Lee.org

Short form: sellers: if you offer weekly, monthly, and quarterly email options, you’ll have a place in my inbox. If not, you are out!

In the last few months, I have started getting daily emails from lots of the companies and organizations I have relationships with. Who the hell wants a DAILY email from their pharmacy or clothing retailer? I can’t imagine who buys that many drugs or clothes! Of course I have to unsubscribe from these things lest my inbox become useless. What bugs me is that none of these companies offer reasonable ways of me keeping in touch! I would stick with them if they offered weekly, monthly, or quarterly mailers.

The new Philips Sonicar AirFloss looks cool and they claim that it “removes up to 99% more plaque compared to regular brushing“, wow! 99%, that’s amazi…. wait a minute!

Let’s give that sentence another go.  “…up to 99% more…”So for instance, if you have 100 “plaques” in your mouth and brushing gets rid of just 20 of them, will AirFloss get rid of 99 of the plaques… leaving just 1 nasty plaque? No it does not. It gets rid of 99% more than brushing. In my example, about 19 more plaques than brushing alone for a total of 39… or in reasonable terms “almost twice as much”. Apparently that fine statistic wasn’t good enough for Phillips America. The fact that they chose to say “99% more” instead of “100% more” or “twice as much” demonstrates that they were trying to deceive. “99% more” is simply an unreasonable claim any way you slice it.  I am disappointed in Philips.

Now I’m not calling the Philips marketeers fucking liars, I’m just saying that trying to pull a fast one like that is deceptive, immoral and against the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines. (Amazon.com listing)

Until last year, people could buy dollar coins with their credit cards from the US Mint and have them delivered, with no shipping or service fees. People often used this “loophole” to rack up airline miles on their credit cards. The purpose of this crazy loss-leader by the US Mint was mostly to get people to use Sacajawia dollars!

Here’s an online forum where people are bemoaning the loss of their beloved loophole. And talking about how nobody likes the coin. For instance, “the cashier [at the supermarket] told us that nearly all of the $1 coins that make it into the cashier tills get rolled and sent back to the fed because most customers refuse them in change.” There’s a hundred more stories just like it.

Funny.

————————————————–

I despise the coin because it is indistinguishable from a quarter when feeling for it in your pocket and under moderate to poor light. And the gold color fades over time, making it look even more like a quarter. Some folks have disagreed with me about the pocket test until I put them to the test. Every person changed their tune when I asked them to try the pocket test themselves.

The US Mint continues to throw good money after bad. It bothers me at how stupid their efforts are and how they are doing it “for the people”. If they could get a dollar coin to stay in circulation, the rewards would be dramatic: dramatic savings in minting costs.

A dollar bill costs about $0.10 to mint and lasts about 1 year
A dollar coin costs about $0.20 to mint and lasts about 30 years.
The US mints about 20 million $1 bills every day, costing about $2 million per day, or $730 million/year.
If we switched to a dollar coin, the US would only need to mint about 666 million $1 coins, costing about $133 thousand per day, or $48 million/year

Switching from bills to coins would save about $680 million dollars/year, every year. Not bad for fixing one stupid problem.

But more than that, it is bad design and bad design hurts my soul. I want nothing to do with it.

A Plea for Legible Flight Reservations
Grrrr!
We’ve been at this whole commercial flight thing for about a hundred years. You would think that the airlines could create a simple, clear flight plan for me. EVERY trip I have made for the last 20 years I have had to translate their gobbly-gook flight reservation into something legible. The relevant data is always the same. Could someone in the airline industry please recognize this? Give me a calendar item that I can copy and paste into my life!

Here is what I put in my calendar. Short. Readable. Useful.

Flight Ref: XXXX

Monday November 21st
depart SFO at 10:35am on AA flight 556
  arrive Chicago ORD at 4:55pm
depart Chicago ORD 8:30pm on AA flight 4308
  arrive Nashville 10:00pm

Friday November 25th
depart Nashville 4:30pm on AA flight 661
  arrive Dallas DFW at 6:40pm
depart Dallas DFW at 9:20pm on AA flight 1575
  arrive SFO at 11:05pm

and here is what American Airlines sent me. It is freaking impossible to read. Sure it contains all the relevant data but I challenge you to understand my flight info in less than 5 minutes!

It doesn’t need to be like this. Make it simple. Make it say what it needs to say. Then put the nitty gritty details at the bottom or something. Bonus points awarded if they put a “Add to Google Calendar” icon next to the reservation so I don’t even have to copy-paste. But hey…

I originally posted this in 2011 and it burns my buns every time I fly that flight reservations are still universally impossible to read. I use parts of this blog post as a template before I fly.

Please please please understand that your phone number does not look like this:

415.555.1212

The use of periods in people’s phone number started during the Dot Com boom of 1999. People wanted their phone numbers to look more “internety”. By replacing the parenthesis and dashes with periods, your phone number resembles an IP address. But it isn’t.

It was a cute fad. But now more than ten years later, when you use dots in your phone number, you demonstrate that you do not know the difference between a phone number and IP address. It’s like writing the word “interweb” on your business card. It makes you look dumb.

The accepted ways of writing a phone number are:

(415) 555-1212  or  415-555-1212.

I prefer the latter because it uses fewer characters and the idea of an area code, the thing specified inside the parenthesis, isn’t important for many areas any more. In many urban areas there are overlapping area codes so you must dial all 10 digits. Simply put, a phone number used to be 7 digits long but now it is 10 digits long.  But don’t be distracted by this last point. Just know: don’t use periods in your phone number. It makes you look like a  Luddite.

Exhibit A

QE2: Fed pulls the trigger (CNN Nov 3, 2010)
Short form:The fed is going to buy 600 billion dollars in T-bills as part of a Quantitative Easing program (e.g. paid for with money they borrowed from themselves… e.g. they just effing printed it)

Exhibit B
Quantitative Easing Explained by 2 cartoon characters

local version:

Are the cartoon characters correct?

Ok, now the big question: Should I cash out my meager life-savings now?

(Yes I know that if every individual cashed out the way I am considering, the world would get all Mad Maxy real quick. But I have to act as an individual, right? I cashed out in September 2008 for a few months; I ended up loosing about 30% of my life savings to the credit crunch while many people lost 50%; it was the right decision then.)

What is the deal with this?

When I double-click a .mov file, it takes 30+ seconds for Quicktime to power up and play the file.

When I plug my iPhone into my computer, it takes 2+ minutes to backup the iPhone every time… and THEN it starts syncing.

iTunes is DOG SLOW to do anything and everything. It is USELESS as a player of anything because I can’t even freaking scroll down a list without frustration.

It never was a very good podcast player. I just switched back to the open source, free, Juice podcast player (an app that hasn’t been updated in 5 years!) and it’s sooo much better.

The interface is still completely non-intuitive. While I watch other people using it, their mouths always say “it’s so easy!” but the frustration in their fingers and eyes tell me they are lying.

I just reinstalled windows due to a hard drive crash. My computer was lighting fast at everything as I was reinstalling apps until I came to reinstalling iTunes. Fucking boat anchor of an application.

The ONLY reason I use iTunes is to sync my iPhone to Outlook.

Could someone please offer one reason why the iTunes interface isn’t completely worthless?

It’s worse than worthless because I keep throwing time at it just to get a few freaking songs and movies put onto my iPhone and nothing is freaking happening.

iTunes wants to “own” my music and video collection but it does a crappy job of finding it (how the frig do you tell it “Look in folder x for my music?) and just as crappy job of sorting it (one giant list of 8,500 media files is NOT helpful). It wants to copy all my files to one central location for no effing purpose. It can’t even tell (or be told) that a file it previously found isn’t there any more.

I could rant for 10 paragraphs about the worthlessness of this interface. Here’s just an outline.

CRAZY slow –  clicking most anything takes a full 0.5 seconds for a response and I never see an hourglass cursor. And that’s  just an “Eff you user, you learn to wait!”

INSANE menu choices – For instance, I can’t even look my iPhone preferences unless my iPhone is plugged in.

NO WAY to tell it simple things like “here is where you should look for my music”

AMBIGUOUS controls. If you “Delete” something in iTunes, are you deleting the content?

DOESN’T PLAY WELL WITH OTHERS. If you want to find the folder where you’ve put a piece of music, sure, you can do a “Get Info” to see what folder it’s in but then you have to go to Windows Explorer and navigate there by hand.

There’s tons of other examples. But I’ve spent enough time on this stupid program.

Update 11-16-09: Be sure to read the comments before assuming this post has all the info you need.

from the CDC on their page Key Facts About Seasonal Influenza (Flu)

Every year in the United States, on average:

• 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu;
• more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu-related complications; and
• about 36,000 people die from flu-related causes.

From the Associated Press and The Discover Channel

SWINE FLU COUNT: 4,000 DEAD, 22 MILLION ILL

The fall flu season has only just begun and already thousands have died from the H1N1 virus.

Estimates of deaths caused by the swine flu have grown to nearly 4,000 since April, roughly quadrupling previous estimates

To borrow from TJIC’s (and the creator of the ONOZ OMG avatar)

But wait. How deadly is the Swine flu really? Let’s see…. four thousand divided by twenty two million is…
4,000 / 22,000,000 = 0.000181

Swine flu AKA H1N1 is 0.018% fatal
Ok, so how deadly is the average flu?

From the CDC stats above, roughly 10% of the US population gets the flu each year… that’s 30,400,000 people. And 36,000 people die from it…

36,000 / 30,400,000 = 0.00118

The average flu is 0.11% fatal

Comparing the two…

0.0011 * n  = 0.00018

n = 6.1

The average flu is 6.1 times more deadly than swine / H1N1 flu.

WHAT????

You’re kidding, right???

Someone is making a lot of money by causing an unwarranted panic. I’m betting it’s the maker of the influenza vaccine and influenza test.

As I was exiting the rear door of the bus on my way home, 3 or 4 people got on the bus through the back door. There’s big signs saying that you’re not allowed to do that so I looked into it.

Yup, fare evading is crazy rampant. This article says:

A study conducted in 2004 and 2005 by the Municipal Transportation Agency and released last year found that between 54 and 73 percent of riders at three subway stations didn’t pay a fare or show a pass.

WHAT? Roughly 60% of riders are freeloaders?!?!?!?! You are kidding, right?

Oh my. Read this from January 2009:

In the past two years, Muni has more than doubled its staff of fare inspectors, to 49
…
The investigation helped kick-start reforms to Muni’s fare enforcement, which helped the agency collect $35,000 in fare-evasion tickets from July through September [2008 I believe]

That sounds good until you do the math. A first time offender pays a $50 fine. Liberally assuming that every one of the fare evaders was a first time offender, and that a pathetic 50% of ticketed people actually pay, that means Muni issued 35,000 / $50 / 50% = 1400 tickets in 90 days.

Therefore, there are 49 inspectors that issued 1400 tickets in 90 days.

The entire Muni inspection team  issued 1400/90 = 15.6 tickets per day for 90 days.

15.6 tickets / 49 inspectors = The average inspector issued 0.32 tickets a day over 3 months.

You have GOT to be kidding. On my way home tonight, in 30 minutes, I saw more than 10 people walking in the back door of  a Muni street car and then the #14 bus. Apparently if I were a Muni inspector and I ticketed those folks, I would have just done my job for an entire fricking month.

This is wrong.

I am outraged.

Really.