Why I Probably Will Never Be An Apple Customer

This article helps explain why I will never be an Apple customer, unless I win the lottery (which I don't play):

Apple has had great success in part because it has convinced customers to turn away from a $1,000 Windows laptop and to buy its $1,600 laptop instead for its stunning displays and ease of use.

$1000? $1600?! You've got to be kidding--$500 is more than I want to spend on a home laptop.

I briefly thought about a Mac. I've heard rave reviews, including "runs Windows better than Windows". I could see paying, oh, say a 30% premium for the Apple experience. But 100-150% premium? I don't think so. Same thing with the iPod--they are double what competitive MP3 players cost. I held out from buying one, and now am using my new cell phone. Definitely not nearly as slick, but one device meets both needs, and anyway, I'm a light user.

The Problem of Government Meddling

Many people say the same about Healthcare and College Tuition (government involvement led to exorbitant, destructive increases in cost).

Many believe that wild greed and market failure led us into this sorry mess. According to that narrative, investors in search of higher yields bought novel securities that bundled loans made to high-risk borrowers. Banks issued these loans because they could sell them to hungry investors. It was a giant Ponzi scheme that only worked as long as housing prices were on the rise. But housing prices were the result of a speculative mania. Once the bubble burst, too many borrowers had negative equity, and the system collapsed.

Mild Ride

Parental controls for cars--when my kids were born 14 years ago, I figured something like this would be available by the time they started driving (probably still too late for us, since will only be in new cars, and I don't see one of those in the immediate future...)

MyKey allows parents to limit teenage drivers to a top speed of 80 miles per hour, cap the volume on the car stereo, demand seat belt use and encourage other safe-driving habits.

also highlighted MyKey’s low-fuel warning, which lights up earlier than normal. He called it “a little thing for Mom and Dad.”

This is a great idea. I think 60 mph would be a good upper limit. Maybe 50, if you could be sure your child wasn't going to need to go on the highway.

Niche PC Ideas

In general, the Windows PC is ultra-commoditized. It is very hard to do anything to earn a higher margin. My ideas for carving out a niche would be:

• Crapware (aka, Trialware)-free (because right now Best Buy is getting some people to pay an extra $75 for this)
  
• Built-in backup (software, but also a mirrored hard drive)
• One or two very modest design and engineering touches--such as the Mac-style magnetic power cord
• The crowning glory would be easy-to-use virtual machines (VMWare), so that you could always roll back to a pristine install

Paying Best Buy to "Optimize" Your Computer

The excellent price I got from Best Buy on our new laptop was the happy part. During the brief sales process, I was prepared for the sales guy to try to upsell me. I politely declined the offer to install anti-virus software for me. But when he asked me if I wanted them to optimize remove the pre-installed crapware for me, it was almost too much. He literally said "we will remove all the junk they pre-install on it"!

I know I am not the first person to make this observation, but how ridiculous is that--I'm supposed to pay them to remove the junk that comes on the product they sell to me?! As I've said before, it just completely undermines the user experience, unlike when you buy Apple. Needless to say, I curtly dismissed this pitch.

I think a big part of the problem is that margins are so thin in the PC hardware business, that the OEMs are just desperate for incremental revenue. It's almost like spam--even if only one person in 500 upgrades their pre-installed trialware to the payeware version, the comission on the pre-install still represents a desperately needed revenue stream for the OEMs.

I still say that a better user experience is an opportunity for a niche player in the Windows PC market.


PS What did surprise me was that the salesman never bothered to pitch two of the usual favorites--expensive cables and extended warranties. I guess my profile--cheapest laptop in the store, no time of day for the virus protection--told him I was a lost cause.

More Mortgage Problems

I am afraid I agree with this article, that lays out a reason why the mortgage crisis will continue unabated:

It seems that the majority of investors, economists, and governmental leaders are overlooking a very important right hand side of this mortgage rate reset graph. The subprime loan reset period (represented by the green bars) may be nearing the end, but the lightly-shaded yellow bars represent $500 billion worth of option-ARM loans expected to reset from mid 2009 through 2012.

I also think the author is overlooking another factor, which is that 5/1 and 7/1 ARMs for non-subprime borrowers will also be re-setting in the next few years. The results may not be quite as catastrophic, but there will still be a lot of rate jumps, particularly if prevailing rates go up between now and then.

Buy Cheap When It Comes to Laptops

I just bought a laptop at Best Buy. My philosophy of computers, especially laptops, is--buy the cheapest one that meets your basic requirements. The expected life of a laptop, before it is lost/stolen/broken/obsolete, is somewhere under 3 years. I used to be anti-laptop, for casual home use where portability is merely nice, not essential, because the laptop cost substantially more, carried much higher risk of breakage, and was prohibitive to repair. However, laptop prices have plummeted so much, that I have changed my view. Just plan to buy cheap and replace as needed.

On that score, I think I did pretty well. I went in, looking for the $499 Dell Inspiron that was advertised. While I was waiting for them to fetch me that, though, I saw an almost-equivalent Acer, clearance-priced for $375. That is about as low as I can possibly imagine getting a Windows laptop; or, for that matter, any PC. And it even came with Vista Home Premium. I believe Micro$oft has given up on trying to extract a premium for VHP over Vista Home Basic--even the very cheapest laptops now come with VHP.

I Don't Like Door-to-Door Campaiging

I am not a fan of door-to-door campaigning, unless the person appearing on my doorstep is the candidate herself. Otherwise, what is it really about? The visit serves no truly useful purpose, other than trying to increase the popularity of their candidate. It is not much different, in spirit, than junior high school student student council campaign.

As was observed in the early days of email spam--unsolicited, unwelcome email is still spam, even when it comes from a charitable organization.

A great Steve Yegge article screed on the importance of touch-typing, and the fact that it is never too late to learn.

On The Fly Price Comparison

two companies showed off their Android applications. Big in Japan showed ShopSavvy, a neat tool that scans a bar code and then searches the web and local stores for the same item

That's a pretty good idea. I have thought something like that would be useful when considering a purchase. If you aren't tuned in to the price point for an item you are considering purchasing (probably as an impulse), you can very quickly get a readout on what is a good price. Of course, as with so many things, the business model seems like a great big question mark.

Extend Toner Life

It is outrageous that the printer manufacturers are doing this to us! From Slate:

To find out, I did what I normally do when I'm trying to save $60: I Googled. Eventually I came upon a note on FixYourOwnPrinter.com posted by a fellow calling himself OppressedPrinterUser. This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out.

Proffesionals Marrying Professionals

John Derbyshire:

our cognitive elites are increasingly inbred. Doctors used to marry nurses, professors used to marry their secretaries, business moguls used to marry starlets. Now doctors marry doctors, professors professors, moguls moguls, lawyers lawyers, etc. Those “modest origins” of our meritocratic elites are less modest by the year. We might be drifting towards a caste system, except that meritocracy requires some openness, some vacuuming-up of high-I.Q. outliers from the lower classes, some dumping of low-I.Q. duffers from the elites.

Product Design Idea: Improving the Grocery Cart

When I go grocery shopping for our hungry family of four, the cart fills up. I mean, really fills up. Although I start out putting the crushable stuff on one side, and the heavy stuff on the other, as the cart fills up, it all jumbles together, and some stuff at the bottom inevitably gets squashed.

A nice, pull-up divider would be a great solution. Keep the heavy nicely segregated from the soft stuff.

Observation on Test-Driven Development

With TDD, I think probably half the benefit is the process benefit of wrapping your mind around the problem and thinking through the test cases. As opposed to the tangible benefit of having the test cases in hand, and the test automation developed (which I think also is significant).

Launchy for Apps

A friend told me about Launchy. You just type a few letters, and it pulls up the apps whose name matches: W-O-R for MS Word, P-H for Photoshop, etc. That's great. I have wanted the same thing for Recently Used Files, for years.

I guess Vista, like the Mac, has this built in. About time. I also think it is an example of classic Microsoft. No improvements, the same festering shortcomings live on for years, until a competitor lights a fire under them.

Reagan's Impression on An Apparatchik

Aleksandrov was an experienced functionary of high rank who had met plenty of Americans in the course of his work. But years after he had seen President Ronald Reagan for the first time he still trembled at the impression. It was not Reagan's words or policies that grabbed Aleksandrov's attention but his manners. The day in question called for an umbrella. As the president and his wife walked in the open air, the president held one aloft to shelter her from the rain. Aleksandrov recalled his own astonishment. Soviet political wives were meant to avoid the limelight; the task of sheltering them was supposed to be discharged by some nearby lackey. For Aleksandrov, Reagan's behavior was chivalrous in the extreme—an example of an ease of social conduct that Aleksandrov was to witness on several other occasions as he became acquainted with the United States.

Elites

David Brooks: In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation's founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin. I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn't just lived through the last eight years.

Social Security ROI

My father-in-law mentioned that he had a number of acquaintances who had unreported incomes for years, and now were suffering because they had reduced Social Security earnings. In theory, those tax cheats would have still come out ahead, had they just had the discipline and foresight to set aside some of their undeclared income for retirement. Of course, that is theory, it often doesn't work that way in messy human practice.

That got me thinking, though. 15 years ago I read that people currently retiring were, on average, getting the equivalent of a 30% return on their Social Security witholding, whereas people just entering the work force could expect a return of between -3% to 0%. 30% is quite a rate of return. Would those people seen a large NPV had they declared all their income, and payed into Social Security, and reaped that 30% rate of return? I'm too lazy to work the math, but it seems like they probably would have.

Chat and other features in Webex

We use Webex a lot at work (daily). The chat feature--which nobody ever seems to use anyway--is dangerously designed, I think. As I have found in teleconference-intensive environments, there is often a fair amount of back-channel conversation ("they are exaggerating the impact of the problem...", "...that's another missed commitment...", etc.). It is natural to use some form of chat for that. Typically, from what I see, the vehicle is instant messaging.

Imagine trying to do that instead through Webex. The default in Webex is to send a message to ALL meeting attendees. WAAAY to easy to open virtual mouth and insert virtual foot. Ouch!

T-Mobile Faves and Conference Call

After 10 years with Sprint wireless, we switched to T-Mobile. A big part of the draw, besides the general appeal of being a new customer and showered with free phones, was the unique Faves program. That lets you select 5 numbers which you get unlimited calling minutes for. They can be almost any domestic number, even T-Mobile competitors.

That had 2 big benefits. One, it let me cut back from 2000 to 1000 minutes, saving $30/month. Two, I can make my company's universal conference call number a fave. I spend about half my day, at least, on calls, and I work from home 2 days/week, so that is a huge convenience. It also should allow me to drop by second line, another $10 saving.

Donate To This Political Ad

Dave Winer with yet another creative idea:

...put a Donate button on the ad. If I give you $100 you commit to using that money to run this ad.

Value-Added Packaging

I am a big proponent of "value-added packaging". Some recent examples I have come across in my personal, consumer life:

Coleman "wrap and roll" air mattress. This is the third air mattress we have purchased, but the first with this nifty little feature. It is as simple, and low-cost, as could be, but makes the job of storing the air mattress so much tidier. Great example of highly economical value-added packaging. (I think Coleman in general has a lot of VAP.)


MS Mouse 7000 snap-in bluetooth adapter. The bluetooth adapter, an easily mis-placed item, neatly stores in a cavity on the underside of the mouse.

LG Decoy Phone with Built-In Wireless Headset. I don't own this one, but as soon as I read about it I recognized a clear example of VAP driving product differentiation. In fact, I had a very similar idea, years ago, for a built in wired headset, with retractable cord.

Google Browser Incognito Feature

This article reports Google is going to launch their own browser, Chrome. One ground-breaking feature if Incognito: " a special privacy mode that lets users create an 'incognito' window where "nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer." This is a read-only feature with access to one's bookmarks of favorite sites."

Very clever. They should also implement an option for anonymous browsing.

Palin VP Nomination

There seems to be some excitement about Palin, but I don't share it. I think it is an inadvisable choice, both tactically, and on the merits. It reminds me of George H. W. Bush's choice of Dan Quayle in 1988.

Palin's experience seems ridiculously thin. That is already a problem, but a much bigger problem when the guy at top of the ticket would become the oldest president, by several years.

I wonder if McCain was not excessively captivated by Palin's own apparent "maverick" (boy is that word over-used, for lack of a good synonym) image. This Peggy Noonan article dwells on the notion that McCain defines himself, more than anything else, by his "maverickness".

Then there is a subtlety pertinent to being the first woman in the office. Not every husband is well-equipped to be a good first gentleman (or whatever he will be called). Margaret Thatcher's husband, Denis, I believe was thought to have laid down a great path to follow in the U.K. I really know nothing about Palin's husband, except that he must have far less experience of the world even than she does, so one just has to wonder about that angle.

The Republican Party Has Developed A Bad Habit

...of nominating the guy who has paid his dues and whose turn it seems to be. And typically that kind of person is a career pol, an organization man, and not necessarily a very exciting candidate. That was how George W. Bush got nominated in 1992. Riding on Reagan's coattails, a record-breaking economic expansion, and a weak opponent, he got himself elected once, but was weak against Bill Clinton. Dole in 1996 was an even more stark example of the habit. Bob Dole was a good man, a dedicated and dutiful politician, but clearly a terrible campaigner for national office. He got destroyed by Clinton, it wasn't even close. Even Reagan was, to some extent, awarded the nomination after waiting his turn (I didn't say the habit always produces lackluster candidates!).

John McCain is yet another example. That wouldn't have been the case in 2000, but it is now. Waaaayy too old and establishment for the present mood of the country.

The one time the Republicans deviated from this recent pattern? Well in 2000, they did the exact opposite, nominated a guy who hadn't paid any dues at all, and that got us Dubya. Which I think explains this year's strong reversion to form.

Exercise Fights Cancer

One more benefit of exercise. As close to a "silver bullet" as one is likely to find. And it is nearly free.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/health/nutrition/14fitness.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1218716635-H0lSJmQwokQsrAoQ/avGhA

There Is No Domestic Oil

This whole article is good, using very arch and pointed language to provide an econ and politics 101 lesson about the stupidity of presidential candidates blathering on about the importance of energy independence.

If we were energy independent, the politicians imply, prices wouldn't go up. But if you're an oil-striking American dude - maybe a little naive but smart enough to know that your hot daughter Elly May is going to be better off in Beverly Hills than the Ozarks - you're going to shop your barrels to the highest bidder, not just to whiny Americans with their near-worthless dollars. More oil procured from under U.S. soil means more oil on the global market, not more oil for just us.

And let us not overlook this point:

The only smart thing I heard was Obama's advice to fully inflate your tires, although he overlooked the fact that gas stations no longer have free air pumps or even decent pay ones.

That last part is SO true! 15 years ago, many stations had these nice, dial-your-psi pumps. When you hit the desired psi, the pump would ding 3 times, and would stop pumping. In one sense it is a silly and trivial thing, but since my solution (using my bike pump) is unlikely to appeal to most people, the absence of good pumps really is an impediment to a public good. A little bit like the shortage of public restrooms in many cities is an impediment to tourism and quality of life.

Know-Nothings, Willful Ignorance

I was already planning on writing the prevous post, then I saw Krugman's article about Republican know-nothing-ism. I don't really like Krugman, and have always self-identified as a Republican conservative, but I have been thinking exactly the same thing myself. That is quite a contrast to Obama, who seems willing and able to speak to Americans as if they were competent adults.

National Inflate Your Tires Day!

Dave Winer has a great idea: National Inflate Your Tires Day. We Americans need to drop any notion that there is a "silver bullet" that will solve the energy/carbon crisis. We need to find many little things that add up. The nice part about little things is they aren't all that hard, the hard part s are paying attention, and taking the first couple of steps toward forming a new habit. After that, little things usually become pretty easy.

(The tires example struck me right away, since it was the subject of my New Year's Resolution 3 years ago. And I have found that one pretty easy to keep.)

Static Electricity and Gas Pumps

I used to think the posted prohibition on re-entering your vehicle while fueling it was intended to make sure the customer keeps an eye on the pump, just in the very unlikely case it should jam somehow, and not auto-shutoff. But I have since learned the real peril is static electricity, (although the article touches on the auto-shutoff issue as well).

"You should never re-enter a vehicle when you're fueling," Mr. Wormser said.

That's because a person who re-enters a vehicle and slides across the seat can acquire a static charge of thousands of volts, caused by friction between two electrically dissimilar materials, such as clothing and seat upholstery, said Dr. Robert E. Nabours, an electrical engineer. If the charge is not harmlessly discharged through the person's shoes or by the person touching metal, such as part of a grounded car, an electrical arc can jump from a hand to the nozzle, igniting gas vapors and starting a fire.

Hot

Based on the 5-day forecast, we are looking at running the air conditioner for a solid week. I think that is the first time for that, in our 6 years in Minnesota. (I have a high threshold for turning it on, typically 86 degrees.)

Golf Considered Incompatible with Fitness

I am a true believer in, and mild evangelist for, the seemingly limitless benefits of exercise. So many people seem to use the excuse that they don't have enough time. Like most excuses, that probably would not hold up to scrutiny. Then I thought about some of the people I know who aren't so fit, but have a pretty good golf game, and I realized that if they were to trade their golf game for strenuous exercise, they could probably be competing in triathlons if they wanted to!

If you play golf once a week, that is probably a 5 hour time investment, unless you are very good. And if you are very good, and it only take you 3+ hours to play--well, that probably means you play 2-3 times per week, and maybe spend some more time at the driving range. So no matter how you slice it, even a moderate golf hobby takes up an amount of time that could account for a pretty decent starter exercise program.

I don't really have anything against golf, this is just an observation. I know, golf provides a little bit of exercise. But considering the fact that almost everybody seems to want to take a cart now, rather than walk, it really doesn't give you very much.

Carpet Is Over-Rated

Nothing feels as nice under the feet as nice, plush, clean carpet. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn't last very long, unless you have no kids, no pets, few visitors, and replace your carpet every 5 years. I have come around to thinking that it would be better to have little or no wall-to-wall carpet. Much better to have wood, fake wood, or tile flooring, all of which are much lower wear and maintenance. It's only taken me 42 years, but now I try to view every consumer decision in terms of its maintenance implications. And carpet requires maintenance, and it still degrades rather quickly. Plus it hides lots of allergens.

Credit to Gates for Moving On

Bill Gates recently retired from active involvement in Microsoft. Gates founded Microsoft 33 years ago, without any venture capital, and was deeply involved in and identified with the company throughout the years of meteoric growth, and well into sedate middle-aged corporate maturity. I have to give him credit for being able to let go. More significantly, he gets credit for fostering an organization that he can step away from without causing much more than a ripple of nostalgia. This is the defining characteristic of what Good to Great author Jim Collins would call a "fifth level leader".

(As an aside, I have deep doubts that Steve Jobs meets this standard, though at the moment, he seems like a helluva fourth level leader.)

Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In | The ...

This Onion headline says it all.

Exercise Anti-Aging

I think of exercise as the silver bullet of health (first rule of silver bullets: there are none). But so did this guy, right down to bicycling avidly, and he almost suffered Tim Russert's fate.

Isn't "Steering Committee" an Oxymoron

I mean, have you ever seen a vehicle steered my two people at the same time, much less by a committee?!

Telephone Call Volume

I find it very tiring and stressful to engage in a telephone conversation in which it is difficult to hear the other party, for whatever reason (more often than not, because they are habitually speaking too softly). It would be a very, very nice feature if phones could dynamically adjust for loudness--amplifying quite voices, and muting loud ones. That would be some fairly sophisticated signal-processing, but in this day and age, it seems possible.

North Shore

After our second trip to Minnesota's north shore, I now understand why people rave about it. The first time, we focused on the shore part, enjoying our campground that backed up to the Lake Superior. That was very nice, but not quite spectacular, at least no more spectacular than other parts of the Great Lakes.

This time, we headed north, into the many, many state parks, all of which have rivers that flow into Superior. Those offered truly spectacular views and hiking, and so pristine. We get it now.

Worse Than Focus-Stealing

Most irritating thing about it is the way the trackpad works. Hesitating while positioning the cursor is interpreted as a click. This has already resulted in wrong information being transmitted to Netflix

That is quite a useability defect!

eBay Doldrums

Slate has a good article on eBay's doldrums.

I have never been a big fan of eBay, or online auctions in general. I have found that it is waaayy too inconvenient for the buyer. Too much time and energy invested in figuring out what to buy and then waiting to see if your bid wins, which it often doesn't.

Part of the problem is that eBay's auctions do not closely enough mirror bricks and mortar auctions, where both the buyer and seller are under time pressure. In eBay's case, time works against the buyer. If you are trying to buy some item, like a $40 used MP3 player, and you lose a couple of auctions, you have now spent a week (elapsed time) trying to buy an item. It's just not worth it. There is the "Buy It Now" option, but in my experience, the prices people set for those are ridiculous--you could buy the item new, at a store, for the Buy It Now price.

I have an idea for solving this problem, by blending aspects of Buy It Now into the auction process, in order to make the element of time work more like a real auction. The seller would set a "win it now" price, but that price would be hidden from bidders (but once set, not changeable by the seller). The way it would work is that the highest bid exceeding your hidden "win it now" price would be accepted, after one hour of no subsequent bids, as the winning bid.

Terrifffic Anti-Apple Tirade from Dave Winer

Dave says:

I just don't like the smarmy marketing attitude of Apple, he's kind of like the teacher's pet in music class, pretending that he's a connoisseur -- I see flaws and bugs everywhere. Fix the bugs and STFU about how great the product is. Sorry. I want to use Apple's products the same way I use a Canon camera, as a product I respect, but if they ever start screwing around the way Apple does, I'd switch to a Nikon or whatever. Problem is there is no Nikon or whatever in PCs and iPods. All the other products suck. Hugely. Apple's just suck a bit less. Not a huge accomplishment for an industry, imho.

Gas Prices

Given the fact that oil keeps going up, and we are in the summer driving season, I am surprised that gas has stayed around the same "trading range" for the last 4 weeks (here in MN, that would be $3.85 - $3.99 / gallon).

Outlook Message Recall

Probably more than you want to know about recalling a message in Outlook. All in all, it is almost too dangerous and unpredictable and probably the world would be a better place if it were removed as a feature.

Recall Message functionality was designed with a passive rather than aggressive system in mind and is dependent on the Outlook clients' background "sniffer" idle process to remove the recalled message from the recipient's inbox. In order for this message to be recalled automatically, the specified criteria must be met. In addition, Outlook clients must also have the Tools, Options, Preferences, E-Mail Options, Tracking Options, "Process requests and responses on arrival" selected. This feature enables the background "sniffer" to run. When it detects an Outlook idle time (generally anywhere from 60-500 seconds) then it will run and process all unread items in the Inbox to see if any of them require its attention such as Meeting Requests, Read Receipt responses, or Message Recalls.

Bitly implements my anti-linkrot feature

http://switchabit.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/bitly/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bitly_alternative_to_tinyurl.php

We automatically mirror each page, never know when you might need a backup.

This is what I was thinking of several years ago, when suggesting a feature like this for blogging software.

Zippers Are the Weak Link

So often, one finds that the zipper is the weak link in an otherwise expensive garment. I have had to toss perfectly good jackets because the zipper was trashed. I don't think it has to be that way. I have a 10-year old L.L. Bean knapsack in which the zippers (and everything else, for that matter) are holding up splendidly. And that is considering I haven't always treated them with kid gloves--I sometimes get lazy, and pick them up by the zipper tab. I hasten to add, this was a very modestly-priced purchase.

Long Story Short

In the last year or so, I have noticed a trend of shortening the well-established phrase "to make a long story short" as simply "long story short". As in "Long story short, by the time I retrieved my car from the New York City impound lot, it was 3 AM, I was $300 poorer, and felt lucky just to be done with the entire ordeal".

Surprisingly, this usage doesn't grate on me. In fact, I find it oddly charming.

Dave Winer

Dave Winer: I saw the story about the librarian who wasn't allowed to wait for a McCain event because she held a sign with a political message, a subtle one, a thought-provoker...When you put on your plastic lapel pin, you should think about the Government of the People, by the People and for the People ...McCain could give a speech about that librarian, that would be truly impressive. Here's something he can fix right now. Tell the people who watch the people lining up to let people express their political thoughts, esp those who do it legally and peacefully.

CT Scans

This NYT article suggests that CT scans for heart patients are over-used, because the machines cost $1 million each, so one a practice commits to buying one, they have to use it a lot to amortize that high cost.

Without addressing whether CT scans for heart disease are effective, I do have an observation. Similar to airports, this is very expensive equipment, and it should be utilized on a 24x7 schedule. What this would mean is fewer machines purchased, shared between more or larger practices, and some inducement needed to compensate patients for taking the "graveyard shift". Still, it seems do-able. If not fully 24x7, the something close, like maybe 18x7. Having it un-utilized all day Saturday and Sunday certainly seems unjustifiable.

Of course, in implementing this kind of factory-like, high-utilization model, we have to be wary of law of unintended consequences. The one I can see coming, a mile away, is that insurers will set their reasonable & customary based on the midnight rate, and pretty soon, everybody will be trying to book the off-peak hours, and the appointments during peak hours will go begging!

Viacom/YouTube Privacy Problem: Another Reason to Use Anonymous Browsing

In all the words I have read about the Viacom suit against YouTube, the possibility of anonymous browsing to remove the problem of preserving one's privacy has been thoroughly overlooked.

A Catchy Name Is Indispensable

I think a significant chunk of the success of a product or marketing campaign is often attributable to catchy naming. I've noticed several very mudane business processes that are made to sound much more exciting and sophisticated via a cool-sounding name:

Sky-hooking: back in the 80s, when insurance claims still arrived as paper, and before off-shoring was in the dictionary, an insurance company sent boxes of claims, air-freight, to Ireland, to take advantage of lower-wage, English speaking labor to process them. The sky part obviously came from the airflight aspect of the process. I really don't know what, if anything, hooking derived from, unless perhaps it was some kind of pre-existing claims-processing lingo.

Blow-back to paper: 5 years ago, the idea of receiving mortgage documents via DVD was somewhat cutting-edge. So cutting-edge, in fact, that we had no processes for internally processing them as images. Our vendor, Xerox, helpfully explained to us that was no problem, there imaging workflow included the option to "blow back to paper". Translation: mass-print the entire contents of the DVD, for further processing 100% unchanged from the past generation of dead-tree-oriented workflow.

Skip-tracing: in the debt-servicing industry, this refers to the process of methodically filling in gaps in address records.

Finally, the Perfect Use for Texting

This has been a very rainy spring here in Minnesota. I have 3 kids in practices, and am coordinator for one of their teams. More than once, it has been touch-and-go as to whether weather would cause a practice to be canceled. When storms threaten, several things happen, all bad:

• Parents call the coaches cell phone all afternoon.
• Some parents don't get cancellation emails in time, and make the trip for nothing
• Other parents assume practice is canceled, when it isn't

While email is very convenient, it is often not timely enough. One, because not everyone carries a BlackBerry; two, because many people use the work email address.

It finally dawned on me that texting was the solution. Everybody carries cell phones, all the time, and texting is very near-real-time.

But I didn't want to solicit and hand-enter 40 or more cell phone numbers (2-3 per athlete). And I wanted all 3 coaches to be able to send the cancellation (or non-cancellation) message.

I looked around the web a little bit, and found a site called www.networktext.com. It's basically a newsgroup for texting. Ad-supported. It has the key features I need:

1. Self-service registering for the members (parents).
2. Ability to designate administrators--the only people who can send messages to the group.
3. Ability to send texts to the group from a computer.

I put out the word to the parents only two days ago, expecting to have low participation. I figured maybe after the next time it was a rainout, that would motivate more people to sign up. But this spring being the wet, unpredictable season it has been, 48 hours later we had our first opportunity to use it. When I logged in, I was surprised to see 23 members registered.

It seemed to work well, one of the parents even replied (by email) thanking me for setting it up, and another replied by text. To be honest, I am surprised this hasn't caught on more. This seems like a very obvious area for Google to move into.

Environmentalism Issue Strategy Memo, Part III

In Parts I and II, we looked at how hard it is to get consumers to focus, in a deep and sustained way, on the stuff that really matters in improving the environment. In Part III, I put forth an idea that seems like it might, just might, in some small way, work.

We need a solution that measures and displays electrical consumption in real-time. The solution I envision would involve wirelessly transmitting power consumption data for appliances to a small screen, conveniently mounted in the kitchen or family room. Ideally, major appliances would each have a built-in transmitter. In the meantime, X10-style plug in modules for major appliances would go a long way.

Clever graphical representation of the data would be the other piece of the puzzle. Showing people how much more $ and carbon they consumed the day they kept their thermostat at 72, versus when they set it at 65, etc.

Postscript 2008-05-14

This city-sized, accidental experiment in Juneau is interesting:

“People are suddenly interested in talking about their water heaters,” said Maria Gladziszewski, who handles special projects for the city manager’s office. “As they say, it’s a teachable moment.”

Postscript 2008-01-25

This experiment demonstrates the potential:

The results of the research project...suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.

MS just does not get user experience

In addition to letting their OEM partners load the machines with crapware/trialware, they are now going to force us to take a lousy OS, Vista, whether we want it or not. I think Apple will slowly eat their lunch. What an irony that MS is reknowned for its senior management being cognizant of the fact that tech supremacy rarely lasts.

You would think MS-Access would be smart enough

to recognize its own auto-assigned PKs, and not try to auto-link them when you add tables with them to the query pane.

Facebook / LinkedIn feature idea

LinkedIn has checkboxes for you to indicate what you are interested in (keeping in touch, career opportunities, etc). I don't find them to be very useful, though. Especially for potential job seekers, I would like a rating of 1-5 to indicate interest level in job opportunities:

• 1 = Very Motivated (i.e., unemployed)
  
• 2 = Motivated (i.e., worried about losing job or hate job)
• 3 = Interested (i.e., looking for a better opportunity, but in no hurry)
• 4 = Would Consider the Right Opportunity (i.e., it would have to be my dream job)
• 5 = Not Interested

I know that when I have been looking to fill positions, I would have found this very, very useful in mining my network.

Dumbest Feature (Not) in MS Office

There is absolutely no incremental versioning. One wrong click and everything is lost. Whereas Google docs automagically gives you many, many versions.

Eat for Exercise Recovery

Not that I am by any stretch a talented athlete, but the way people complain about soreness, I've just never understood it. I get a little sore, but it just doesn't feel that bad. However, I do like to eat, a lot, and I really, really like protein. So that might explain a lot.

Excess marketing email

It is galling how a company, if you ever order even one single thing from them, will assume you want to receive thrice-weekly email offers from them. Of course I never give out my main email address for commercial purposes, but other people do. I have to wonder, if they could just restrain themselves and only send monthly messages, if they might find "less is more"?

I'm also tempted to punish the offenders by clicking the "report as spam" option in Google. I wonder what Google does if I report Home Depot email, for example, as spam?

Reactions to Ads

I have watched very nearly zero television since about the time I could drive, and the only radio I have listened to is NPR. So basically I took a generation off from exposure to TV and radio ads. Now that I have pre-teenage children, though, I am exposed to a modest amount of incidental advertising.

TV ads have gotten much, much better. Many of them are visually compelling, at least on the first or second viewing. Quite a contrast to the repetitive, jingle-based stuff I remember from my childhood. Radio, on the other hand, seems relatively unchanged. It's pretty intolerable, I find--once you have developed the NPR temperament, I don't see how you could tolerate the grating ads, even if the content were compelling.

Regarding IT As A Profession

A pair of terrific columns by Cringely. He hits the high points in some inter-related themes that I have been thinking about:

1. IT as a profession isn't all that fun any more.
2. IT if factionalized and balkanized.
3. Outsourcing and off-shoring have lots of problems, including quite possibly not saving money, just buying a much higher volume of labor at lower prices.

Choice quotes for each:

One of the real miracles of the PC revolution was that it often was led by super-users -- enthusiasts who had a PC at home before they had one at work and who led their co-workers as much through example as skill. Well those days of the 1970s and '80s are long gone and IT is today as entrenched and isolated as it was during the mainframe era of the 1960s.

in most organizations power ultimately manifests itself in head count, so IT organizations grow like crazy, becoming ever less efficient in the process. The typical power structure of corporate (which includes government) IT tends to discourage efficiency while encouraging factionalization. Except in the rare instance where the IT director rises from the ranks of super-users, there is a prideful disconnect between the IT culture and the user culture.

Outsourcing, while a very popular recommendation to improve IT, is treating the symptom and not the problem. The problem is IT applications require lots of ongoing maintenance and that costs labor, meaning REAL MONEY. Rather than make applications more reliable and reduce problems, IT managers seem to prefer shopping for cheaper labor. The problems are still there. It is cheaper to fix them with offshoring and outsourcing, true, but it often takes longer. If the end users -- the people who actually make MONEY for the company (IT doesn't, Lord knows) -- are unable to work from time to time, this is okay because IT is spending less money.

Behaviorism Health Care

So Express Scripts surveyed thousands of customers to understand better their concerns about generics. It learned some were uncomfortable with how to tell their doctors they wanted to switch, or felt it wasn't their role as patients to bring up the topic. Others found the whole topic too complicated to bother with.

With those concerns in mind, Express Scripts made several changes to how customers were informed about simvastatin, such as shortening the text in its literature and changing its color and including a letter that patients could just hand to their doctor requesting a switch.

The company also framed the message to focus not merely on cost savings, but on how generics can be the better value -- explaining that drugs that cost more but don't do more aren't a better value. People often believe branded or costlier drugs simply are better, says Dr. Nease, whereas Express Scripts' new message stated that the "best buys" are drugs that cost less and do the same thing.

Generic statin use among its customers soared to 53% as of March of this year, Express Scripts is expected to say at a conference Tuesday.

Interesting. I wonder if there could ever be a "tipping point" effect, whereby the idea becomes "socialized" that, like recycling, seeking healthcare cost savings is A Good Thing.

A Little Supporting Evidence for My Alternative Employer Health Insurance Tactic

Among employers, the hardest pressed may be small businesses. Their insurance premiums tend to be proportionately higher than ones paid by large employers, because small companies have little bargaining clout with insurers.

Health costs are "burying small business," said Mike Roach, who owns a small clothing store in Portland, Ore.

So, another reason for small business to find different rules to play by.

Apple Profit

For a long, long time, my mental model of "Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs" was that they were playing different games. For Gates, it was all about winning, as measured by profit, and as Cringely has observed, "a graceless win is still a win". Everything else--style, innovation, originality--was completely secondary to winning.

Apple, on the other hand, was all about style, elegance, Steve Jobs' vision. What made Jobs happy was having the coolest products, good profit margins, if not the biggest total profits, and getting to boss people around. It was like Wal-Mart and Nordstrom's--same industry, but totally different approaches.

Now, however, Cringely observes that Apple has become a "lean and mean profit machine". So it seems that, finally, Jobs even matching Gates at his own game--winning in volume.

Google Should Buy LinkedIn

I know Google had some foray into social networking, but they somehow missed the boat. I wasn't paying a lot of attention at the time. But LinkedIn has a solid, professionally-oriented user base.
One strategic beneft would be to get a whole lot more people to have a Google login. I would like to use newsgroups and member-only weblogs for organizing various teams my children are on, but the high number of parents who need a Google login is a barrier.

LinkedIn doesn't have the cachet Facebook had, I bet they could buy it for a reasonable price.

Al Franken Tax Imbroglio

I think it is probably much ado about nothing. If conservatives didn't hate him so much, they would be sympathetic with the compliance burden of having to report any pay tax in 30 different states.

Ugly NFL Neon Sets

Is it just me, or are the modern NFL "sets", with all their unnatural, neon-ish gleam and glisten, simply garish? I'm pretty sure they are computer-generated, and not only do I find them extremely ugly--like the Las Vegas strip in miniature--but also very distracting.

Proton Beam Therapy

But critics say that the technique's advantage over X-rays has not been proved, except in certain rare tumors, and that proton therapy might not be worth the substantial extra cost. They say hospitals are engaged in a wasteful "arms race" for the prestige and profits that come from having a proton center.

I have read for years about this kind of hospital "arms race". When the administrators for each hospital are interviewed, they predictably all say "Yes, there should only be one of these--but OUR hospital is clearly the best place for it". I hope the government-mandated collaboration works out...

Consistency

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds

This has long been one of my favorite quotes.

Eczema Treatment--Hydration Then Moisturizers

This NYT article talks about a new theory of what causes at least some cases of eczema. It also talks about the fact that, while that may ultimately lead to new medications, in the short-term, the treatment is still the same--keep the skin hydrated.

Our son had moderately bad eczema on his feet and legs till he was 6. We saw a few doctors, the last of whom was a double-specialist in pediatric dermatology and pharmacology. He recommended a low-tech but surprisingly effective treatment. Rather than just slather on a lotion periodically during the day, he recommended first a soaking bath, to thoroughly hydrate the skin, then only a quick blot-dry, followed by a heavy dose of heavy-duty sealant, like petroleum jelly. Finally, the coup de grace was to encase the poor kid in damp, cotton pajamas for several hours, or the whole night!

We did this for over a year, and Seth was a surprisingly good sport (can you imagine wearing damp pajamas to bed?!). The effects were remarkable. It steadily mitigated, then eliminated his eczema. And since eczema to some extent tends to be self-reinforcing, I think if you can get rid of it for a while, you have a much better chance of getting rid of it permanently. We discontinued the wet pajamas treatment after about 15 months, and there was no relapse.

I have since used a similar approach to my own moderately dry skin, especially my hands. I hydrate, either by a shower or running my hands under water, then apply the moisturizer. What surprises me is that this hydrate-then-seal approach is not more well-known. Probably fits the classic saying--if this treatment could be bottled, it would cost a pretty penny and be heavily promoted.

Windows Battery Remaining Readout

35:17 hours?! What algorithm are they using? More often, it goes from half-to-nothing almost instantly. Windows power management in general leaves a whole lot to be desired, in my experience.

CFL Light Quality

You read a lot of grumbling about the color/quality of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs). I think I am pickier than average about that, and I generally have been very happy with the CFLs I have throughout the house (I typically buy 6-packs of 100W-equivalent at Sam's). However, I did buy a GE Daylight 6500K at Wal-Mart that is just terrible--extreme white with maybe a tinge of blue.

Salary Info Gets Out? Really?

An athlete's worth to a college is often negotiated behind the closed door of a coach's office with the scholarship amount kept a guarded secret, like a salary in a workplace. But the figures have a way of eventually getting out, as they do in any office.

The part about salary info getting out seem like false conventional wisdom to me. I have read similar assertions many times over the years, but in my 20+ years experience, both as employee and manager, it is just not very accurate. In general nobody discusses salaries of others in the workplace, and I have known of specific cases where there were substantial outliers, in both directions, and neither the outliers nor their peers seemed aware of the situation.

Ironically, 2 hours after posting, this, I saw this article in the NYT that seems to say differently. I remember, 20 years ago, my cousin Cliff opined that this social taboo worked to the disadvantage of employees, since it preserved a condition of information asymmetry in compensation matters. Which is exactly one of the motivations cited for the move toward frankness among friends in this regard.

Onshore Customer Service

Netflix set up shop here a year ago, shunning other lower-cost places in the United States and overseas, because it thought that Oregonians would present a friendlier voice to its customers. Then in July, Netflix took an unusual step for a Web-based company: it eliminated e-mail-based customer service inquiries. Now all questions, complaints and suggestions go to the Hillsboro call center, which is open 24 hours a day. The company's toll-free number, previously buried on the Web site, is now prominently displayed.

This sounds very good, in the spirit of Joel on Software steps to excellent customer service.

I will say that I have had some good luck with email-based customer service lately, with Northwest Airlines, and BlockBuster. But I hate how hard they make it to actually get hold of a human being.

Blogger Needs A "Now" Time Feature

When you first create a posting, Blogger sets the timestamp for the posting, but it will let you manuallyl override this default time. This feature is important to me, because I tend to email myself very small snippets of ideas for postings, and then come back to them days or weeks later. So generally, I would like the timestamp of my posting to be the time I click "publish".

What I wish is that Blogger enabled this more automatically. At a minimum, with a checkbox by the time-entry box, that says "Now". Better yet, as a configuration setting, to default to "Now", unless over-ridden.

Goodbye, Cursive!

I see one of my predictions is coming true...my children barely learned cursive, and never use it.

Idea for Consumer Reports Project

Collect instances where the dealer says the reported problem "is normal", but subequent evidence conclusively shows there was a problem that should have been diagnosed.

Electronic Appliance Controls - I HATE Them

Our 15-month old dishwasher basically stopped working. It was pretty clearly the touch-sensitive control panel, since it would eratically respond to button presses. I called in a highly-recommended independent repairman. He said it was likely one of two boards--one that costs $80, the other $120. More likely the former. Oh, and they can't be returned (the downside of an independent). That made matters worse, since if it turned out to be the latter, it would require a second service call, since it had to be ordered separately. So between $140 and $320 to repair a 15-month old, $399 dishwasher!

The primary culprit here is expensive, proprietary electronic controls. Adding insult to injury, is the fact that electronic controls don't really add much value. Sure, you have a bunch of different cycles and permutations, a few more than might be feasible with electro-mechanical controls. But all those variations are overkill. Almost all we ever use is normal. Occasionally, rinse or heavy. The same settings you had 20 years ago.

At the very least, appliance equipped with these crummy electronics should have a default basic mode that will work even if the board goes ka-flooey.

The odd postscript to this is that, while putting off the decision, the dishwasher has been working. Not quite perfectly, but basically in the way I just described--normal mode works fine.

(Dishwashers have gotten better at cleaning the dishes, and quieter, but I think they are also flimsier. This Kenmore replaced a Whirlpool that the people we bought our house from had ordered only a few years before.)

Cold Willpower

This NYT article talks about how willpower can be built up, almost like a muscle. I've read that a few other places recently. Maybe that explains why I tend to view the opportunity to tolerate brief bouts of cold as a character-building exercise.

My overt rationale is that it is worth enduring a few moments of discomfort in order not to be encumbered for several hours (in the mall, or restaurant or whatever) with a bulky coat. (I live in Minnesota, so I do keep an emergency coat in the trunk.) But I must admit, the feeling is also bracing, and maybe that comes from the chance to build up some willpower!

Music with Photos

As noted, I like seeing my home photos as a slideshow on my HDTV. With slideshows, I have noticed that even canned music which is not thematically related in any way, nor timed to the photo transitions, livens things up. So it seems like a really cool feature for slideshow software would be for the software to read a song and then create the transitions in rythym to the music. I am sure this is out there in some higher-end product, I just don't see why it hasn't migrated to the mainstream.

Differentiation Opportunity: Photos on HDTV

Growing up, my father was a big fan of slides. He took a lot of pretty-good photos, using an 35mm SLR camera, and had them all converted to slides. Once a month or so, we would have family slde night and look at the pictures on the big screen. It was a great way to look at them, and to collectively re-live family memories. MUCH more participative than leafing through a photo album.

I see the big, brilliant HDTVs that have been populating America's living rooms in the last few years as the obvious, and much more accessible, succesor to the home slide show. RSS inventor and inveterate software tinkerer Dave Winer is pushing this concept with FlickrFan (Mac-only, unfortunately). It is just such a great way to see your pictures--think of your HDTV as a really big monitor, and your rolling slideshow of pictures as the photo-screensaver, that plays whenever you aren't using your TV for something else.

I have been doing this, sporadically, with our HDTV. Unfortunately, our HDTV does not have an SD slot, so my easiest means of getting photos to TV is using the SD slot in my son's Wii. That works pretty well, but the built-in slide show functionality on the Wii is pretty limited.

So given the very fevered competition in the HDTV world, I think the top-tier manufacturers (e.g., Sony) could create some differentiation and value-add if they worked really hard at positioning and marketing their displays as platforms for displaying digital photos.

I think key ingredients would be:

1. Ease of use.
2. SD slot built in (more slots would be better, but SD at a minimum).
3. USB port (so you can hook up a card reader, or a USB drive, of a laptop).
4. Good built-in slideshow software.
5. Screensaver mode option--show photos automagically, when the TV is not being used.
   
6. Ease of use.
   

Other more advanced offerings might include;

1. Internet connectivity and downloding from Flickr, etc (basically what Dave Winer is doing.
2. Pre-integrated bundling with a streaming media device. Have to be careful, because without exquisite execution, this could trash ease of use. This is where Apple will probably make inroads.

Light notebooks over-rated?

I think lightness is over-rates in notebook computers, for many home and business users. The reviewers tend to emphasize this factor heavily, I imagine because they are big travelers. And I agree--if you are carrying your notebook a lot, weight would really matter.

But for the typical, non-traveling business user, like myself, toting a 6-7 lb. notebook is not a big deal. For most business users, the notebook stays docked through much of the day. Even if you un-dock frequently to bring it to meetings, as I do, the distance you are traveling is so short that weight doesn't matter too much.

I un-dock at the end of the day, put it in my backpack, and walk the few hundred feet to my car. (The backpack may be a differentiator right there--I could see how a small woman, using a crummy, shoulde-slung laptop bag, might find the weight burdensome.) Drive home, park in the gargage, carry the laptop into my home office. Done. Reverse in morning.

Again, if a significant part of your commute involved walking, then weight would matter more. Including perhaps walking up flights of stairs to get to your domicile (for those few buildings left that don't have elevators). Still, I think that is a minority of laptop-equipped office workers.

Mis-Guided HSA Users Experience Disillusionment

HSAs do offer some long-term potential for helping restrain runaway health-care costs. But as the linked story shows, the empahsis here is long-term. In the short-term, if employees have a chance of HSA or traditional indemnity, they are going to self-select. HSAs will be selected mostly by low-utilizers. Furthermore, in some circumstances, HSAs may be cheaper for very high utilizers as well (because once the deductible is met, typically 100% of costs are covered, no co-pays, including drugs). The middle-to-medium-high users will stick with traditional plans.

So in the short-term, employees and individuals will optimize, by selecting HSAs if they think there is a direct savings to them, so that if anything, upon introduction of HSAs, employers will actually see their costs increase.

The strategic value of HSAs to the system only is realized over time, if they truly work
to cause individuals to be wiser, more efficient consumers of healthcare.

TurboTax Rip-Off Attempt

Talk about unethical. When you got to use TurboTax to e-file, they offer you the option to pay by credit card, or pay by deducting from your refund. That might be a nice convenience, if it didn't nick you for 2x the cost of the filing, just to have that convenience. I think a convenience charge of this magnitude is indefensible, and constitutes an ethical offense. Compounded by the fact that they make that choice the default. I'm sure they trick a fair number of people, and that is an irresistible profit-margin, I suppose.

Shrinking Half-Gallon Cartons

About 5 years ago, Edy's/Dreyer's sneakily started selling 1.75 quart containers of ice cream, for the old half-gallon (2.0 quart) price. Others followed suit. Well tonight, I just noticed that Breyers cartons are down to 1.5 quarts! Probably in part a response to pressure on raw materials, so trying to maintain the same price but provide less product at that familiar price. The container's design seemed intend to diguise the change--flared out from the base. Borderline unethical.

Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet

I have been skeptical of the steady parade of articles discussing how far behind the U.S. lags in internet infrastructure and speeds.

Why Isn't Anonymous Web-Surfing More Popular?

There are various services and programs that will let you web-surf without leaving very obvious tracks. I'm surprised they are so little-used. I think many people don't even know that they exist.

Also, I wonder what the impact would be on the business model of the various companies working very hard to aggregate digital user data, if this were to take hold in a big way?

Who benefits from a real-estate boom?

I hate real-estate booms. I lived through one in the northeast in my early twenties. In 3 years, condo prices declined 30% from their peak. By another 3 years, they were down close to 50% from peak. Beth and I were happy to escape to the inexpensive and dull Indiana real-estate market.

We lived in Indiana for a decade. There, prices increased between 0-3% per year. Housing was very affordable, even in the best suburbs of Indianapolis. We sold our house there for almost no gain, and moved to Minnesota in late 2002, well into the real-estate boom. We bought a slightly nicer house here for way more money, I would say 30-35% more.

I cursed the boom even then, but there wasn't anything to be done for it. With school-age kids, renting wasn't an appealing option. At least we bought a couple of years before the peak, so it could have been worse. But it reminded me of the boom from the late 80s. People were saying all the same things:

• "they aren't making any more land"
• "when is the last time real estate went down in value??"
• "stretch to buy as much as you can afford, it is a great investment"
• "what other kind of investment can you live in while it goes up in value?"

I knew it was a boom, and wouldn't go on for ever. I won't pretend I knew how big the bust would be. I was hoping for the idealized "soft landing"--no outright price crash, maybe just years of stagnation, as incomes catch up to inflated housing prices.

The rest is history, of course.

So as I think about the real-estate boom and subsequent bust, I wonder who has benefited, and who has lost out. I don't think a full boom-bust cycle is a zero-sum game, with a winner for every loser. That might be true of a modest boomlet, when there are a few really strong years, followed by a return to normalcy. But a real bust also involves huge waste of economic opportunity.

So this is my quick analysis of who benefits versus who loses in a real-estate boom.

Farmers and other landowners. They clearly benefit, if they sell during the boom. That's an easy one.

Builders. It would seem like builders boom. They do lots of business, and their unsold inventory keeps increasing in value. Except. The longer the boom goes on, the more a builder is likely to expand. So when the bubble bursts, the builder is likely to have lots and lots of inventory, that sits un-sold for months. So I think builders may be more likely to get hurt, in the end, than to benefit.

Existing homeowners. We need to sub-divide this group. First, let's consider exisiting homeowners who bought before the boom, and continued to own their house through the bust. They never realized their paper gains, so they are clearly not big winners. But it might be worse than that. They might have been suckered into thinking that their house was their retirement plan, so they may have under-saved and/or over-extended. So in a sense, they may well have been hurt by the boom, even if all the fallout was based on decisions under their control.

Then there are existing homeowners who bought before the boom, and sold during the boom. Although it would appear that these people are winners, not necessarily. Most people sell and trade up, in which case they would be worse off. Even retirees often don't really trade down. So it would only be a small subset of homeowners who sell, who come out ahead. Those who sell and rent, or sell and leave for a less-booming real estate market. There will be a small number of people who have lucky timing: were planning to sell and trade up, but saw the market sliding after they sold, but before they bought; or sold because they were getting a 2-year expatriate assignment, for example.

First-time or out-of-town buyers who bought during the boom. They are losers--they paid more than they would have in a calm, orderly market.

Would-be homeowners. People who would like to become first-time homeowners, but either can't afford to in the hot market, or are just afraid of buying in a hot market. They are losers, though maybe not as bad as the above group, because although they would prefer owning to renting in reasonable market conditions, the frenetic market keeps them out.

Parents of young adult children. Even if you are thrilled to see the value of your own house go up, is it really so great if your adult children can't afford to but their first house?

Plastic Bag Bans Over-Rated

A classic environmentalist distraction.

Bailouts

This guy makes a lot of sense. WAY more sense than those in business clamoring for government intervention and bailout. I have seen a large number of articles, where executives in the mortgage and related industries are urging some form of government intervention. Appalling.

Like their counterparts in Japan in the 1990s, American authorities may be deluding themselves into believing they can forestall the endgame of post-bubble adjustments. Government aid is being aimed, mistakenly, at maintaining unsustainably high rates of personal consumption. Yet that's precisely what got the United States into this mess in the first place — pushing down the savings rate, fostering a huge trade deficit and stretching consumers to take on an untenable amount of debt.

Booms

As mortgage lenders imploded and stock prices swooned last summer, a light bulb went off for Tim Houlne, chief executive of a Texas call-agent provider: "Bubbles always burst."

Mr. Houlne's realization attests to how, far from Wall Street, executives in other industries and their advisers are finding management lessons in the subprime-loan meltdown.

Among the key insights: Don't chase a boom without planning for the bust. Make sure subordinates feel safe delivering bad news. Ensure that incentive systems don't encourage excessive risk. And don't gloss over complicated details.

They ought to teach this stuff in schools. Seriously. I think the only possible cure for booms would be widespread consciousness-raising. Nobody wants to hear that during the boom.

Mark Inconsistent Formatting: A Very Annoying New MS-Word Feature

I have used MS Word for Windows for years, almost decades. Just recently, I started very consistently encountering entire documents with wavy blue lines under all the text. Similar to the very-familiar wavy red ones that highlight spelling problems (a brilliant feature), and the wavy green ones that denote possible grammar problems (an okay feature). When I would right-click, the top menu choice was "return formatting to match original" (or something like that).

After a few weeks of being very annoyed by that (I read lots of Word docs online at work) I finally rooted around the Options tabbed mega-dialog, and found where to turn it off. Put that innovation right up there with "Open in Reading Layout".

Now--More Mis-Spellings of Juneau

I live on Juneau drive. It is already enough of a problem getting people to spell it right. Many simply have no idea how to spell "Juneau, like in Alaska". Many others may have once known, but default to Juno because of the old free email pioneer. Now Juno the movie will just exacerbate that problem.

Things Parents Should Deny Their Kids Even If They Can Afford Them

This article talks about how bad it is to have a TV in the bedroom. Also on my personal list: cell phones. That one eventually becomes hard to resist, but at least, for goodness' sake, don't go out of your way to hurry and get your kid a phone, just because it hardly adds anything to your monthly bill. The cell phone is very disruptive, in that you no longer know who is calling your kids. I know, email and IM is similar, but at least a lot of that takes place in the house (and you can always install spyware).

That's one of the challenges living in an affluent community--for so many parents, the only calculation is "is it affordable?"

How Is Ortho Insurance Like Rebates and Gift Cards?

My daughter got orthodontia last year. We had ortho insurance, which hardly covers the cost, but it does help defray it some. The bill for the ortho is very front-loaded, however, whereas the ortho insurance only pays out 1/3 of its total each year. But as far as I can tell, there is nothing to get the insurer to automatically pay the next year's installment (assuming you are still covered). I had to work pretty hard to get it re-submitted and paid. Which makes me wonder--how many $ or legitimate ortho claims never get paid, because the insured doesn't remember (or even know) that they have to re-submit in years 2 and 3?

Photo Forgery Detection

I've thought this would be a cool field to specialize in.

Wii Fitness--why can't MS and Sony retrofit Wii sensors?

It still seems to me like the Wii-style motion-sensors could be retro-fitted into XBox and PS/3.

Oh Thank Goodness

I don't pay a lot of attention to college sports. But I turned on ESPN while stretching, and Butler was playing Cleveland State. The announcers kept talking about how it was an important matchup in the Verizon League. I had never heard of the Verizon League, but my first reaction was "this is just taking naming rights way too far". So I looked it up on the web. Fortunately, it is the Horizon League. Whew.

A Matter of Trust: Bigger Volume = Savings

I consider it a breach of trust when the unit price for a larger size of a product is higher than for a smaller size. As a consumer, I want to be able to take the mental shortcut of assuming that there will be some savings by buying in volume. So if I need the larger volume anyway, I shouldn't have to bother comparing the price to the smaller size(s). Sales or promotions are an exception, but in those cases, at least I have the signage to alert me to the fact that I might want to take the time to compare.

It doesn't happen too often that this rule if violated, but it does happen. Today at Wal-Mart the 8.5-oz size of Jet Dry was less than half the cost of the 16 oz size, no promotions involved. I personally view that as unethical behavior on the part of the retailer, and it does make me think less favorably of them (for what that is worth!).