Dropping the Mask on Invasive TV Screens

The surest sign cementing my status as a curmudgeon is my annoyance at the creeping spread of TV screens into places that didn't have them before. It was bad enough when they started introducing them into taxis - they would turn on automatically, blaring worthless nonsense at you, and you had to turn them off manually.

But the world has continued to find fresh ways to vex me, the latest being TV screens at petrol pumps. There's no way to turn them off. They're just blaring at you, volume high through tinny computer speakers. Given that the clientele of a petrol station includes nearly all of society, it would be a tough challenge for a well-meaning program director to come up with content that would be interesting to most viewers, given they're only going to be watching it for 3 minutes or so. Whatever you put is likely to be annoying to a lot of people.

Oh well, can't win, don't try! The obvious response is to just make the programming almost non-stop ads. Because that's what you want when filling up your car - a TV screen tuned totally to ads. Every now and again, some crappy 7 second football clip will be displayed, then it's back to finding out about some new snack product. The ratio of advertising to actual content is perhaps higher than any other medium I've come across. The same holds true for the world's crappiest radio station, the 'Gas Station Radio Network'. (Ugh).

This whole phenomenon reminds me of the worst websites, which automatically start playing a video clip or ad, and you have to hunt around to find what's making the noise. Except here there's no way to turn it off.

There is simply no pretense that this is something customers are meant to enjoy, unless these people are complete fools. Or I'm falling victim to the false consensus effect, which is always possible, and the world is actually full of people finding fulfillment in the Gas Station Radio Network. Hey, did you know they sell cheeseburgers here?

I can't tell which possibility is more depressing.

/rant.

Good News, Bad News

People are apparently still surprised that when you take a country like Egypt and remove most of the forces ensuring law and order (however imperfectly and corruptly), this kind of thing happens.

At this late stage in the proceedings, I honestly cannot figure out why they would be.

Shylock's free tip to aspiring female reporters - if offered the lucrative assignment of covering the freedom-loving democracy protest in Tahrir Square, Cairo, you should politely decline.

My initial reaction to the first-mentioned story was "You mean they're still sending in female reporters to cover these events without a full bodyguard contingent? Seriously?".

Thank goodness she seemed to escape less harmed than some of the other cases, in part because she managed to not get separated from the rest of her news crew. That's when things tend to go downhill really fast.

The bad news is that public rapes are up.

The good news (apparently) is that people are voting!

The bad news is that the voters include the rapists.

The other bad news is that they're voting for the Muslim Brotherhood.

Not sure I'd score this as a win overall, methinks.

A Memo to United Airlines

George Gershwin is rolling in his grave every time you play your sh***y bastardised adult contemporary version of 'Rhapsody in Blue'. There's a good reason that the original song didn't just have one small section of the melody looped repeatedly with an easy-listening drumbeat in the background.

Fun run participants - stop being so god damn smug

Suppose I were to present you with the following proposition:

"Next Sunday morning, I'm going to take a dump on your front lawn.  When I'm done, I'm then going to donate $15 to charity. You'll have no say in the matter - this is going to happen regardless of what you want.  When I'm done, I'm going to walk away and feel proud of how I helped out a good cause, and you should be honoured to be part of the charity process - in your case, the cleanup."

How persuaded would you be by this logic? Would the phrase 'not very' about sum it up?

I imagine the modal answer would be something like:

"Look, I'm glad you want to give to charity, but what the hell has that got to do with crapping on my lawn? It seems that taking a dump on someone's property is the actual point of the exercise, and the charity bit is mainly a fig leaf. The whole thing seems bizarre and contrived. Donate to charity if you want to, but leave my lawn out of it."

And that's exactly how I feel about fun runs.

A bunch of yuppie, SWPL women (and their herb boyfriends) decide to go for some charity run or other. The neighbourhood gets shut down. Local residents get the joy of having their house made inaccessible, and their streets closed down.

So if you happen to be (to pick an entirely hypothetical example) dropping someone at the airport as the run is being set up, and you had the misfortune to arrive back while it was in full swing, you might find yourself unable to get back to the street that your house is on. You might also, to extend our hypothetical, be unable to even park anywhere remotely close to your house, due to the bays all being taken by everyone trying to do the same thing, resulting in swarms of angry drivers doing police-enforced U-turns looking for parking and/or an open street. Hypothetically.

So why do these damn things keep happening? Simple - a sizable fraction of the participants find it fun to get to run in a big crowd along the road that's normally reserved for cars. Not all, of course - some are just giddy with the ability to ostentatiously give to charity, and the fun run gives them an excuse to tell their friends about their generosity in a way that writing a cheque doesn't.

But a large percentage just like the idea of doing an organised run along the streets, and don't think or care if they're inconveniencing a lot of people.

You know who else does that? A**holes like Critical Mass. Fun runs are basically just Critical Mass, but with a better PR department. At least the cyclists are honest enough to admit that they're going to piss you off, and don't care. Fun run participants convince themselves that they're actually doing you, and the world, a huge service.

In order to launder the guilt properly, there has to be the maddening two-step of blame-dodging. It's the charity that organises the run. The participants just say 'look, the run was already going ahead! It's not me blocking off your streets, I just happen to like taking part.' The charity either doesn't care (more likely), or explains it as 'look, these charity fun runs raise a lot of money because SWPLs like running on city streets. If we don't do it, someone else will.'

And so they go on.

I know exactly what response this kind of claim produces from the standard whiners - "They're doing so much for charity! Why don't you just put up with a small inconvenience for a good cause?"

This is totally bogus, and just muddies the two parts.

Nothing, nothing, is stopping these people just writing a cheque to whatever charity they're supporting. You think the charity won't take your money unless you've signed up to the fun run? Don't make me laugh. Donating directly would also have the added benefit that a) all the money goes to the cause, instead of most of it subsidising the recreation, and b) then it would have to be all made up of their own money, rather than hassling their friends.

And if they won't write the cheque unless they're allowed to do the fun run, what is that telling you? To me, it sounds exactly like the first hypothetical. I'm going to use this act of charity as moral blackmail in order to do something entirely unrelated that I want to do anyway.

The Talmud has a very different idea of charity:

Charity, ideally, should be given in secret so that the two parties, the giver and the receiver, do not know each other.

By this standard, modern charity can't be accomplished without the donors literally organising their own parade run to celebrate their generosity, and then using most of the proceeds to fund the parade itself.

You'll forgive me for not getting all misty-eyed.

"Please Place Towels On The Floor If You Want Them Cleaned"

Man, do hotels love trying to get you to reduce the amount of laundry you do. It's always couched in the language of saving the environment. Think of all the towels in the world being laundered after only one use! All the water! All the detergent! All the energy!

First of all, I'm not asking for all the world's towels and sheets to be cleaned, just mine. And they ain't much. I know, because I do it myself. Or, you know, pay someone, which is basically the same thing.

You know what? Now that you mention the Hindenberg-scale disaster of all those laundered towels, I'm thinking about it, and it doesn't seem like much. Not because it's not a big amount - it is. But simply because the percent of the world's energy use that goes to the unnecessary laundering of towels is basically zero. If you did nothing but devote your life to washing towels over and over at the laundromat, your actions are going to be rounding error compared with the amount of energy the aluminium smelter down the road uses on a given days.

And even when the total amount still seems like a large number, that's mainly because if you take absolutely anything and aggregate it over the whole planet, it becomes huge. Think how many miles of cotton are wasted every day by people pulling on loose threads on their shirts, jackets and pants. It would be enough to stretch to Pluto! It would be enough to manufacture garments for all of the starving children of Guinea Bissau! It would be enough to let 300 tired garment workers take a whole extra year of vacation! etc. etc. etc.

The reality is that the hotel cares about the environment only to the extent that it cares about its profits. Which is fine - that's how capitalism generally works.

But you'll forgive me for not getting all misty-eyed about how I need to sacrifice so that the hotel makes twelve cents more profit.

Screw that. You know the Holmes motto? No Linen Too Fresh! It's my contribution to the Keynesian stimulus that I'm reliably told the economy desperately needs.

Algorithms that need improving

There’s nothing worse than being at the mercy of a poorly designed algorithm. You’ll be sitting there, knowing that if you were just given half an hour with their source code and maybe a programmer of theirs to explain the basic design, you could improve it

One of the classic examples is the ‘estimated arrival time’ on my GPS. A well-calibrated estimate should be too fast about half the time, and too slow about half the time. In the GPS case, however, their estimate is an understatement of your true travel time in about 95% of cases. The only, only time you’ll get there earlier than the GPS estimate is if you’re speeding for a significant fraction of the journey.

As near as I can tell, their estimate of speed is to take the total distance travelled and divide by the speed limit for each of the roads you’re travelling on.

For a company that makes GPS devices for a living, this is shockingly lazy. The big problem is that it seems to make zero adjustment for stop signs and traffic lights, meaning that it always takes too long. Traffic is another one that would be useful, but that’s probably harder to do. Still, it wouldn’t be hard to get a rough estimate – find major arterial roads, and increase the estimate by 50% if it’s between 7:30 and 9:30 or 5 and 7 on a weekday. I am highly confident that even something this simple would reduce the mean squared error in estimated travel times. That’s even without taking historical traffic data.

One that was even more infuriating was the one for the lifts in an old apartment of mine. The building was about 40 stories tall, and had about 4 elevators. During the interminable minutes spent waiting there every day, I deduced tha the algorithm would only send an elevator to the lobby if a) someone had pressed the down button, and b) the elevator in question was the lowest of the four. So what would happen is that you’d have elevators sitting there at floors 28, 35 and 39, and another one going up from floor 5. You’d sit there, watching the floor 5 elevator slowly make it’s way up each of its stops, and the other three would sit there doing nothing until the elevator that started at floor 5 reached floor 28. Only then would the floor 28 elevator start going down to the lobby.

This, as you can imagine, drove me absolutely batty. Talk about pure deadweight loss because some moron can’t add in a line saying:

‘If {No Elevator in Lobby} then send {lowest floor elevator with no buttons pressed} to lobby’.

Hundreds and hundreds of man hours were wasted in my building every year because the elevator company didn’t know what they were doing.

This is the kind of thing that almost nobody takes into account when choosing a building to live in – how quickly do the elevators seem to arrive? As my grandmother used to say, act in haste, repent at leisure. Or in this case, repent in slow minutes of agitation every day.

No One Could Have Seen This Coming!

TSA Creator Says Dismantle, Privatize the Agency

No kidding! Let's hear from Representative John Mica (R -Fl.), about the litany of failure that he is responsible for creating:

“The whole program has been hijacked by bureaucrats,” said Rep. John Mica (R. -Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

 A government department, has been hijacked by those who run it? Really? The government?!?

“It mushroomed into an army,” Mica said.  “It’s gone from a couple-billion-dollar enterprise to close to $9 billion.”

Hmm, you mean it now costs way more than originally envisaged? That sounds a lot like ... absolutely everything the government has done ever. How were we meant to see this coming?

Okay, but at least they're doing their job, right? It's a huge cost, but surely it's worth it, no?

As for keeping the American public safe, Mica says, “They’ve failed to actually detect any threat in 10 years.”

Screeners have also been accused of committing crimes, from smuggling drugs to stealing valuables from passengers' luggage. 

In 2006, screeners at Los Angeles and Chicago O'Hare airports failed to find more than 60% of fake explosives during checkpoint security tests.

Shocking, shocking stuff! A government department does their job incredibly poorly and inefficiently, but strangely they seem to keep getting given more and more money. Honestly, who among us could have predicted that? 

Okay, I mean anyone who'd never seen the operations of the FDA, or EPA, or the INS, or the Department of Education, or the Department of Agriculture, or...

“We are one of the only countries still using this model of security," Mica said, "other than Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, and I think, Libya."

Well, pat yourself on the back!

John Mica, welcome to the party. You're ten years late and you took a dump in the punchbowl that we've been trying to clean up ever since, but I guess we'll have to take what we can get.

If you'd like to demonstrate that you're serious and not just grandstanding and ass-covering, I look forward to reading the legislation you introduce to actually do all the things you're talking about.

Zero Emissions!*

I was driving behind a Nissan Leaf, the fancy new electric only car. On the back, the badge said 'Zero Emissions'.

Man, talk about marketing yourself to gullible fools who don't understand fixed costs or hidden variable costs.

This claim is just monstrously stupid. The power in your car is coming from somewhere! The chances that it will be produced from zero emission unicorns is pretty damn low. Even if it comes from something renewable like Hydro, there were big fixed emissions costs in building that dam. And if everyone started using Leafs running on hydro power, we'd probably have to build more dams, at a cost of, you guessed it, lots of emissions.

It's like giving your friend money to buy you weed, and then claiming that your conscience is clear because you never buy drugs. Zero dollars on marijuana!

Idiots.

How to Fail in Business Without Really Trying

Over at Paco Enterprises, Paco has an interesting post on Solyndra, the glorious new bankrupt solar energy company that managed to finagle $500 million in loans from the government and proceeded to send the money (and the company) down the rathole.

The more that comes out about this company, the more it becomes apparent that this was a horrible investment of money to start with. From the Government! I know, you must be as shocked as I was. As Zero Hedge noted, when you're producing a low-margin commoditised product like solar panels, and you've got revenues of $58 million versus cost of goods sold of $108 million, that's a recipe for the fast track to insolvency. Coyote's description is almost right:

Even in the worst run late 90′s Internet company I ever encountered, they were not selling dollars for 50 cents.

True enough. My only quibble with this metaphor is that if Solyndra were actually selling dollar bills for 50 cents, it would be a big improvement, because at least the final product would be re-salable for a full dollar. Here, it's more like they took a dollar bill to the 7-11, got change in quarters, melted two of the quarters into a blob of metal and proceeded to flush the blob down the toilet.

There is only one silver lining that I can see in this whole mess. At least the company actually went bankrupt, and now hopefully will be liquidated. In other words, taxpayer losses appear limited to only (only!) $500 million of yours and my money. By contrast, had Solyndra managed to limp along long enough to become a large political constituency, we probably would have been on the hook for much larger ongoing bailouts. It could have been added to the pantheon of dollar-bill blast furnaces of General Motors, Chrysler, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Post Office that no matter how badly they perform, the government picks up the tab and nobody ever gets fired.

The best thing Solyndra did for us was to fail fast enough and spectacularly enough that even the most coked-out green energy fanboys in the government couldn't justify throwing more money its way. You'll forgive me for not celebrating this fact too highly.

Let Hallmark Express Your Innermost Thoughts

I never understood why so many people want to buy cards that have messages already written in them.

I know I'm in the small minority on this matter thanks to the miracle of revealed preference. Go to virtually any card section, and you'll find rows and rows of pre-written cards for all sorts of occasions. The section for blank cards tends to be small, and verging on nonexistent if you're in a cheap place. It's safe to assume that the newsagents and supermarkets know their customers pretty well, and that the distribution of cards on shelves roughly matches the distribution in demand.

I understand that, human nature being what it is, sometimes people really don't know exactly how to express their thoughts, and only 'get it' when they read what someone else has written.

By why are the messages in cards so chronically awful? Does anyone read the boilerplate tripe like "wishing you every happiness on your special day" and think "Yes, YES! That's what I've been trying to say all these years!". Look, If they were printing Valentine's day cards with Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 or condolence cards with Catullus 101, I could understand. Hell, I might even buy one. But no, it's always the most jejune, hackneyed prose, trite to the point of being sickening.

I have a few theories. The most charitable is that card writers know that the average person is deathly afraid of a blank page. The messages are rarely long enough to make up the whole card, so it's assumed that you have to write more. Maybe they're just meant to get your thoughts flowing. But if so, it leaves a page looking tacky and broken up.

Less charitably, I wonder whether people aren't really interested in the message in the card, and just want a low-cost symbolic way to 'show they care' (*retch*). The message in this case means they have to write less, although this would suggest you should get longer messages. Or we just live in age age where bogus sentimentality is the norm, and people don't much appreciate the difference between good and bad messages.

There was however one occasion in which I valued message cards. That was when my brother and I had the tradition of sending each other birthday cards with some other message inside (Happy Bat Mizvah! Congratulations on your Baby!), and the card itself being filled with ribald abuse.

If it turns out that this practice is more widespread than I thought, and sufficient to explain the demand for messages cards, I take back all my grousing on the subject.