Category Archives: Rants

The Mythical High Performance Sock

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All my socks do is sit and plot their escape.

All my socks do is sit and plot their escape.

The day before I flew to India, a guy in the hotel’s guest laundry room told me that he’d almost gotten in a fight once when a pair of socks turned up missing. We all know that socks are the great self-emancipators of the garment world; they go Steve McQueen from the dryer all the time. Begging the question, why would anyone get so upset over the disappearance of them.

He must have seen the incredulity in my face, as he went on to tell me these were “high performance” socks.

I don’t know if got my second level incredulity as I thought, High… Performance… Socks? The things you wear on your feet to mop up sweat?

A sock is essentially a foot-shaped bag for your feet. As near as I can tell, the acts it “performs” are: 1.) warming the foot a little, 2.) drying the foot a little (theoretically)–though it can also keep the foot wet longer than it otherwise would be, and 3.) producing stink.

In the military we were instructed to wear two pairs of socks. The sock closest to the skin was a cotton sock, and the outer sock was wool. This rationale for this foot sauna was that the cotton sock would wick moisture away from one’s skin, and the wool sock would keep one’s foot warm even when wet. Incidentally, this works great if you are in a cold environment–unfortunately, we haven’t fought a war in a cold environment since 1953.

So when I thought about the “performance” at which these socks excelled, I assumed they must keep one’s feet toasty. Wrong! The material seems extra thin. So, they must keep the foot extra dry, perhaps they are embedded with talc or something like that. Wrong again.

Surely these socks aren’t better than average at producing foot stench?  No. That’s not it.

Then I realized there was an other factor on which a sock might be judged: its ability to get people to hand over money in exchange for it. An average pair of socks can garner $3 or $4, but high performance socks can get people to shell over $17 or more. That’s some high performance.

Now, I know someone out there will be wanting to tell me about the orthopedic benefits of said sock in supporting one’s arch. This sounds like sock oil salesmen shtick. Is there any fabric known to man that can support your body weight so as overcome in adequate arch support in your shoes? Unless you are Tinkerbell, I doubt it. Perhaps, these socks do have physics-defying properties; maybe we should use them to mend bridges.

RANT ROOM: Robots Calling

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698px-Alt_TelefonThe phone rings. I pick it up. A robot starts talking in my ear. Well, not a robot, but an electronically recorded voice. I hang up. This happens about seven times a day.

I’m on a no-call list, but there’re so many loopholes so as to make its value questionable. First of all,  the politicians exempt themselves–of course. Only a politician could be so megalomaniacal as to think that a person who expressly requests not to be bothered by anyone by phone is secretly awaiting his robo-call.  Second, charities are exempt, whether it’s the March of Dimes or the Irritable Bowel Syndrome Defense Fund.  There seem to be more charities calling than ever. Or, perhaps, they’re like Phnom Penh urchins– if you give one of them money it induces a swarm. (Or, more likely, they make all the big money by selling contact lists to other charities.) Finally, any business that you’ve ever done business with is exempt  (even monopoly phone companies and utilities, for which you had no choice but a third world existence), as well as the parent companies that bought a company that you did business with once 20 years ago.

People who know me will tell you that I don’t even like to talk on the phone with human beings that I like, what hope would a machine have? Answer: “None.”

Now, let it be known that I’m not anti-machine. In 200 years, when they unfreeze my brain after the Terminator Wars, I’m not going to be one of the douche-bags standing on a picket like to prevent little T8-Y0 from going to school with the human kids and super-intelligent dolphins. I just resent someone calling me, intent on taking up my time, without even having the common courtesy to be intelligent–artificially or otherwise.

Some will say, “But, Bernie, you’ve called me and said not a word that was remotely intelligent.”

To that I say, “Nuh-uh, stop being a jerk-head.”

I almost always meet the technical definition of “intelligent” (self-aware? I’m self-obsessed!) when I call someone on the phone, and that’s all I expect of others.  I would pass a Turing test because the evaluator would say, “Any machine would maintain a train of thought better than this guy. He’s all over the place. He must be human. Plus, he can’t do math for shit.” [If you want to weed the androids out of your life, ask them to divide 49  by 18. If they answer automatically and correctly to two decimal points, stake them through the oil pump. If they are one of those “Human Calculators,” they deserve it for betraying their kind–but I’m not speciesist.]

Still, this brings one question to mind, how lonely do you have to be to listen to a machine blather on? Obviously the companies using robo-calls have sufficient success to keep paying their phone bills. That means that some people have to hear the robot voice and say, “What the heck? Let me hear what R2-D2 has to say.”

Who does this? I’ve heard that some people have guilt issues with hanging up on people because they were “raised right.” I can’t claim to understand this. It’s not an affliction that burdens me. I will hang up on anyone who assumes they can make demands on my time without compensation in about two microseconds. Yes, I said it, Mom. (Just kidding, I’m really talking to cable companies, natural gas providers, credit card companies, etc.)

Still, even if one feels guilty about hurting the feelings of a person, why would the same guilt apply to machines–which do not have feelings to hurt.

I mean, does this person think the caller might be a T-101 calling from the future to warn him that a mean T-1000 is on its way to poke him to death with a memory metal finger? I guess that sounds reasonable… no, no it doesn’t.

Alternatively, do people sit around thinking, I wish someone would call me up and tell me what I want, because I have no idea.

Maybe I just don’t understand this mindset. No person has ever convinced me to make an impulse buy by yapping. I’ve never said, “Gee-whiz, you’re right, I definitely need this product or plan that I didn’t know existed five minutes ago.”

It has occurred to me that I might be taking the wrong tack by hanging up on these calls instantaneously. By doing that, I am helping them weed out an unlikely sale in as inexpensive a manner as possible. The next time a robot calls me, I think I’ll put the phone down next to the radio–playing easy listening, of course–and then walk off. I encourage you all to do the same.

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING: Presidents of Wild Facial Hair Coin Set

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As I’m eating breakfast this morning, I noticed this ad among the newspaper flyers.

Notice Grover Cleveland's two different styles of facial hair (for authenticity, as he served two non-consecutive terms.)

Notice Grover Cleveland’s two different styles of facial hair (for authenticity, as he served two non-consecutive terms.)

This spurred two thoughts. First, is there really a pent-up demand for coins with these three Presidents on them. I realize that, besides Abraham Lincoln, we don’t have any “money Presidents” who’ve made bold choices in facial hair (only with wigs), but is that really enough. I remembered the boondoggle in which Congress required the Treasury to mint coins faced with all the deceased Presidents on them (FYI- that’s the only way Jimmy Carter will ever be on a coin unless he kills an alien invader with his Habitat-4-Humanity claw hammer.) Anyway, they minted all these coins, but there was no demand for them–precisely because banks were afraid that tellers would get shot for trying to pass on a coin with Benjamin Harrison’s face on it. People won’t accept a Grover Cleveland coin as money (regardless of whether he sports the Hulk Hogan fu manchu) any more than they would a coin with Justin Bieber on the front and a poodle on the back.

Then, of course, I realized that these seem to be the very same coins put out by the U.S. Treasury. Which brings me to my second point, you can buy 8 of these $1 coins for 8 dollars. Normally, that isn’t called “buying” but, rather, “making change.” So it looks like the Treasury held a fire sale to get rid of all these coins. Congratulations, our Congress may be the first to have mastered reverse-seigniorage. For those of you who weren’t economics majors, seigniorage is revenue that is normally earned by the government as a maker of money. For example, if it costs $0.16 to make a quarter, the government makes $0.09 in seigniorage. Of course, if you sell the coin for enough less than face value… well, you can do the math. (FYI -This is why there is a movement afoot to eliminate pennies, because it costs $0.0124 to mint these $0.01 coins.)

You’ll note that the government has been trying for years to replace the iconic paper dollar with a coin. However, they always seem to blow it by either a.) making the coin the exact same dimensions as a quarter, b.) being super PC and putting someone on the coin that [fairly or unfairly] no one recognizes as money-worthy (e.g. Sacajawea, Susan B. Anthony, William Howard Taft, or Chester Arthur), c.) doing both of the above.

Granted, there are economic reasons for wanting to replace the paper dollar with a coin. The dollar is such a rapidly circulating denomination that it wears out quickly. Travelers will note that most countries have coins for the denomination that represents a roughly similar level of purchasing power to the dollar. However, I think there’s a more insidious reason for the drive to dollar coinage, and it may–in fact– be the reason that all attempts to date have thus failed. There are always movements to try to put strip clubs out of business. The coin dollar is just one more attempt. Frequenters of strip clubs cannot tuck a coin into a g-string, and if they start tucking $5 bills the average customer won’t be  able to stay for long. Thus, it’s those who enjoy strip clubs that keep the demand for the paper dollar high, and they are winning in their fight against the Moral Majority–or whatever we are calling the group that tries to dictate morality to the rest of the world while knoodling their secretaries behind their wife’s back as god apparently intended.

TODAY’S RANT: DIY Home Improvement Videos, or Vishnu Wallpapering

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So, I’ve been doing a lot of home improvement lately. My life, largely divided between having my nose to either a laptop or a book, has prepared me to  find out how to do any task in record time–in theory. Give me a few minutes and I can find out how to–in theory–install a cardiac shunt. That’s from a starting point of not knowing what a “cardiac shunt” is or even if it’s a real thing. The problem is that this background has in no way prepared me to interact with the physical universe. (So while I can find out everything one needs to know about cardiac shunts in a short period of time, and even probably understand [or look up] all of the arcane language in the scientific journals, I wouldn’t offer me $100 to install your cardiac shunt if I were you.)

I ramble. So I know how to optimize my search terms to find out how to do exactly what I need to do. Then I watch the video and I’m filled with great confidence, having seen exactly how easy it is. And then I wallpaper myself to the wall. The whole time the experts in the video are doing the task, they are filling my head with false confidence. “See how easy that was?… People think this requires an expert, but…”

It occurs to me that this might just be a strategy by such experts. My training as an economist invariably leads me to ask one question–from an economist’s perspective it’s the root question about any human behavior.  That question is, “What’s the incentive?” What is the incentive for a professional wallpaper hanger to make a do-it-yourself video? We don’t see travel agents (if such mythical creatures still exist) doing videos on how to use Orbitz, Kayak, or Travelocity. My training as a human has led me to be skeptical of munificence in all its forms. I think the strategy is to build false expectations. If one went into a home improvement chore knowing that it was going to be a hellish nightmare, one would have the right state of mind to get through it. However, if one thinks it’s going to be easy-peasy, then one ends up ripping one’s hair out and creating holes in the wall for an expert to–lucratively–repair.

That’s just one theory.  I have others. Now, I know that you are familiar with the common adage, “It’s a poor workman who blames aliens or Hindu deities.” Still, I can’t help but feeling that the wallpaper hanging experts in the YouTube videos had extra appendages that I couldn’t see due to some sort of psychic block or CGI erasure (i.e. like when they take the wires out of kung fu movies.) It’s my contention that one would have to have extra arms, like Vishnu, to keep the paper that straight and perfect as it’s applied. At one point I thought I’d made a breakthrough in string theory when I saw my wallpaper curl into more than three dimensions simultaneously, but it may have just been rage-induced brain hypoxia.

So why would multi-armed aliens, or Vishnu, make home improvement videos? How should I know. I can speculate that Vishnu might enjoy practicing Shakti, which–as I understand it–is the ability to make the impossible possible, the impossible in this scenario being effortless wallpaper hanging. The aliens might just be testing whether our species has the fine motor skills to challenge them in their impending takeover.

TODAY’S RANT: Crossing False Alarm

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Source: roadtrafficsigns.com

Source: roadtrafficsigns.com

If you’re like me, when you see the above sign, you say to yourself, “That is all well and good, but what if I get a non-conformist deer, or one of those illegals who can’t read English?”  Now, I know what you’re thinking, usually they put a little leaping deer silhouette on the sign so the deer knows the sign is addressed to it, even if reading is not its strong suit. (Let’s face it, if reading were essential to life on this planet, most of humanity would die out.) At any rate, for any number of reasons I might collide with a deer in a completely inappropriate zone.

Now imagine my confusion, and then excitement, when I came across this sign on a recent walk.

IMG_5309This was a flat piece of land, and rocks are generally believed to be inanimate.  So–at first blush–this doesn’t seem to make a lick of sense. However, then I began to think, “What if they mean ‘Rock’ as in ‘rock-n-roll’?”  So I staked it out for an entire day, hoping to get an autograph–maybe Clapton or REO Speedwagon. Who did I get? No one. Not even Donnie Osmond, because–you know–he’s a little bit rock and roll (a very little bit, an infinitesimally small part nano-rock-n-roll.) There weren’t even local bands.

What’s more, no actual rocks tried to cross all day. No igneous, no sedimentary, no basalt, no granite, no shale, no pyrite, no agate, no jasper, no oolite, no amber, no opalite, no Icelandite, no norite, no obsidian, no quartz, no chert, no flint, no gneiss, no marble, no schist, no slate… are you getting my point here? There wasn’t a single rock crossing event all day. Furthermore, how would a rock even know where to cross the trail? They aren’t as smart as deer.

TODAY’S RANT: How’d I Get So Much Stuff?

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IMG_5194I don’t  like to use words like “stuff”, “things”, or the vague but picturesque “crap.”  Such words have low information content and are thus semantic lightweights. However, there are few words for the random compilation of tchotchkes, trinkets, baubles, gewgaws, kit, tools, devices, objects, gadgets, contraptions, contrivances, gizmos, widgets, thingamajigs, and doohickeys that line the drawers, shelves, and closets of my house.

You may think I’m some sort of packrat, but the sad fact is– I’m not. I’d say our household buys  less than average for homeowners. For one thing, we have no children. For another thing, both my wife and I might be classified as, for lack of a more eloquent term, cheapskates. (She’s an accountant and I’m trained as an economist, what do you expect?)  Of course, many people, perhaps most people, organize their junk better than I.

I do have one consumption fetish, and that is books. If you live in a very small town (or a large city with many small, local libraries) I may have more volumes in my house than does your local library. However, two things have slowed me down in collecting [physical] books. First, I buy most of my books on my Kindle these days. Second, I’ve come to realize that the reason I’ve bought so many books is the hope that one of them would provide some impetus for me to say something interesting, insightful, and valuable, and the entire English language canon has failed me utterly in this regard.

Still, I have a lot of miscellaneous detritus floating around in my home. You’ve heard of the 500-year flood? I have 500-year tools; that is, tools that are specifically for some task that only comes up once every few lifetimes or so. In a reasonable world, one would rent such tools. However, most tool rental places are also tool sellers. Such businesses have learned that if the tool sells new for $60, they can rent it for $50. Most people will buy it on the principle of the matter, and if they don’t… CHA-Ching. Who would rent a tool that costs almost as much to rent as it does to buy? I’ll tell you who (you thought that was rhetorical, didn’t you?), people who have the good sense to think of every object that comes into their home as an item being warehoused at their expense. People who have garage sales are brilliant. They are getting paid to store their junk in your home.

When I’m doing spring cleaning, as I am now, I frequently find containers that contain nothing. I guess I’ve just kept them around in case some pressing containment needs pop up. I keep all sorts of things because I think one day I’ll need them. However,  I never do need such items again, except the day after I throw them out.  To avoid such a situation, I don’t pitch them. However, if I keep them I won’t need them. If Joseph Heller was still alive, he could write a novel about my life.

Of course, sometimes I do need such items, but–owing to my poor organizational paradigm–I can’t find them. I then face the ultimate dilemma. Do I put the new one that I just bought with the old one that I found after I made the purchase, or do I put it in an entirely different location in the hope that when I need it again I’ll have a better chance of finding it.

No place have I felt the weight of how much “junk”  is swirling through our planet as when I was in Bangkok’s Chinatown last fall. There are miles of cramped alleyways and corridors packed to the gills with little plastic-wrapped junk, much of which seems to serve no purpose other than to satisfy the aesthetic needs of people with really poor taste or as gifts for people to whom you really want to send a statement of loathing. I had to get out of there, owing to a fear that shelving would collapse and I would be buried alive under a pile of knock-off Hello-Kitty coin purses.  I can think of no death that is more embarrassing and yet apropos of life in the modern world than that.

Of course, one of the many downsides of an economics education is the knowledge that our high standard of living is dependent upon people making and buying ever more stuff. If you are saying “what high standard of living?” and you haven’t hand-churned your own butter, darned some socks, and killed a mastodon today, I would encourage you to look into how people lived in the past. People unburdened of an economics education can make statements like, “People shouldn’t be materialistic and everybody should have a job and all jobs should pay a living wage.” However, that is like saying, “I should be able to keep my cake and I should be able to eat it as well and somebody should pay me $100 for it.”

We are still hunter-gatherers. We just hunt for bargains, and gather up geegaws.

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TODAY’S RANT: Puny Machines

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When the machines rise up against humanity, I will be high on their list of Homo sapiens to put through the chipper-shredder.

You may be asking, “How can such an unimportant person make such a self-important statement?”

Here’s my confession: I have killed more than my fair share of consumer electronics. Let it be known for posterity that these were all cases of manslaughter–or, I guess, machineslaughter. I never once had malicious intent, nor did I ever engage in premeditation. Furthermore, in a way, I mourned the loss of these machines more intensely than I did the death of granny.

Let me say, in my defense, machines are weaklings. The good news is that I don’t worry about them taking over just yet because you can always take out a marauding terminator with a can of soda–and even make it look like an accident.

The rant part of this post has to do with the divergence between what is advertised, and what is true.

Below is a video that Lenovo has put on YouTube to show how robust their computers are.

Here was my experience, avoiding the lunging paw of a hyper cat, I spilled a drop of milk the size of a quarter onto the upper mouse buttons. This killed my mouse instantaneously (I’m aware of the irony of me killing a mouse while my cat looked on in horror.) My entire laptop died a few weeks later from what I assumed to be related causes.

Your Experience May Vary

Your Experience May Vary

Since my last machineslaughter, I’ve  quelled my killing spree by implementing three simple rules.
1.) I don’t eat in the same room as my computer.
2.) I don’t drink within 12 feet of my computer.
3.) I must close the computer any time I leave the room, if a cat is present. (This is not so much to save the laptop as to prevent the cat from composing a witty coded email such as, “a;oreanrpwipfvchaqewutheiuancvpiwe. wpn2qeyt028hnfqv-,” and sending it out to my entire email list with his butt.)

Do I resent having to walk on eggshells around consumer electronics? A little. I’d like to be able to listen to my transistor radio while taking a bath. (Research notes: Do radios still have “transistors?” Do they still make radios?)

However, what I really resent is the manufacturer making it seem like its product is indestructible when, in fact, it’s really pretty puny.

That said, I like the fact that people are tougher than the forces of robopocalypse by virtue of the fact that we can get wet.  (Of course, by that logic, fish should be our gods.)

Until next time, keep your can of Coke at the ready (but don’t drink it, that stuff will kill you.)