The usual Libertarian response to complaints about suburban sprawl, bad urban planning, and the horrible traffic that those things generate, is to point out that people continue to buy houses in the middle of nowhere for ever-increasing prices, so the market is just supplying what people want. However, here we’re faced with the phenomenon of million-dollar townhouses in an area known for its bad traffic.

The Washington area has generally high real-estate values, but for a million dollars you can find something quite nice. In Great Falls, VA, one of the highest-buck areas in the Washington suburbs, at the moment there’s an 18-year-old house for sale for $959,000 with two acres of wooded land, a big swimming pool, a two-car garage, five bedrooms, 3.5 baths, etc., etc. You do not have to camp out to buy this house; you just need a million dollars. Yet people are willing to pay that much (and more) for much less house if it’s in the right location. The ‘right location’ almost always means a very dense location.

Why is this? Do people only want to live in dense locations? Obviously not, or we wouldn’t have tract-house subdivisions sprawling all over the country. But that people are willing to pay a hefty premium — and camp out — for the opportunity to live in dense surroundings would seem to indicate that there’s significant unmet demand for the dense-housing product.

There’s an article in the real-estate section of Washington Post today on ‘kid-friendly’ neighborhoods. There are a lot of things mentioned, such as nearby swimming pools and parks, ‘walkability’ etc. However, of course, ‘diversity’ has to be mentioned:

For some parents, however, diversity is as big a selling point as a community pool or festival. Vicki Wilson, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker Pardoe in Bethesda and parent of two adolescents, said, “After being raised in a rich white suburb, I wanted to raise my kids in a place that’s culturally and economically diverse; I wanted there to be people with more and with less, materially speaking, so that when my kids got to high school they wouldn’t be the only ones without a car.”

It is interesting that this woman sees one of the benefits of economic ‘diversity’ the fact that there will be people living around her who have roughly the same amount of money as she does, i.e. her kids will not be the poorest and thus only car-less kids at their school.

Others who agree on the importance of diversity note that vibrant neighborhoods don’t always cater to children.

I would think that living in a vibrant neighborhood wouldn’t be all that good; you’d constantly be patching the cracks in the plaster. Oh, wait, by ‘vibrant’ they mean… what, exactly?

Elaine Martin, a stay-at-home mother of a 4-year-old who lives between Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan, loves her neighborhood’s variety: “We see people in turbans and men holding hands; we have an Ethiopian hardware store [...]

Oh, thank God. You know, I’ve spent time in places where you can’t get Ethiopian hardware, and I’ll never go back to that kind of living — if you can call it living.

[...] and a lot of serious dog lovers,” she said.

For me, this conjures up images of Al Gore down on one knee, speaking very dispassionately to a golden retriever: “You are a good dog, Bonzo. A treat is in order for your handling of that butt-sniffing incident.”

And, of course, in less ‘vibrant’ neighborhoods, everyone hates dogs. Or maybe they’re just too casual in their love for them.

But the local video store has very few G-rated movies, the health club offers no babysitting, the pharmacy has few brands of diapers, and most restaurants don’t provide high chairs or diaper-changing areas. “When I go to the suburbs to eat and they give us a little plastic bag with crayons, a bib and a high chair, I’m like, ‘Whoa, so this is how the other half of the world lives,’ ” she said.

So, in other words, her ‘vibrant’ neighborhood — must be all the heavy trucks rumbling past — caters to all kinds of needs, as long as they’re for Ethopian hardware or homosexual hand-holding. It doesn’t particularly cater to what this particular woman needs. Sounds great. But then maybe you don’t want to live in a place that’s too ‘child-friendly’:

Today’s model of a child-friendly neighborhood often has the benefit of being parent-friendly, too, said John McManus, editor in chief of New York-based American Demographics magazine. That notion appears to hold true in American University Park. Resident Stacey Rabbino, a lawyer and mother of a 10-month-old, said that besides attending the neighborhood’s kid-oriented events such as the ice cream social and fall festival, she can walk with her daughter and meet friends at nearby restaurants such as the bagel shop on Massachusetts Avenue.

“There are tons of kids there,” she said. “You never feel like you have to be careful — they can spill and throw stuff on the floor and it’s fine.” [emphasis by Tino]

Yeaaaaaarrrrrgggh. That’s definitely how you want to raise children: to teach them that they can spill and throw stuff on the floor and it’s fine. When the bagel shop shuts down and is replaced by something less ‘child-friendly’ (and that has to spend less on cleaning), I bet that Ms. Rabbino will complain.