Boise
Idaho
windsurfing
Photography
Politics
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Economics
unraveling
30.June 2010
The latest in sales pitches
Halfway down the story about how
faulty capacitors have led to Dell's fall from glory, when they
start quoting the things put into emails that shouldn't have been,
there's this instant classic from a document "about how to handle
questions around the faulty... systems," instructing the sales people
not to bring the problems to customers' attention, and to
"emphasize uncertainty."
(They don't spell it out, but you have to wonder: was the tipping point
that "even the firm defending Dell in the lawsuit was affected when Dell
balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers"?)
Eureka!
We've had our own to-do with public universities, their foundations, and
inappropriate
fundraising here in Idaho, so
Mrs. Palin's complaint that public disclosure of the fee and perks
she collected for speaking in Turlock seem misguided, at least. The
candor of the foundation's president is appreciated, though:
"We're not here to make a political statement, we're here to make
money," he said, and if indeed it was good for a couple hundred grand,
good for them. If the donors don't care about the accounting or how their
money was spent... um, can we buy a copy of your donor mailing list?
California State University Stanislaus does sound like some sort of
public institution though, even though we've never heard of Stanislaus
or Turlock before today. The Attorney General's plan to look into the
questions seems pretty reasonable to me.
But maybe Jerry should lighten up: this is comedy gold! We've got
students diving in dumpsters to retrieve unshredded secrets, a
post-political entertainer scolding them to protect the privacy of
her first-class airfare and deluxe accommodations, chain link fences put
up to keep the riff-raff out, and pro-Palin protesters with signs saying
"Support Free Speech." In defense of keeping secrets for a fundraiser.
And this:
"Palin has endorsed former Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive Carly
Fiorina in her bid to unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, but a
Fiorina spokeswoman said Palin would not be making any stops on behalf
of the campaign."
For dessert, a new chapter in the garbled lore of Palin:
"This is Reagan country. And perhaps it was destiny that the man who
went to California's Eureka College would become so woven within and
interlinked to the Golden State."
Or, perhaps it was just fiction, as Ronald Reagan attended college in
his home state of Illinois.
Eureka,
Illinois.
Three days on the Palouse
And two days going and coming makes a vacation. After our wet spring,
Idaho is remarkably green from top to bottom in the first week of
summer, and the wheat was waving tall Tuesday morning as we took the
scenic route home. We helped our daughter with house work, enjoying the
reminder of just how labor-intensive a place in the country can be, as a
sort of busman's holiday, except for the fact that we don't work
that hard looking after our place in the city (and we share the
labor).
I had the chance for a couple evening bike rides, another reminder of
hard work, pedaling up those steep roller coaster hills, reminding me of
the instant conditioning that started my cross-country bike trip in 1976,
the hardest 50 miles going from Arny's Trailer Court to Kendrick and
Orofino. The grade out of Kendrick was one of the few hills I had to
walk up over the course of that summer.
Down along Blaine Road, where the peas are flowering, a farm dog came
running out at me barking, didn't seem too scary, so I kept going
while he was yapping at my feet. He didn't give up at the edge of the
farmstead as I'd expected, and since that stretch of road was pretty flat
and worn free of gravel, I decided to see how fast he could go. Not
quite as fast as me pedaling, as it turns out.
But he kept dogging me after I'd bested his top speed. I put on another
burst of speed, and left him again, but he STILL didn't give up. I
stopped and let him catch me, gave him a "good boy" for his trouble. On
restart, he was jumping, trying to bite my front tire, kept crossing
right in front of me (I hit his butt with my front tire once or twice),
I dropped him a 3rd time, but he stayed after me all the way to the end
of Blaine Road at the Troy/Genesee Highway, where it felt like time to
turn around. I paced him a while, dropped him again off the crest of
the first rise, but he kept trotting after me all the way back to the
farmstead, and a little ways beyond, stopped only by the the curve that
leaves his home out of sight.
Back on Eid Road and turning west, huge cumulonimbus south of the Clearwater
were lit up by the setting sun, complementing the blue sky over me and
Paradise Ridge. Awesome moments.
On the way home yesterday, we saw the other end of those early summer
thunderstorms, dozens of trees pruned, broken, uprooted south of
Cascade. Utility crews were still cleaning up the falls in
mid-afternoon.
25.June 2010
Wake up call
We use natural air conditioning as much as possible, and it seems quite
strange to be into late June before finally sleeping with the windows
open, but here we are. The bird alarm clock went off about 5:15, cycles
through various species I wish I could name by their calls, got to the
mourning dove snooze alarm at 6.
24.June 2010
Thanks again for being so frank
Alan Simpson, up close and personal is not a very attractive
person. He's talking kind of quiet and confidential-like, as if it was
just him and this guy with the camera, rather than a couple hundred
million (potential) viewers.
He comes across as a nasty, condenscending, profane SOB. How would you
like to have him looking after reforming your Social Security?
Oh whoops, he actually is. Sort of.
"You can go through all the sophistry of babbling that you want to,"
he says.
Turning point: the Reagan Revolution
Many conservatives celebrate the fundamental changes in politics and
economics that came with the 1980s and the two terms of Ronald Reagan.
Whether the changes constitute cause for celebration or not depends on
your point of view, as the charts that
Dave Johnson has collected illustrate. Shifting from a creditor
nation to a debtor nation?
A dwindling share of the benefits of increasing productivity going to
working people? Greater concentration of wealth? Plummeting personal
savings and skyrocketing household debt?
Not so good from the aggregate point of view.
I guess that covers the range of scoring
The phenomenal final match of the round robin,
USA d. Algeria, 1-0; preceded by, overlapped with, and followed by
the
tennis match to end all tennis matches, John Isner d. Nicolas Mahut,
6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68. The commentators exhausted their
repertoire of superlatives well before the end of day 2 of the 3 day
match, spanning just over 11 hours. 215 aces between the two of them
(almost evenly split, of course). Mahut served to stay in the match,
and held his serve 64 times in a row. Just one short.
The football match could have been 0-0, of course, which would have left
the USA just one short of advancing in the World Cup. Instead, they've
won their round robin group and have a path to the semifinals before
them. And the undisputed hero of the USA effort? A perfectly-sized
soccer player with steely nerves, 5'8", 158 pound Landon Donovan.
22.June 2010
Crazy in a good way
My first "real" job, working for $1.65/hour, (the Federal minimum wage
that summer before I turned 16) was in the print shop of
Wm. K. Walthers, Inc.
the company that my grandfather named after himself. Among the pinball
memories provided by Erik Gunn's feature piece in Milwaukee
Magazine,
ChooChoo Crazy, I enjoyed reading about grampa's buddy Al Kalmbach,
drawing locomotives, buying a printing press at age 12, starting his own
magazine with "the first 12-page issue [that] looked more like a
newsletter and sold 272 copies at 10 cents apiece."
The two of them and future Milwaukee Mayor Frank Zeidler teamed up to
form the National Model Railroad Association, which is holding its
75th annual convention in Milwaukee
next month. The NMRA convention was always the focus of our family
vacations, a significant combination of business and pleasure for my
dad, all fun for me.
Solstice
Copy that
KTVB's Sunday Viewpoint provides a sufficiently final word on
Vaughn Ward's political career, I'd think. (If you prefer the text
version, they have a lengthy
article by Jim Gilchriest, covering the "blatant copying" in a key
speech of Ward's, not just of Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic
National Convention, but of another candidate for Congress. (I guess
it's good news for all the Republicans who backed Ward that that
source, Pat Meehan, was at least in the same party?)
Ward's failed campaign for Congress illustrates the limitations of a
synthetic candidate. The copying is bad enough, but to hear him garble
and suck the life out of other people's words is the painful part.
As Agent Maxwell Smart used to say, "missed it by that
much."
Coming after our car
It's a little creepy to have businesses keeping track of what we own so
that they can send us "personalized" marketing. And a little comic to
see how they try to use the information they obtain. One local dealer
started their letter by addressing me as a "preferred customer." I'm
sure they'd prefer me to be their customer, but I've never, ever
done business with them.
"Our records indicate you are one of the few individuals that still
own a vehicle in good condition," they write.
I see plenty of cars newer than the 9-year-old Prius they seem to be
after, most of them in fine condition. If they're so wrong about
something so obvious, it makes you wonder what else they're wrong about,
eh?
The other letter is printed with a faux handwritten font and further
personalized by "Mike" telling us that "It has come to [his] attention
that [I] own a 2001 Toyota Toyota."
You don't say.
19.June 2010
Half a century of spilling oil
The people of Nigeria can empathize with those experiencing catastrophe
in our Gulf Coast, but forgive them if they're not more sympathetic.
They've been living with an Exxon Valdez worth of spilled oil every year
for the last 50 years now, and not very many people have cared.
All in a game
The Idaho Statesman's editorial page editor, Kevin Richert,
recently expressed
his fanatic enthusiasm for soccer (or as it's known in the Rest of
the World, football), and made the remarkable prediction that the USA
side would reach a 1-1 tie with England. Prescient!
Today's Sports section made the case that the Statesman's news
and editorial sides are completely separate, quite convincingly, by
limiting its coverage of yesterday's 2nd round robin match for the USA
to a whiny opinion piece, telling us all that we shouldn't complain
about being robbed, since gee, they shouldn't have let themselves
fall behind 0-2, so who do we have to blame, anyway? It was on the front
page of Sports, at least, down at the bottom, with the actual score an
afterthought of a smaller subhead.
5 million people watched, ho hum.
They had the decency not to put Nancy Armour's commentary on their
website, but then they put
John Leicester's equally useless opinion up instead. Just part of
football, don't you know. The referee doesn't have to explain his
execrable call, and there's no recourse for his interjecting poor
judgment to decide the outcome of the match. Hey, get over it!
At least
Simon
Haydon made the call explicable, even though we have no idea where
this explanation came from. Watching replays? Does the ref ever have to
explain his action to anyone? So at least it wasn't a made-up
call, for as terrible as it was.
17.June 2010
Scale of gas
With our new high-efficiency gas furnace (and not so new, not so
high-efficiency gas water heater), we used 40,000 cu ft. of natural
gas in the last 12 months. The
Oil Drum blog's latest
update notes that along with what oil they collected at the
Deepwater spill, they flared (as in "burned off for convenience, because
how would we collect it, anyway?) 25.1 million cubic feet of natural
gas on June 15th.
One day. One well. 627 years' worth of heating our home and water.
Shorter World Cup
I watched England v. USA last Saturday, of course, all 90 plus stoppage
time minutes. But just in case you missed it, the
60-to-1 compressed Lego version pretty much covers the
highlights. (Thanks for that, JQT!)
And yes,
there's more. Much, much more,
including the
trailer.
I've watched a couple of the other games, including Brazil vs. N.Korea.
Those teams were ranked 1st and 105th, respectively, but kept the
outcome in doubt much of the way to Brazil collecting its expected
victory by the unexpected margin of 2-1. I can't think of another sport
where #1 and #105 could end up so close.
Ready to double dip
Back when Japan was having its
Lost
Decade and the U.S. economy was having its dot com bubble,
I used to wonder what was wrong with those unfortunate people that they
couldn't pull themselves out of their malaise by their bootstraps or
something. Now here we are, feeling around in the dark for where did we
leave those bootstraps, anyway.
On the one hand, we have the prospect of a $trillion in stimulus—a
trillion!—which would cost us, oh,
less than one tenth of one percent of GDP to service at current rates.
On the other, we have... a lot of history that we might have learned
from, including
our own.
Ezra Klein spells it out:
"The point of the money is to get the economy moving faster, to give
people cash to spend. This isn't like health-care reform, where you're
purchasing something and you should pay for it. When you're trying to
expand the economy, you need to use debt to put more money into it than
would otherwise be there. If you're just moving a dollar from one
purpose to another, you may be using that dollar better, but you're not
expanding the total amount of demand in the economy by very much. You're
just moving it around. It would be like bailing water from a boat, but
throwing it into another part of the boat."
16.June 2010
Local Gasland
After listening to Josh Fox on Fresh Air
earlier this week, I checked the map and noted with some relief that
there was nothing in Idaho.
But then the voice of Butch Otter, coming to us from his trade mission
in China, talking about
a million cubic feet a day of sweet gas. The
press release from Canadian Bridge Resources last month
talks about higher production rates, with only "natural flow." But
"higher production rates are anticipated with future use of
non-damaging mud and minor stimulation."
Let's hope the "stimulation" is minor enough not to contaminate local
water supplies while they
fast-track production to achieve near-term strong cash flow.
At the risk of being cheesy
I've never been to
a
World's Fair, although I've visited remnants in Spokane,
Seattle, San Francisco (from 1915!), at least. Growing up in the second
half of the 20th Century, and studying architecture from time to time,
those remnants were beacons for the history of technology
to me, starting with The Crystal Palace from the 1851 Great Exhibition
in London, through the Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe,
Space Needle, Biosphère. There's doubtless an interesting story
to be made in stitching together expositions, circuses, and amusement
parks. (In addition to
Marge vs.
the Monorail, that is.)
Cynthia Schneider and Hailey Woldt pick up the narrative with
their recent Center for Public Diplomacy blog post,
Shanghai'd,
or the USA pavilion as a corporate theme park.
"[W]hile it might be a stretch to match the brilliance of past publicly
funded exhibitions, notably Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome at the
Montreal Expo of 1967, the lamentable form and content of the USA
Pavilion could have been avoided if someone had taken this important
opportunity for cultural outreach seriously. Creative products number
among the U.S.'s top three exports; American architects, filmmakers,
writers, artists, dancers, musicians, and actors are global leaders in
their fields, yet none were enlisted. The varied dimensions of America's
story are examined in ways entirely consistent with the country that
stands for freedom of speech in film, theater, visual arts and other
forms of expression, and yet the USA Pavilion says nothing about what
makes America unique.
"The Pavilion in Shanghai is just the most visible example of the
outsourcing of America's outreach to the world.... Whether it was
cynicism, other priorities, or an active dismissal of the importance of
crafting a message for the Pavilion (beyond its mere existence) does not
really matter. The result is $61 million dollars spent, and an
opportunity lost."
For counterpoint on the CPD blog, Jian Wang
looks
on the bright side:
"For many Chinese visitors, the greetings by President Obama and
Secretary Clinton, projected on giant movie screens, are considered a
highlight. The two American public diplomats, popular celebrities in
their own right in China, appear personable, engaging, and respectful.
This is poignant, because in the Chinese context people do look up to
leaders and authorities, and in terms of communication style, Chinese
leaders are, in contrast, often seen as remote and removed."
And the "student ambassadors" are a hit, some of our college students
who can speak Chinese.
15.June 2010
Pet . ti . fog . ging
That is, quibbling over insignificant details, paltry, shabby, niggling,
abject, contemptible, piffling. It comes to mind reading
Phil Hart's lawyer's work, trying to buy his client some free time
to stretch out Hart's state tax (and penalty and interest) liability
going back to the mid-1990s, and repeatedly delayed for Hart's
insistence that being a state legislator makes him specially
privileged.
Betsy Russell reports that "Hart has sought delays from the IRS and
the state Tax Commission four times in the six years he's served as a
state lawmaker."
I was a bit surprised to see the Deputy AG citing a dictionary in
his memorandum, but gobsmacked to see Starr Kelso telling the Board
of Tax Appeals about what he couldn't find in the 2010 Merriam-Webster
on-line dictionary. Yo Starr,
the Ada County Sheriff
can instruct you on "civil process." Hundreds of thousands served.
Lots of experience. This ignorance thing is an act, right? If
so, when you're done with the state, you can talk to
the U.S. Marshals
Service about their understanding of civil process.
Kelso continues his pettifoggery by arguing that Hart's promise
to pay somehow constituted "security acceptable to the the tax
commission," because they didn't say it wasn't. And I'm sure he'll
gladly pay us next Tuesday for a hamburger today.
14.June 2010
This changes everything
"This" being
vast riches of minerals in Afghanistan. Hundreds of billions of
dollars worth of iron and copper; tens of $billions worth of niobium,
cobalt, gold, molybdenum and on down the periodic table.
You can't eat any of that stuff, so the opportunity is predicated on
trade, as well as industrial development. And trade means getting
along with people.
Come on baby light my fire
Josh Fox,
Living in the Middle of a 'Gasland' on Fresh Air last week.
"Some of these people were showering with the lights off, because they
were afraid if they turned on the light bulb, if there was a spark...
they'd blow up the shower."
Instead of taking a natural gas mining company up on their offer of
$100,000 to lease 19.5 acres of his land, he made a documentary about
the effects of natural gas drilling on communities and homeowners. His
film, Gasland, will premiere on HBO on June 21. He's touring
with the film as well, showing it in affected communities.
"We're talking about 65% of Pennsylvania... What the gas company is
saying is, 'You can live where this is happening. You can go to camp
where this is happening.' If watersheds are not off the table, schools
are not off the table, summer camps are not off the table—your
hospitals are not off the table. You have close to 15,000 wells in the
downtown Fort Worth area—in the urban area, in the country, in the
city. This is everywhere. So it stands to reason if you can put
it next to somebody's house and the gas company says that's OK, you can
put it in the middle of a summer camp. You can put it in the middle of a
lake. You can put it right on the banks of the Colorado River, which
supplies all the water to Los Angeles. This is what we're seeing."
Angel art
One of those interesting connections facilitated by Facebook: our niece
finding
my brother's
Wikipedia entry and me finding
her artwork on offer
on eBay. I signed up for eBay once upon a time but have never bought or
sold something in one of its auctions. Still, feel free to (try to)
outbid me in the next 3 days. :-)
What if you spot a weed?
Fun story featured in the Idaho Statesman today, about
enlisting geocachers in the war on noxious weeds. They're an
attractive group because they're out and about and able to report
precise locations, I guess, but the method of communication made me
think of Tom Sawyer getting the fence painted. First you find this
not-so-hidden treasure we've planted along the Greenbelt or in the
foothills, and inside there's instructions...
The Statesman didn't quite get in the spirit and offer clues to
where the caches were, but if you look around,
you can find the coordinates. And you can find an open house
at the Ada County Weed, Pest and Mosquito Abatement Department 10am to
2pm Tuesday and Wednesday, at 975 E. Pine Ave. in Meridian.
Adaweb.net also has
an
illustrated collection of noxious weeds found in our county, with an
easy "what to do" shown in all of these: If you spot a weed, send the
location information to weedandpest @ adaweb.net or call 577-4646. (The
rollout
was part of "Noxious Weed Awareness Week," which was last week, but it's
definitely not too late to play.)
They haven't put up a
pest
of the month
for June yet, but last month's will do:
quagga
and zebra mussels (yikes, an 11MB PDF!). Some of our pests are
animals, and some of these animals
were just found at one of our border patrols.
11.June 2010
The escalating hysteria
Thanks to
Sisyphus on 43rd
State Blues for the YouTube embed of Sam Seder's hilarious "That's
Bullshit," illustrating the alarmism gathering on the Mexican border, in
spite of what, hello?
violent crime down 30% over the last two decades in the
border states? San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin our safest big
cities?
(If you don't like
FBI
statistics though, you can always tune into Fox News, or
Arizona Republicans, and thrill to the sound of
illegal
immigrant crime waves. "It's just — it's been outrageous,"
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer told them, and no, not with intended irony.
The problem's
out in the country rather than in the cities, the Sheriff says.)
There's always something to be afraid of, and I guess this can
take your mind off the oil spill.
What's happening?
I feel like some explanation is needed for the lack of posting this
month, although my universe of regular readers who might wonder about
this question is undoubtedly tiny. Oddly enough, I'm not sure I have an
explanation. Perhaps that I'm getting less sleep this time of year as
our northern hemisphere rolls toward solstice and it's light deep into
the evening and then waking me up early. Been busy with managing the
FCAI board transition, Music
Committee, the volunteer webmaster
stuff,
tennis, Senior Sages, moderating the
HP Alumni Association
finance discussion group, the non-HPAA
hp_misc,
some of my paying work, too.
With all the rain we've had, and cool weather, the neighborhood is just
a riot of flowers and greenery, and maybe it's just been time to stop
and smell the roses a while.
8.June 2010
Old school
China's concept for deprogramming computer addicts: military-style
"total immersion and physical training" with traditional Chinese
philosophy and calligraphy classes for good measure. Just imagine how
well your surly adolescent would appreciate having his or her gadgetry
taken away in favor of that program.
Some of the inmates
made
a break for it but they were quickly rounded up.
"The 14 patients, aged from 15 to 22, hailed a taxi to take them to a
nearby town in east China's Jiangsu province—but were uncovered
when the driver took them to the police station instead, suspicious of
the identically-dressed young men who were unable to pay the fare."
7.June 2010
A very interesting question
Have we discovered evidence for life on Titan? If so, the
form of life would be interesting, too: organisms consuming
hydrogen, acetylene and ethane, and producing methane as waste, living
at 95K (-178°C).
It's not the most likely explanation for what's been observed, but
it's a possibility.
3.June 2010
Ocean Intervention III
Along with trying to manage 2,000 or so people, three drilling
platforms, a dozen ships and as many as 16 ROVs on site, BP is pushing
out an amazing amount of information about
its simultaneous operations in the Gulf. Watching them try to trim
off a side appendage at the base of the riser with a 24" circular saw
this morning. It's flat-out amazing stuff, a mezmering combination of
disaster, disaster response and "hands on" mechanical engineering.
The plan for the beautiful flat cut with the diamond saw didn't pan out,
and it appears they've chomped off the 21" riser with the shears,
leaving a pretty funky pipe to try to connect to at the top of the
blowout preventer on the wellhead. And as forecast, the flow of oil and
gas out the top has "improved" by the removal of the bent and twisted
steel pipe left after the blowout.
Thanks to my buddy Rick for a timely pointer to which of the
many live feeds from the ROVs to pay attention to. (Screen shot from
the
Ocean Intervention III ROV2 feed.)
Update: Here's a
BBC news report
on the riser trim. The
ROV2 feed from Enterprise has a view of the LMRP cap being lowered down and
prepared for fitting to the well.
1.June 2010
The optimism of engineering
In the midst of gathering gloom over the prospects of governments,
financiers and management getting anything right, it's nice to
hear from the engineering department, with
yesterday's technical update from BP's Kent Wells (video),
describing the work going on under the Gulf of Mexico to fix the
leak.
"Our response to this tragic incident is a tremendous challenge, there's
no question about it. The one thing that hasn't wavered is the
commitment of BP to bring this to a successful conclusion and the
commitment of our people. It doesn't seem to matter what challenge is
thrown toward the teams, they respond. Whether it's the BP engineers,
the BP operating people, all the people from the rest of industry that
[are] helping us, the government scientists... everybody pulls together
and rises to the occasion. I know it's been a struggle, I know we're all
wanting this to end quickly, no one more than these folks; they've
worked endless days and nights... It's not a matter of 'if', but 'when'
we'll bring this to a successful conclusion."
Moral hazard
Turns out it's rather easy to get out of the habit of making house
payments; there are so many other things one can spend money on. Since
"they're all crooks,"
being
crooked is now OK, apparently. The lawyers are working
wholesale:
"About 10 new clients a week sign up, according to Mr. Stopa, who says
he now has 350 clients in foreclosure, each of whom pays $1,500 a year
for a maximum of six hours of attorney time. “I just do as much as needs
to be done to force the bank to prove its case,” Mr. Stopa
said."
Ben Franklin and Poor Richard must be resting uneasily.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
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Thursday, 01-Jul-2010 10:45:35 MDT
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